This just came to me over ‘teh internetz’:

Elizabeth Mills response to the regulation of Home Education seemed to echo the common response from home-educators. Another opportunity for the state to control how we treat our children. And so on. It’s something I find an increasingly tiresome argument, as I seem to be one of the few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing.

Here we go…

I was home-educated between 1993-2001. It was an appalling experience. My mother was, in the most polite terms, a manipulative bitch, who actually never bothered to teach us at all. It was a whim for her for about a year, but then I think she just lost it and just couldn’t be bothered with anything, except keeping us in the house. As a child I barely left the house except maybe once a week to help do the shopping in Morrisons. I didn’t do science, languages, PE, art, music, or anything interesting. My interest in English Literature arose out of being a Manics fan, otherwise I suspect I would have never had that.

Your problem is that your mother was a ‘manipulative bitch’. I would also say that she failed to teach you any logic. It does not immediately follow that Home Education is bad for everyone else, just because your mother was not a very good parent. All the families in the UK should not have to suffer at the hands of the state because you were born to a dysfunctional family.

Only once did someone come round to inspect us. Once in eight years. The night before that inspection is something I try to forget. Essentially an hours beating to make sure when they ask how me and my sisters felt our response was that we were happier. My memories of the inspection were that he had no problem with our basic skills – from the few rushed examples of work pushed at him – but that he was concerned by our mothers Irish nationalist stance in everything and the lack of PE, language or music. Mostly though, he disliked that none of our work was dated, because that meant he had no idea when what he saw was produced.

I feel very sorry for you, just as I feel sorry for all the people who have ‘bad parents’. Once again, this story and all other ‘horror stories’ are not enough to smear ALL PARENTS. We do not live in a world where if there is one nutcase in the country, everyone gets a new raft of laws eliminating ancient freedo….. oops.

Yes, some people are just honestly supporting children with learning difficulties or trying to embrace their own culture, but there are cases where it does just turn into abuse. The chances are, like me and my sisters, that it isn’t really reported or known. The reason for that being that, with no real or completely accurate figures oh home education, its possible for the worst situations to slip between everyone’s fingers. Who would have considered themselves responsible for my welfare when I was growing up? We just went on living in a dysfunctional and destructive family until we were old enough to be dysfunctional adults. I’m not even sure if my sisters can read or write properly.

And there are abusive families who send their children to school. The point is, once again, that no natter what the statistics are, people have rights. People are innocent until proven guilty. They have the right to privacy. They have the right to organize themselves and their families as they see fit. We are now starting to see what it is like to live in a country where because a few people get hurt, the government tries to ban everything that could potentially cause harm, we now call it ‘the nanny state’ and everyone agrees, its not a very nice place to live in.

It seems like the majority of opinions on this are all about embracing positive alternative education. I don’t dispute that home education can be a positive experience for many and take them leaps and bounds beyond others in their schools. Equally though, I fail to understand why so many parents can’t see that it could turn into a nightmare. Surely, if you have nothing to hide or be ashamed of, then no harm will come of someone checking that your children are being educated.

‘Nothing to hide, nothing to fear‘ only the most naive of people believe this. Thankfully, their numbers have dwindled to almost nothing.

My sisters and I are all completely estranged from our mother now. She hates us because we stole her life because she had to teach us. As soon as I got to sixth form I felt that even the weakest student, with Cs and Ds, was better educated than I was. Around this time we fell out. She denies my existence now.

This is all very sad, but is has nothing to do with Home Education in general, our rights, right and wrong, or anything else. There ARE bad parents out there. There will ALWAYS be bad parents. You can never have perfection or the elimination of crime, bad parenting or any other ill. What we need to do is pay attention to the vast majority of people who are good, trustworthy and decent, and not allow ourselves to be sucked into a totalitarian nanny state because an EXTREMELY small minority of people have a bad time of life.

Your best revenge is not to try and destroy the lives of all the decent people in the UK by calling for them to be violated, but to use your pain and your experience to make the world a better place, without trampling on the rights of other people.

Surely someone checking that your children meet a standard of numeracy and literacy, and aren’t raised to believe that the world is controlled by Jew-hating-lizards from outer space is something that should be done, not beaten down by shouty hippie parents with anger issues towards the local education authority, or Labour, or Catholicism or various other issues, is a good thing? If parents become ill, or must work more, and can’t support their children’s education, shouldn’t there be someone to step in and make a stand about that?

You sound like an angry person who has deeply seated problems that you have not resolved. You want to lash out at all parents because your parents were bad. Hurting other people will not make your pain go away. You need to get some psychiatric help to get you over your problems.

After all, when you’re young, whoever teaches you tends to be your earliest guide in the world. Did you know how you should be educated when you were 8 or 9? You don’t really have any authority on this yourself when you’re young, parents decide it for you. If you did, you’d probably just sit in the dirt chopping hair off dolls and eating refreshers all day.

This is not an argument.

I fail to understand why there’s such opinion that the government/ LEAs/ the big bad whoever are anti-home education.

That is indeed, a big failure on your part. A failure to read, a failure to empathize and a failure to understand what a real family is like. This is understandable, since you never had one.

The attitude against this regulation does seem to broadly be part of a much larger anti-Labour grudge, or a grudge against local education authorities and regulation.

This is simply not true. No matter what political party is in charge, if they were to propose what New Labour are proposing they would be rounded upon. You really do not understand what this is all about!

Regulation seems to be a dirty word to these people, implying control when it equally means protection.

Regulation does not mean protection. Get yourself a dictionary. You have no experience in parenting or of parenting, you have no idea of what the nature of the state really is… you are ignorant.

Home education has grown as an alternative option since the 70s or so and there really has been very little regulation on it at all, and yet it concerns one of the most important factors in a persons life being decided by what could be the whim of an unstable parent. What seems to be recommended is an enforced and compulsory regulation of what is currently very loosely done. The suggestions made by the recent review have flaws, which have been pointed out on the previous post’s comments, but I view them as caring for the education and welfare of vulnerable children who are currently beyond any particular authority and whose lives are solely controlled by one or two people.

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/18/regulating-home-education/

Those ‘two people’ are called PARENTS they are not just ‘people’.

Compulsory school education is a relatively new phenomenon:

Whilst the intentions of compulsory school laws were good, what we have now is a system that serves to brainwash people. Now that there is a trend away from state schools, there are many forces that want to reverse it.

Teachers unions are bitterly opposed to Home Schooling. Departments of education are against it. Communists are against it. Fascists are against it. Well meaning busy bodies are against it.

What is most bizarre is that you come off sounding just like a person who is a product of the state school system with its ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ doublespeak lines learned by rote.

Either way, The point remains the same; your deeply saddening story of suffering at the hands of your parents is not a reason to destroy the sanctity of the family in general by mandating that the state become the parent of all children.

Finally, there are only a few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing because it is wrong; most people understand the threat that the state represents, what their freedom is worth and have a naturally powered ferocious desire to protect their children.

And this comment, says it all:

I feel for you, I really do, but…

The current proposals would have instead turned your once in eight year beating to coach your responses into a once a year beating.* I’m sure your mother could have turned in a report every year to show she was trying, and she would have been approved, even supported, by the authorities. She was in your own words “a manipulative bitch”, and who’s to say that she, like Baby P’s mother, like Eunice Spry, couldn’t wrap the authorities round her little finger.

Your story is repeated over and over with schooled children as well, with school staff at the very least ignorant, if not complicit in wilfull silence.

The authorities have shown that they cannot prevent abuse in schooled children, or children which are under the tightest scrutiny available to them. They have also demonstrated that people who are not manipulative, who are simply anxious in the presence of authority, get their children removed from them on the weakest of grounds because social workers don’t want to be the ones in the headlines for inaction.

The hostility to authorites is not due to some airy-fairy anti-establishment dogma, but due to a history of abuse of authority, coupled with a demonstrated inability of authorities to use their existing powers effectively.

I think you’ll also find that most people who believe the world is truly ruled by jew hating lizards from outer space were, in fact, schooled, along with the vast majority of British Islamic extremists, BNP supporters, climate change believers / deniers (delete where you agree) and people who vote on Britain’s Got Talent. Being schooled does not, on present evidence, innoculate you in any way against collective insanity.

*Yes, I’m sure there were more beatings, just this one was for coaching before the authority visit.

NO $ALE!

Before the Balls and Badman review nastiness, I have had some interesting discussions with Home Schoolers in the UK. To a man, all of them bristle when they are referred to as ‘Home Schoolers’. At any other time, I would simply take note of it as one of the many beautiful differences between people, and go on to discuss something else.

Sadly, we live in a world where there is a concerted and international governmental effort underway to totally eradicate Home Schooling in all its myriad forms.

Under such circumstances, it is plainly the height of total insanity, shooting yourself in the foot and foolishness, that parents who Home School should split themselves into non cooperating factions in the face of this powerful, single minded and organized enemy.

I had a tweet from a Home Educator saying sarcastically that, “apparently all homeschoolers should register, so we are OK since we are Home Educators not Home Schoolers!”. Then came some snide comments about Britain not being a part of America. Then followed another tweet from a different person saying that they would not sign a petition whose aim is to safeguard the rights of parents because the petition has the phrase ‘Home Schooling’ in it.

Oh dear me.

Regular readers of BLOGDIAL know that the age of writing and signing petitions an demonstrating as a tactic to get what you want is over, that they do not work and that doing them is nothing more than a time wasting feel good activity, but that is not the point here. The point is that over the phrase ‘Home Schooling’, some parents are not willing to join with others to fight people who are trying to kidnap and brainwash their children.

That is INSANITY.

The facts of the matter are these.

Whatever you might call yourself, all parents have one thing in common; they are parents, and they have the best interests of their children at heart, and they all have the absolute right to bring up their children as they see fit, without interference from the state.

This is the thing that binds all parents, and which binds all Home Schoolers, Home Educators, unschoolers, autonomous learners, structured learners, or whatever term happens to be en vogue at the moment.

Let me tell you something; the people who are trying to destroy your way of life do not care a damn what you call yourself. As far as they are concerned, you are ALL trash and your children are CANNON FODDER and you are ALL GOING TO BE MADE TO CONFORM.

The fact that you squabble over terminology to such an extent that you will refuse to help each other demonstrates to them that you really are a totally clueless bunch that have no right to be in charge of an empty carton of milk much less your own children. They laugh at you as you bicker like morons over this, all the while, rolling out their plans to take your children from you if you do not implement their brainwashing programmes and testing regimes IN YOUR OWN HOUSE.

There are lots of things that I do not agree with. I keep them STRICTLY private, and only share them with my inner circle. Whilst we are in the battle of our lives, I strongly suggest that if you want to HELP destroy the Badman and Balls agenda, that you keep irrelevant distinctions out of the discussion, and join with other parents who are fighting for the true goal of this battle, the rights of all parents.

You have the right to say whatever you want, join with whomever you want, not join with people that you disagree with and express yourself in any way you see fit. What you CANNOT claim however, is that it helps to factionalize people when we are all fighting against a common enemy.

And speaking of americans, we have this from the Home School Legal Defense Association:

UN Treaty Jeopardizes Homeschool Freedom in Britain

June 16, 2009

Ever since the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and opened to nations across the world for ratification in 1989, HSLDA has been deeply concerned about the implications of this treaty for U.S. homeschoolers, if the U.S. were to ratify the treaty.

We have consistently warned that this treaty could be the vehicle opponents of home education could use to effectively ban or severely regulate homeschooling. On February 16, 1995, when Secretary of State Madeline Albright signed the UNCRC, the United States took a major step along the path to ratification which would make the UNCRC, as stated in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land.

For the UNCRC to be ratified it must gain a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate. If this happens then the UNCRC will automatically supersede all state laws and U.S. judges will be obligated to follow the provisions of the treaty. Currently, family and education laws are state-based; however, ratification of the UNCRC would transfer the jurisdiction for making family and education law to the U.S. Congress. Congress would, in turn, be obligated to follow the UN mandates contained in the CRC.

While HSLDA has been sounding the alarm about this treaty for years, proponents of the UNCRC maintain that our concerns are invalid.

One such claim relating to homeschooling is from the Children’s Rights Campaign website, a group of 300 organizations arguing that we have nothing to fear from the UNCRC.

They say: “There is no language in the CRC that dictates the manner in which parents are to raise and instruct their children. Ratification of the Convention would not prevent parents from homeschooling their children.”

Sadly, HSLDA’s position has been proven to be correct. Contrary to what proponents like the Children’s Rights Campaign claim, UNCRC will be used to significantly restrict the freedom to homeschool in England.

On June 11, 2009 a report on home education in England by Graham Badman, a former Managing Director of Children, Families and Education in the County of Kent, was accepted in full by the British Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. The report makes the case that homeschooling should be extensively regulated in England.

Aside from registering with the state and mandating reports by homeschoolers, the Badman report makes references to balancing the rights of parents with the rights of children. This idea is expressed in the UNCRC.

As Mr. Badman says:

I am not persuaded that under the current regulatory regime that there is a correct balance between the rights of parents and the rights of the child either to an appropriate education or to be safe from harm.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) gives children and young people over forty substantive rights which include the right to express their views freely, the right to be heard in any legal or administrative matters that affect them and the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas. Article 12 makes clear the responsibility of signatories to give children a voice:

“Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Yet under the current legislation and guidance, local authorities have no right of access to the child to determine or ascertain such views.

Mr. Badman has a solution for the lack of access of the state to homeschooled children in order to fulfill this provision of the UNCRC.

He proposed the following:

That designated local authority officers should:
• have the right of access to the home
• have the right to speak with each child alone

And:

That a requirement is placed upon local authorities to secure the monitoring of the effectiveness of elective home education.

Mr. Badman’s rationale for placing the state in charge of determining the effectiveness of a home education (i.e. deciding which curriculum is used) is based on Article 29 of the UNCRC. He asserts:

Such is the demand and complexity of 21st Century society and employment that further thought should be given to what constitutes an appropriate curriculum within the context of elective home education. Such a curriculum must be sufficiently broad and balanced and relevant to enable young people to make suitable choices about their life and likely future employment. Article 29 of the UNCRC states that:

1. States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:

1. The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;
2. The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;
3. The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own;
4. The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin;
5. The development of respect for the natural environment.

In short, the Badman report recommends that the state should have the authority to choose the curriculum for homeschoolers and he used Britain’s treaty obligations under the UNCRC to justify this intrusion.

Remember, the Badman report has already been accepted by the British government. It is now only a question of time before the legislation is introduced and a vote occurs in the British Parliament. Not surprisingly, the estimated 80,000 British homeschooling families are outraged at the Badman report.
The Badman report is a stark reminder of how government officials in an English-speaking democracy have interpreted the UNCRC. It’s clear that the right to homeschool in America will be negatively impacted if the U.S. Senate ever ratifies the UNCRC.

Ultimately, the answer to completely defeating the UNCRC is to amend the U.S. Constitution. This is the purpose of the Parental Rights Amendment being advanced by HSLDA and ParentalRights.org. The PRA would uphold the current U.S. legal framework which only allows the state to intervene where there is credible evidence of abuse or neglect. Otherwise parents are free to raise their children, which includes the right to home educate. Amending the Constitution will permanently protect the right of parents and homeschoolers. It’s a right we cannot surrender to any U.S. government present or future and certainly a right we must not surrender to the United Nations.

[…]

http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200906161.asp

I am very grateful that there are people in other countries that are paying close attention to the problems that parents are facing in the UK. Especially a country where there are about THIRTY to FORTY times as many Home Schoolers as there are in the UK. I am willing to discuss with them, join with them and coordinate with them to protect my rights. I don’t care what they choose to call themselves. In the same way that I am willing to deal with any Home Educator on this matter, I will deal with the HSDLA if it serves the greater purpose of protecting my rights.

Come to think of it, I cannot think of a single Home Schooler that I know, to whom I have asked, “How do you Home Educate your children?”. It would never occur to me to ask that question; it is none of my business. I am able to communicate with other Home Schoolers, laugh with them, get incandescent with rage with them, down some beers with them, let my children play with theirs and just be a human being.

You may now follow Irdial on Twitter.

The Guardian reports:

A new 50p per month broadband tax is to be levied on every home and business with a phone line under government plans to raise up to £1.5bn to pay for the next generation of internet connections.

Even if you believe this is a role for the government this money could easily be diverted from more controversial schemes (insert your least favourite database here).

… [swathe about carving up the licence fee removed] …

“The licence fee must not become a slush fund to be dipped into at will, leading to spiralling demands on licence fee payers to help fund the political or commercial concerns of the day,” he said. “This would lead to the licence fee being seen as another form of general taxation.”

HA!

Carter stressed he is not advocating a reduction in the BBC’s licence fee […]. The National Audit Office believes the corporation could be sitting on a £250m surplus from the digital switchover fund.

“The case is made to make available public funding for the provision of news in the nations and regions,” said Carter. “It is our view that we have a funding mechanism for public content – it is called the TV licence fee.”

With the ‘digital switchover’ the licence fee is a relic and an even more unjustifiable tax – it has never been easier for the BBC to encode their transmissions and set up a subscription or micropayment system to restrict access and gain revenues.

Lord Carter’s 238-page report covers everything from combating internet piracy to setting a 2015 date for the switch to digital radio. Alongside the plan to get existing broadband – at 2Mb per second – to everyone in the UK by 2012, Carter took many in the industry by surprise by proposing the new 50p-a-month tax on all phone lines. That will raise between £150m and £175m a year which the government will make available to companies such as BT which want to push the next generation of internet networks, allowing consumers to download music in seconds and movies in a minute, to 90% of the UK population by 2017.

The ‘next generation’ broadband of now will be a previous generation by 2012, private companies will be subsidised to provide lesser technologies. No one, not least, the government has a clue how the internet(z) will be used in 2017 but I am sure it will NOT be ‘the same but faster’. Focussing private companies on deploying obsolete technologies when they could be engaged in R&D work to improve access actually distorts the natural improvement of technologies and should not be encouraged. The £6 a year tax is just a starting point and is already in discussion side by side with the TV licence fee – the obvious intention to be to create a broadband licence fee. Quite what the speed of downloading movies has got to do with the government is anybody’s guess.

Mirroring Gordon Brown’s recent appointment of Alan Sugar as enterprise champion, Carter also announced the appointment of Martha Lane Fox, one of the founders of travel site Lastminute.com, as his “champion for digital inclusion”, charged with persuading the 30% of households who are not online to get broadband access.

20th January
I have taken Inclusion. If I had been expecting an experience like that of Hoffman, when he accidentally took LSD-25 and unleashed the psychedelic revlution, I would have been disappointed. But, of course, I wasn’t, and was delighted.
[…] I found myself staring blankly at a Senior League Curling Championship, being broadcast from Peebles.

Will Self

That easily represents the extent of the Government’s ambitions about ‘inclusion’.

But the report was immediately attacked by shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt as “a colossal disappointment” and “digital dithering” as it will result in yet more discussions over the summer. “Where in all this is a single action?” he asked. “But there is one area in which this report has excelled itself: consultations. This is surely government of the management consultants, for the management consultants, by the management consultants.”

Quite except we do not want ‘action’ we want the Government not to act, not to commission these reports, not even to ‘consult’, just to remove themselves from what does not concern them.

The film and music industries also reacted angrily to what they saw as Carter’s half-hearted attempt to clamp down on people who illegally share copyrighted material over the internet. […] internet users could have their broadband connections slowed down or access to particular websites blocked after a year, although this is also up for further consultation.

Can’t work, won’t work. Consumers successfully rejected DRM and they will circumvent measures to restrict ‘unofficial’ downloading. ‘Slowing down connections’ shows that Lord Carter doesn’t consider the future of public/unsecured wi-fi to be relevant.

Recent research has shown that more than two-thirds of internet users would ignore warning letters, […].

Lavinia Carey, chair of Respect for Film and director general of the British Video Association, said: “As an alternative to legal action we advocate a more effective and proportionate approach, namely the prompt implementation of technical measures or ‘road humps’ for persistent infringers in order to make life difficult for them to continue to access content illicitly, while still enabling them to access other services such as email, banking and shopping sites.”

Hmmm, stay tuned and watch the inevitable fail.

An Anonymous Coward at BBQ writes with great sadness:

The Tories have written to five firms bidding to supply ID cards warning them not to sign any long-term contracts.

In the letter, shadow home secretary Chris Grayling says one of his party’s first acts, if it wins the next general election, would be to scrap the scheme.

He said he was urging the firms against large investments that may be wasted.

The government says ID cards, being trialled in Manchester from this autumn, will combat fraud, terrorism and organised crime.

You see how the scumbag BBC promotes the lies about ID Cards by repeating without analysis lines directly from Neu Liebour? The BBC reporters are, and have been throughout all of this, the ultimate total human garbage.

‘Substantial bill’

They want a nationwide roll-out of the scheme by 2012 but with a general election due within a year, the Conservatives say they intend to scrap it.

Mr Grayling’s predecessor as shadow home secretary, David Davis, issued a similar warning to firms in February 2007 and gave Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell formal notice of the party’s intention not to continue with the scheme.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats oppose the scheme, estimated at costing about £5bn, and some Labour MPs have expressed doubts.

ID Cards do not work, are socially corrosive, are un-British and only collectivist vermin like the BBC support them.

ID CARD TIMETABLE
2009: Workers at Manchester and London City airport
Autumn 2009: Manchester pilot
2010: Students opening bank accounts offered ID cards
2011/12: All UK passport applicants
2015: 90% foreign nationals covered
2017: Full roll-out?

I have another timetable for you:

2001 BLOGDIAL warns that ID Cards will not solve anything

2002 BLOGIAL describes how ID cards destroy societies and dehumanize people.

2003 BLOGDIAL describes how a centralized database is extremely dangerous and open to abuse.

2004 BLOGDIAL attacks the imbecile David Bkunkett

2005 BLOGDIAL attacks the proposed ID Cards bill.

2006 The Frances Stonor Saunders letter AKA ‘the anonymous email‘ widely circulated and published.

snip!

2010 ID Cards plans permanently abandoned. ID Card contractors lose billions. ContactPoint scrapped. NIR scrapped.

Mr Grayling told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he was concerned about “a number of signals” recently suggesting “quite big penalty costs” were being built into contracts which will leave a “substantial bill” for the taxpayer.

“I want companies to be cautious and recognise that if they invest large amounts of money preparing for this business, it may not happen,” he said.

“There’s a danger the government will build more poisoned pills into the contracts that will simply make it more difficult to scrap.”

Asked whether the Tories were trying to paralyse government plans, he said: “I would be delighted if this slows down progress with the ID project because I think it’s the wrong thing to do.”

This is music to the ears of everyone in Britain.

Later this year, airside workers at London City and Manchester airports will be issued with ID cards.

They are all going to refuse them you jackass.

‘Conditioning’ public

And, from the autumn, people in Manchester will be able to voluntarily sign up for a card as part of a pilot project.

It is the beginning of the main phase of the scheme which ministers say will result in cards being available nationwide by 2012.

Within the next three years, the Identity and Passport Service plans to issue “significant volumes” of ID cards alongside British passports – but people will be able to opt out of having a card if they do not want one.

Earlier retired law lord Lord Steyn accused the Home Office of introducing the cards in stages as a way of “conditioning” and “softening up” public opinion.

He added: “The Home Office now proudly asserts that comprehensive surveillance has become routine. If that is true, the resemblance to the world of Kafka is no longer so very distant.”

The government believes that the public support the scheme – former home secretary Jacqui Smith said she was regularly approached by people who said they did not want to wait several years to register for an ID card.

It has been reported that Alan Johnson, who replaced Jacqui Smith as home secretary in the recent cabinet reshuffle, might be considering a U-turn on ID cards, after ordering a review of the scheme.

But in a statement Mr Johnson said: “In my very first interview as home secretary I made clear that identity cards was a manifesto commitment and that legislation governing their introduction was passed in 2006.

“We remain on progress to bring in what we believe has widespread public support.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8104481.stm

What does ‘remain on progress’ mean? Who cares. ID Cards in the UK are TOAST, millions will not accept them, the Tories are going to scrap them; from both sides, the pressure will be so great that it will be impossible for this insane nonsense to work.

The only people who are weeping about this are the corrupt monsters like the wife of former Downing Street policy adviser Lord Birt who was set to land £2 billion ID card contract who will now be getting precisely nothing.

The Register reports that the Conservatives are writing to companies involved in ‘ID card contracts’, asking them to reconsider, this is a good first move but something more forceful is needed before the next election:

NATIONAL IDENTITY CARD SCHEME

As you will be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention that we will commit to cancel the ID card project and related databases immediately on our being elected to government.

I am writing to you as one of the companies involved in contracting for the project. I wanted to make it clear to you that our intention commitment to cancel the project remains unchanged. I think it is important that the companies concerned bear this carefully in mind before committing to any long term contracts for the project, since it will not be our intention to proceed with be a manifesto commitment to cancel the work if we are elected.

In addition, I wanted to draw your attention to my concerns about the nature of the contracts that are in development.

In March, the Home Secretary announced that the cancellation of two contracts for the national identity scheme, one to upgrade passport application systems, and one for a biometric database, would incur costs of £40 million.

Whilst we do not intend to scrap We will also substantially overhaul the programme introducing biometric passports, therefore I wanted to make it clear that we will take an extremely sceptical view of actively contest any future contractual arrangements on ID cards that appear to have been put in place simply to tie the hands of a future Government.

In light of this, I urge you to consider very carefully your future involvement in the ID Card project.

Yours sincerely

Chris Grayling

Shadow Home Secretary

Yes, I typed that and thanks to Debs for the heads up.

Take a look at this:

Judge warns over family breakdowns

A senior judge has called for the creation of a national commission to tackle the “epidemic” of family breakdown.

More must be done to promote marriage, a senior judge has urged;

Mr Justice Coleridge, a Family Division judge, said the consequences of family break-up for the wider society are now so great it can no longer be treated as a purely private matter.

Action is needed, he said, to achieve a “fundamental change” in individual attitudes and behaviour to re-establish marriage as the “gold standard” for relationships.

The problems are so great that no one political party on its own could resolve them and only a national commission drawn from a wide constituency would have any any chance of success, he said.

Judge Coleridge sparked controversy last year when he said family relationships in Britain were in “meltdown”, likening the problem to a “cancer”.

In his speech to the Family Holiday Association at Westminster, he blamed unrealistic expectations about relationships for the extent of the disputes and breakdowns which “overwhelmed” the family courts.

“What, I hope in all humility, I am drawing attention to is the endless game of ‘musical relationships’, or ‘pass the partner’, in which such a significant portion of the population is engaged, in the endless and futile quest for a perfect relationship which will be attained, it is supposed, by landing on the right chair or unwrapping a new and more exciting parcel,” he said.

With many children growing up “scarred” by the effects of their parents’ break-ups, he said that it could no longer be seen as just a matter for the individuals involved.

“The fundamental change in individual attitude and behaviour that is required is in our assumption that the way in which we conduct our private lives in relation to both the production and parenting of children, or the break-up of a parental relationship, is a private matter which only affects the individuals directly concerned,” he said.

“Although, superficially, these are private issues, they become matters of public concern when they are happening on such a huge scale and affect detrimentally such a significant proportion of the population of all types and ages.”

[…]

Yahoo News

First of all, Marriage is not the business of the state. It is a purely private (and often religious) commitment that should not be regulated by, licensed by or interfered with by the state. The only cancer here is the government.

If you are a Catholic, and get married as a Catholic, then you cannot expect a divorce. The state should not be involved in marrying people (‘Civil marriages’) and were that the case, would not have any right to offer to dissolve marriages that it has not sanctified.

The very idea that the state can marry people is at the heart of this problem; the state is not God, or a replacement for a philosophy or religion. It is not a sanctioner of people’s commitment to each other. The idea that the state can act as a replacement for something that is private is what has caused the problems that this Judge is whining about.

The state has made it easy for people to get married and divorced. When people take advantage of these rules and regulations and the consequences are the destruction of the family (which pre dates the monolithic state) everyone reels back in horror. This Judge decries the ‘musical relationships’, and ‘pass the partner’, behavior of people today, yet it is the judiciary that facilitates this by sanctioning divorces on demand.

What is worse, they do not diagnose the problem correctly, and prescribe MORE STATE INTERFERENCE through commissions, the inevitable raft of consultations written by the worst possible, most inappropriate, monstrous creatures imaginable to be followed by guidelines and then legislation putting the state right into your business where it does not belong.

The state will define what a family is, outline precisely what each member of a family must do etc etc, and then they will have a whole army of apartchicks to inspect, tick box and monitor these state ordained model families.

Oh! so you don’t think it will come to that? You must be one of the delusional ‘It can never happen here’ people who never thought that Britain would try and outlaw Home Education.

I hope you are paying close enough attention to notice how this Judge says, “…the production and parenting of children“.

PRODUCTION, used in the same way that that word is applied to cars made in factories; this is the beginning of the defining of children as products that are the property of the state. Home Educators in the UK are starting to feel what this is like, with the looming and soon to be destroyed recommendations of Badman and Balls. What this judge is proposing will end in people having to apply to the state for a license to produce children, who will not have the same relationship to the mother and father as has been the case for thousands of years, but who will act as ‘carers’, provisionally, since the children will be the registered property of the state. You will nave no say in how your children should be brought up, taught, treated medically or anything else, and should your children become dissatisfied with your parenting, they will be able to seek a divorce from YOU.

The fundamental change that is needed here is not in individual attitudes, but in the role of the state in the private affairs of human beings. It is the courts and these Judges using the powers of the legislature that have caused these problems, not the individual, who only ever acts in her own interest.

Throughout all of this, the ‘primitive’ third world, that has retained its sanity throughout the twentieth century will have the benefits of strong families. As the west descends into total chaos and confusion on every fundamental level, dehumanized beyond all recognition, the people of the third world will sit back and watch while the populations of the west disappear up their own arseholes; there will be no one left to carry on their culture as it has all been legislated away, regulated away and relegated to history. Like the inbred members of dead aristocratic lines, British culture will disappear because it will have become fundamentally unhealthy, unnatural, ugly (no sane person from the third world would marry into a death culture like the one that is being engineered here), impotent, infertile and useless.

Unless they turn it around RIGHT NOW, starting with the reversal of the Home Education attack.

Finally and for the record, if we are going to have any sort of gold standard, it should be money that is 100% redeemable in gold coins.

In 1939 1,800,000 children were moved out of London to escape the bombing of that great city.

How it all happened is relevant to us today, in the light of New Labour, and its infinitely repulsive, shocking and sickening disregard for what Britain is and was, and what it is meant to be.

London was being bombarded nightly. Londoners spent their nights in shelters or deep in the Underground on the platforms as the bombs hammered away.

It was decided that children living in the areas that were being Blitzed were to be evacuated to safe parts of Britain. The first evacuations began on Friday 1 September 1939, and was code named 'Operation Pied Piper'.

The evacuated children were put on trains in London, had tags pinned on their clothes stating their names, and were then despatched to different parts of the countryside.

When they arrived at the various train stations and evacuation centres, adults who were to take in the evacuees were waiting. The children were selected on the spot, by a point of the finger and words like, "I'll take the one with red hair just there", and taken away to their new homes; those who were not wanted, judged solely on the look of the child were simply left behind:

[…]

The whole school (Sellincourt Road Infants) marched through streets to Tooting Junction station. I was carrying a small rucksack for my luggage. I remember the cornfields en route and that we changed trains at Exeter. We stopped at several villages and at each stop we got off and lined up in the road so the villagers could take who they wanted. Those of us that remained then re-boarded and went onto the next village. Those of us not selected were then deposited at a commandeered camp belonging to NALGO (trade union).

[…]

BBC

[…]

“We were walked to the rail station at Clapham Junction and from there we caught the train to Waterloo, from Waterloo we travelled all the way to north Cornwall.

“After a short period of time, I was evacuated to a farmer and his wife who had no children, and I became part of the family.”
Children at the time would wait at temporary evacuee centres were they could be selected by a family who liked them. He felt he was one of the lucky ones who got a good home.

[…]

BBC

[…]

I suppose there was about 20 of us from class seven of Christ Church. The children from other classes went elsewhere to nearby villages. I remember standing in a line next to Kenneth, my friend, feeling hot, tired and somewhat unsettled. The long journey, just undertaken, left me slightly bewildered. Was it all a dream?

Standing opposite us in the hall was quite a large group of villagers. These people had agreed to take us into their homes and become our foster parents. They had, previously, signed the necessary forms and stated their preference for boys or girls. Soon a rather awkward process of selection began, and after, watching, waiting and wondering. My friend Kenneth and I found ourselves being paired up and being led along by a tall, kindly-looking gentleman, Mr Ware, the village postman. At that moment, to use the official term, he had become our foster father. Waiting outside, no doubt very interested to see what we looked like, were two of Mr Ware's daughters, Maureen and Barbara.

[…]

BBC

And so on and so on. What an incredible story!

Now, fast forward to 2009.

We have a government that wants to force everyone to carry an ID Card that is linked to a giant database of fingerprints and faces that can identify you in a fraction of a second from one of millions of CCTV cameras that are everywhere. A country where if you change your address and do not tell the government, you can be fined £1000, where you will not be able to buy wine or withdraw money from your bank account without presenting this card. Where you cannot even buy a teaspoon without showing ID. We have a government that believes that all parents are child abuse suspects, and as such, must be put into a database.

Just what the HELL has happened to Great Britain?

How has it come to pass that in a country where people were trusted and trusting by default, to such an extent that children could be given away to total strangers without any doubt whatsoever that strangers will have nothing but absolute concern and care for the welfare of their wards, in close to two million instances… that this trust is all but completely destroyed?

How is it that the people of this fair island have become so ground down, so inured to slavery and tyranny that when over 100,000 parents are accused in a most vicious and dastardly way, without a shred of evidence, of being potential child abusers, that almost nothing is said, and that there are even parents who AGREE with the totalitarian government responsible for the perverted claims and insane recommendations?

How is it that two men, named 'Balls' and 'Badman' can get away with such a thing, and no one thinks this combination of names is in any way odd, or unusual, or freakish, monstrous, sinister or nightmarish? Are we living as characters on the pages of an edition of 200AD?

What the HELL is wrong with everybody?!

Even if you accept that it is the role of government to organize education and protect children (which I do not), any reasonable person would require that there is evidence of a real problem before you legislate; in this case, the author of the review, the singularly unqualified Badman, admits that there is no evidence that Home Educated children are at risk and that Home Education is not being used as a 'cover'. Even by those standards the conclusions and recommendations of this scabrous review are completely illogical in that light.

The fact of the matter is, quite apart from the natural rights aspect of this, parents are the most trustworthy people when it comes to the care of their children. The vast majority of people are also completely trustworthy, as the example of the evacuees demonstrates. The only people who cannot be trusted are, CRB Checked, ‘trusted’ agents of the government; the social workers, local authority workers etc etc, who are a self selected group of control freaks whose only desire is to exert their will upon others. They never refuse new powers, are keen to enter into and interfere with the private business of every family, down to the food that is eaten in the home.

The men and women of the 1930s adn 40s would never have accepted a government like New Labour; in fact, they were willing to die fighting against a government just like it; a government that explicitly banned (and continues to ban) home schooling.

They did not need to check every adult against a database before they did the evacuation. Even if they had time and the means to do it, they would not have done it, just as in the 70’s ID Cards were rejected as ‘un-British’ when the IRA was attacking England and the attackers were visually indistinguishable from the attacked by virtue of both groups being ‘European’ in appearance.

The men of that era would never accept a government like New Labour:

Clarence Henry Willcock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clarence Henry Willcock, (23 January 1896 – 12 December 1952) a member of the Liberal Party, was the last person in the UK to be prosecuted for refusing to produce an Identity Card.

On 7 December 1950, Harry Willcock, 54 year old dry-cleaning manager was stopped while driving in Finchley, London by police constable Harold Muckle who demanded that he present his identity card at a police station within 48 hours. He refused, reputedly saying "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing". He was prosecuted under the National Registration Act 1939, convicted and fined 10 shillings.

Willcock appealed, in the case Willcock vs Muckle. Although he lost the appeal, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Goddard, spoke out against the continued use of compulsory Identity Cards and commented that they "tend to make people resentful of the acts of the police".

As a result of the court case, Willcock became well-known and he founded the Freedom Defence Association to campaign against ID cards. In a publicity event he tore up his own identity card in front of the National Liberal Club, inspiring a later similar action for the press outside Parliament by the British Housewives' League. When the Conservative government elected at the 1951 general election decided to abolish identity cards in 1952, Willcock received hundreds of redundant cards through the post to auction for charity.

Willcock was the Liberal candidate in Barking in 1945 and in 1950. He came third in both contests, losing his deposit in 1950. He had been a councillor and magistrate in Horsforth, Leeds.

Willcock was born in Alverthorpe, Wakefield, Yorkshire and died, while debating at a meeting of the Eighty Club at the National Liberal Club.
Goddard's comments are thought to have influenced Winston Churchill's decision to scrap compulsory national Identity Cards in 1952.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Henry_Willcock

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

It is now your turn to defend your rights; the rights that people died to protect and give to you. If you give them up as if they were nothing, if you compromise one inch, go half way for a little peace, go along to get along, or sign up so that you can continue to get ‘free’ rail cards and other ‘benefits’…. then you are not fit to breath the air of this great country. You deserve whatever they put upon you. You lose your right to complain, to make a fuss or to whine about 'civil liberties'. You are already dead.

You are at the same time, very lucky. In this case, all that is required of you is that you refuse to comply. Refuse to register. Refuse to take the ID card. Refuse to engage in any way with anything that comes from ContactPoint. Never use or agree with weasel words of compromise and, 'seeing the other point of view'. Do not bow and scrape to anyone, and thank your oppressors for 'being on your side'.

There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to put up with the incessant abuses, violations, invasions, smears and the totalitarian apparatus that this government, New Labour, is pouring out on the land.

Enough is enough. Just as this venal and murderous government stubbornly refuses to submit to the will of the public, as it should, since it has no legitimacy (so the textbooks say) without the consent of the governed, so too can anyone also refuse to obey any illegitimate law or regulation.

Those of you who believe that you have a sacred duty to protect your family from evil are already on this page.

Those of you who have doubts, who are frightened about the consequences of 'going silent' or who are swayed by the soothing weasel words of men with an air of authority, or who are actually dumb enough to believe that what is planned is in any part a good thing; be warned – the reason why we are at this abysmal point is because the weak people between the days of the evacuees and today, allowed small concessions to their liberties year on year that mounted up to become the totalitarian state that now looms over you, and which is about to tip over and crush you, splitting open to unleash a torrent of aparatchick ants that will swarm over you and your family and bite you to death.

The only way to stop this is to draw a line in the sand and say, "this far, and no further" The power of the totalitarian state is derived directly from the cooperation of the people who are its victims. The aparatchicks who use ContactPoint (for example) will be sitting in offices on the phone, compiling lists and contacting people, trying to arrange interviews etc etc. If no one speaks to them or answers their letters, they will be completely stymied. If no one registers, they will have an intractable task on their hands of tracking everyone down, writing to them, chasing them up on foot… They will never be able to pull this off. And remember; all of this is going to happen whilst they are taking care of all their other duties, with which they are already overwhelmed. This is why it is important to make it absolutely clear; this report is rejected. We will not comply with any of it, should it become the law. You are wasting your time, and we will not waste any more of ours responding to you now, or in the future.

WE ARE DONE.

It appears that the Swedish film censor is to be shut down and replaced by an ‘advisory body’ similar to the BBFC. However the interesting thing is that, unlike in the UK, submissions to the new board may be voluntary and so the cash-cow of vetting all movies is domesticated:

The inquiry also proposes that film companies be allowed to submit their films for review by the new agency voluntarily. However, films not reviewed by the new agency would automatically be classified as only appropriate for viewers 15 years and older.

This is a reasonably good thing as it means only films aimed at children will need to be classified, an improvement would be to make classifications advisory so that parents can decide what films they allow their children to see.
Unclassified films for adults are then free from restrictions and interventions (excepting real harm and exploitation which would be subject to existing laws anyway), this seems like a good thing!

Additionally just as health and safety standards can be applied without state intervention, so too can film classification.

The Graham Badman review of Home Education in England has just been released. It is as bad as it could possibly be.

The review of elective home education, as the terms of reference (Annex A) make clear, has been triggered by a range of issues and representations, not least being the quite proper concern to ensure that systems for keeping children safe and ensuring that they receive a suitable education are as robust as possible.

Annex A says:

The Department is committed to ensuring that systems for keeping children safe, and ensuring that they receive a suitable education, are as robust as possible. An independent review of home education is part of this continuing commitment.

If the department is committed to keeping children safe, it would not be rolling out ContactPoint. It is clear that they do not have the best interests of children at heart. Home Education is not a child safety issue. This is the fundamental flaw with this review; it is built on the ignorance and personal prejudices of a single man, whose notions about Home Education are completely incorrect.

It is not the duty of the department to make sure that any child has a ‘suitable education’ that is the role of the parent. These are non negotiable, and set in stone. Any attempt to interfere with the right of parents to organize their family life as they see fit is a fundamental violation.

Parents have a well established right to educate their children at home and Government respects that right. There are no plans to change that position.

This is a lie. Logically if parents have this right then how they educate is their own business, and a part of that right. That means that the state has no place interfering with Home Education in the way that this report recommends.

However, where local authorities have concerns about the safety and welfare, or education, of a home educated child, effective systems must be in place to deal with those concerns. The review will assess the effectiveness of current arrangements and will, if necessary, make recommendations for improvements.

Home education has nothing whatsoever to do with child welfare and safety. Local authorities have no business or right to voice concerns about the education of children who are educated outside of the systems (schools) that they are responsible for. Those are just pretexts to engineer the registration and control of Home Education.

During the course of the review I have been struck by the passion and commitment of many parents who either as a result of deeply held convictions or absolute necessity as they see it have chosen to educate their child or children at home. Indeed for many it is quite clear that this course of action is not without personal cost, often financial and professional. I have met some extraordinarily accomplished young people who have prospered as a consequence of elective home education of whom their parents are justly proud, but I am not persuaded that I could argue this to be a universal picture, any more than the same argument could be applied to the schooling system, but the same checks and balances do not apply.

The same checks and balances do not apply because the family is private and not the responsibility of the state. Education of a child becomes the responsibility of the state only when the parent voluntarily hands over the responsibility, and this is always provisional. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the individual and the state that both Ed Balls and Graham Badman share in common. They see people as property of the state, who have rights that are given to them by the state. This is incorrect.

I have read the many submissions made by home educators who argue their case from almost as many standpoints as there are children in elective home education – indeed to attempt to categorise the views of home educators or regard them as an homogenous group would simply be wrong. It is a cause of concern that although approximately 20,000 home educated children and young people are known to local authorities, estimates vary as to the real number which could be in excess of 80,000. I will discuss this later in this report. The degree of individualism exhibited may well be a strength but it militates against securing representative opinion and has led to factions within the elective home education community that actually distort the strength of philosophical commitment, achievement and need. I shall make recommendation in this regard.

There is no need for you to ‘secure representative opinion’. This is a fantasy requirement. The fact of the matter is what these individuals are doing is none of your business. How many there are is none of your business, and they are quite capable of getting on with their educating without your help.

I have taken account of the views of local authorities who are strongly of the opinion that the current guidelines are unworkable in that they are contradictory and confer responsibility without power. I agree with this view and will recommend accordingly. However, I also recognise that despite the excellent practice of some, there are local authorities who do not discharge their responsibilities properly, make effective use of current statutory powers or use the ingenuity referenced in the good practice illustrated later in this report. Good relationships and mutual respect are at the heart of the engagement of local authorities with home educating parents – this is evidenced in many authorities but such is the number of children now within elective home education that the development of these relationships cannot be left to chance or personality. The current disparity in practice across local authorities cannot continue – there is a need for a common national approach locally applied.

Local authorities should not be responsible for Home Educators. There is no reason for them to be responsible for them, and the irrational guidelines that caused them to be responsible for them should be withdrawn; that would solve the problem of the unworkable and contradictory responsibilities that they suffer. The wrong response would be to do what Graham Badman is recommending.

Few would argue with the assertion that parents are the prime educator within or outside of a schooling system. There is a considerable body of research evidence that points to this conclusion – parental attitude, support and expectation are the key determinants of educational success2. Indeed, as the national Children’s Plan makes clear it is “Parents not Government that bring up children”3 and there is nothing in this report which sets out to contradict or modify this contention. However, there has to be a balance between the rights of the parents and the rights of the child. I believe that balance is not achieved through current legislation or guidance, and the imbalance must be addressed. Not to do so could result in the concerns for a minority being applied to the vast majority of caring, motivated home educating parents.

First of all, it is an assertion that there has to be a balance between the rights of the parent and the rights of the child. Children are the sole responsibility of their parents or wards. It is the responsibility of the parent to protect and educate their child. Children do not have ‘rights’ that are separate from their parents in the way that this report suggest; Graham Badman, in making this assertion, is suggesting that the state act as a third parent to protect children. This is the true meaning of the phrase ‘children’s rights’. Children, since they are not responsible for themselves, must be in the care of their parents. What Badman is saying is that there is shared responsibility between parents and the state. Either children are in the care and under the protection of their parents or in extreme circumstances, they are wards of the state. If they are wrds of the state, there are laws that cover what that means exactly.

And as for “the concerns for a minority being applied to the vast majority of caring, motivated home educating parents.” that is exactly what Graham Badman is doing in this review; he is applying the concerns for a non existent minority (‘Home Educated children at risk’) to the vast majority, implying that ALL of them are at risk. Does he even know what he is saying?

As my introductory comments make clear, I am not persuaded that under the current regulatory regime4 that there is a correct balance between the rights of parents and the rights of the child either to an appropriate education or to be safe from harm. That being said I am not in anyway arguing that elective home education is intrinsically wrong or that within the elective home education community there is not exemplary practice. Indeed, there is a strong argument to commission further research to better inform understanding of “personalisation” as an element of student progression and achievement. I shall return to this issue later.

And who, exactly, is Graham Badman? Who is this man, that he can, with a single report, change the relationship between parents and their children -by the force of law- in ways that would have been inconceivable at any other time in the history of Britain, and that in many parts of the world would be rejected outright? By what authority does this man operate? Who selected him, what is his expertise? And even if he were the ‘perfect man’ to write such a report, how is it that in a ‘free country’ a single report can change the lives of free people in a way that is wholly unacceptable and a violation of the most fundamental kind?

I for one, do not accept the authority of Ed Balls or Graham Badman to make these pronouncements and assertions and then turn them into law, any more than I would accept the right of Caesar to mandate slavery. At the end of the day, this is what it comes down to; wether or not you accept that these people have any right to control and destroy you and your children.

Graham Badman is the worst sort of person, who on the one hand says that he feels that Home Educated children need to be kept safe from harm, but in the same breath says that “I am not in anyway arguing that elective home education is intrinsically wrong…” It is only if it is intrinsically wrong that you would be able to justify intervention or a change in the law. That is obvious. These are weasel words to damp down the incandescent outrage that is about to burn this report to ashes. It will not work.

The question is simply a matter of balance and securing the right regulatory regime within a framework of legislation that protects the rights of all children, even if in transaction such regulation is only necessary to protect a minority.

This is incorrect, and it is the same ‘thinking’ behind ContactPoint; put ALL children into a massive database to protect the small number of children at risk. It is a completely backwards, wrong headed way of thinking, and betrays Graham Badman’s lack of intellectual rigor. Legislation to protect the minority should protect the minority without affecting the law abiding and properly behaving majority. That is the principle which should operate here.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) gives children and young people over forty substantive rights which include the right to express their views freely, the right to be heard in any legal or administrative matters that affect them and the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas. Article 12 makes clear the responsibility of signatories to give children a voice:

“Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.” Yet under the current legislation and guidance, local authorities have no right of access to the child to determine or ascertain such views.

This is utter nonsense. The rights of man do not emanate from the United Nations. These ‘rights’, as I say above, are actually designed to give a voice to government via the child. They are completely bogus, and have no business in this review.

Furthermore Article 28 of the UNCRC recognises the right of the child to an education. Education is compulsory in England and it can be provided at school “or otherwise” 5. The responsibility for the provision of a child’s education rests with their parents who also have a duty to ensure that any education provided is “efficient”, “full time” and ”suitable”. This is set out in Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 which provides that:

Here the report goes into what we have discussed before during a previous review.

• It is the responsibility of the parent to educate their children, not the state.
• It is the judgement of the parent ALONE as to what is suitable education. That too is not the business of the state.

Any legislation or guidelines that cause a local authority to have to measure what education is being provided for by Home Educating parents is absurd on its face, and must be removed so that they are not in the position of having to act as parents. Once again, Home Education has nothing to do with child safety issues.

The terms “efficient” and “suitable” education are not defined in law, despite the detailed prescription of expectations in schools.

These need to be defined for schools because schools are not the parents of children, and they have different responsibilities. Once again, Graham Badman cannot distinguish between the duties of the state and the responsibilities of parents. The two are not equatable in any way and should never be confused with each other.

Within current guidance local authorities are “encouraged to address the situation informally” 8. Such an approach may or may not be sufficient. How can local authorities know what they don’t know with no means of determining the number of children who are being electively home educated in their area, or the quality of what is provided, without rights of access to the child? For many, perhaps the majority of home educating families, this approach may be sufficient. However, I do not believe that such arrangements are sufficiently robust to protect the rights of all children.

Notice how this report has been written in a vacuum of information. Graham Badman BELIEVES that such arrangements are insufficiently robust. What his beliefs are are irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that Home Education presents no problem whatsoever to anyone, and this whole scenario has been artificially constructed by a series of irrational and absurd guidelines that have caused secondary actions to be needed.

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Article 2 of Protocol 1 states: “No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.”

3.9 This Article is much quoted by home educators in defence of their rights as parents to educate their children as they see fit. However, case law on the ECHR challenges any claim that home education is a fundamental right:

“The second sentence of Article 2 [of Protocol 1] must however be read together with the first which enshrines the right of everyone to education. It is on to this fundamental right that is grafted the right of parents to respect for their religious and philosophical convictions. …Furthermore, respect is only due to convictions on the part of the parents which do not conflict with the fundamental right of the child to education”9

It is absolutely clear that the right of parents to follow their religious and philosophical convictions means that the state is excluded from interfering with Home Educators. The fact that the EHCR (who also upheld the Hitler written Nazi era Home Education ban in Germany) are using sophistry to destroy the rights of parents is irrelevant. If the ECHR says that slavery should be permitted, that does not make it right, no matter what the case law says.

This review does not argue against the rights of parents as set out in Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 outlined above, nor their deeply held convictions about education. I believe it would be wrong to seek to legislate in pursuit of an all embracing definition of “suitable”. However, such is the demand and complexity of 21st Century society and employment that further thought should be given to what constitutes an appropriate curriculum within the context of elective home education. Such a curriculum must be sufficiently broad and balanced and relevant to enable young people to make suitable choices about their life and likely future employment.

Once again, a self contradicting section. On the one hand, Badman says that it would be wrong to legislate to define what is ‘suitable’ but on the other hand, he says that, “further thought should be given to what constitutes an appropriate curriculum”. I find it hard to believe that any intelligent man can write such a paragraph. It is obvious that setting a curriculum would de-facto mean defining what is suitable; the curriculum itself would be what the state feels is suitable.

I am sure that all unschoolers / autonomous learners now have two fistfuls of hair in their hands. Many Home Educators do so explicitly to get away from from the state curriculum. To now say that they must adhere to it in their homes is frankly, an outrage of an unspeakable kind.

Look at what the core of this curriculum would entail:

“State Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:
(a) The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;
(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations; (c) The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own;
(d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin;
(e) The development of respect for the natural environment.”

(a) The development of the child’s personality is not the responsibility of the state.

(b) Respect for human rights is not a universal truth. People from Saudi Arabia have a very different view of this, and those Saudis educating at home should not be forced to swallow the ideology of another country, and neither should any child be forced to learn and accept the Charter of the United Nations, should the parents of that child not agree with that document.

(c) Respect for the child’s parents is not the business of the state. Some parents allow their children to address them by their first names. Others think that is discourteous. Neither is the business of the state; the state should not define what respect is or is not, and once again, in many cultures, respect takes different forms. In many cultures, children kneel or bow horizontally before their parents. Graham Badman may feel that this is ‘humiliating’ for a child. It is not his concern what the customs of families are, and he would be well advised to keep out of these affairs. As for civilizations different from his or her own, Graham Badman and Ed Balls would do well to lead by example in this respect. Home Educators are, for all intents and purposes, from a different civilization to them. They should respect that, and not try and change Home Educators to fit in with their beliefs.

(d) This is almost laughable. Britain, as we can clearly see by the publication of this report, is nothing like a free society. Governments in free societies do not interfere with the private lives of citizens and families. What Home Educators are in fact doing, is creating a generation of TRUELY FREE CITIZENS who think for themselves, learn for themselves and who are not under the control of the state.

(e) Here we are talking about Anthropogenic Global Warming, and the agenda surrounding it. Home Educators sometimes use science books that do not teach AGW, and this is deeply offensive to Graham Badman. Once again, no respect for other people’s ideas or beliefs or culture; its all ‘be like us or we will kidnap your children’.

And here it comes:

Recommendation 1
That the DCSF establishes a compulsory national registration scheme, locally administered, for all children of statutory school age, who are, or become, electively home educated.

?? This scheme should be common to all local authorities.

Home Educators refuse.

?? Registration should be renewed annually.

Absolutely ridiculous.

?? Those who are registering for the first time should be visited by the appropriate local authority officer within one month of registration.

Under no circumstances.

?? Local authorities should ensure that all home educated children and young people already known to them are registered on the new scheme within one month of its inception and visited over the following twelve months, following the commencement of any new legislation.

Absolutely not.

?? Provision should be made to allow registration at a local school, children’s centre or other public building as determined by the local authority.

Once again, totally ridiculous.

?? When parents are thinking of deregistering their child/children from school to home educate, schools should retain such pupils on roll for a period of 20 school days so that should there be a change in circumstances, the child could be readmitted to the school. This period would also allow for the resolution of such difficulties that may have prompted the decision to remove the child from school.

This is interesting, and I do not disagree with it; it really doesn’t have anything to do with Home Educators.

?? National guidance should be issued on the requirements of registration and be made available online and at appropriate public buildings. Such guidance must include a clear statement of the statutory basis of elective home education and the rights and responsibilities of parents.

Unless you are going to compel people to register and threaten them with fines, no one will register. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

? At the time of registration parents/carers/guardians must provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following twelve months.

Absolutely outrageous. Obviously Graham Badman doesn’t understand anything about Home Education, which is astonishing after having had so much contact with them. The idea of a ‘statement of intent’, outcomes for the year; these are how a school has to run, because it is responsible to the parent. Home Educators are not responsible to anyone but themselves; they set their own goals and use their own methods and these are all private.

Guidance should be issued to support parents in this task with an opportunity to meet local authority officers to discuss the planned approach to home education and develop the plan before it is finalised. The plan should be finalised within eight weeks of first registration.

Completely ridiculous; the local authorities cannot run the schools they are in charge of already; asking them to become involved (deeply involved) in Home Education like this is totally ABSURD. This also presupposes that the local authority has the capacity and the right to give guidance to parents; they have neither. How parents choose to Home Educate is a purely private matter.

As well as written guidance, support should encompass advice from a range of advisers and organisations, including schools. Schools should regard this support as a part of their commitment to extended schooling.

Many parents Home Educate explicitly to get away from the influence of schools, who are in any case already overstretched. This is total, unrefined insanity.

Where a child is removed from a school roll to be home educated, the school must provide to the appropriate officer of the local authority a record of the child’s achievement to date and expected achievement, within 20 school days of the registration, together with any other school records.

This is a violation of privacy.

? Local authorities must ensure that there are mechanisms/systems in place to record and review registrations annually.

This means another database.

Recommendation 2
That the DCSF review the current statutory definition of what constitutes a “suitable” and “efficient” education in the light of the Rose review of the primary curriculum, and other changes to curriculum assessment and definition throughout statutory school age. Such a review should take account of the five Every Child Matters outcomes determined by the 2004 Children Act, should not be overly prescriptive but be sufficiently defined to secure a broad, balanced, relevant and differentiated curriculum that would allow children and young people educated at home to have sufficient information to enable them to expand their talents and make choices about likely careers. The outcome of this review should further inform guidance on registration.

Home educators should be engaged in this process.

They, like Graham Badman, do not listen to Home Educators, so why should anyone waste time ‘engaging in the process’?

In any case, the process is not what Home Educators want. They do not want a curriculum imposed on them. They do not want to be monitored, registered or to have the goals of the state imposed on them. They will not accept it.

And now, the most outrageous, unacceptable and totally not going to happen recommendation:

Recommendation 7 The DCSF should bring forward proposals to change the current regulatory and statutory basis to ensure that in monitoring the efficiency and suitability of elective home education:

?? That designated local authority officers should:
– have the right of access to the home;
– have the right to speak with each child alone if deemed appropriate or, if a child is particularly vulnerable or has particular communication needs, in the company of a trusted person who is not the home educator or the parent/carer.

In so doing, officers will be able to satisfy themselves that the child is safe and well.

?? That a requirement is placed upon local authorities to secure the monitoring of the effectiveness of elective home education as determined in Recommendation 1.

?? That parents be required to allow the child through exhibition or other means to demonstrate both attainment and progress in accord with the statement of intent lodged at the time of registration.

On the one hand Graham Badman says that Home Educators are not abusers, but on the other, he recommends this. Absolutely absurd.

Ofsted when they inspect a school, do not interface with children, they interface with staff. They do not take children off ALONE to question them; they observe lessons but that is as far as they go. There are even Ofsted recommendations that weak school teachers should not be inspected at all, lest they be ’caused stress’.

This recommendation makes it clear that Graham Badman thinks that Home Education is a cover for abuse. If he did not think that, he would not have made this recommendation. This is a very sinister, pure evil recommendation, and I am sure that every Home Educator in the UK and world-wide is incensed that these words have been delivered in this report.

In the main, home educators in their responses through questionnaire, email, letter and interview were fiercely defensive of their rights and actions. There were some who welcomed the visits of local authority officers and the support offered through drop-in centres, resources and materials and some argued for more regularised monitoring and intervention. However, there were those who wanted nothing from the local authority nor any contact with it.

I do not think that Graham Badman understands just what it is he is recommending, and what the word ‘fierce’ means in this context. Parents have pulled up stakes and left countries in order to Home Educate without interference.

I am not going to go over any more of this review. It is clear that it should be rejected in it’s entirety since it is based on a fundamentally flawed initial premise.

This review is a declaration of war. In the end, the state will not win. I do not know a single Home Educator that will comply with any of this, and they will fight it vigorously. In the end, if the pressure gets to be too much, as it is in Germany, parents will simply move their families to free countries. In the end, the state cannot win; the ultimate maneuver, to escape, is always on the cards. Families who can sacrifice to Home Educate will be predisposed to doing this.

Yet another group of people leaving the UK; in the end, there will be no individuals left.

But we are not at that point yet.

Ed Balls is going to lose his seat at the next election. Labour is going to be wiped out. The economic crisis has not yet peaked; Britain is facing a budget deficit unprecedented in its history. There is no money for any of this, and in the end, this single factor might be the bullet that kills off this garbage.

Between now and then, I would recommend to all Home Educating parents that a PR campaign be launched targeted at Tory MPS, who are unquestionably going to make up the next government. They are already committed to scrapping ContactPoint, and it is in this context that this incredibly offensive, Orwellian review should be put.

If a campaign is not launched, and the case not made, You can be sure that more difficult battles are going to be in store.

Finally, and I have said this before, Home Education is the future. In the USA millions of families are doing it, and their numbers are growing. New Liebor, as usual, is destructive and authoritarian in its approach to anything that is unfamiliar or ‘out of control’. Up till now, Britain has respected parents rights, and Home Education has flourished undisturbed. Home Educators have organized themselves, produced spectacular results and demonstrated that they do not need any help from anyone.

Home Educators need to act now, and point blank reject the results of this review, with a stern warning that it is indeed a declaration of war.

And remember all you parents who do not Home Educate; this is a right that is being taken away from you also, even if you do not choose to exercise it. Recommendation seven will apply to ALL homes; the local authority will have the right of access to your home, and the right to speak to your child without you being there.

This is SPARTA!

+++++++

UPDATE

We have been writing about Home Education for some time; by all means, go through our archive of posts on this subject. You will find it has everything you need to understand the why, what and how of Home Education. Every myth is dispelled, facts are laid out and the position made crystal clear.

The press has reacted to the Badman report. Thanks to Dare to Know.

The Telegraph has a piece that is right and a special comment that is absolutely correct. Someone out there GETS IT.

The Guadian has a piece that restates and reinforces the review. That newspaper is a staunch, unquestioning supporter of New Labour; they are totalitarian control freaks, and their token attempts to appease people who want real liberty do not fool anyone (Henry Porter).

BBC News has a similar piece, with this unrepresentative pull quote from ‘Have your say’, “It’s a shame that some children do not get to have the interaction of the classroom and other children of their same age” Once again, a nameless aparatchick peddles propaganda for the state. No surprise there. And watch out for the glove puppets in there, they stick out like sore thumbs.

The Times has the following paragraph:

The reforms are necessary because twice as many home educated children are known to social services as the normal school-aged population under current arrangements, the report revealed.

At least in this case we know the name of the ignorant swine who wrote it, ‘Nicola Woolcock’. A shameful piece of garbage masquerading as journalism.

The Independent, who published a scandalously bad piece in September 2008, published a short blurb with this title, “Children educated at home more at risk of abuse”. Just about what you would expect from bird cage liner imitating a newspaper.

Finally, the newsletter ‘Community Care’ has this very strange title to a piece on this review, “Parents face being struck off for failing to safeguard children”. ‘Struck Off’? Struck off of what exactly?.

It will be interesting to hear the reaction of the Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove.

Everyone should remember that it does not matter what review they publish or what laws they enact. You do not have to obey them. If this nonsense is not struck down, you will be just like the Germans; in a fight for your lives against Nazi law. Thankfully there are so many Home Educators it will be impossible for them to police them all. They do not have the money or the resources to do it. In any case, this is just the beginning of this war.

This piece by Gerald Warner deserves to be reprinted in full:

The dying scorpion still has venom in its tail: this decomposing Labour government, rotting like a fish from the head down and with a maximum life expectancy of 11 months, is still doggedly pursuing the destruction of British society – the Project on which it embarked 12 years ago. Its latest assault on the family is an offensive against home schooling.

Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary – the very title is a totalitarian evocation of Maoist crèches and collectivist indoctrination – is to compel all parents educating their children at home to register them with local authorities (whose property they evidently are) and “extra support” (ie taxpayers’ money) will be made available as part of “significantly strengthened” regulatory guidelines. In other words, the state, furious that 50,000 children have eluded its clutches, is intruding further into family life.

The pretext for this intervention, even more offensive, is the claim by Baroness Morgan, the Children’s Minister, that “in some extreme cases, home education could be used as a cover for abuse”. Note the weasel-worded “could be used”. The review whose findings are being used to justify this intervention was charged, as part of its remit, to investigate claims that lessons at home could disguise “neglect, forced marriage, sexual exploitation or domestic servitude”.

So, order your home-schooled children to wash the dishes and whoops! you’re nicked for domestic servitude. The irony of the sexual insinuations is that some parents prefer to educate their children at home to protect them from state-imposed pornographic “sex education”, immoral peer pressure and the outrage whereby a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge. The story in the Telegraph immediately above the report on this latest anti-family aggression concerned a nursery shut down over sex abuse charges.

Until recently it was impossible to imagine a Government minister being more loathed than Harriet Harridan, but lately Ed Balls has been coming up strongly on the outside. For 12 years this abomination of a régime has used every weapon at its disposal to destroy the family, the basic building block of society. In that prejudice it follows the precepts of the Frankfurt School of Marxism and, in particular, Herbert Marcuse.

The premise on which this latest aggression is based is that parents are unfit to care for children: only the state can be trusted. Fortunately, parents are also voters. Beleaguered families are just another element, though an important one, in the vast coalition of resentment that is gathering force to annihilate Labour (and any other party that seeks to imitate its PC tyranny, Dave) at the next general election. Here is a laudable ambition for any patriot to pursue: Britain as a Labour-free zone.

Amen to that.

And after Britain has been cleansed of the disease that is New Labour, as I have said before, everything that they did during these terrible twelve years should be undone, so that not a trace of their sick ideology and pernicious influence is left. Only the scar in the minds of all Britons should be left, and that scar should remain forever so that never again will such a government be allowed to poison this beautiful country.

UPDATE 2

Renegade Parent links here moves to the bigger picture:

[…]

Remove home education from the equation: it’s irrelevant. What Badman is proposing places primary responsibility for education (and welfare) on the state, rather than the parent. It assumes that the home is an inherently unsafe or unhealthy place for the child to be. It tramples over family freedom in its haste to bestow additional “rights” on children that only an anonymous third party can adequately minister to. It destroys the very possibility of autonomy in learning. It operates from a position of requiring proof of parental innocence rather than reasonable suspicion of guilt. It universally uses the coercive and interventionist tools of compulsory registration, entry to the home, inspection according to external standards, and power to see the child without the parent present.

By implication this applies to anyone who has their child at home with them: particularly parents with under 5s, but also those with school-aged children who are at home in the evenings, over the weekends, and throughout the summer holidays. Think on: the possibility of parental inspection, with or without your presence, based on the very human whim of a local authority officer.

Is that okay with you? Despite those officers being instructed by the author of this review to doubt your every word, to put their fears of error aside, and to act swiftly if they have even the slightest doubt? Because it’s better for an innocent child to be removed into care than for one to be abused. Even yours.

Are you still comfortable with the recomendations of this home education review? Despite the system being riddled with people like this or this, undoubtedly CRB checked, who rape, abuse, and photograph children for their own vile purposes? When we already know, unsurprisingly, that they are statistically far more likely to do this to our children than you or I?

[…]

Renegade Parent

I agree with this entirely. This is an attack on ALL FAMILIES and the family itself. It tries to re-engineer the family and Home Education is just the pretext. As I say above, once the local authorities are given the power to enter your home, they can enter ANY home, not just the home of a Home Educator.

UPDATE 3

UKIP denounce the review:

UKIP slams home education review

Thursday, 11th June 2009

The Badman Review into Home Education, out today, has been slammed by UKIP as a heavyhanded Government attempt to tell parents how their children should be taught

“The release of the Badman Review into Home Education today is yet another example of this government’s controlling, heavy handed approach to society,” said UKIP chairman Paul Nuttall MEP.

He said: “Calling for local councils to have the right to interfere in the responsibility of parents to provide sufficient education for their children may sound reasonable but amounts to a grab for power.

“Worse still the Government is using appalling scare tactics to justify its actions by suggesting that home education is a cover for the worst forms of child abuse. No evidence is presented merely smears and threats.”

The newly-elected North West region MEP said: “UKIP believe that it should be up to the parent to decide how their children be educated.

“Child abuse must be tackled, but the tragic failures of the systems have been due to local councils’ inability to follow basic procedures, not due to home educators.

“The fact that this report is being backed by organisations such as the NSPCC and the National Children’s Bureau should come as no surprise.

“Those organisations are these days largely adjuncts to the state and appear to see for themselves a role in the monitoring, inspecting and running of Home Education, all for a nice taxpayer-funded fee. They are not independent voices and mustn’t be seen as such.”

An Action for Home Education spokesmananother an has called for the Badman review to be abandoned, saying: “AHEd members believe that the review has been composed in this skewed manner in order to attain predetermined answers for the purpose of supporting the government’s desire to impose compulsory registration, monitoring and tracking of electively home-educated children and their families, including state control and prescription of educational method, content and outcome for all children.”

UKIP’s home education policy can be found here (PDF).

And here is the text of it:

Freedom must extend to Education

UK Independence Party Statement on Home Education

There is a growing attempt by the Government to marginalise and to attack those who choose entirely legally, to educate their children at home. UKIP strongly endorses the right of parents to offer Elective Home Education

The 1996 Education act states quite clearly:

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable: 1. to his age, ability and aptitude, and 2. to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

The UK Independence Party in 2007 stated that it is fully behind the principle of Elective Home Education:

“We will nonetheless guarantee that those wishing to educate their children at home will still have this option available to them”.

This was our position and remains so. UKIP utterly opposes attempts by the Government and state funded charities like the NSPCC to demonise Home Schooling. Home Education is a choice and one that should be supported.

Attempts to bring Elective Home Education under the authority of local government should be opposed wherever they are found. The Every Child Matters Program of the Government is a scheme by which the Government, under spurious grounds, wishes to take control of those who elect to educate their children at home. It must not be allowed to do this.

To that end UKIP will work to:
1) Ensure that parents remain responsible for the upbringing and education of their children within or without formal schooling.

2) Fight against current and proposed policies and legislation which may affect the rights and freedoms of families who choose home education.

3) Support the right to fair and equal treatment for those who choose independent, elective home based learning for their children.

Clearly, this is 100% correct.

This next piece is by Dr Sean Gabb from the Libertarian Alliance. It describes very neatly how Home Education is going to be banned in the UK and how this review is only the first step:

[…]

“The right of people to educate their children within the values of their family, their faith or their community has always been respected by the British State. Parents have been legally obliged to proved their children with an education – but have never been obliged to send them to school, or even to notify the authorities of what they intend.

“The current proposals sound moderate. The talk is of giving support, not of forbidding. But they are the first step to outlawing home education. Registration will, for the first time, let the authorities know who is educating their children at home. Once these parents are known, they will be visited and inspected to ensure that they are providing a ’suitable’ education. What this means – though not all at once: it will take several years of salami slicing – is that parents will be hit with impossible and ever-changing health and safety rules. They will be forced to keep records in rigidly prescribed formats – records that will almost certainly demand disclosure of the race and probable sexuality of the children, and that will (if not first lost on a railway train) be shared with foreign governments and private companies. paper qualifications may be required from parents. They will eventually be forced to teach the feared and discredited National Curriculum.

“At no point will home education be made into a criminal offence – as it is in Germany and Belgium, among other European countries. Instead, it will be surrounded by so many rules and by so much supervision, that most parents who now educate at home will give up. Many who carry on will be picked off one at a time – their children conscripted into a state school for some trifling infraction of deliberately conflicting and arbitrary rules. In extreme cases, parents will have their children taken into ‘care’.

[…]

“As for regulation as a guarantor of safety, we only need look at the nursery worker arrested this week for sexual assaults on children. Since this is a matter before the courts we make no comment on the woman’s guilt or innocence. We do note, however, that she will have been closely examined by Ofsted, and checked against all the relevant databases, and judged officially safe with children. Anyone who thinks regulation makes children safe needs his head examined.

“This current proposals will lead ultimately to a state of affairs in which children can be torn from their homes and forced into schools where they will be brainwashed into values that their parents find abhorrent – and where they will probably be kept illiterate and innumerate as these things were once measured, and where they might also be bullied into suicide or lifelong depression.

“Ed Balls, the Minister concerned, wants all this because his Government has turned Britain into a soft totalitarian state. No child – except, of course, of the rich, who can always buy their way out – must be permitted to escape the ideological apparatus of the New Labour State. Home educators are the equivalent of the Kulaks in the Soviet Union. They show too much independence. They must be destroyed.

“The Libertarian Alliance denounces Mr Balls and the Government in which he is a Minister, and calls on people everywhere – British or not, parents or not – to write to him expressing their own contempt of and opposition to this attempted mass kidnapping of our children.”

[…]

Libertarian Alliance

UPDATE 4

Renegade Parent attacks again with clarity:

This morally corrupt government has already caused too much damage with its ever-expanding, power-seeking, controlling agenda. For the government to target our children in this way is the beginning of the end unless we just say NO:

It is NOT acceptable for the state to have ultimate control of the education of our children

It is NOT acceptable for the state to make ultra vires judgements about the welfare of our children and then act in loco parentis

It is NOT acceptable for the state to operate on a presumption of guilt

It is NOT acceptable for the state to demand access to our homes without reasonable suspicion that an actual offence has been or is about to be committed

It is NOT acceptable for the state to demand access to our children without reasonable suspicion that an actual offence has been or is about to be committed

It is NOT acceptable for the state to demand unsupervised access to our children

These are all contained within the recommendations of Badman’s review document. The government has them accepted in full as “proportionate and reasonable”.

[…]

And to add to this, just saying ‘No’ is outlined here. It means non-cooperation. It means ignoring all correspondence from the local authority. There is no way that they can compel all 80,000 home schoolers in the UK to comply with these proposals, should they become law. It is important to remember this, keep it in mind and focus on it. If they telephone you incessantly, block number so that they cannot call you without revealing their number. Ignore all the letters they send to you. These simple measures will be enough… but we are not at that point yet.

Renegade Parent also adds these links:

Adam Smith Institute

This Labour government has been especially bad at dealing with difference, and its latest stance against home schooling is indicative of this lack of tolerance and understanding. Specifically, the government is considering forcing home educating families to have to register annually and demonstrate they are providing a suitable education. It would mean that local Councils would be given the power to force children into school against their parent’s wishes.

The BBC reports that: “Some teaching unions say they feel home educated children do not develop certain skills such as co-operation, conflict management or relationship-building.” The irony of teaching unions holding up these virtues is comically ironic given their track record for militant power battles between themselves and the government. If that’s the kind of co-operation, conflict management or relationship-building a state education can give you, I am not at all surprised people prefer to privately educate their children or teach them at home in increasing numbers.

Bishop Hill

The Badman report on home education is out, and it’s monstrous. Forced entry to people’s homes is recommended. Revolutions have been started over this sort of thing.

LPUK

Ian Parker-Joseph, leader of the Libertarian Party says: “LPUK will oppose changes to HE. Parents must be free to educate children as they see fit, they are yours not the State’s.”

That is the position of the Libertarian Party. The state does not own your children.

Mark Fields MP

As Conservatives, we should be vigorously defending the rights of parents to reject the state’s ideas on education and the constant testing, restrictive curriculum and poor results that often stem from them. Home educators are self-reliant, pursue excellence, cost the taxpayer next to nothing, believe the parent, not the state knows best and firmly reject the idea that government has the answers to everything. A home education can also be an excellent option for those who cannot afford private schooling but have no confidence in a failing local state school.

reflections in the greenhouse

This blogger does some BLOGDIAL style substitution to make it clear how absurd the recommendations of this review are:

* All vegetarians are required to register with their local authorities, and inform the authorities whenever they move house.

* Vegetarians must be visited annually by an inspector (usually a former employee of the meat industry), who will assess their dietary plans for the coming year against government standards.

* Inspectors have the right to interview children in vegetarian families, without their parents present, in order to find out whether the children are safe and well, and ask them if they are happy to be living on a vegetarian diet.

Insane isn’t it?!

Telegraph Letters

“Parents should educate children as they wish” ran the heading of your leading article yesterday. This not just a slogan but an aphorism.

It states a basic human right and points the way to achieve the best education – and I write as one who was for more than 20 years a head of schools, independent and maintained.

The Government’s intention to regulate – in effect, nationalise – home education is spiteful, dictatorial and simply anti-educational. There is no evidence that home-educated children do worse than those in schools. To suggest that home education might lead to abuse ill becomes a Government at a time when a state-regulated nursery is being investigated over horrific crimes.

Instead, the Government should ask why parents want to educate children at home. Almost always, it is because of dissatisfaction with state schooling.

Britain’s independent schools are among the best in the world. This is because they must educate children as the parents wish, since no one is compelled to send a child to an independent school.

Home educators are not always rich. Parents able to choose an independent school would hardly need to educate a child at home.

State schools have, in practice, been nationalised. Governors, heads and teachers, many of them excellent, must do as politicians dictate. It is notable that the best maintained schools are usually church schools, which have rather less interference from politicians. Schools known by the Labour term of “bog-standard comprehensives” are among the worst in the world. No wonder parents go to any lengths to avoid them.

The Government has no authority to dictate to parents how their children should be educated. The measure to subject home education to state control should be resisted.

Eric Hester
Bolton, Lancashire

Now we read that almost instantly, there is a new consultation that they want everyone to fill out, to discuss how Home Educators are to be monitored and registered. The arrogance of these people is breathtaking. They have presumed in advance that Home Educators agree with Graham Badman, and will co-operate with the elimination of their rights and the giving up of their children.

The fact of the matter is that no one agrees with this review. I strongly suggest that you do not engage with this consultation.

Answering the previous consultations did not result in government listening to the concerns of Home Educators and then acting on them, and this one will be no different. This consultation must be boycotted by Home Educators. By engaging with it, you give legitimacy to the state; legitimacy that it has completely lost. If you answer this consultation, they will be able to say that Home Educators were consulted, allowing them to portray themselves as reasonable and fair, no matter what it is they are doing. Look at the questions:

Question 1 Do you agree that these proposals strike the right balance between the rights of parents to home educate and the rights of children to receive a suitable education?

Question 2 Do you agree that a register should be kept?

Question 3 Do you agree with the information to be provided for registration?

Question 4 Do you agree that home educating parents should be required to keep the register up to date?

Question 5 Do you agree that it should be a criminal offence to fail to register or to provide inadequate or false information?

Question 6a Do you agree that home educated children should stay on the roll of their former school for 20 days after parents notify that they intend to home educate?

Question 6b Do you agree that the school should provide the local authority with achievement and future attainment data?

Question 7 Do you agree that DCSF should take powers to issue statutory guidance in relation to the registration and monitoring of home education?

Question 9 Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises where home education is taking place provided 2 weeks notice is given?

Question 10 Do you agree that the local authority should have the power to interview the child, alone if this is judged appropriate, or if not in the presence of a trusted person who is not the parent/carer?

Question 11 Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises and interview the child within four weeks of home education starting, after 6 months has elapsed, at the anniversary of home education starting, and thereafter at least on an annual basis? This would not preclude more frequent monitoring if the local authority thought that was necessary.

Now I have a question for YOU.

Question 12 Do you really believe that if you answer in the negative to all of these questions, that the Badman proposals will be dropped?

If you do, you are COMPLETELY DELUSIONAL.

DO NOT RESPOND TO THE CONSULTATION.

Your fundamental rights cannot be erased by dint of a consultation that anyone can answer, or a review by a paranoid imbecile or a minister from a totally discredited government on its last legs.

UPDATE 5

This blogger, who is a victim of abuse, chimes in with pure reason against Badman and Balls:

[…]

As a victim myself, I’m the last person to make light of the importance of safeguarding children. But having bureaucrats interfering in the lives of innocent people will not safeguard abused children and in itself could represent a form of abuse. I’m thinking of a more subtle form of abuse where children are denied the completely individualised education they can currently enjoy at home, because they are made to jump through the same stupid hoops as the poor children at school. I’m also thinking of this one-to-one interview, without parents present, where children will be quizzed about their achievements. For children who have been withdrawn from school because of special needs, academic problems, or bullying, this could be a terrifying ordeal.

[…]

http://frabjousdays.blogspot.com/2009/06/badness-from-badman.html

UPDATE 6

This was written by James Bartholomew, renowned author who wrote “The Welfare State We’re In“:

What is wrong with the government inspecting all home schoolers?
1. If the state starts to inspect all home educators, it will soon start to dictate to them. It will tell them what to teach, when and how. This is an infringement of freedom and free speech.

2. The parent is the correct person to have primary responsibility for a child, not the state. The state should be the servant of the people, not the boss. The state already has the power to take a hand if it has reason to think a child is being abused or not getting an education. Anything more than that would mean the state was taking over the primary responsibility of the individual.

3. Through inspecting and then prescribing what should be taught and how, the state will reduce the diversity of home education. In doing this, it will damage home education. Some children are currently taught in ways that are a response to the individual problems and opportunities that exist in the particular situation. For one child, lots of confidence-building activities may be desirable after that child has been badly bullied at a school. For another, trips to China, Egypt and elsewhere in the world may be possible and highly desirable to give a world perspective. Freedom allows the ulitmate in individualised education.

4.Inspection followed by increasing prescription of what should be taught will deter an unknown proportion of parents from home educating. This will deprive their children of the benefit that they would otherwise have had from home education. The benefit includes plenty of on-to-one teaching and a great deal of parental contact. Already some local authorities are somewhat hostile to home education. Further powers to inspect and regulate will give those bureaucrats greater power to obstruct and discourage parents who would otherwise have home-schooled.

5. Mr Badman has apparently said that there is no apparent correlation between home education and child abuse. In admitting this, he has removed the main argument for automatic inspection.

One supporter of moves to inspect all home educators every year said on Radio 5 Live that “We want to know where children are” as though this was a clinching argument. It is an absurd argument. For the vast bulk of the time, the state has no idea where people are nor does it need to know nor is desirable that it should know. We, the people, should be free to live our lives under the law. The state should not be monitoring us or dictating to us. The idea of “we want to know where children are” is based either on the notion that “the state knows best and had better be in?control of everything” or else on some psychological problem which leads individual administrators or parties to want to control others. The first notion is wrong and the second is positively disturbing.

The whole history of the welfare state tells us one thing above all others: the state starts by inspecting, goes on to regulate and finishes by taking over. In the process, the state demoralises those who perform a service; it makes that service inferior to what it would otherwise have been; the bureaucrats dominate frontline providers; the numbers of bureaucrats increase and the cost of what it does escalates. So one ends up with an inferior service provided at great expense to the taxpayer. Both of these consequences in turn lead to damage to the economy and culture of a country.

[…]

http://www.thewelfarestatewerein.com/archives/2009/06/what_is_wrong_w.php

From every corner, people are coming out in support of Home Educators, the sanctity of the family and fundamental personal liberty. There is widespread understanding that the proposals of Badman and Balls are entirely unacceptable.

When the parents of children who are sent to school get wind of this and realize that the local authority will have new powers to interrogate THEIR children without supervision, there will be a groundswell of rage that will put an end to this.

UPDATE 7

This appeared in The Times; astonishingly, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing at that ‘newspaper’. They can repeat government propaganda unquestioned and in fact bolstered, but they can also print this piece, which demonstrates why Home Education is so very great:

As the government’s review into home education is announced, a (home-educated) teenager gives her view

Home education is back in the spotlight, with the news that the government is to set up a register for parents choosing to home-educate. The register is part of the government’s review into home education which was set up in January, and which one mother wrote about on School Gate. The homeschooling community was not happy about suggestions that teaching their children was being used as a “cover” for some kind of abuse.

The issue of home-schooling splits visitors to School Gate. To put it crudely, many just don’t understand why anyone would want to home-educate, while those who do are evangelical about its benefits (and often critical of the millions of us who send our children to school). Today Schools Secretary Ed Balls talked of “striking the right balance” in this area, “between two important principles: giving parents the right to decide how and where their children should be educated – because I am clear that parents bring up their children, not government; and ensuring that every child gets the education they need to help them fulfil their potential.

“Graham [Badman, who carried out the review] recommends action to address the very small number of cases where home-educated children have suffered harm because safeguarding concerns were either not picked up or addressed urgently,” Mr Balls continued. “Home education is a well-established and important part of our education system. And Graham’s review will – rightly in my view – stress the importance of maintaining those principles.”

Within all the arguments about home-schooling it’s rare to hear from a child who was home schooled. But on School Gate today 15-year-old Charley Mountney (whom you can see above) gives her view. It’s a real eye-opener…

“I have been home educated for nine years and I don’t regret a moment of it, if I had been in school I think I probably would be a lot different to how I am now.

I only did my first year in primary school, and all my memories of it are horrible! I used to get really badly bullied all the time.

This isn’t the case now; I have loads of home educated friends and friends that go to school. Bullying is not something that goes on in the home educated groups because the kids aren’t trying to get one up on each other all the time, no one feels threatened, and we have a lot of parents and adults around us to see every one is behaving appropriately. We all mix with different ages so there’s no peer group pressure. We don’t judge each other, we get to know each other and help when we can. There’s no competition and no intimidation.

The way I learn is very different to the way the children in school learn. I think we have a lot more say in things that we learn and what we do.

I choose most of the things I want to learn about, although mum and dad set me things to do that they think I should practice. I normally do my work in work books and on the computer, by studying text books and watching programmes, but we also go out lots to museums and galleries, and do field trips and activities with other home educated children. We use the library, sports halls, parks and playgrounds, swimming pools, places of interest, nature reserves and go ice skating and wall climbing. I do the usual after-school clubs as well, like pottery, youth club, SCUBA diving and in the past I’ve done gymnastics, dance and drama, horse riding and swimming lessons like other kids my age.

Other kids my age are doing GCSEs but at the present time I have no interest in doing them because the only way you can study for them is all academic and boring. I am interested in some of the subjects; I’m always doing science and biology, I did a lot of human biology in preparation for my diving exam, but when I do the biology GCSE course work it just makes me switch off! I feel GCSEs are forced upon most children and they don’t really want to do them.

I’ve always been encouraged to work for the things I want to achieve. At the moment I don’t know my own mind on my future, I don’t want to do GCSEs just for the sake of doing them because that’s a waste of my time, I could be working towards other things. When I’m completely decided on what I want to do in the future I will go for it, and there are other ways to build my future apart from doing GCSEs.

All the people I know that go to school absolutely despise being there and going to school. Everyone at youth club when they know I’m home educated thinks I’m really lucky. I feel school has a corrupting influence because many of my friends do things that they wouldn’t do if they weren’t in that group, like smoking for example. Mum has offered me the chances to try school if I wanted but being home educated I’m more able to be myself, do the things I’m good at and be who I want to be, not what people around me want me to be. I know I wouldn’t like school; I wouldn’t like that environment and the way that school children treat each other, so I think that home education was the best option for me. I am amazingly lucky.”

[…]

http://timesonline.typepad.com/

What a wonderful and insightful person. A REAL HUMAN BEING who will not jump through hoops, who faces the future without fear, with confidence and with an appreciation that hard work gets you what you want. If only all schoolchildren in the state system came out like this; able to compose a coherent pice like this that is correct in both its form and its content.

Of course, the collectivists see this sweet child as ‘the enemy’; she can think for herself, she is an individual. If the Home Educators are producing people like this in the hundreds of thousands, they represent a significant existential threat to collectivism, dishonesty and conformity that they represent and promote.

This corrupt and evil government has bitten off more than it can chew. The tide has turned against them in a most unprecedented and angry way, and the only reason why widespread rioting has not broken out is that an election is coming soon and everyone knows that New Labour will be completely purged from Parliament. That is the sole thing that is keeping this country from complete civil unrest.

The Times has published this piece on the complete insanity that has taken over the state schools:

Edu-babble is turning schoolchildren into ‘customers’

Performativity is forcing curriculum deliverers to focus on desired outputs among customers in managed learning environments.

If you struggled to understand that sentence, pity the poor teachers (curriculum deliverers) who are struggling to interpret jargon and management language rather than simply teaching their pupils (customers).

Edu-babble has become so common that it earns censure today in a review of education led by professors at the University of Oxford. Their report criticises the “Orwellian language seeping through government documents of performance management and control that has come to dominate educational deliberation and planning”.

Heads and teachers receive edicts on inputs and outputs, audits, targets, curriculum delivery, customers, deliverers, efficiency gains, performance indicators and bottom lines, it says.

This language of policymakers and their advisers hinders the enthusiasm of teachers and engagement of pupils, it adds. The Nuffield Review report is the biggest independent analysis of education for those aged 14 to 19 in fifty years, taking six years to complete. It was led by Professor Richard Pring and Dr Geoff Hayward, from Oxford, and professors from the Institute of Education and Cardiff University.

It claims that ministers’ micro-management of schools and colleges has resulted in a narrow curriculum, teaching to the test, and a high number of disaffected teenagers not in education, employment or training.

The report says: “The increased central control of education brings with it the need for a management perspective, and language of performance management — for example, levers and drivers of change, and public service agreements as a basis of funding. The consumer or client replaces the learner. The curriculum is delivered. Stakeholders shape the aims. Aims are spelt out in terms of targets. Audits measure success defined in terms of hitting targets. Cuts in resources are euphemistically called ‘efficiency gains’. Education becomes that package of activities (or inputs) largely determined by government.”

It adds: “As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of questions, of trying to make sense of reality, of seeking understanding, of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human.”

Professor Pring told The Times that policy language was “leading to a narrowing of the curriculum and impoverishment of learning”. He added: “We are losing the tradition of teachers being curriculum directors and developers — instead they’re curriculum deliverers. It’s almost as though they have little robots in front of them and they have to fill their minds, rather than engage with them.”

Bill Rammell, a former education minister, recently told the House of Commons about the establishment of the Centre for Procurement Performance. This had worked “proactively with the schools sector” to “embed principles and secure commitment from the front line” by “working with and through key stakeholders” and “engaging with procurement experts” to “deliver efficiency gains”.

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “We call it edu-babble. It completely denudes education from being a human and social act.”

WHAT THE DICTIONARY SAYS

Articulated progression

A clearly defined route through the qualification system that enables pupils to choose the next step in education towards their goal

Big Brother syndrome

A growing tendency among younger learners to voice an ambition for celebrity without notable achievement

Dialogic teaching

Teaching through dialogue between teachers and pupils, and between pupils themselves, which places an emphasis on speaking and listening

Level descriptor

A definition of the outcomes that a learner should have reached

Performativity

A relatively recent term coined to convey the emphasis that monitoring by government agencies and Ofsted places on the achievement of targets

Source: Truncated definitions from the Oxford Dictionary of Education

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6458791.ece?Submitted=true

And this, in a nutshell, is why Home Education as we have known it must be banned.

Home Education exists in the polar opposite, anti-matter universe of what is described above. Home Education is an unknown. There are no statistics available about it, no performance metrics, no hierarchy, no governing body. Home Education is autonomous. Its practitioners are outside of the mainstream, outside of society. Out of control. No one has a handle on them, what they are doing, what they are teaching, how they are teaching it, where they are going, how they get there and who decided what the goals were. No one even knows how many Home Educators there are. There is no uniform curriculum that they follow, no single test that they take, the ‘teachers’ do not need qualifications or state vetting of any kind.

In other words, Home Educators are free.

And that is anathema to the state.

What is worse, is that where there are data on how Home Education performs, the pupils that are measured outperform the state fodder in every way. The top universities are bending over backwards to recruit these exceptional students, taking places away from the state educated ‘customers’. Once they see this trend increasing, the immediate reaction of the state is to imagine a worst case scenario, where there are hundreds of thousands of Home Educated children in the country that will eventually emerge as a superclass that will dominate everyone like the old public school boys did (and still do).

This is why the upcoming report from Graham Badman will recommend the end of Home Education as it has been practiced in the UK. Its secret thrust will be the same as the German desire of not tolerating ‘parallel societies’, and of course, we all know that it was Hitler who outlawed Home Education in Germany for this very reason, and that it is the exact same law that the Third Reich enacted which is being followed to the letter and so brutally enforced in Germany today, with the explicit approval of the European Court of Justice.

The overt pretext for eliminating Home Education will be the absurd notion of, ‘children’s rights’, and the emotionally manipulative call to, ‘protect the children’. Whatever the review says, Home Education is here to stay, and I predict that it will remain unchanged since there will be an unprecedented backlash against any move to change the status quo.

People are leaving state education in droves precisely because of the pernicious influences described above, as well as the insane, suicidal nonsense of introducing (for example) sex education to five year olds and giving condom credit cards to twelve year old boys.

Now take a look at the sickening origins of this:

Part 1

Part 2

The state cannot run the schools that it is in charge of. They are failing the pupils that they are already responsible for; only a total idiot would want the state to interfere in Home Education, and only a deluded imbecile would call for incompetent people to try and regulate something that already works far better than the thing the incompetent are failing to run correctly.

I do not know a single Home Educator that is going to change what they do and how they do it in any way; no matter what they recommend in this report, and no matter what changes are made in the legislation, the rights of man are set in stone; this far, and no further – no one has the right to enter any home and demand that a family behave in one way or another. This is the logical conclusion of the totalitarian fascist state; they try and control everything you do outside the home, and now that they have nowhere left to legislate, they come into the home to control you there also. Many Home Educators are saying, “over my dead body”, and I agree with them one thousand percent.

No matter what this review of Home Education says, Home Educators will not be managed, manipulated, registered, corralled, categorized, controlled and subjected to the abuse that they dish out at state schools.

You can take your Edu-Babble, your reviews, your ignorant opinions and your bogus concerns and take a running jump. No one is buying what you have to sell, no one will tolerate your attempts to control and destroy the family, and you can go straight to hell.

And for your information, this is how you tell them to go to hell. This is a TRUE THING:

[…]

Yesterday morning, I received a phone call from a gentlemen in the EOTAs section of a Local Authority who asked me to tell him the names and addresses of all the people who attend a home education group we help to run and any other home educating families I happen to know about. Naturally, I told him this was impossible as I didn’t know him from Adam and anyway I couldn’t possibly breach people’s confidentiality or betray their friendship and trust, even had he come at me with a badge, his Criminal Record’s Bureau Check, his CV, his passport, you name it. All the while I was thinking, I do actually love loads of the people he is asking about. Who does he think I am?

The conversation, if anything, then took a turn for the even worse with a perfect demonstration of one LA employee’s serpentine understanding of current legislation. Actually, chopped logic is the phrase that springs to mind.

I tried to explain that I thought he might like to think again about his understandable belief that he must search us all out for the purpose of assessing every family for the suitability of their educational provision, whether or not there is any reason to think that there might be a problem. I suggested that this behaviour might create both a constitutional and a practical problem for his authority, whatever current guidance might actually say.

I told him that since he (understandably) believes that it is this duty to assess all out of school educational provision, then he must accept that the state is responsible for determining the nature of education in this country. In which case, I went on, I think both home educating and state schooled parents alike whose children are being failed by this state-elected educational provision should be rubbing their hands rather gleefully, since it looks like bonanza time.

He then said “Well, it’s up to the parents what and how they teach”. In which case, says I, “Why are you bothering to visit? If the parent says that they are not going to help their child to learn to read because that is part of their educational philosophy, what exactly are you going to do about it, if it is up to the parents to make that decision?”

At which point, he turns round and says angrily and heatedly (sorry, this is mutating into a bad episode of Eastenders I do realise), “This is not what this conversation is about. I just rang you up for the names and addresses.”

“Yes, you did,” I says, “and I can’t help you there, and no-one I know will help you”.

“Well, how am I supposed to do my job then?” he asks.

“The thing is,” says I, “I don’t think that is my problem,” which I don’t think it is really, as I didn’t vote for this government and didn’t write the Education and Inspections Act 2006.

“But”, says I, trying to be generous, “If it’s any consolation, I’ll tell you that there isn’t a single family I currently know of who isn’t providing a highly suitable education. ”

“Well, that’s not up to you to decide”, says he.

I didn’t actually manage to provide an instant summary of his argument at the time, but in l’esprit d’escalier:

“So what you’re saying is that it’s not up to the state to decide on the nature of a suitable education because it’s up to the parents, but it’s actually not really up to the parents, because in fact the state does have this duty. Err?

[…]

http://daretoknowblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/stasiland.html

WTF?

WELL DONE to this person for having the guts and brains and awareness to be on your toes when a call like this invades your home. She is a heroine.

Second, HOW DID THEY GET HER PHONE NUMBER?

Third, By what statute are they able to demand that she provide information on other people?

Fourth, this is ONLY THE BEGINNING. If ContactPoint is not stopped, they will be calling everyone who is the parent of a child not listed as registered in a school. All HE people need to be ready to receive this call or one like it, and answer it in terms like this or less, i.e., telling them they do not have your permission to call your telephone, telling them to write to you, and hanging up. You should then ban their number by dialing 14258 after you hang up and blocking the last number called. Then, when the letters arrive, simply ignore them.

This is the only way to deal with these subhuman animals; be on your toes and ready to react instantly and firmly.

These people and their power are like spider’s webs; easily brushed away. They have no real power, and no ability to do anything. They cannot even collect the names of Home Educators without the collaboration of the people they are trying to target. They have lost before they have even begun.

It is people like the HE mother above who make a difference to everyone by setting such a sterling example, and then posting it for everyone to read.

Robert Mugabe has described British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's regime as a "criminal and discredited cabal" which "should not be recognised by anybody".

He told MPs it had made it impossible to hold fair elections and "state sponsored terror" had put opposition Conservative party in an "untenable position".

The President said he would push for more sanctions against the regime.

He said Zimbabwe would offer "substantial help" for reconstruction "once democracy has been restored".

Mr Mugabe told MPs he had spoken to the leader of the Conservative opposition, David Cameron, who has pulled out of Friday's election run-off because of folded ballots, handing symbolic and unprecedented victory to the BNP.

Strengthen sanctions

Mr Cameron has since sought refuge in Somerset.

In a Commons statement Mr Mugabe said Britain had seen killings, many beatings, the detention of opposition leaders and the displacement of 34,000 people.

"The whole world is of one view – that the status quo cannot continue. The European Union has called for violence to end."

“Will you set out a detailed rescue package for the post-Brown era, to make it absolutely clear that when Brown goes we will do all we can to breathe new life into that country”
Morgan Tsvangirai
Opposition leader

"The current government, with no parliamentary support, having lost the first round of the European Parliament elections, and holding power only because of power and intimidation is a regime that should not be recognised by anyone."

He said on Monday he had talked to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, to the European Union president, the president of South Africa and Mr Cameron about the situation.

He said the international community had to send a powerful message that it would not recognise "fraudulent election rigging" and "the violence and intimidation of a criminal and discredited cabal".

'Rescue package'

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said he hoped the international community would look at "all options available" to put an end to Brown's regime and urged the government to allow Britains's asylum seekers to live and work temporarily in the UK.

Mr Brown said each asylum case was dealt with on an individual basis.

Conservative leader David Cameron welcomed Mr Mugabe's comments about wider EU sanctions against members of the regime but asked that he make sure "it really happens this time".

“Gordon Brown and his thugs made an election impossible”
Joice Mujuru
Vice President of Zimbabwe

He urged a UN inquiry into abuses of human rights with a view to a possible criminal action later on and asked: "Will you set out a detailed rescue package for the post-Brown era, to make it absolutely clear that when Brown goes we will do all we can to breathe new life into this country and into those people who have suffered so much."

He also said the government should say it is prepared to withdraw international recognition from the regime.

Later in a separate government statement, Vice President Joice Mujuru said the "only people with any democratic legitimacy" were the opposition Conservative party and added: "We do not, repeat do not recognise the Brown government as the legitimate representative of the British people."

He added: "The stage was set for the most rigged election in British history. The failure is not of the opposition but of the government. Gordon Brown and his thugs made an election impossible."

Ms Mujuru said it was now for Sadc (the Southern African Development Community) and European Union leaders to meet to establish "a clear framework of engagement".

He also said the UN Security Council would discuss the situation later on Monday – and it was important it worked with Sadc and the EU on the issue.

The Liberal Democrats have called for "foreign remittances" – money sent back to Britain by Britons abroad should be stopped as they are a source of funding for the regime.

But Ms Mujuru urged the party to stop calling for it, saying the money was vital for suffering Britons – and dismissed the Lib Dems' call to put pressure on France and Ireland to cut off electricity supplies.

There has been mounting international criticism of Britains's government in advance of the European Parliament election.

But Prime Minister Brown and New Labour blame the opposition for political violence across the country. Mr Brown said last week that the Conservatives would "never, ever" be allowed to rule Britain.

New Labour also said Mr Cameron had run to Somerset to avoid "humiliation".

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7468818.stm

Later this year the venerable incandescent lightbulb is going to be banned in many countries in the west. The reasoning behind this ban is that the bulbs are ‘inefficient’, and that removing them from use will save energy and reduce the amount of ‘carbon’ that is released into the atmosphere by the people who use them.

As a replacement for these bulbs, ‘energy efficient’ fluorescent light bulbs are planned to replace the incandescent light bulb, by the force of law.

All of the production lines that used to produce the incandescent light bulb have either been stopped or are in the process of being stopped. Capital has been diverted to the production of fluorescent light bulbs, and manufacturing capacity of the factories that make them has been increased to meet the demand caused by the ban on incandescent bulbs.

The incandescent light bulb is an old technology, developed and patented by Thomas Edison, and refined over many decades. They are cheap to manufacture, made of simple, 100% recyclable non toxic parts (glass, steel and tungsten), and there are literally billions of receptacles that have been designed to accommodate their shape.

The new ‘Environmentally Friendly’, ‘energy saving’ compact fluorescent lightbulbs are expensive to manufacture, have plastic parts, are not simple in design and contain poisons like mercury, making it necessary to dispose of them carefully, lest the mercury escape, polluting the environment and poisoning people.

The new bulbs also produce a hideous, unpleasant light that flickers at the frequency of the electricity mains. These bulbs have been demonstrated to have deleterious effects on people who are sensitive to their light, causing them migraine headaches and eye strain.

Now, as the ban on the incandescent light bulb is about to come into force, we read the following:

Boffins: Ordinary lightbulbs can be made efficient, cheaply

Incandescents nearing extinction: Impeccable timing, everyone
By Lewis Page

Posted in Physics, 1st June 2009 11:03 GMT

Just as authorities in much of the Western world have moved to phase out the incandescent lightbulb, American boffins believe they have developed a process which can make the oldschool lights more efficient than energy-saving lamps.

Optics boffins at the Rochester Uni in New York state say they’ve developed a process in which an ordinary lighbulb is zapped with a femtosecond-long pulse of extremely high-energy laser light. The laser blast travels through the glass to hit the tungsten filament, causing complex nano- and micro-structures to form on its surface.

Once the lasered light bulb is than powered up, according to the Rochester scientists, it emits a lot more light for the same energy compared to an untreated bulb – equivalent to 40 per cent energy savings. The process of lasing incandescent bulbs wouldn’t be expensive, apparently, so they’d remain cheap compared to fluorescent energy-saving jobs.

According to Rochester Uni:

The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb. Despite the incredible intensity involved, the femtosecond laser can be powered by a simple wall outlet, meaning that when the process is refined, implementing it to augment regular light bulbs should be relatively simple.

It seems that Professor Chunlei Guo of Rochester hit upon the idea of brightening-up lightbulb filaments following earlier experiments in which he and his team used laser zapping to turn metals completely black. This worked so well that Guo and his cohorts wondered if they could reverse the process.

“We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament,” says the prof. “When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb’s energy usage.”

It seems that Guo and his team of lightbulb-blasting boffins can also produce other strange effects, getting incandescent bulbs to emit partially polarised or differently-coloured light – without the energy-wasting filters that would normally be necessary.

It’s the efficiency-enhancement aspect of the studies which could make headlines, however. Both the US and European Union governments are now committed to firm timetables which will see incandescent bulbs phased out in favour of more energy-efficient alternatives, such as fluorescents. This is being done in order to save energy and so lower carbon emissions. But if it’s as simple as Guo suggests to enhance an incandescent with his laser process, this may turn out to have been an unnecessary or even retrograde step.

Guo’s research has been accepted for publication by the journal Applied Physics Letters, but isn’t out yet. In the meantime, there’s a pop-sci release from the university here.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/light_bulb_laser_blast_enhancement/

This is a perfect example of why the state should have no say in what technology firms must use to produce their goods and which goods people can and cannot have access to.

In their zeal to ‘protect the environment’ the state has diverted capital and resources away from the well established incandescent lightbulb production lines, by force, to the new fluorescent lightbulb lines, that have had their  manufacturing capacity ramped up in order to meet the artificially stimulated demand for the new bad bulbs.

The decision to ban the incandescent lightbulb was made with all of the information the legislatures had to hand; i.e. all the relevant facts about the different types of bulb that were available in 2007/2008. What they did not and could not take into account was the research in the above article, which, had they known about it, may have prevented them from legislating for the ban.

This is the central problem with the state interfering with technology; no one can predict the future. Now that the law is about to come into force, we are in a situation where capital has been wasted and misdirected, resources wasted and misdirected and depending on the state of the decommissioning of the incandescent bulb lines, no costless way back to the manufacturing of incandescent lightbulbs.

The state, by its nature, is incompetent. They cannot predict the future and they are not omniscient. In order to be able to legislate effectively, especially where technology is concerned, they would need to be omniscient, with perfect knowledge of every piece and field of ongoing research and technology, and the potential of each piece and field of research and technology.

The enormity of this amount of knowledge is beyond the capacity of any man or group of men; it would mean being able to apply each existing technology (implemented or not) and each piece of research against each other (in the case above, femtosecond lasers and incandescent light bulbs), considering the effect of multiples of them upon each other in succession, and then considering the knock on effects of each of these, say, ten levels down on the tree. This would produce a multi dimensional matrix / tree with a size bigger than the universe. Only then would they be able to synthesize an optimal plan that would maximize the production and movements of capital to reach any particular goal, and of course, who has the moral authority to choose the appropriate goals is something to consider…. for another post.

Applying a femtosecond laser to incandescent lightbulbs is one solution that has produced significant increases in efficiency. Who knows what other treatments, changes in filament formulation, the glass envelope etc etc will produce? Certainly, the state cannot possibly predict them. What the state can do however, is prevent research and innovation, destroying potential breakthroughs, efficiencies, savings and progress.

The state is a bumbler, a reactive and ignorant dealer; they are like a cave man being tasked to turn off a diesel engine that has been left running. Instead of getting into the car by actuating the door handle and turing the key counter clockwise, the caveman takes his club out and beats against the hood covering engine until it stops running. Of course, he claims success when it stops, when in fact the tank has run out of gas and the engine cuts out of its own accord. But I digress.

This femtosecond laser process, an inexpensive, and easy addition to any incandescent lightbulb production line, would have saved billions in electricity bills, spared the environment – and our bodies – from tonnes of mercury poisoning, eliminated the need to build light bulb recycling plants and spared the health of many millions of people, with all the costs attendant on that. Then there are all the other applications of this femtosecond laser technology that are now going to be delayed or which will not now come into existence.

Think about it; the widespread deployment of femtosecond flashers would mean designing modular systems for resale to manufacturers; out of that design and manufacturing process, other processes will have emerged. Secondary uses of these flashers would have been subsequently discovered, which would have other knock on effects. The innovation cascade resulting from this process is what the state has destroyed.

When you apply this example to any other industry or technology where the state legislates, and take into account the default incompetence that inheres in the people that make these decisions, you can begin to get a glimpse of the suboptimal world that we are now in.

Imagine what sort of world it would be had the state not interfered in any way with any technology. To put it into perspective, think of the ubiquity of cheap mobile phones, and then apply that example to every expensive technology that the state has controlled in any way… like the automobile. Imagine how much more efficient, inexpensive, clean and beneficial cars would be had the state stayed out of the business of the details of car manufacture.

‘Consumer advocates’ would tell you that cars are safer now only because the state intervened in the manufacturing process. This may or may not be the case, but what is certain is that cars would be safer than they are now had the state not interfered with the manufacture of cars.

I do not know of a single person who would not pick a safer car over an unsafe one, and since competition is fierce in car manufacture, this fact would be taken into account at every point the design stage, producing just the sort of cars that people want, and cars that people did not know that they wanted. Think iPhone here; once you see it, you want it; you did not know that you would want it before it existed, but now that you have seen it, you want it more than any other mobile phone… the same could be said for the very idea of the cellular phone itself.

Extrapolating from all of this, it is clear that in many aspects of the way we live, we are existing in a world that is grossly distorted and sub-optimal. This world could be better in every way by orders of magnitude had the destructive and disruptive state not interfered with the innovations and interactions of men.

The single worst interference in technology has been the system of Patents. The system of state granted monopolies on ideas has been a total disaster, causing distortion and disruption for generations, throwing us off the optimal path down the years leading to a future that is literally retarded by a century or more of compounded diversions. See ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘ for the full, and truly horrifying story of this.

If you are one of those people who have not drunk the Environmentalism Kool-Aid, then you will realize that state intervention in technology is the worst possible thing to do to protect the environment. Only when technology is unleashed can the imaginations and inventions of men be applied dynamically across the maximum number of fields to produce the sort of efficiencies that are needed to keep the environment clean.

Then again if you have drunk the ‘E Kool-Aid’, by definition you have no imagination, are science illiterate, irrationally anti business and are incapable of understanding any of this.

Like we have been saying for years, all you have to do to completely derail the state is refuse to obey and there is nothing that they can do about it. The pilots have won their fight against being made the test subjects for ID Cards and there has not been the slightest sign of this climb-down from the state. That may be because we are witnessing the ignominious and long overdue end to fascist New Liebour but whatever the reason for the silent u-turn, it happened, and it happened because the pilots refused to obey.

June 4, 2009
The Home Office has made a “very quiet U-turn” over its plans to make airport ID cards compulsory for all airside workers, Public Servant Daily reports.

An initial roll-out of the controversial cards – which the Unite union said had “insulted” its members – was due to take place at London City and Manchester airports.

But with the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) threatening legal action over the move, the government appears to have backtracked on its plans.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who announced her resignation from the cabinet yesterday, approved the early-adopter scheme for Manchester workers in May.

It has now emerged, however, that buried within the fine print of her statement was the revelation that the 18-month scheme will apply solely to new starters.

A BALPA spokesman told Public Servant Daily that it was unclear what had prompted the revision. He welcomed the apparent U-turn, but reiterated that once the scheme is rolled out nationally “pilots who refuse to have the card will lose their job”.

The Home Office responded by confirming that its long-term plans have not changed.

“We have previously said that identity cards will be mandatory for all airside workers, just as other pre-employment checks are today, so that the benefits from the scheme can be realised across the aviation sector,” a spokesperson told the website.

Airport workers have steadfastly opposed the introduction of ID cards, insisting that extensive vetting procedures already in place make them redundant.

[…]

Cheapflights

The disgusting fascist queen of the aparatchicks, the witch Jacqui Smith, now resigned, caved to pressure from the brave members of BALPA.

The thinking of the witch and her minions must have gone like this:

“we are determined to roll this out. This trial is not really needed; we can iron out the bugs with a wider sample user base. If we antagonize pilots, who have a high status in society as eminently sensible and inherently trustworthy people, the public will pay attention to the details of their complaints, which could seriously derail the project. When the public realizes that pilots are willing to strike over this matter, all eyes will be on the details of what we are planning and the jig will be up. Let us quietly drop the pilots trial. No one will notice, the schedule will not be affected and damaging information about the system’s flaws will not be amplified by a very public pilots strike and its inevitable disruption.”

Of course, what they fail to understand is that the resistance of the pilots is only a single instance of a much wider resolve to absolutely refuse ID Cards that will not go away, and that will become more and more ferocious as time goes on.

All of this can be avoided by a Tory government putting an end to it once and for all. If they do not do this, it will be the Poll Tax all over again, and they will throw away the massive swing and good will they are going to be given.

BLOGDIAL readers know that we are for a general and permanent boycott of everything related to the police state and its apparatus (ID Cards, ContactPoint NIR, CCTV etc). In this General Boycott Everything that touches them is ‘tainted’, so if someone contacts you because they got your details from ContactPoint, those communications are tainted, and so should be ignored. Any request to show ID for purchases should likewise result in ‘NO SALE’.

Academics are taking exactly this stance within their own field:

Academics boycott visa ‘snooping’
University academics say they will boycott new visa rules for overseas students that would make them into “immigration snoopers”.

Delegates at the University and College Union’s annual conference said they did not want to become a branch of the UK Border Agency.

This is absolutely excellent. We have said many times that the state cannot run the police state by itself; they do not have the resources. They need business and the people themselvs to run it. This is why all professionals should pledge not to become proxy aparatchicks; everyone must reject the Zero Trust Society if we are to avoid the creation of a hideous STASI style state where everyone is spying and tattling on everyone else.

Under the new rules universities are expected to monitor whether overseas students really attend their courses.

The Home Office said such things were part of their normal duty of care.

Once again, this is a BBC News article by an unnamed author, quoting unnamed spokespersons; you cant make stuff like this up. Voices from nowhere, unaccountable and untraceable, issue commands from secret offices that everyone is expected to read and obey without question. Yet another example of the BBC News website acting as a propaganda repeater. Absolutely disgusting and transparent.

And Neu Labour cannot understand why they are about to be flushed down the toilet in the upcoming EU and local authority polls.

More on the ‘part of their normal duty of care’ below.

Institutions must also report concerns that a student could be involved in terrorism.

This is not the job of teachers.

In a debate at the conference, in Bournemouth, delegates argued that the rules would place a strain on the relationship between staff and students from outside the European Union.

‘Pernicious’

General secretary Sally Hunt said: “UCU members are educators not border guards.”

She said later: “Politically, UCU is absolutely opposed to this legislation and we know that many members have strong and principled moral objections as members of society and as professional educators.

At last, people are beginning to stand up and simply say ‘NO’. That is all it takes, believe it or not.

“One of the more pernicious effects of this new system will be to turn our members into an extra arm of the police force, placing monitoring and reporting responsibilities onto academic and support staff.”

Precisely. They are trying to turn everyone into a spy, eliminating the normal bonds of trust that should exist between human beings and delivering everyone into a horrible, inhuman state where trust is mediated by machines and a secret police state. And as it implies above, anyone from the EU will not be subject to this; that means in reality, profiling. This indefensible, immoral and thankfully, will not be done, because someone had the guts to stand up and say ‘NO’.

One of the resolutions tabled for discussion said the new system “makes educators into immigration snoopers which could damage UK education irreparably”.

Once the word gets out that people are being mistreated by the very institutions that they are PAYING to learn in, there will be an exodus of students to other centres. No one will trust the Universities in the UK; and why should they? If these academics did not stand up and do what they are doing, it would be stupid to come here and be mistreated when you can go to other countries and just get on with learning.

When they say that UK education could be damaged irreparably, they are talking about people not coming back here for generations. They are talking about becoming a pariah system that students avoid reflexively. They are talking about a stain that will be very hard to remove.

It deplored “this pandering to anti-immigration racism” and committed the union to “non-compliance with all such policing and surveillance duties”.

This is the key; non compliance. What is the state going to do in response?

• Close the universities?
• Deport the non EU students en masse?
• Arrest all the academics?

Imagine any of those three happening. Imagine the other, equally absurd things the state could try and do to coerce the academics into betraying their students. None of it will wash.

But a Home Office spokesman said: “Educational institutions have a duty of care to all their students and checking that they are attending and making progress in their studies is part of that responsibility.

“The records we expect education providers to keep are those which most will keep for their own purposes anyway.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8074515.stm

Now this is the most sickening part.

Is is possible that this anonymous person is so retarded that she cannot see that information that is PRIVATE and collected as a part of running a college is perfectly natural, and the sending of that information to the state is a gross violation?

There are two possibilities:

(1) Either these people think we are so stupid they can say something like this and get away with it

or

(2) These people are so stupid they can say something like this and believe it doesn’t matter.

Whatever the reason this has been proposed and put into law, it is clear that this spokesperson and the other people who are behind this are not ‘fit for purpose’. They are of the same school that believes everyone is guilty until proven innocent, that parents have no rights, that all children belong to the state, and all data belongs to the state. Except theirs of course, which is why they constantly speak anonymously.

Whatever happens next, all of this is going to end up being destroyed. The nanny state is finished. We will soon see the end of ‘legislation by grieving parent” and all the other vile garbage that has turned the UK into what it has very sadly become – a place where the lunatics are running the asylum:

Spotted today:

A female PCSO (Police Community Support Officer, or Pretend Police Officer) stopping a father (naturally, what do they know?) who was pushing his baby daughter along the road in a pushchair. She demanded to know why his baby looked so hot – I suspect it was due to the HOT WEATHER, but perhaps she’s still working on her investigative skills. The PCSO was so doubtful of this man’s ability to parent, she even checked the child’s pulse – without asking – and took a few notes. At this point the man declined to give his details and simply walked off, shaking his head.

Scary, huh?

I had two PCSO’s tell my daughter who was about 11 at the time that she shouldn’t eat the blackberries that she was picking, because they might be poisonous. I interjected and told them they were perfectly fine and popped one in my mouth (a blackberry..not the PCSO). They both nearly fainted. I then informed them that Sainsburys sell blackberries and they said, “Oh do they? but they must be safe because they come from the supermarket”. (They hadn’t even heard of blackberries!)

I then thought of showing them my trick of picking nettles with my bare hands, but thought they had suffered enough excitement for one day!

If nothing concrete happens to fix it in the very short term, people everywhere are going to fix it themselves. This is now absolutely inevitable. Reading any of the comments in the newspaper’s websites, you will see Jultra style invective forming the majority of responses to anything to do with government.

That is what we call ‘GAME OVER’; and there is no way to re-boot this particular game. The only way to go forward is to dismantle the hardware, and switch operating systems (to use a computer analogy). This is not switching from Windows 95 to Windows XP (actually, what they are proposing is to keep the same old hardware and switch from Windows XP to Windows VISTA!), no, this is switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux. This is switching to stability, real security, real choice and real freedom.

This is pretty cool stuff.

But.

Only a handful of people that I know, know how to thread email.

You know the sort; you spend 15 minutes typing out a well considered email and then you get a single line reply, quoting the ENTIRE email you composed with only a one word reply at the top:

rubbish!

On 28 févr. 09, at 21:11, Irdial-Discs wrote:

> All,
>
> A major scientific report by leading Japanese academics concludes that
> global warming is not man-made and that the overall warming trend from
> the mid-part of the 20th Century onwards has now stopped.

[60 lines of email snipped]

> This serves the agenda to deliberately whip up mass hysteria on behalf
> of governments who are all too eager to introduce draconian taxation and
> control measures that won’t do anything to combat any form of warming,
> whether you believe it to be natural or man-made.

See what I mean?

Equally bad is when the person replying does not thread the email, but just adds his 2¢s to the top, ignoring everything you typed. Even worse, are the group emails where everyone just adds what they have to say to the top of every mail, without deleting the preceding text, so that you get monster long mails threaded across separate mails.

Yes, these people are INSANE.

If these insane people were exposed to Google Wave, now only would they would be unable to handle threaded waves, but they would also be overwhelmed by the multiple sources, the blurry distinction between public and private messages, its realtime-ness, dynamic nature and all the other things that make this tool so very cool.

I cant wait to try it!

Perhaps Google Wave will cause people to start to use threaded conversations properly. There will be, however, massive resistance to it. There is resistance to Gmail, as good as it is; I have heard people say that they do not like it, and that they prefer Hotmail and webmail inferior to Hotmail over Gmail.

Go figure.

This piece was forwarded to BLOGDIAL by a lurker. Its contents are simply shocking:

I raised the alarm about family 15 years ago. I still want answers

Eileen Fairweather

Every time I have seen Lord Laming, the Government's favourite child protection “expert”, wheeled out since Baby Peter's death I have gritted my teeth.

Never once has he admitted he knew the truth about this poor child's family.

Fifteen years ago, I warned Lord Laming in writing that a young relative of Baby Peter was central to a vicious London paedophile ring.

This followed one of the most disturbing and revealing inquiries ever mounted by the Evening Standard.

But Lord Laming — then chief inspector of social services — did nothing effective to rescue this terrified boy.

Since then, Lord Laming has presided over the destruction of tried and tested child protection systems, so more children than ever are at risk. He has also helped create today's surveillance society, which allows government apparatchiks and paedophiles alike to spy on innocent families.

In the early Nineties, Baby Peter's mother and a relative were under Islington council's care. Shockingly, all of its 12 children's homes then contained pimps, paedophiles and pornographers, who openly abused children. Decent staff who protested were threatened or sacked. In desperation, some bravely contacted this newspaper.

Baby Peter's relative, we were repeatedly told, was under particular pressure to introduce children to outside pimps. But the authorities thought it more important to protect politicians.

The then-council leader Margaret Hodge labelled the newspaper's meticulously-sourced investigation as “sensationalist gutter journalism”.

Laming, who later worked for Hodge, responded by letting Islington investigate itself. Inevitably, its inquiries were a whitewash.

So I and a Standard colleague met Lord Laming and revealed that management had “lost” incriminating files requested by police investigating three separate child sex rings. Islington's assistant director resigned a few days later “for personal reasons”.

But still no real inquiry ensued.

Hence the Standard's decision to compile a 112-page dossier of further evidence. I submitted it with real if naïve hope and Laming, to his credit, ordered a secret inquiry into Baby Peter's relative. It confirmed in August 1994 that Islington knew for two years that he was at the heart of grave concerns about pimps preying on children's homes. The council and local police had done nothing save call meetings about meetings.

A broader independent inquiry in 1995 demanded that 26 former Islington staff, given glowing references following serious allegations of rape, kidnap and pimping, be barred from social work. Still no paedophiles were raided or charged, and no children interviewed or rescued.

Social services is the lead agency in child protection inquiries, so Laming had the power to call for police action.

None followed. Thus Hodge was able to boast that no one was convicted as a result of the scandal, and no evidence was found of a ring. The ring dispersed but continued hurting children.

Three protected Islington children's home heads moved to Thailand's notorious Pattaya child sex resort. Thai police charged Nick Rabet there in 2006 with abusing 30 local children, as young as six.

The Islington cover-up had, Thai police estimated, allowed him to hurt hundreds more children. Everyone who failed the children of London rose spectacularly higher.

Sue Akers, the detective inspector then in charge of Islington's Child Protection Team, is now a Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

Hodge, infamously, became Britain's first children's minister.

Herbert Laming was awarded ermine and undertook the inquiry into Victoria Climbie's murder, whose 2003 recommendations allowed Hodge to treat all parents as potential abusers.

Her subsequent Every Child Matters (ECM) “reform” of social services abolished the Child Protection Register, and replaced it with the controversial ContactPoint database on all Britain's 11 million children.

The few children at grave risk are now almost invisible, while social workers drown under a tidal wave of paperwork about ordinary families. ECM also effectively removed police from investigating child abuse — Laming suggested in his Climbie report that the police only investigate actual crime, not a child's feared risk of harm.

The police responded by closing most child protection teams.

Baby Peter's mother was once a victim too, and became an abuser in turn, through the well-documented “cycle of abuse”.

So why did no one in power ever do anything effective to stop the evil ring which ultimately destroyed her and Baby Peter?

I asked Lord Laming recently but he would not comment.

Eileen Fairweather is a former Standard reporter involved in an award-winning investigation into Islington care homes

[…]

Evening Standard

This confirms many of the things we have been saying about ContactPoint:

• The people who organized it are dangerously incompetent.
• It will hurt children, and not help them.
• If you want to keep a register of children, you only list those at risk, and not every child.
• ContactPoint is a dream come true for paedophiles.
• ContactPoint will make ordinary people into suspects.

It is clear, in the light of this information, that ContactPoint should never have been developed, and that Lord Lamming, Margaret Hodge and everyone involved in this scandal should have been permanently barred from having anything to do with the welfare of children.

I wonder if this evidence, had it been presented during the consultations on ContactPoint, would have made a difference. I expect not. What is more clear than ever is that ContactPoint is flawed, not only in the technical sense, which is irremediable, but in its inception. The people who were behind its creation were scandal ridden molestation enablers. That people of that background should be able to commission and create a system like ContactPoint (and Every Child Matters) is a prime example of what is wrong with Britain. Monsters, literally, are in charge and enabling the worst sort of criminals to carry out their crimes.

If you were not scared by ContactPoint, this should be enough to utterly terrify you. If you are not scared by it, you are INSANE. The children listed in ContactPoint are going to be viewable by over ONE MILLION PEOPLE. It cannot ever be secured. Anyone using the system can take a screenshot from the database, and then send it anywhere they like. Once the data is out, it is out forever, and since there are over a million people using the system at once, this means that all it will take for the entire database to be copied is for every user of contact point to make 11 screenshots each (11 million children being divided by one million users). The shortest time this could happen in is less than a day. It will happen. Even if ‘only’ half of the children’s records are copied, or one 100th of them are copied, the crime is still the same. It is totally immoral, socially corrosive and evil to create a system like this; there is no excuse for it, and that it comes from the minds of monsters like Lord Lamming and Margaret Hodge is no surprise whatsoever.