Thursday
(0)One of the many perils associated with declining birthrates is that it makes it much easier for the social-working classes to nationalise children:
Every local authority in England will be required to appoint a director of children's services in a bid to improve child welfare under legislation due to be unveiled by the government.An "information hub" will be set up in 150 local authorities to record details of all the children in the area. Each child will have an electronic file - including their name, address, date of birth, school and GP - that states whether they are known to social services, education welfare, police, or youth offending teams.
Other measures expected in the bill include the creation of a children's commissioner for England, who would protect the rights of children and young people, and statutory children's safeguarding boards, responsible for coordinating local child protection work among social services, the NHS, the police and other agencies.
Only they don't call it 'nationalisation' any more. Now they call it 'protection' but it amounts to same thing.
Sometimes, just occasionally mind, I actually quite miss the old-style firebrand lefties and their revolutionary rhetoric. At least they were honest and open about their ambitions and, in many ways, that made it a lot easier to tackle them head-on.
At least it's not as bad as this plan. Fingerprinting just to get on a bus. Do you walk if you don't want to get fingerprinted by Big Brother?
Posted by Revolutionary Blogger at March 4, 2004 02:04 PM
Let the state raise its own younglings--in jars would be best: clean and scientific, weaklings could be flushed down the toilet.
Incredibly, they fail to recognize that the more overt they are about controlling and monitoring every aspect of childhood, the more people will reject ALL contact between their families and any agent of the state. You will, at some point, have people refusing to register births altogether. Then things will get interesting.
Posted by Kelli at March 4, 2004 02:30 PM
For a moment there, I thought that Guardian piece was describing the Hitler Youth. Next they'll be organizing country wide kid's marches, singing campfire songs about our patriotic leader, Il Tonino.
Problem is; far from having to worry about keeping track of all the little buggers, there actually wont be enough of them to count on one hand. They'll have to sort out those countrywide marches for us old age pensioners. Trips to Butlins please, and don't forget your pissbag.
European demographics forecasts are in the public domain.
Posted by M Morris at March 4, 2004 05:34 PM
Sounds like that old "permanent record" we were always warned against tarnishing.
Posted by Martin at March 5, 2004 04:31 AM
A single database containing all childrens details (addresses, school).
A target for paedophile stalker hacker types.
My children won't be on it.
Btw, what's with the "ID checks" on the commenting system. Not very libertarian.
Posted by Anonymous Libertarian at March 5, 2004 09:16 AM
Anonymous Libertarian: so, controling access to our own property is not very libertarian??? And how exactly do you figure that?
OR... put another way, what would be libertarian about offering up this blog's comment system to spambots to freely use? On the assumption that 'libertarian' does not mean 'gormless', I doubt our readers want to have to pick through hundreds of adverts for on-line viagra and Russian teen-porn websites to find the pearls of wisdom left by legitimate commenters.
Posted by Perry de Havilland at March 5, 2004 10:43 AM
"I doubt our readers want to have to pick through hundreds of adverts for on-line viagra and Russian teen-porn websites"
Exactly why not? Sounds good to me.
;)
Posted by Rob Read at March 5, 2004 06:52 PM
I was just doing some research for my book and thought this might be of interest to you (these are all 2002 rates; the replacement rate is ~2.1):
Country Fertility Rate Country Fertility Rate
U.S. 2.1. Japan 1.3
UK 1.6. Australia 1.7
France 1.9 Brazil 2.2
Germany 1.3 India 3.1
Italy 1.2 Saudi Arabia 4.6
Russian Federation 1.2 South Africa 2.6
China 1.8 Yemen 7
Posted by ema at March 6, 2004 05:06 AM
Spam is stopped by the turing code. Why mandate an email address? As it is your private property, I respect the libertarian principle of "your blog, your rules".
However, mandating that the email field is filled just seems a bit in line with big brother attitudes. Though you don't seem to check it's validity anyhow.
Last time I used a real email address, the spammers starting flooding it, having scraped your site. It has a UId in it so I could see it was scraped from Samizdata.
Posted by Anon at March 7, 2004 07:36 PM
