(0) (17)

If you were annoyed at the support being shown for state regulation of fashion modelling, check out what they want to do to cheerleading.

Texas Representative Al Edwards wants state funding of schools to be cut for those schools that knowingly permit "sexually suggestive" cheerleading performances. Because everyone knows how hard it is for a bunch of jailbait dancing around in mini-skirts and showing their underwear to be "sexually suggestive," right? According to Edwards:

It's just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they're shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down...And then we say to them, 'don't get involved in sex unless it's marriage or love, it's dangerous out there' and yet the teachers and directors are helping them go through those kind of gyrations.

That the state should not be instructing any children when it comes to sex, marriage, and love in the first place would no doubt never occur to this politician. More discouraging is the reaction from constituents.

J.M. Farias, owner of Austin Cheer Factory, said cheerleading aficionados would welcome the law. Cheering competitions, he said, penalize for suggestive movements or any vulgarity.

[...]

"I don't think this law would really shake the industry at all. In fact, it would give parents a better feeling, mostly dads and boyfriends, too," Farias said.

Gosh, if making dads and boyfriends feel better isn't a good excuse to create more laws, what is?

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I am aware of the arguments in favour of home-schooling. The educational standards tend to be higher. Children are usually brought up as reasonable human beings and not part of a pack of savages. In principle, home schooling allows for an upbringing that is tailored to each child. The conscription of children in schools is removed.

And then something like this comes along.

There are two benefits of even the most useless schools. Children meet other children their own age, which is useful if one is not intent on becoming a hermit.

Of course there is plenty of unreported abuse that occurs in full view. In some schools abuse is ignored or even inflicted. But most basically of all, a 12 year-old child turning up weighing 35 pounds with burn marks and bruises in rags might be noticed. So having children turn up somewhere where their disappearance or injury will be noticed is a valuable function of schools. Perhaps they need to open twice a month for roll-call and then let them go home?

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Although I may not live to see it, I am nonetheless very confident that the day will come when the idea of compelling children to attend schools will be regarded with the same contempt and revulsion that is now directed at the idea of slavery.

That day is hastening:

A school in Swansea is considering tagging its pupils because of a shortage of assistants who can supervise lunch breaks.

The idea is for children at Lonlas Primary to wear the tags all day, with a buzzer sounding if they leave.

I welcome this development and I sincerely hope it spreads because it will make it impossible to deny that state schools are anything other than day-prisons.

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I have always endured a distinctly uncomfortable ambivolence on the subject of the physical chastisement of children. My rational inclinations are to disapprove of it as a whole. The law protects adults from being physically assaulted by other adults and I find the arguments that seek to exempt youngsters from this law to be flawed and unpersuasive.

That said, I know that there are many good and loving parents who sometimes smack their children out of frustration or a temporary flare of temper. It may not be beneficial thing but, rarely does this cause any real harm. Consequently, I view the engagement of the machinery of law enforcement with family life with the utmost trepidation:

Parents in England and Wales who smack children so hard it leaves a mark will face up to five years in jail under new laws in force from Saturday.

Mild smacking is allowed under a "reasonable chastisement" defence against common assault.

The purported distinction is not one in which I have any degree of confidence. Law enforcement in this country is often patchy, capricious and incompetent. I expect that truly serious abusers will slip the net while normally conscientious parents who lash out once in a moment of uncustomary anger will find themselves facing a custodial sentence and ruination.

Even if that were not the case (and it is very much the case) the new laws will result in an entrenchment of a culture of fear and suspicion. Children contrive to harm themselves all the time by flying off of their bikes, falling out of trees and sticking themselves with sharp implements. I have already heard far too many plausible accounts of parents who are scared of taking their wounded charges to a hospital in case they are accused of abusing them

In another age and in different political and legal circumstances, I would not be too concerned about these new laws. I may even (cautiously) approve. But it is not possible to see these developments as anything other than another step in the process of the gradual nationalisation of the family.

Nor will anyone's life be improved by this legislation. It is enacted, in part, because it serves the interests of the professional welfare classes whose wealth and status is entirely dependent on this kind of state activism and partly because of the unfortunately fashionable view that people cannot be trusted to arrange their own affairs in a satisfactory manner without the external discipline of regulatory control.

None of this means that I necessarily approve of parents who smack their children. Generally, I do not. But just leaving matters be is probably the least worst solution. Over the coming years, that object lesson will be driven home.

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Of all the criticisms of the War on Terror (and there are many legitimate ones), at least there appears to be no intention on the part of the prosecutors to deliberately target children.

Alas, the same cannot be said for the War on Drugs:

PUPILS at a secondary school will undergo random drug testing when they return from the Christmas holiday next week in what is believed to be the first state scheme of its kind.

Students as young as 11 at The Abbey School in Faversham, Kent, will have mouth swabs taken to detect the use of drugs including cannabis, cocaine and Ecstasy, Peter Walker, the headmaster, said.

Oh but why settle for all these namby-pamby, milquetoast, half-measures? There is only one sure way to stop children taking drugs: kill them.

Yes, that's it! Kill the little bastards. Think of all the valuable police and court time it will save, not to mention precious and overstretched NHS resources.

Kill them all now. You know it makes sense. If it saves just one child from a life on drugs it's worth it. It's for their own good. It's called 'tough love'...etc...etc... (adding shopworn cliches infinitum).

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I have always liked J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (though I must confess I have only seen the movies and not read the books). She writes about wizards and magic and yet the world she creates is populated by characters who still act like real people.

Moreover she is the anti-thesis of the sugar coated Disney pabulum of recent years. Not only do her characters act like real people, when the story calls for it, they die.

l have long loathed Disney for presenting some of the classic children's stories of Western literature in such a sanitised and castrated form that Disney's use of the titles is close to being fraudulent (such as the completely inverted 'Little Mermaid'). J.K. Rowling is made of far sterner stuff and she realises what the focus-group addled hacks at Disney do not... children are also made of sterner stuff.

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It is so bloody infuriating when some ungrateful, selfish kids simply refuse to acknowledge the fact that they are 'disadvantaged':

Scientists have witnessed the birth of a new language, one invented by deaf children.

A study published today shows that a sign language that emerged over two decades ago now counts as a true language.

It began in a school for the deaf in Managua, Nicaragua, founded in 1977. With instruction only in lip-reading and speaking Spanish, neither very successful, and no exposure to adult signing, the children were left to their own devices.

Preposterous nonsense. They must be making it up. It is totally beyond question that things like this can only happen by means of an appropriate legislative framework, an appointed governing body and generous levels of public funding.

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Newsflash time, people: Little girls like to play with makeup. Shocking stuff, at least if you read yesterday's Guardian.

The inappropriate sexualisation of young children is, of course, nothing to encourage. But the predictable calls for government intervention to prevent female children from being exposed to the radical ideas that girls often like to make themselves look as pretty as possible and girls often like boys that way are as ludicrous as they are predictable. Once again, we are told, it is not acceptable to entrust parents with the care of their children - we must step in and make new laws to restrict commerce. The likes of Bliss magazine should only be purchased with proof of ID and age. If we can just keep these magazines out of the hands of our (and other peoples') daughters, we can raise a generation of females who do not think about their physical appearances or their feelings for the opposite sex. And if we can achieve that, then we will be a little closer to "equality".

The Guardian also files this first-person account of a 10-year-old's experiences with cosmetics and perfume. All of it is the same standard stuff that I remember from my childhood in the '80s: hijacking mummy's lipstick, ill-advised experiments with blue eyeshadow, spending pocket money on pink nail varnish and playing beauty salon with friends. Perhaps not finding any of this quite shocking enough to spur Guardianistas into joining the fight against big, bad commerce, the piece concludes with little Joanna's confession that:

I like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears and I'd like to be one of them. I like the way they dress. I'd like to walk down the catwalk. I've got Christina Aguilera on my wall.

Finally, something truly disturbing - and yet also not up to the state to control. Even if the idolatry of trashy pop stars or the normal, healthy female enthusiasm for boys and lipgloss could be legislated against, who would dare suggest that we should do so? Scarily enough, more people than one might think. In a nation where parents do not think it unreasonable to demand the state foot the bill for their child's minding, healthcare, and education right through university, is it any shock that even those who themselves have no children expect the government to do yet more to raise them outright?

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Today's edition of Britain's Sun tabloid features five readers who demand: "End our childcare misery, Mr Blair". That so many middle and working class people in this country turn to the state to solve any challenges they face in life is, if depressing, unsurprising when one considers the prevailing British attitude towards government's role in individuals' lives. This comment from PM Tony Blair sums it up succinctly enough:

Some mothers will want to stay at home and look after their children, and that’s fine. But if they don’t we have to support them.

Actually, Mr Blair, we do not have to support financially any person who chooses to have children and then chooses to rely on others to look after them while they go out to work. (You may feel you need to 'support' them in order to be re-elected, but let us not confuse what you do in the interests of your career with what is right.)

I understand the dilemma - one may want to have children but not be able to afford to do so without earning a certain income, which may require full- or part-time work - but one makes such choices and then deals with the consequences. I doubt seriously that any of the women in the Sun asking Mr Blair to 'end the misery' of having to struggle to raise children on limited budgets, whose ages range from 31 to 39, went into parenthood without realising that making ends meet would be a concern. Kids are expensive, and although there are ways to make them less expensive (even the wealthiest parents I know buy and sell baby gear and other children's stuff on eBay or in consignment shops or at NCT sales), people decide to have them with the full realisation that this life they are creating will need to be looked after and cared for. With that comes expense, and the need to work out how to meet that expense. All pretty basic stuff, one would think. But reading the complaints of parents who think that the state should be easing their burdens - brought about by choices they have made - with other peoples' money, it becomes clear that we have in this country bred a population of adults who think and behave like children. I will do what I like - it will be fine! (But somebody better be there to rescue me and kiss my boo-boos better if it is not.)

Perhaps it is a shame that life is not so easy that we cannot always have everything our hearts desire (children, enough money in the bank, personal fulfilment outside of stay-at-home parenthood, trendy, slightly politically subversive t-shirts for our babies), but that is not a situation that the state can change with any amount of money they may take fom you and me.

"But think of the children!" comes the usual plaintive wail. To do so is terrifying: a nation of babies raising babies can only end in tears. How much will we be expected to spend on cleaning up this spill before the idea that individual choices matter ceases to be answered with a "Yes, but..." and a tax demand?

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From David Carr's posting (quoting the Independent newspaper):

Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.

I have a cunning plan.

Immunisation is crude and easy to avoid, especially for immigrants and people who move. What is needed is a form of treatment that is visible and difficult to fake. Vaccines can be expensive and there is a whole problem of producing and storing them. The paperwork involved in ensuring that all children have been vaccinated is complicated and errors can creep in.

So the obvious solution is a full frontal lobotomy with a tatooing on the forehead. Consider a few benefits of such a scheme.

1. The pharmaceutical companies lose some business, but they avoid being associated with any screw-ups from the scheme. (This could be spun as an anti-corporate greed measure)
2. No more juvenile delinquency, except the occasional suicides. (Blamed on tobacco companies)
3. No more worrying about education standards: all children will be morons.
4. Arguing about teaching methods will not matter. (Peace at last!)
5. Parents no longer need to pretend to raise their children.
6. The law can be changed: leaving a child alone at home will be no more dangerous than leaving the television switched on.

What is a little puzzling to me is how many schemes are being done to children which would be considered highly objectionable if applied to say 'black people'.

Part-birth abortion is virtual infanticide, we have NHS doctors calling for premature children not to be incubated. We have conscription into schools, prohibitions of all sorts, cameras in classrooms to allow parents to watch, ID cards for children. Child rapists and killers can get shorter jail sentences than a child has to spend at school, (and they sometimes gets jobs in schools). Child criminals are effectively told to "do it again, you have to kill someone before we do anything", so the honest children get preyed on.

The only short-term way of preventing this sort of abuse would be if children had the right to vote. Would four-year olds come up with worse lunacy than that which they have to endure?

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I think I have settled on my nomination for Most Frightening Story of the Year. Given the current political climate, the competition for this prestigious title is ferocious but, having carefully assessed the many excellent candidates, I have to put this one forward as the front-runner:

A radical scheme to vaccinate children against future drug addiction is being considered by ministers, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Under the plans, doctors would immunise children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection. The scheme could operate in a similar way to the current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.

What they mean is that it will be shuffled in under the same 'health' rubrics.

Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.

Note the use of the word 'protection'. As if emotions are an affliction from which we need to be spared. I wonder what else can be neutralised? Hate? Love? Anger? Curiosity? Rebelliousness? Will this herald the age of 'Stepford' kids?

The Department of Trade and Industry has set up a special project to investigate ways of using new scientific breakthroughs to combat drug and nicotine addiction.

To add to all the carnage already caused by the psychotic Conservative drug war, it has now provided a legitimising ideology for these fantasies of chemical zombification.

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In common with many classical liberals, I find the case against allowing the physical punishment of children by their parents to be a compelling one. After all, if assaulting an adult is wrong then why is it any less wrong to assault a child? In fact, it is arguably a greater wrong to assault a child since an adult (well, any adult outside of the UK at any rate) can at least make a decent fist out of defending themselves, whereas a five year-old has no such capability.

I am also aware that most parents who resort to physical chastisement do so by means of a light smack on the rump and therein lies a whole world of difference from that tiny number of parents who hospitalise or even kill their children by the application of sustained and quite brutal force.

In other words, the whole issue is messy, complicated and shrouded in grey arears. However, and that said, I do not approve of state intervention:

Ministers are preparing to help outlaw smacking in return for guarantees that parents are not prosecuted for giving children "a playful tap".

The Government is desperate to avoid defeat at the hands of a powerful cross-party alliance building behind moves for an outright smacking ban.

Without having had an opportunity to peruse the proposes legislation, I am already deeply sceptical about the claim that 'playful taps' will not be acted upon. As with most law enforcement, it is rarely the most heinous that are punished but rather the most vulnerable and, therefore, the easiest targets.

The Association of Directors of Social Services recently wrote to its members supporting the proposed change to the law. "We believe children can and should be disciplined and made subject to clear parental controls but that this can be achieved without inflicting violence."

However, the organisation did admit that the introduction of a smacking ban would have "resource implications".

Yes, those old "resource implications". Therein lies the key. For it is all very well to announce that assualts on children will no longer be tolerated but the real questions are, who enforces this measure and how?

The answer is, who else but for Social Services, the Police and the various child-welfare agences? Provided the "resource implications" are addressed to their satisfaction it will be up to these newly-appointed Guardians to investigate claims of child-assault and prosecute the offending parents.

This is a very bad idea. Quite aside from the extra powers that will be granted to these agencies (and they already have a cartload), the implication behind that investment is that thse public servants are wiser, more relaible and and more humane that those dreaful abusing parents. The record does not bear this out.

Because I live in a nation without memory, I very often find myself reminding people of what happended in the late 1980's when all of the above agencies became convinced that parents all over the country were engaged in serious child abuse as part and parcel of 'Satan-worship' rituals. It was a flagrant and rank absurdity but nonetheless this hysterical fabrication shot through the entire public sector and fourth estate like an outbreak of the plague.

Eventually, (and only after these fictions became unsustainable) calmer heads prevailed and 'Satanic child abuse' canard was quashed. But nor before several families had been effectively destroyed by what was, to all intents and purposes, a witchhunt.

Far from being infallible, or even reliable, the agences of the state have proved by their track record that they are mendacious, self-serving and pernicious. To hand them even more power over family life than they have now is to invoke a 'cure' that will prove far worse than the disease.

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Here, a story on how refusing to medicate your child can be deemed child abuse.

So Taylor took Daniel off Ritalin, against his doctor's wishes. And though Taylor noticed Daniel was sleeping better and his appetite had returned, his teachers complained about the return of his disruptive behavior. Daniel seemed unable to sit still and was inattentive. His teachers ultimately learned that he was no longer taking Ritalin.

School officials reported Daniel's parents to New Mexico's Department of Children, Youth and Families.Then a detective and social worker made a home visit.

"The detective told me if I did not medicate my son, I would be arrested for child abuse and neglect," Taylor said.

One hardly knows where to begin. The bogus "medicalization" of behavior? The all-too-common abdication of parental and teacher responsibility in favor of the easy fix of medication? The heavy hand of the state telling a man he has to drug his child for the convenience of public employees, even though the drugs are causing sleep and appetite problems.

(0) (2)

What is the difference between a headline and a story?

Well, in this case, a whole world of difference. The headline to this item on the BBC (where else?) spells out in big, bold type:

Calls for tax rise to help children

Ahhhhhh...children. Itty-bitty, helpless, doe-eyed, little moppets. Who can refuse a plea to help the little children? What kind of greedy, stone-hearted monster would vote against the opportunity to bring a ray of sunshine to their adorable, chubby faces?

Spare yourself the struggle with your conscience for only in text of the story does the actual identity of the proposed beneficiaries become clear:

Scotland's new children's commissioner has called for a penny on income tax to pay for improvements to child protection agencies, which she claims are badly overstretched.

So the extra tax money is not for children at all but to create more public sector jobs for functionaries.

The only things that are 'overstretched' are the public heart-strings they keep tugging on.

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In my usual stupor, this morning, before all the drugs in my constitutional cup of tea kick-started my ageing brain cells, I watched a snippet of the popular BBC children's programme, Blue Peter.

This is a perennial of tax-funded British programming, imbibed with your mother's milk, which delivers a twice-weekly compendium presented by a rotating set of three bright young things, who tour the world looking for informational opportunities for five to 15 year olds.

When I grew up with the programme these were the splendidly quirky John Noakes, the woodenly hip Peter Purves, and the prim but smouldering Lesley Judd. Ah, the things Lesley could do with a hot wet bucket of clay which would warm the confused cockles of a 12 year old boy.

So I watched this morning's programme with interest. A fresh-faced pretty female presenter wandered around a cocoa plantation in Africa explaining the cocoa pod origins of chocolate production. 'Fascinating,' I thought. There was plenty of factual information and so far a distinct lack of anti-capitalist agitation. 'What is wrong with the BBC, this morning?' I wondered.

Alas, I think the presenter could feel my disappointment at her failure to take a regressively tax-funded opportunity to try to brainwash British children into becoming politically correct. So just to make me happy she moved up into the BBC's more usual anti-capitalistic gear. This is the essence of what she said next, in front of a group of happy smiling African children:

Now this cocoa farm worker, Mary, only has primitive tools [including a machete and a pole-handled knife] to collect her cocoa pods, which I do find puzzling, but she is happy because she belongs to a co-operative. All the workers here share the co-operative's profits and are funded by the 'Fair Trade' organisation. This means that they have enough money to pay for a water pump and a school for their children. So please make sure that when you buy chocolate it is covered by the 'Fair Trade' logo, to help people like Mary, her family, and all the children you can see here.

Absolutely shameless. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud of her. The subtext message is, of course, very clear:

Collectivism is good. Free markets are bad. Feel guilty if you buy free market chocolate.

At the end of this bright young thing's piece to camera there was a big smile and then a 'Fair Trade' photo plug for their supported brands of chocolate. This was followed by words of hearty support from an even prettier himbo back in the studio. In fact it seems the Blue Peter report is part of a concerted BBC effort to help the 'Fair Trade' cocoa campaign. That I am coerced into funding this anti-capitalist rubbish is one thing, as hopefully being over 18 years of age I can make up my own mind about such matters, but broadcasting this anti-free market poison to five year olds is morally outrageous.

So just to preserve a smidgin of balance I thought I would try to improve on what the Blue Peter presenter said this morning, particularly as she seemed so genuinely puzzled as to why Mary had nothing more than iron age tools to cut down her cocoa pods:

Now this cocoa farm worker, Mary, only has primitive tools, such as her machete and a pole-handled knife, which at first I found puzzling until I thought about it. I then realised that Mary and her family are kept deliberately poor at a bare subsistence level by two different sets of collectivists. The first corrupt set of thieves are the tyrannical political classes in Africa who routinely steal from their governmentally-controlled populations, via taxation, import tariffs, and export license corruption, to help finance their personal purchases of Swiss gold and to fund their governmental purchases of arms, which they need to keep their own people down. This deprivation by taxation, inflation, and regulation, means that African farmers are never able to save enough re-investment capital to improve their farm production methods beyond subsistence or to increase their revenue to create better lives for themselves and their families. The second group of corrupt collectivists are the politicians in the protectionist blocs, like NAFTA and the EU, who do everything they can through taxation, subsidisation, and import controls, to increase food costs for their own populations and to protect their rent-seeking farmer clients. The resulting western tax revenue is used to give large numbers of these western parasites comfortable secured incomes and to help African tyrants buy even more western weapons systems to further suppress African people through the arms supply mechanism known in these parts as 'international government aid'. So all you five year olds out there, if you really want to decrease poverty in Africa, always try to see beyond the immediately obvious problem and try to discover the underlying causative factors, which will almost always be some kind of government intervention. Free markets feed. Collectivism starves. And now back to the studio.

Now if the BBC were to broadcast that kind of propaganda, though only to adults of course, then even I would be willing to pay the BBC television license fee.

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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.

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'The state hates competition... this is why it tries so hard to stamp out organised crime'

So goes the old joke. Yet there actually is more than a little truth to it. As someone who views conscripting children against their will into vast 'educational factories' as institutionalized child abuse, the fact that members of the state's educational conscription elite should pick on a few isolated cases of private sector child abuse to justify moving against home educators surprises me not one jot.

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Madonna was wrong. We are not living in a 'material world', we are living in a 'managerial world':

A planned children's pancake race has been dropped because of spiralling insurance costs.

Children at Okehampton Primary School in Devon had been looking forward to the annual event on Shrove Tuesday next week.

But the 80-yard run in the town's Red Lion Yard has had to be cancelled because a risk assessment had revealed that 25 marshalls would have to line the race route to ensure public safety.

What good are marshalls? Ban this kind of thing altogether I say. What if a six year-old with a pancake, hurtling around the track at mind-numbing speeds, spins out of control and veers off into a crowd of helpless onlookers, leaving a trail of carnage and devastation in his wake?

No, no, no. Too terrible to even contemplate.

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Sitting here in London, I am horrified at the decision by Coca-Cola to remove its brand logo from drinks dispensers (which sell Coca-Cola) in English schools, afraid of being branded (!) exploitative.

It must therefore be all right - according to les bien-pensants - to prohibit freedom of commercial expression in England and Wales, but it is not all right to keep religious bigotry and bullying out of school in France?

Let us be clear, if wearing a scarf were no more than a style preference or an expression of belief, it could only be objected to on grounds of taste, which is something that bureaucrats and politicians collectively, are not known for having. However, the scarf is too often the product of beatings, threatened rape, and patriarchal oppression, with state schools juggling the demands of children's rights versus political correctness.

If Coca-Cola were truly capable of using the illuminated front of a drinks-dispenser to brainwash children into switching from Pepsi, vodka and crack cocaine, then there could be a case for the school's prohibition of the display. It is rather strange to assume that children would naturally rather drink soy milk. I would find it odd to go to a school where girls were beaten by Islamic bullies with impunity for not wearing modest clothing and where children were harangued by teachers about the evils of Coca Cola.

The next time that I hear French Imams condemn the use of compulsion against girls who dress according to Western norms, I shall withdraw my support for the headscarf ban. In the meantime, in protest against spineless Coca-Cola, I shall make a point of ordering Pepsi.

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Government-fetishists are always trying to justify their demands for ever-bigger state by claiming that only the state can ride to the rescue of the public to correct what they call 'market failures'.

So, who is going to come riding to the rescue to put this right?

Thousands of parents who had children taken away from them on the evidence of the controversial paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow will not have them returned.

Ministers are to review as many as 5,000 civil cases of families affected over the past 15 years by Prof Meadow's now-discredited theory of Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. This accused mothers of harming their children to draw attention to themselves.

Many mothers say that they have been vindicated in their insistence that they were wrongly accused and now want their children back. However, Margaret Hodge, the minister for children, has ruled out any widespread return.

Mrs Hodge said that the exact number of civil cases where Prof Meadow's theory had been used to remove children from mothers was unknown, but could run into "thousands or even tens of thousands".

She added, however: "If a miscarriage of justice was made 10 or 15 years ago, what is in the child's interest now? If the adoption order was made on the back of Meadow's evidence and that was 10 years ago, what is in the real interest of the child? If they were taken as babies the only parent they know is the adopted one. It is incredibly difficult. It is a really tough call to make.

"The sort of families that are coming forward are heartbroken families. But if the child was adopted at birth the sensible thing to do is to let it stay. As children's minister my prime interest has to be the interests of the child."

I would be willing to wager that the 'prime interest' of Margaret Hodge is Margaret Hodge.

As for the thousands of parents who may have had their children abducted by the state, well, tough titties. Live with it.

What the government puteth asunder, let no man join together again.

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I've just read an article in Fox News which has left me both speechless and in a fury:

A 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy — whose dad and stepdad are in the military — was suspended for five days because he drew a "patriotic" stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter, officials said yesterday.

It further notes:

Scott Switzer, of Colts Neck, was sent home last week from Tinton Falls Middle School after a teacher saw the image on a computer and described it to the principal.

Scott, who turned 14 Tuesday and was headed back to school Wednesday, said he was unjustly disciplined for his sketch of "a war scene."

This sort of treatment of a young lad for simply being a young lad is incredibly destructive. You can't repress the natural expression of, well, being a boy. Boys like imaginary wars and fighting battles in the back yard, climbing trees, hiding under porches, jumping off porch roofs and playing 'paratrooper' by swinging as high as they can before letting go. You can't stop them from going bang-bang at passing cars - transmogrified by imagination into Russian or Nazi or Jap or Iraqi tanks, depending on the generation.

If you were to succeed, you would destroy them as thoroughly as if you'd taken them in a backroom and buggered their wee bottoms. Worse, actually. One can recover from mere physical abuse... rape of the soul is forever.

I used to draw all sorts of battle scenes when I was 14. Lots of aircraft diving and strafing, even an imaginary Nazi Spaceship after reading Robert Heinlein's "Rocketship Galileo". I'm sure these morons would have loved me.

At one point we had a long running series of water gun 'assassinations' in the halls of Coraopolis Senior High School. One group of us were the "Nazi's" and another were "Codename Jericho" and "Operation Bluelight" from the TV series of the time. This included secret coded messages being passed around and sometimes captured and passed on to me as the senior Herr codebreaker. I'd just gotten my first book on Codes and Ciphers through the Scholastic Book Service. Since both 'sides' were working from the same book, it was fairly easy to crack them!

We finally caught a 'double agent' and surrounded him in the basketball court bleachers during some ceremony in which a Pennsylvania State official presented our school a State flag. When it ended, our target tried to run for it, but we surrounded him. The 'we' being all of us zombies who'd already been watergunned over the last few weeks. The rules were that those already 'dead' weren't allowed to take out anyone else.

Our designated assassin then emptied the watergun on him.

These politically correct fruitcakes in New Jersey would simply have adored us. They would probably have sent me and the others in for Indoctrination and Re-education.

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The improbably named UK Home Office Minister Paul Goggins, with the even more improbable title of Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Correctional Services, has defended the lack of strict definitions in a proposed new Internet grooming law. This is designed to prevent the entrapment of young children by older sexual predators. However, the proposed law, as it is currently drafted, could theoretically see a 15-year old boy-and-girl couple, who have mutually consenting sex together, being prosecuted, and sent to jail for five years alongside a 45-year old man who has sex with a 13-year old girl.

On the BBC Today program this morning, Mr Goggins said that the government could find no way of wording their new legislation to include the older predators, but to exclude the under-age couples. However, he said this would be alright, because the Crown Prosecution Service would receive the correct legal guidance on when to and when not to prosecute, to avoid imprisoning sexually adventurous youngsters. Which of course begs the question, why aren't they clever enough to frame this splendid new legal guidance in the new law?

It also begs the question of how many Samizdata readers would be criminalized if this new law were to be retro-actively applied to them, and only kept out of jail via the masterly whim of any future Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Correctional Services? As our socialist lords and masters wrap us in ever more legislation, to criminalize us, in order to control us better, their excuses and deceptions for this cacophony of intrusive legislation grow ever flimsier. I'm confident they'll soon make it illegal to walk on the cracks in the pavement, in a loud shirt. But don't worry, I'm sure Mr Goggins will be kind enough not to bang us away for this heinous misdemeanour, unless of course we do something else much more serious to annoy him, such as calling him a very rude name. Mr Goggins, you are an idiotarian.

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Our government is determined that we shall be numbered and identity carded no matter how long it takes or how much opposition has to be ground down, and if they can't do it by persuading adults, they'll do it by habituating (and I can think of ruder words than that) children.

Every child in England is to be given a credit card-style ID number in reforms aimed at preventing a repeat of the murder of Victoria Climbie, the Government has announced.

The long-awaited Green Paper on children's services also included a proposal to create a Children's Commissioner for England, whose job it will be to speak up for under-18s and ensure their views are "fed into" Government policy.

It set out a large number of changes to the structure of children's services, which will see education, health and social care combined and dispensed from neighbourhood schools.

Tony Blair said the proposals were a "significant step" towards ensuring there was no repeat of the Climbie case.

One thing is very certain about this new ID numbered world which they are determined to create. It will still contain outbursts of evil like Victoria Climbie's murder. ID numbers won't stop that.

This is but one more example of what the Telegraph's Christopher Booker has described as the "Hidden Europe" effect. What this means is that every major political decision in Britain these days is (a) aimed at bringing our institutions and legal procedures in line with those of the rest of the European Union, but (b) never justified as being done for that reason.

It has reached the point where, if you are puzzled by any item of political behaviour, you simply ask yourself: how does this fix Britain more firmly to Europe? Usually there is an answer. And if there is such an answer, that's why they're doing it.

I get the definite impression that about a month or two ago, the pro-EUnionists in Britain decided that they had had enough of Mr Blair's simultaneous apparent enthusiasm for their cause with his demonstrated enthusiasm for continuing close ties between Britain and the USA, and they decided that they would dump him. I further believe that Mr Blair is now doing as much for the EUro-cause as he can, in order to try keep his job. Things like this ID numbering system for children, which is just the sort of thing that politicians normally steer clear of because it could prove so very unpopular and unwieldy and expensive and pointless, are, I believe part of this kind of process.

If you read "Christopher Booker's Notebook" (just type "Christopher Booker" in the Telegraph search engine) you are bombarded with a steady stream of this kind of stuff. I can't read Booker too often, because I find what he reveals too depressing.

As for the idea of having a Children's Commissioner, if the government is so keen to be influenced by the opinions of children, why don't they just give children the vote? Well, no, that wouldn't be good, because it might get out of control. What might they vote for? What if they were not pro-EU in sufficient numbers? Best to have a Commissioner, to "feed" children's ideas into government, in the desired manner. Besides, EUro-kids don't have votes, so ours shouldn't either.

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There is probably a drop-dead serious point to be made here about the gradual 'feminisation' of boys but, for now at least, I am content just to publicly guffaw at this latest forlorn attempt to make the world a safer place:

Children in Melbourne have been banned from dressing up as Batman, Superman and the Incredible Hulk because schools say the action hero costumes encourage aggressive behaviour.

At least 10 childcare centres have declared themselves "superhero-free zones", claiming that youngsters who don capes and masks are more likely to end up wrestling, punching and karate-kicking unsuspecting classmates.

Lex Luther take note: all their childcare centres are belong to you!

The head of one childcare centre, Madeleine Kellaway, told the Sun Herald newspaper: "There is a lot of violence involved, where you get wham-bam aggressive behaviour."

Perhaps the kids just don't like her very much.

She said banning the superhero costumes had encouraged more creative play.

'Okay children, today we're all going to dress up as Outreach Co-ordinators and play a game of who can get most money from the government in order to implement a policy framework for achieving diversity in local authority management structure. Hooray!'

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There are times when I compare 2003 with the Orwellian world of 1984. In one respect at least, the fictional Airstrip One was far better than present day Britain: kids could have more fun!

Consider this report, that children are being harrassed by intolerant adults into staying locked indoors. Of course we live in an age where most children are treated at best as designer lap dogs or fashion accessories and at worst like punchbags or sex toys. So that actually letting children run around parks, fall in streams, get muddy and avoid obesity and truancy by burning off their excess energy in creative or harmless pursuits are not an option. The streets where I grew up have too many cars parked in them to play football, never mind the traffic.

The contrast with the Orwellian child utopia of Airstrip One is amazing: kids can run around as they wish, there is no shortage of activities for them to enjoy, from attending public executions, to outings in the countryside. But the real fun is in the "spies". Children are actively encouraged to look through keyholes, snoop into the affairs of adults and they can earn plaudits for exposing corrupt and treasonable behaviour. So when that nasty Mrs B. at the corner of A***** Rd and M****** Rd would should at my friends and I for kicking a football outside her house, we could pick up the phone and denounce her to the Party as an agent of Emmanuel Goldstein!

I wonder if there are any equivalent means for children today to get even with bossy and intolerant adults? They could try this phone number: 0800 11 11 (Airstrip One only).

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It is a little known fact but Britain is a world-leader in the manufacture and distribution of paranoia. We even export it.

For most of the time our public officials are hard at work busily churning out the stuff for both the domestic and foreign markets. But, what happens when one health-panic runs headlong into another? Well, the whole machine just grinds to an embarrassing halt:

A council has forbidden pupils to apply sunscreen in school - in case other children suffer an allergic reaction.

Cancer Research UK, which launched the Sun Smart campaign to warn of the dangers of the sun, said it was "amazed" by the policy.

Manchester City Council says it is following health and safety guidelines.

Pity the poor child, stuck out on a limb, while two different nannies squawk at them with two entirely conflicting demands. Maybe the nannies could solve the problem (and do everyone a real favour) by just dropping dead from worry.

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Children are always a bit of a knotty problem for libertarians (yes, I am still using that word until a better one comes along). I have almost lost count of the number of arguments I have engaged in concerning their rights or absence thereof and I have still not reached any (or very many) satisfactory conclusions.

So it is with the question of physical punishment. Every instinct I possess and every principle to which I subscribe tells me that hitting children (albeit a moderate smack to the posterior) is wrong. You can camouflage it in as many codes of discipline or doctrines of necessity as you wish but the bald fact remains that it is an assault. If assaulting somebody is wrong (and I should hope that most sane people will agree that it is) then surely it remains wrong notwithstanding that it is administered by someone who otherwise loves and cares for you and is intended to provide some sort of memorable object lesson. If I strike out at my wife, co-worker, best friend or next-door neighbour I run the risk of prosecution and a lawsuit. But not so if I strike my child.

I find it extremely difficult to justify this distinction. In fact, if anything, a child should have an even stronger presumption of physical integrity because they are incapable of mounting anything like a plausible self-defence.

So, while my mind is not closed on the issue, that is where I currently stand and that is what I currently think. But, however starkly I may oppose the physical punishment of children, I am even more stridently opposed to the idea of appointing the state as guardian:

Spanking children can lead to more severe abuse, two parliamentary committees said Monday, and urged the government to pass a law barring parents from hitting their children.

The government has already outlawed corporal punishment in day care centers and schools. But parents and guardians are still permitted to use spanking as "reasonable chastisement," putting Britain out of step with several European countries where all physical punishment of children is illegal.

Heavens to Betsy! We're 'out of step'. Quick, somebody crank up that metronome.

Actually this is not a fresh hell. There is a dedicated coterie of toweringly self-righteous do-gooders who have been campaigning for years for a ban on all physical punishment to be enforced by the state and every couple of years or so they manage to force their agenda on to the front pages. I am implacably opposed to them. Quite aside from the fact that these people are so obnoxiously condescending, there is no way I want to hand an excuse to the 'Social Working Classes' to drive the thin end of what is sure to prove a very fat wedge in between children and their parents. It will provide further justification for them to go trampling all over people's private lives and accelerate the process of family nationalisation and resulting social disintegration. A few red rumps are by far the lesser of those two evils.

Fortunately, I can cast aside my customary pessimism because there appears to be no chance whatsoever of this law getting onto the Statute Books. At least not yet. I allowed myself a cheer of relief upon hearing a government minister on the radio news this morning give it the unequivocal thumbs-down. I don't believe there has been any great examination of ethics involved; more likely their minds are concentrated by the fact that (for a change) the overwhelming majority of public opinion is against any state intervention in this area. I think HMG might be tempted if they knew they weren't going to face such stiff public opposition.

And I am with the British public on this one. Well, sort of. I do think that assaulting a child is wrong regardless of the intentions behind it but I am equally sure that legislation is a cure that will prove worse than the disease. Parents should raise their children, not the state and I hope sufficient numbers of parents share my sentiments. That is far from a perfect solution but maybe it is the least worst solution and, in any event, it is the best I can do.

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Just before our server shut down (which was actually a 'false flag' attack by Mossad and the CIA acting under direct orders from the Bush Nazi regime in collaboration with a secret cabal of oil bankers working in cahoots with their Zionist paymasters) one of our readers, Simon Austin sent me this reminiscence of childhood in ages now gone by:

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 50's, 60's, and 70's probably shouldn't have survived, because...

Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.

When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops and fluorescent' clackers' on our wheels.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the passenger seat was a treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle - tasted the same.

We ate dripping sandwiches, bread and butter pudding and drank Fizzy pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.

We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no one actually died from this.

We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us all day and no one minded.

We did not have Playstations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet chat rooms. We had friends. We went outside and found them.

We played elastics and street rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt.

We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits. They were accidents. We learnt not to do the same thing again.

We had fights, punched each other hard and got black and blue - we learned to get over it.

We walked to friend's homes.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate live stuff, and although we were told it would happen, we did not have very many eyes out, nor did the live stuff live inside us forever.

We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood.

Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

And you're one of them. Congratulations!

Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good.

I was one of those who grew up in the 1970's and that is a pretty accurate description of my childhood. But perhaps it only seems so idyllic in hindsight. The curse of middle-aged curmudgeons everywhere is that they are wont to denounce the whole world for going to hell in a handcart. More realistically the bleak prognosis is just a symptom of growing older and wearier. Is that what has happened to the author of that letter?

I am no position to judge whether children now are any less carefree and creative than they used to be thirty years ago but I have to admit there is ample evidence to suggest that the author's misgivings are more than just jaundice:

Salt levels in children's food should be cut, the Food Standards Agency has recommended.

For the first time, the agency has published targets for salt levels in children's food during cooking, at the table and in shop-bought meals.

There is nothing new about children having their dietary rules laid down for them but I honestly do not recall from my childhood anything like the ant-farm of busy bureaucrats dedicated to this micro-managerial task. I distinctly recall a time when parental responsibility was assumed to exist and was duly accorded some respect. Children, it seems, are prime targets of the creeping menace of nationalisation (for their own good of course).

Yesteryear is always a gilded age but the author has not entirely fallen under the spell of nostalgia. Some things have got worse and may get worse still.

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I think my relationship with the BBC is finally settling into something quite satisfactory. Having been through the stages of disillusion, mistrust, contempt and loathing I now find that I have reached the point where I now regard the BBC as reasonably reliable reverse indicator.

For example, whenever the BBC presents an event as a spontaneous outburst of public feeling, I immediately turn my mind to the possibility that it is anything but.

A case to consider is this series of nationwide anti-war protests by schoolchildren:

Hundreds of children are among crowds protesting at Westminster.

School children have been played a big part in many demonstrations across the UK while others have staged their own protests at their schools.

Sixth-former Sam Beste, from Fortismere School in north London, has organised many protests against the war.

He is staging a demonstration with dozens of others in Muswell Hilll before heading for Westminster.

In Carlisle, the police were called to a school after hundreds of pupils staged an anti-war demonstration.

There were two separate demonstrations in Belfast with more than 1,000 students and schoolchildren mounting a sit-down protest, blocking the road outside Queen's University.

In Nottinghamshire, more than 100 pupils walked out of lessons at West Bridgford School to stage a demonstration on a nearby playing field.

In Manchester, about 200 school children joined a big demonstration.

The article makes no specific claims but first impressions would lead one to believe that these pre-pubescent protests are just breaking out everywhere like typhoid. Who knows, maybe they are. I certainly cannot prove anything but, for me, this wave of teenybopper discontent bears all the hallmarks of orchestration. And, if that is so, who are the conductors?

Far be it from me to point the dirty end of the stick at their teachers and lecturers, but it would not be an entirely unreasonable inquiry to make. Just don't expect anyone at the BBC to make it.

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Recommend that they avoid such ridiculous non-advice as this lot of BBC rubbish (thanks Natalie Solent) which I fisked today over here, and tell them this:

The war in Iraq will happen in Iraq, not in Bromley, Guildford or Kansas City. If it’s anything like the last gulf war, it will kill far few people than Saddam has since the last gulf war. But it might kill fewer people. And anyway, the world already contains some disgusting countries where people are killed by their own governments for no reason, which is why the war in Iraq is happening: to reduce their number, and improve things.

You might not want to talk about many of the actual specific evil things Saddam has done, in case they are upset by such details. Children don’t always want to see pictures of innocent mothers and babies gassed to death by their own government in their home villages, for instance. But you could say that Saddam is a vicious thug who has murdered many, many human beings, and the world will be better off once he’s out of power.

If they are having nightmares about terrorist attacks, you can explain how incredibly unlikely it is that one of these will affect them personally or anyone they know, and that you personally do not waste time worrying about it. Tell them terrorist attacks will be reduced once the governments that fund terrorists have been changed to better ones, which is why the Iraq war is happening.

And of course, find out whether they have been subjected to irrational antiwar nonsense from teachers or anyone else they know. My view, since watching a TV documentary about how British children 'felt' about 9/11, is that something very unpleasant in the current political climate is actively encouraging kids to feel personally bad and anxious about world events in coercive, irrational ways. For most children- still trying to learn how to read, play football, write stories and get on with their friends- people they never met being killed thousands of miles away should be no more upsetting than people they never met being killed in WWII.

But it’s easy to induce hysteria. "Oh dear, how awful! Isn’t it shocking, little Jimmy! Those people could bomb our home next! Now, how do you feel…?" Well, if the people you rely on for help tell you fairly clearly that you should worry, then you worry. A lot of antiwar propaganda consists of scaremongering, and our children are unfortunately very vulnerable to it. This BBC advice doesn’t address that: it’s part of the problem. Parents: protect your kids from antiwar propaganda: talk to them rationally about the war.

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...or how to ensure your kids are more technologically literate than you.

One of the best ways to motivate someone is to present the person with a challenge. For children, forbidding something works equally well, if not better. So when I came across this product in one of those little catalogues that come with Sunday newspapers, I immediately realised its potential to do an amazing service in further advancing the technological awareness of the young generation.

Achieve total control over TV time

Worried about the hours your children spend watching TV or playing computer games? This remarkable new British invention hands back control to parents. Using the electronic Parent Key, you program the child's daily viewing allowances into Screenblock - say, 7-8 am and 5-7 pm. As the TV mains cable is routed via the locked compartment, Screenblock controls the power supply, turning it on and off at the times requested. But here's the best bit! It also comes with two electronic cards which act like a football ref's cards. Wave the yellow one at Screenblock and today's allowance is reduced by 15 mins - and red means the TV stays off until tomorrow. The all-important Parent Key also overrides all settings when the kids are in bed and it's time for grown-up viewing.

So far, so good. But if parents led by the desire to curb their children's TV-viewing habits succumb to the advertising and purchase such devices en masse, pretty soon many a technologically gifted whizkid will be popular, spots or no spots. Not only ways to disable the screenblock will be devised, but kids will be 'instructed' in how to do that themselves without their modifications being detected. Part of the solution will have to be the inability of parents to notice the 'adjustment'. Aren't you just grateful to the screenblock inventors for broadening your children's technological horizons?

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The Raelians are a truly weird cult, that is for sure, and the fact they are claiming to have produced the world's first cloned human is hardly going to calm feelings about the technology. However even if their contention to have done so is true (not surprisingly I am disinclined to just take the word of a group which claims humans are the descendents of bio-engineered clones created by space aliens), I must say that I find it hard to get all that excited about the whole matter.

Although I do have worries that the technology and underpinning science is sufficiently immature that there is cause for concern for the health of a cloned child, the principle itself does not bother me at all... a child is a child is a child, and the manner of its creation does not give it any less worth or intrinsic rights.

However the issue of how to assign paternal and maternal responsibility for the child is, of course, going to keep a small army of lawyers busy for quite a while! I would be quite interested to see what people's views are as to "who is left holding the baby", if you will forgive the expression

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Sundon Lower School in Bedfordshire has banned video and digital cameras from its nativity play this year, because it is worried that the images may get into the hands of paedophiles.

So let me get this right... The head teacher of a state school has banned parents from recording their children in a play. How can it be okay for a woman in authority to be instilling fear of sexual predators into small children, clearly implying their own parents are collectively under suspicion?

This is the toxic paranoid psychology of the witch hunt. The world is not packed full of paedophiles hunting for pictures of nativity plays but it suits some people to act as it that was the case... powers must be expanded to 'protect' children after all and who better than a pettifogging head teacher to do that?

I suspect that this head teacher must be a fifth columnist for the Home Schooling Movement in Britain because no one is really that idiotic and paranoid, right? Right?

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Alice Bachini looks at parenthood without any rose coloured glasses.

I moan a lot about having children. This sometimes makes me feel really mean, and I certainly wouldn't do it in the presence of my dear friends who have wanted children for years and been unable to conceive so far. But maybe I should.

Of course, children are wonderful. The problem is, they are likely to be only slightly more wonderful than the treatment they get from you, the parent, and we parents have an incredibly difficult time trying to do things right.

Let me take the hypothetical example of, say, a one-year-old baby. This is what a day is like with a one-year-old baby. You wake up, with the baby in your bed, and breastfeed, for maybe an hour. Then you get up, carrying the baby. Then you try to get dressed, while the baby plays with something, if you're lucky. Maybe you get interrupted a few times. An hour later, you can attempt to get some breakfast.

Entertaining one-year-olds is not easy; there isn't much they can do, and their attention-span is zero. Another hour later, you can maybe go out, carrying the baby yourself or pushing it in a buggy for maybe fifteen minutes before she gets bored again.

Where will you go? A friend's house, or a playgroup, where you will follow your baby around trying to make sure she doesn't eat any live wires or spiders, and constantly looking for anything that will occupy her for ten minutes so you can have a cup of tea and some conversation. About feeding babies, entertaining babies, baby illnesses, and how to get any housework or cooking done.

I won't bore you any further. It's not much intellectual stimulation for a person with an adult-sized brain.

Now, what most parents would already be doing by now is probably some amount of coercion. They would, say, leave the baby in her cot and go and cook the dinner regardless of any complaining, and eventually the complaining would die down. But the problem with coercing kids for the sake of a quiet life is, it doesn't bring you a quiet life for very long. All it amounts to is, making a rod for your own back later on (not to mention being rather wrong, and not very useful for the child, see Taking Children Seriously).

The more you use force to make your kids fit round you, the more you undermine your relationship with them. The worse your relationship with them, the harder it gets to solve problems in the future. If you totally neglect or coerce your child in ways she really suffers from (and only she can know exactly what that amounts to; it is fairly easy to ignore the wishes of a child who may not be able to express them very well unless encouraged) then ultimately you will end up with an older child or teen whom you really cannot 'control' at all. And that's when the s**t really hits the fan.

Which is exactly how it happens when states do nasty things to their citizens. Treat people badly, and you cannot expect a wonderful civilised country full of tolerant generous individuals. Thuggery breeds thuggery.

Parents can stop passing on their own worst ideas and learn to treat children as human beings capable of as much reason as they are. The only actual differences between their minds and ours are that our ideas are more detailed and more f***ed-up. Every argument about children being different used to be applied to women and black people. When we stop thinking kids are unreasonable for disagreeing with us, we will start creating a nicer future.

But considering how much sheer work it takes in terms of fetching, carrying, dressing, explaining, listening, feeding, nappy-changing, helping, not to mention in terms of time and money, I don't think quite so many people will be choosing to do it in the first place. Kids are wonderful. But only because they are people.

Alice Bachini

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Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator. She is a supporter of Taking Children Seriously and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective. Her third book, Bound To Be Free deals in depth with the hidden costs of so called 'free' education, including further discussion of the issues below

According to last week's Independent on Sunday a new mental health campaign sparked off by the fear that parents may face jail over compulsory drug orders for their children if a new Bill becomes law. Not content with collecting personal and private data on parents and children via the Orwellian Connexions scheme, the Blairite regime is now proposing to parent our children for us still further by accusing parents who do not favour drugging their children of being negligent and denying their children medical treatment.

The use of the ADHD drug, Ritalin, continues to rocket - 208,000 in 2001 compared to 2,000 a decade earlier. Compulsory treatment orders are a symptom of a culture which treats children as products and an adjunct of administering a brutal, centralised 'free' education system. Those who do not conform to this 'one size fits all' educational machine are 'bad' and/or 'dysfunctional' and can be diagnosed and treated. The more the system feels threatened, the more aggressive the intervention. In a collapsing state education system so-called hyperactivity disorders such as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) are popular tools of control and neatly shift the focus of failure away from the non-individually responsive institution and onto the child.

There are an increasing number of doctors and psychiatrists who consider that there is no objective difference in the behaviours of so called 'normal' and ADHD children. There are even some, like Thomas Szasz, who put these objections vigorously, pointing out that feeding children what is effectively 'speed' in order to curb what is not a disease, but a 'catch all' for troublesome behaviour, is a matter of adult convenience and control, not of medicine.

Formerly, quacks had fake cures for real diseases; now, they claim to have real cures for fake diseases.¹

When big brother is threatening to drug your children so that they can be more suited to the homogenised environments of state schools perhaps its time not only to fight back, but to ensure that more and more people are aware that they can opt out of the system entirely and choose the freedom of home education. The hidden costs of so called 'free'; state education are on the increase - not only through massive taxation, but also via services delivered with increasing menaces to civil liberties.

Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood

¹ = Chemical Straitjackets for Children by Thomas S. Szasz
     © 2001 The Foundation for Economic Education

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Blogger Alice Bachini rejects yet another collectivist 'one size fits all' approach to the problem of juvenile crime

If a certain group of people is identified as causing particular kinds of crime, is it OK to legislate against the rights of that group? Say, black men were proven to be responsible for 90 percent of stabbings. Would that make it OK to ban black men from buying or owning knives? What if white men between twenty and forty were responsible for 95 percent of all drink-driving deaths? Should we make a law banning them from pubs except between certain hours of the morning, say?

Obviously not. Which is why it is a good thing that plans to bring in an ageist curfew in Corby have been shelved. But of course, no-one there is concerned about the civil liberties of people under fifteen. The argument seems to be between those who want something done about certain kinds of crime perpetuated by this age group, reasonably enough, and those who think more football and youth clubs are the answer to immoral behaviour, which, they aren't. And I don't have any easy answers either, but I do think some kind of intelligent understanding that young people are human beings like the rest of us would be a good start.

My other main suggestion is to make it easier for young people to do proper, money-earning work. As long as the system continues to ban kids from doing honest mornings on low-paid milk rounds on the grounds that this interferes with their totally pointless unpaid days of school, it is actively preventing many of them from finding a good way forward with their lives.

Alice Bachini

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Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously

I read in The Telegraph the depressing statistic that even when the police know a child has been killed by one of his parents, they still only convict 27 percent of murderers, as opposed to 90 percent when the murderer is a stranger.

"This failure to convict arises when parents blame each other or refuse to disclose any details about the injuries and there is no independent evidence."

So the law against murder doesn't exactly guarantee children's safety. And I'm not sure giving them guns is the answer. The trouble goes deeper than anything libertarianism is qualified to solve, because it is about what goes on behind closed doors, and libertarians are only interested in protecting the rights of door-owners.

Except that I don't think this is true. I think there are some libertarians who believe in right and wrong, and who think that the reason freedom matters is that it is morally a good thing, and that children benefit from it just as much as adults do.

At the moment, the family, or the parent/child relationship, is a largely private institution. This benefits those of us who want to improve on the norm in radical ways without being scrutinised, but those who want to do evil to their children sometimes abuse this private freedom in the most horrible ways imaginable.

Libertarians are right, I believe, that subjecting all families to more state interference would, even on this kind of balance, be wrong. But this does not mean that murdering children should be more legal than murdering adults. Nor does it make hitting kids OK. It just means that legislation is too flawed and clumsy a mechanism for improving children's lives.

What's the real answer? You really need to ask?!

Alice Bachini

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Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously

Think about this: your husband decides that you need to go to the dentist. He drags you there against your will, and orders you to have a tooth extracted. You don‚t want the treatment. He threatens you, then strips half of your clothes off, in full view of everyone in the waiting-room, forces you down onto your front, and starts hitting you painfully on the exposed parts of your body.

The wrongs of the case of the man who was convicted for smacking his daughter as mentioned by Natalie Solent on her blog go much deeper than smacking and whether it should be prosecutable. Of course, I think that violence against children should be illegal if violence against adults is illegal, which it is. But I don't know how much laws about it will help children in the current climate. A law change might even damage children more than they are being damaged already, if it results in people they want to have around being forcibly removed from their homes, for example.

There is a correlation between bad coercive parenting and smacking, but it is perfectly possible to be extremely damagingly nasty without smacking, and (theoretically, at least) above (the not-very-impressive) averagely useful to your kids while habitually tapping them lightly on the wrist if they do something you don‚t like (although IME this kind of pointless exercise is not actually the most of it).

One reason why lots of parents say "It never did me any harm" is that children, and indeed humans of other ages, often prefer honest coercion to dishonest manipulation, and violence is nothing if not explicit. There is no yardstick of damage or detriment that can compare an honest threat followed by a bash, with hours of wheedling and twisting of the truth, or even years of deliberate keeping-in-the-dark, and in most cases there is no actual time when anyone can make a choice between the two.

But honesty seems fundamental to good parenting, because people who are genuinely doing their best and seeking to improve themselves and their relationships are at least able to perceive something of better ideas when they come along. Whereas those who go around claiming a monopoly on rightness and refusing even to consider alternatives to their own ideas are entrenched against rightness and their treatment of others therefore inevitably gets worse instead of better; there is no future in a relationship with such a person.

However, violence against children is definitely bad, and the case mentioned above was particularly vile, which I imagine is why it resulted in a conviction. And I guess insofar as we trust the existing legal systems to enforce decent behaviour in people, which I don't know how far that is (and it seems to me that libertarians differ in their views on this), this is a good case of something going right for a change.

Making violence against children as illegal as it is against adults seems like a minor tinkering that, on balance, would justify the extra-ness of the law in involved. I think if we are going to have laws at all, this is the kind of thing they should be used for. But if it's going to become a social workers‚ free-for-all then I think that would be very dangerous. And I really don‚t know whether that would happen or not.

Alice Bachini

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You lucky kids! Those cool people at the BBC don't just know what's good for you, they even know what you want. All of you. Despite anything you might say to the contrary. If you have forgotten what you want and need to be reminded, just check out this website from children's news programme "Newsround". See, it's telling you: "Kids Want Tougher Air Rifle Laws."

Adult readers seeking a more detailed rundown on this topic, including details of which of the BBC's own guidelines are being ignored, might like to see my post at Biased BBC.

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Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a libertarian home educator and freelance writer who supports 'Taking Children Seriously'. She writes in with some insightful views on the Orwellian 'Connexions' programme.

The nine most frightening words in the English language, Ronald Reagan is once reputed to have said, are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." One only has to glance at the latest brainchild of 'joined-up government' to know the truth of that statement. The Connexions scheme is meant to ensure that children are tracked in order to give them maximum access to the benefits everything taxation has to offer. The price tag comes in the form of an electronic card that is programmed with a complete history of the child. It is optional, no one has to join the scheme - it's simply that learning institutions can make it a requirement for registration and it remains to be seen how many other public sector institutions will be joining in the rush for data.

This back door identity card is administered by 'personal advisors' (PAs) using the 'Connexions Assessment Tool'. Based on a system used by Social Services, the tool enables PAs to assess eighteen areas of private life and 'score' the answers from 1 - 'positive strengths' to 5 - 'critical or complex issues identified'. With just one simple tool these PAs can sum up and objectify young people under the all encompassing headings of:

Life Skills

Key Skills

Basic Skills

Achievements

Participation

Substance use issues

Emotional well-being

Physical health

Income

Housing

Social & community factors

Family history & functioning

Capacity of parents/carers

Risk of offending

Relationships within family & society

Attitudes & motivation

Identity & self-image

Aspirations

When it comes to 'exploring issues' with the young person no category escapes scrutiny, for example 'attitude to authority' is 'explored' as a key skill for young people. As the sickening document develops, PAs are advised to look for evidence of living in a criminal environment to predict risk of offending. Blair's advisors have not yet discovered any gifted precogniscants who can see the future and lock up offenders before they commit their crime in the manner of the recent 'Minority Report' Movie, but they are doing their best to decide people's futures even without the aid of extra sensory perception.

Young people are expected to report on their parents as part of this welfare provision, telling all about the level of their parents' aspirations for the young person, what kind of dental care they have provided and how often they are made to take a shower. Parental stability, difficulties and 'evidence' of substance abuse by parents, all as perceived by the young person, are all recorded.

Again and again the recurrent word is 'appropriate' and the document suggests that it is highly appropriate for some under trained, intrusive PA to explore a young person's private sexual history alongside her 'developmental progress' and immunisation history. Moreover, this PA, fresh from her in service training course on how to be an authoritarian government lackey goes on to delve into the young person's mental health. 'Do you now or have you ever had suicidal thoughts?' Does the teenager have any other juicy emotional life experiences that can be recorded for his own good? Self harm? Bereavement? Masturbation doesn't seem to be listed, but then there is enough of that going on in this document already.

Home-educated young people are amongst the few escaping the routine invasion of this new and invidious scheme, but as they enter colleges later in their education they are being asked for details of their Connexions cards and pressurized to join the herd of electronically tagged Blairite citizen fodder. Having libertarian views would no doubt earn them a 5 score for critical and complex attitudes to authority. Living in a household where they are taken seriously as autonomous human beings able to initiate and motivate their own learning would put them well off the scale, a new class of 'potential offenders' in their own right. The Connexions scheme is inimical to liberty and we need to be campaigning against it vociferously before all young people are made the subjects of joined up government 'help'.

Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood, North Wales

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Question: if someone wanted to swathe you in cloth dipped in turmeric water and then bury you alive in a pit, what would you say? Awww, c'mon, it's only for a minute or so, and in the 400 years of this tradition, no one has died yet (they say). Actually, the participants on the sharp end (or is it in the deep end?) are typically young children, it being far too terrifying a procedure to subject adults to. They say it's completely consensual, and after all, if the gods are not appeased, who knows what might happen! Naturally, the police don't want to intervene, because no one is calling them to do so.

Hang on a minute, one of those little children is bound to place a call to her local police station or submit a complaint in writing if there is any problem, isn't she? The fact that her parents are making her submit to being buried alive by putting the fear of the gods into her is neither here nor there, is it?

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Following a news item about a mother in Ohio whose children suffered second degree sunburns at a fair, some folks on a private Libertarian List have been busy theorising about want should happen. Obviously, the children would not want hideous sunburn or skin cancer, and nor would they want the extreme discomfort of baking in the sun. At this point, people leap to the conclusion that the answer is for the parents to impose their will on the children,and not take them to the fair.

Dare I mention the existence of such everyday things as sunscreen, hats, sunshades, tea tents (oh all right then, beer tents), and, for slightly older children, the solving of problems through pleasant conversation? There is absolutely no reason for a child to get fried or miss out on the fair.

Luckily, children don't have to understand the physiological effects of baking in the sun, any more than I have to understand anything about any number of things that significantly affect my life. Just as I might have a doctor, a dentist, surgeons, tax/investment advisors, and so on to advise me, children have their parents (and others) to advise them.

It is a mistake to assume that there are only two options, one being to say nothing and let the child rot, and the other being for parents to coerce their children. That is a false dichotomy. If you think of it that way – just like statists think that bad things will happen without the government benevolently coercing citizens for their own good or the good of others – it will indeed seem as though force is the best option. But in fact, there is a third option, which people use all the time with friends: reason, persuasion, the creation of new knowledge.

When you fail to persuade your friend of something, you may think that he is stupid and foolish, but you do not leap to the conclusion that it is right to impose your will on him for his own good (or whatever). Even if you could persuade the entire world that your friend is making the biggest mistake of his life, you still would not think that gives you any right whatever to impose your will. You would think that (1) you might possibly be mistaken, and (2) it is his life and his mistake to make, not yours.

If you want to use a different standard for children, you need an argument that isn't circular. No one has come up with one so far.

I shall be speaking about such matters (title: Unreasonable Parents – why spanking won't help!) in San José, California, USA, on 28th August. See my web site for details.

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After the recent abduction and murder of two young girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, parents everywhere fear for their children’s safety. This morning's TV news was full of related items. There was an attempted child abduction just yesterday morning near where I live. And in another item, a Huddersfield University researcher reported that one in five children have been subjected to unwanted sexual advances outside the home. On GMTV yesterday morning, in an item about how to keep children safe, a National Society for the prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) representative said that parents should tell children that they don’t have to do everything an adult tells them.

But what are children to think, when in the next breath their parents demand complete obedience? TCS (Taking Children Seriously) parents don't give these mixed messages. Unlike many parents, they do not impose their will on their children, but instead resolve disagreements with their children rationally, by consent.

In my Taking Children Seriously article, Questionable Motives?, soon to be re-published by the Libertarian Alliance, I argued that:

Large imbalances of power, such as that of adults over children, make it easy for the powerful to coerce the powerless in a thousand ways, from the most overt to the most subtle. Slaves were commonly raped by their masters. Yet even where this was illegal, the slaves could do little about it. The cure - the only effective cure and the only morally justifiable one - was not harsher penalties for miscegenation; it was to free the slaves: to give them equal rights. Generally, were children accustomed to being in control of their own lives, they would be far more likely to complain about any ill-treatment they received.

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As human lifespans in the prosperous bits of the planet get longer, the older generation is able to live life much more fully. And it seems this is causing a few problems. In a lightly amusing but also poignant article in the Spectator , Nicholas Coleridge writes that granny and grandpa are now so busy with fund-raising, taking exotic holidays or other activity that they don't have the time to babysit for the children any more, thereby making it harder for working couples to take the odd weekend off without the kids.

I guess this is part of the demographic shift now affecting us. We are living longer, having children later in life, and traditional networks of childcare are breaking down. On the one hand this is not always a bad thing, since it means people are living full lives well into their 70s and 80s, but it also has its costs. I was looked after by my grandparents several times to help out my parents. I will treasure those memories until the day I die.

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Newly-installed Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams, about whom I made a brief mention on the blog yesterday seems an opinionated fellow, but I don't want to discuss his particular insights on the possible invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Afghanistan or other foreign points. What really piqued my interest was his broad condemnation of consumerism, particularly the use by young children of video games, such as those which feature violence.

By happy coincidence, I have started to read a fascinating new book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by American comic book author and child psychologist Gerard Jones, who has written about how violent video games like Doom or Tomb Raider can in reality help children to master insecurities and fears of all kinds.

Jones explores the many fantasy games now on the market, the importance of superheroes in comics and television, ending with the broad conclusion that this stuff is essentially good for children rather than harmful. He points to the fact that during the 1990s, when such games became wildly popular in the United States, teenage violence decreased. Of course, some horrific school shootings prompted commentators to wonder whether video games were making youngsters more violent, but Jones' book tends to weaken that argument quite strongly.

He even shows how comics, action hero films starring the likes of James Bond or Spiderman can in reality help children suffering from low self confidence become stronger, more assertive (in a good way), and better suited to coping with the inevitable difficulties of adulthood. In many ways the book is a re-working of the need for fantasy and make-believe in childhood development.

His analysis is light-years away from that of Archbishop Williams, and I would guess, from that of many mainstream commentators for whom video games are just another dread feature of global capitalism. For me, the profusion of amazing games and top-notch films are one its great glories.

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Alice Bachini has some views about Brian Micklethwait's article Which way did your pram face?

It's not just outward-facing prams that are new; what about all those carriers and backpacks that allow babies to view the world from a user-friendly height? I think a social change is very definitely afoot, and a libertarian change for the better as well. But I don't think all this is just the result of parents consciously trying to encourage more outgoing interactions for their offspring. Nor do I think that it contradicts with the kind of intimate mother/baby relationship Brian associates with the National Childbirth Trust. I think parents are just being more sensitive about what kids actually enjoy doing, and the result of this is inevitably good.

It's much more fun to watch the world from Dad's shoulders than to be stuck in a pram with only a row of plastic bunnies for company. Although even if you do have plastic bunnies nowadays, they are likely to be all-singing, all-dancing electro-bunnies which recite the alphabet in fifteen languages at the press of a button, the real world is still very often more fun than the gimmicky or "educational" toys that adults seem to think babies will enjoy.

Kids, including babies, want more, more, more, and capitalism with all its mind-blowing array of baby entertainments and transport machines, meets more and more of their wants. And parents know this is good for their development, because they can see how happy they are and how much they are learning from all that interesting stuff. Whereas in the 1950s little Billy would have spent all day in his pram, his cot or his playpen, nowadays he gets to go to exciting places and meet interesting people with fun toys. So things are getting better, in a pro-human beings, libertarian direction.

But mostly, we just aren't inclined to leave them screaming in boredom if putting them somewhere more stimulating cheers them up. As this represents good parenting, it doesn't detract from the mother/child stuff so much as adds to it. Happy people tend to get on better with each other, and you're not walking round town all day; sometimes you are sitting together at home on the sofa, watching the "Super Duper Sumos" and drinking "Sunny Delight".

Alice Bachini

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Here's an observation which I think deserves wider currency, which I got – very appropriately considering the nature of the observation – from my mother.

Prams. Which way do they face?

In the olden days, prams faced inwards. Babies, when being walked by their mothers, or nannies or au-pairs or whoever, faced backwards, back to whoever was doing the walking. Prams were also quite bulky, and babies were shielded (cut off?) from the dramas of the outside world. Now, most prams are far smaller and skimpier, and they mostly face outwards, away from whoever is doing the walking.

Given what has been learned about the truly astonishing rate at which the growing brains of babies suck in information from all around them, is this not a quite important change of social custom? Does it somehow portend a world of looser and less intimate family relationships, and greater (and maybe also earlier) engagement between growing children and the outside world, beyond their little family households?

My mother disapproves of this change, because she considers the relationship between children and their mothers to be of crucial importance. (She was one of the Founding Mothers of the National Childbirth Trust.)

Me, I don't know. I think there's much to be said for getting to know about the world early on and feeling at ease with its excitements, opportunities and complexities, and not just getting acquainted with your mum. But I think my mum is definitely on to something. I completely agree with her that this is a fascinating little fact about the modern world.

Thoughts anyone? Does Natalie Solent have anything to say about this, what with her being a mum herself?

Incidentally, when checking out the link to the NCT, I noticed that they still use the same logo, based on an Eskimo wood carving that my mother brought back from a trip to Canada. It's of a mother and child. It may even be Mary and Jesus, I can't remember. And the child? It's facing mother.

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Patrick Crozier, writer of the excellent blog UK Transport finds the issue of how parents treat their children a complex one for libertarians

On television (Powerhouse, Channel 4) just now were calls for banning parents smacking their own children.

I have to say I find myself divided on this issue. I used to just accept it as one of those things that parents needed "just in case". But there has recently been a debate in libertarian circles - largely ignited by a talk Sarah Lawrence gave at one of 'Brian's Fridays' (a monthly libertarian meeting in London hosted by regular Samizdata contributor Brian Micklethwait).

Sarah says that children are people too and are entitled to exactly the same rights as adults.

"Ah" I say "But what if a child is determined to cross the road and get run over? Got you there." Apparently not. After all, if an adult stepped in front of a bus most of us would make some attempt to stop them. The more I heard about this line of thinking the more I liked it. It would no longer be possible to "send" children to schools - so no more juvenile prison camps. Would we end up with a generation of illiterates? Probably not. Those children who are home schooled tend to do very well. And anyway, the present system needs little help in raising children who can't read.

But back to smacking. If it is illegal to hit an adult it should be illegal to hit a child. Unless, of course, it is consensual. Boxers knock seven bells out of one another but no one gets arrested. Likewise sado-masochists. OK, so some of them do get arrested but they shouldn't.

So, do I think children will consent to boxing matches with their fathers or engage in sado-masochism? Probably not.

But there is an issue here. If children have rights so do adults. One of these is to throw their children out on the street. In fact this is about the only fallback that parents have if children have rights. This is pretty unpalatable - especially for parents. This is where smacking in a consensual form may come in. Rather than throw the child out the parent could offer a compromise in the form of a consensual punishment. Of course, it doesn't have to be smacking or even physical but the point is that in a libertarian world smacking could exit.

This is not, by the way, what the anti-smacking brigade want. They do not want parents to have the power of eviction. They are quite happy to force parents to house, clothe and feed little hooligans. Indeed, it may well be the intention.

Patrick Crozier (London)

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A real life Tellytubbie at work.

Update: Oops. It seems we sent so many visitors to the site that their server blew up. Amy has acquired more bandwidth and the cute little Tellytubby chap is available for viewing once more