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And then ask yourself: What is to be done? What can I do? How far am I prepared to go?

John Osimek reports for The Register:

The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.

The questionnaire – or "School Entry Wellbeing Review" – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a "Health Record" on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.

The Review asks parents to indicate whether their child "often lies or cheats": whether they steal or bully; and how often they eat red meat, takeaway meals or fizzy drinks. [...]

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Someone called Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times has written about the use of alcohol in the latest Harry Potter film and I must say I find her article deeply... something...disturbing? No, not quite right... alien... yes that is it. It is deeply alien.

As Harry Potter fans crowd movie theaters to catch the latest installment in the blockbuster series, parents may be surprised by the starring role given to alcohol. In scene after scene, the young wizards and their adult professors are seen sipping, gulping and pouring various forms of alcohol to calm their nerves, fortify their courage or comfort their sorrows. [...] As the mother of a 10-year-old Harry Potter fan, I was taken aback by the reaction of the young people in the theater. They snickered at Hermione’s goofy grin and, later, guffawed when an inebriated Hagrid passed out. While I don’t think my daughter fully understood what was going on, I wondered how other parents, educators and addiction experts would react.

If she found funny drunk people funny, it sounds to me like her daughter understood just fine.

Liz Perle, a mother of two teenage boys and the editor in chief of Common Sense Media, which reviews books, movies and Web content aimed at children, said she was bothered by so many scenes showing alcohol as a coping mechanism.

“Hermione is such a tightly wound young lady, but she’s liberated by some butterbeer,” she said. “The message is that it gives you liquid courage to put your arms around the guy you really like but are afraid to.”
[...]
Alcohol educators say that they don’t want to ruin the fun, but that parents should be aware of alcohol’s role in the Harry Potter series, the books as well as the movies. Several studies suggest that movies influence teenagers’ behavior when it comes to drinking, drugs and tobacco.

So why is this alien? Partially because booze really is a quite effective 'coping aid' that people have used since time immemorial to pluck up their courage to put their arms around the object of their affections for the first time. Why? Because at the risk of stating the obvious, it bleedin' works. Is this really shocking or alarming to "parents, educators and addiction experts"?

I rather doubt my folks would have found a drunk giant and some pie-eyed teenagers in a film all too perplexing. But then they were hardly puritans and came from a more robust generation who felt there was value in a child occasionally colliding with life's sharp protruding edges. Nor did they get the vapours from the sight of their little treasure's bumps and bruises or feel any need to call in 'experts' when I intermittently got rat-faced drunk.

And what exactly is an 'alcohol educator'? Pointing out that drinking can make you drunk and being drunk can make you walk into lamp posts or crash cars requires a specialist 'alcohol educator'? How did anyone reach adulthood before such people existed I wonder?

Well I learned that drinking has its downside too, not from an 'alcohol educator' but from puking my guts up rather too often. I recall a teacher seeing me once heaving miserably after a school event and did he send me to an 'alcohol commissar educator'? No, he left and returned a while later to present me with a bucket and mop and rather unsympathetically said "clean up before you leave". Quite right too. He also never mentioned it again, because what could he possibly tell me about the downside of drinking too much that I had not just taught myself?

Teachers and parents teach children many things. And many of those things are true, half true or pure unadulterated lies. And most children know when what they are taught is hogwash. As a consequence, they learn the importance of critical judgement in ways that were not really intended by the person doing the 'teaching'.

So when we hear this...

"I hope parents can talk to their kids and tell them even though Harry Potter made that seem fun, that it isn't O.K.," said Dr. Welsh, the author of a 2007 article about alcohol use in the Harry Potter series, published in The Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Abuse.

...any 100+ IQ child who has had a few beers learns something valuable: his parents, and Dr. Welsh writing in The Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Abuse, are full of it, because for most people it really is okay and their own experiences confirm that. They sank a few brewskis, had a giggle and maybe made an ass of themselves, and 99.9% of the time, no one died, got pregnant or lost an eye.

And this is an important lesson we all learn when growing up: some of what we are taught makes sense and quite a lot of it is complete and utter tosh, and just because your parents tell you something, ain't necessarily so. And when an 'alcohol educator' is trotted out to tell you something, it is because he is being paid to tell you that, and often there is quite a bit more to it than he is letting on.

There is only one kind of professional 'alcohol educator' worth listening to, and they are called sommeliers.

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Surely the Second Coming is at hand!

The way to absolute power is to dress up empty cruelty as public virtue, and have the organs of propaganda promulgate it for 'carers' to inflict on children. Finally they have an excuse to take Teddy Bears from toddlers.

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Alan Forrester is none too impressed with the evident wish of the state to stamp out any alternatives to state directed indoctrination

The government has recently published a review on home education written by Graham Badman in which he expresses a laudable concern for free speech for children:

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

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

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

What remedy does Mr Badman recommend? He recommends that all home education families should be registered with the Local Education Authority and:

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

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

Of course Mr Badman really has no interest in free speech and is just a political hack hired by the government to write crude propaganda for their campaign to destroy home education and he can't even do that properly. Mr Badman is quoting a definition of free speech from the United Nations. Many of the UN's member governments are tyrranical kleptocracies run by thugs who murder or torture anyone who dares to openly oppose them. Seems to me they don't really like free speech too much and quoting them is a big giveaway.

Mr Badman takes their advice because he worships the power of the state and feels the need to have people who like to play at being an international state dictate what he says about fee speech. Free speech is freedom from having your speech dictated by anybody else, including the British government. The British government violates free speech rights on a massive scale by imprisoning children in schools in which they are not allowed to speak or go to the toilet without permission. Instead of solving this problem Mr Badman proposes to secure a child's right to free speech by forcing parents to dictate what their children what their children will think in twelve months and if they fail to indoctrinate their child the child will be locked up in one of the government's prisons for children schools.

A new, pathetic low for the British government.

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This story will not help the blood pressure of our regular readership, I am sure:

A flagship database intended to protect every child in the country will be used by police to hunt for evidence of crime in a "shocking" extension of its original purpose.

How marvellous. Makes one's heart swell with pride.

ContactPoint will include the names, ages and addresses of all 11 million under-18s in England as well as information on their parents, GPs, schools and support services such as social workers.

Tremendous. I almost want to sing "Land of Hope and Glory" (sarcasm alert).

The £224 million computer system was announced in the wake of the death of Victoria Climbié, who was abused and then murdered after a string of missed opportunities to intervene by the authorities, as a way to connect the different services dealing with children.

The death of this girl, like that of all children in the care of monstrous parents, is a terrible story but the creation of this database is not the answer. Punishment of the offenders surely is (I'll leave it to the commentariat for what those punishments should be).

It has always been portrayed as a way for professionals to find out which other agencies are working with a particular child, to make their work easier and provide a better service for young people.

No doubt.

However, it has now emerged that police officers, council staff, head teachers, doctors and care workers will use the records to search for evidence of criminality and wrongdoing to help them launch prosecutions against those on the database - even long after they have reached adulthood.

And this, of course, is the nub of the issue. Governments down the ages, whether in the real world or in the dystopias of fiction writers, have sought to spot criminals ahead of their actually being criminals. I remember watching the Spielberg movie "Minority Report" - loosely based on the old Philip K. Dick novel - and wondered just how long it would take for NuLab or its equivalents to come up with an attempt to do stuff like this. Now it is becoming reality. But although the creators of such databases may like to kid themselves that they are protecting the little ones, in truth, they are placing dangerous power in the hands of state officials that can be used against people for the rest of their lives.

I am glad the Daily Telegraph is creating a stink about this. Question: will the Tories pledge to shut this database down? (Cough, nervous laughter).

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My comment the other day about a rather imperfect - if interesting - article about the late F.A. Hayek suddenly turned into a comment thread argument about whether religious parents have the right to have the genitalia of their children adjusted (as in the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, etc cultures). Now, I am not all that interested in the specific health or medical arguments here, although I would be interested if those with actual medical knowledge could give some ideas on the value or otherwise of said. What interests me, as a defender of liberty, is what should be the boundaries on what parents should observe when it comes to raising their children when it comes to actions that actually affect the bodies of their kids. For example, suppose a parent of religion/ideology X decided that he or she really wanted to put a small tattoo on the forehead of their son with the symbol of their family faith? Suppose the operation to do this was painless. Would it be justified? (In my view, no).

I put this point because in the comment thread attached to my post about Hayek, one commenter called Gabriel argues that banning such operations on children done for religious reasons constitutes discrimination against his faith. Such an argument is, I think, an example of multiculturalism gone mad.

On a related theme of protecting kids, David Friedman - son of the great Milton Friedman - has thoughts.

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It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers' money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We'd despaired of reaching 'the youth' ourselves, too expensive. I'm very glad they decided to do it for us.

With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows 'kids' not to be quite the suckers they'd hoped. Enjoy.

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Up to a quarter of all adults are to be vetted to ensure they are not kiddie-abusing maniacs, as part of an effort to protect youngsters under the age of 16 in cases such as voluntary organisations and so on.

And people wonder why there is sometimes a shortage of volunteers for things like youth clubs and the like. The destruction of civil society, of the bonds of trust that are vital to such an organic, grass-roots cluster of non-state institutions, is remorseless and deliberate. This government, in its totalitarian way - I use that word quite deliberately - wants to make all human interactions subject to its tests. The consequences for the long term health of civil society, and of the ability of people to grow up normally, are ignored.

None of this is to say that the issue of child abuse is not serious, nor deserving of legal action to protect children from child abusers, who deserve the strongest punishment. I really do wonder, however, whose interests are served by the sort of vetting processes that the state is embarking upon. One hears examples of how adults are sometimes reluctant to help a kid because they are frightened they will get some sort of complaint later on. That cannot be good.

It is sometimes lazily assumed that this present Labour government is not "radical" like its predecessors. But that is only a superficial issue. In substance, this is arguably the most dangerously radical government in modern times in terms of its view of how individuals interact not just with the state, but with each other.

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A story here which says that fans of computer games are not all weird. I have never quite understood this whole media fixation with games just because they are on a screen rather than face-to-face. A lot of games draw on all kinds of creative energies and are arguably far better for cognitive development than just passively watching TV. As for the arguments about various social pathologies, well, this book is an excellent corrective to the social scolds, pointing out that games involving superheroes and vanquishing monsters is actually a very healthy thing.

Coming next, research shows that people who like to play poker with their mates on a Friday night, play tennis on a Sunday afternoon, do the Times crossword, are also normal. (Sarcasm alert).

Of course, by some yardsticks of social behaviour, gamers, or other hobbyists, are "weird", but then what counts as normal, exactly?

Personally, I think the world could use a bit more eccentricity, not less.

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In a piece of character assassination on Cherie Blair in the Observer (one so comprehensive that she would almost certainly describe it as 'misogynistic', if it came from a male writer), Catherine Bennett makes at least one palpable hit. Forget the inane boastfulness and obsessive self-justification against every suggestion of venality:

She complains how the Daily Mail 'ratcheted up its attacks on me', demanding to know - though Mr Blair could have answered just as well - if Leo had had the MMR. Doctors were also keen for the Blairs to help subdue a scare which threatened public health. Now she discloses that Leo had, indeed, been vaccinated, though she would not save lives at the time if it gave 'the press chapter and verse'.

I wonder, though, whether it is not even worse than that. It is possible that the Blairs might have withheld the information, not out of genuine concern for their family's privacy (effectively discounted by the present revelation, as Bennett points out), nor out of pique at the press, as in Cherie Blair's current account, but for political reasons: that they preferred to keep silent, and thereby to encourage the spread of dangerous infectious diseases against which they had quite properly protected their own infant, in order not to cross the noisy anti-vaccination lobby.

Since we saw them use family events to political purpose at much the same time, it would be entirely consistent with their known behaviour. The Blairs have never avoided telling other people what to think when they stood to get a tactical political gain, or when they believed it necessary for their great projects for the world. But concealing an actual belief in vaccination looks like sacrificing other people's children to calculation of the most self-regarding kind.

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Every child should have authoritarian parents, because then they'll grow up to be libertarians.

-Oddball Australian journalist Paddy McGuinness, as recounted at his funeral this week by Bill Hayden.

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A long time ago, when I was a wee nip of a lad, my parents would keep me quiet by turning on the television and having me watch such classics as Sesame Street. Little did they know that what I was watching was not suitable for children! I know that now, because the early seasons of Sesame Street have come out on DVD and they have been given a parental advisory, no less.

The first few seasons have just been released and come with, of all things, a warning.

"These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child," the warning reads.

"Sesame was created in the '60s, and it was a bit edgier, if you will," said Sherrie Rollins Westin, executive vice president of Sesame Workshop.

What parent today would want their child to see kids running through a construction site or jumping on an old box spring? Scenes like the ones included on the new DVD would probably not make it into today's program now.

"We wouldn't have children on the set riding without a bicycle helmet," Rollins Westin says.

And what's that little girl doing with that man?

"In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl's hand who he's just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream," Rollins Westin said. "That's something we wouldn't do on the show today."

And rightly so. You wouldn't want your kids to turn out like us dreadful Generation X old fogeys, after all!

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I am prepared to believe that there may be some things (though not many of them) that are of such public benefit that they should be provided at the general expense. That is not to say that I think that if something is good it should be compulsory. Let alone that if it sounds like a good, that is justification for its being compulsory.

But when you are dealing with the state, "free" does not mean 'free as in free speech', nor does it mean 'free as in free beer'. It means 'compulsory'. If the government is advertising free beer, it wants everybody drunk; prepare to have your head held under if you don't feel like a tipple just now.

Hence this Guardian headline, a classic of pusilanimity against spin:

Plan to give every child internet access at home

The actual story is somewhat, er... more nuanced:

Parents could be required to provide their children with high-speed internet access under plans being drawn up by ministers in partnership with some of the country's leading IT firms.

[...]

The initiative is part of a major push which could also see the parents of every secondary school student given access to continuous online updates on their child's lessons, performance and behaviour as early as next year. So-called "real-time reporting", which was first mooted in the government's children's plan last month, could be extended to primary schools within two years.

A sub less versed in the cult of the benign state might have abstracted that as:

"Big business bonanza: Parents must pay for children to be watched at home by online officials."

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Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state.

Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls's speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn't the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies - in this case a para-Party body - last a long time? It bears close reading:

Excerpt I:

Our ambition must be that all of our young people will continue in education or training.

That is what our Bill sets out to achieve - new rights for young people to take up opportunities for education and training, and the support they need to take up these opportunities; alongside new responsibilities for all young people - and a new partnership between young people and parents, schools and colleges, local government and employers. ....
But it is important to make clear that this is not a Bill to force young people to stay on at school or college full-time. They will be able to participate in a wide range of different ways through:

* full-time education, for example, at school or college
* work-based learning, such as an apprenticeship
* or one day a week part-time education or training, if they are employed, self-employed or volunteering more than 20 hours a week.

But the Education and Skills Bill is a bill of responsibilities as well as a bill of rights.

Because if young people fail to take up these opportunities, there will be a system of enforcement - very much a last resort - but necessary to strike the right balance between new rights and new responsibilities.

Phew - not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be - they'll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, "building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them - but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights...". It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G tells you to. This is the traditional line of Calvinism and Islam, is it not?

Don't you love that "our young people"? Völkisch, nicht wahr?

Excerpt II:

The second building block [after mucking around with exams and the curriculum some more - GH] is advice and guidance - so that young people know and understand what is out there, and can be confident that they can make choices that will work for them.

First, this means local authorities taking clear responsibility for advice and guidance as part of the integrated support they offer to young people – making sure that youth services, Connexions and others who provide personal support to young people come together in a coherent way.

Second, clear new national standards for advice and guidance.

Last week my colleague Beverley Hughes set out clearly what we expect of local authorities as they take responsibility for the services provided by Connexions.

Third, a new local area prospectus available online, already available from this September in every area - setting out the full range of opportunities available, so that young people can see the choices available to them clearly in one place.

So not only will whether you do something state-approved be checked, but what you do will be subject to state advice and monitoring and made from a menu provided by the state. For the uninitiated Connexions is a formerly semi-independent, and notionally voluntary, database surveillance scheme for teenagers set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000.

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Exciting news for British schoolchildren. Early leavers 'will not be jailed' (PA). Except of course they will be under control orders, in effect; incarcerated and enslaved part-time. "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance," ran the old slogan. This policy is pretty clear evidence that what's offerred to many in the state school system is not education. If you have to force people to take something, then it is not plausiible that it is of use to them. There is no problem selling education and training to those who want it. Even very poor parents in London often find money for extra lessons or private day-schooling on top of the taxes they pay to imprison other people's children. The prison function of the system reduces its value to others.

Put aside for the moment whether it should be paid for from taxes or not. How much more cost-effective would state education be if it were voluntary, and the classes were full of eager participants and even the grumpiest teenagers present were those whose parents or peers had persuaded them it was worthwhile? How much better would the curriculum be if it had to attract an audience by being interesting or useful, rather than prescribed by bureaucrats? How much better would teachers feel about their work if it didn't include the roles of commissar, bureaucrat and gaoler?

Teenagers who refuse to stay in education until they are 18 will not face jail, Schools Secretary Ed Balls insisted ahead of new legislation to raise the leaving age.

The reform - hailed as one of the biggest in education for half a century - will be included in the first Queen's Speech of Gordon Brown's premiership on Tuesday.

Mr Balls said the legislation, which will raise the age to 17 by 2013 and 18 by 2015, will be backed by a "robust regime" of support and sanctions including spot fines and court action.

Since if you are at school you are barred from employment without the permission of the authorities, I imagine they will pay the fines with the proceeds of robbery and prostitution. Well done, Balls!

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Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is like a compass-that-faces-south... always wrong but useful nevertheless because as long as he is dependably wrong, he can still be used when plotting a course.

His latest pearl of wisdom is the solution to reducing the numbers of children acting irresponsibly by engaging in violent crimes: Stop holding them responsible. His logic is hard to fault. If you deem than a child cannot be responsible for their actions, clearly they cannot therefore be irresponsible... voila... less children acting irresponsibly. In fact by definition no children can be said to have acted irresponsibly because the very notion of judging responsibility is disallowed. In a political and law-enforcement culture in which 'that which is not measured never happened', I can see the attraction of this approach. But then again Britain's welfare state treats everyone regardless of their age like an irresponsible child, incapable or unwilling to look to their own pensions, medical care, etc. etc, so perhaps there is a bigger meme at work here.

It's not to weaken the seriousness of what they do

... the Archbishop says, and then promptly weakens the seriousness of what they do by suggesting a child can cause the death of someone and get away with it, whereas an older person cannot. So how is that not weakening the seriousness of what the child has done? Also I am curious, how is taking away responsibility going to encourage more responsibility? Perhaps the following is what the Plod will be told to do:

PC Dixon of Dock Green: "Now look here, Little Timmy, it is very bad throwing rocks at people and killing them. If you do that when you are older, we will be very cross."

Little Timmy from the Bedlam Estate: "Oh, okay then, I'll just get it out of my system now while it doesn't count."

PC Dixon of Dock Green: "It's a fair cop, Timmy, just don't do it after you turn sixteen, okay?"

Little Timmy from the Bedlam Estate: "Nice hat, Copper. Hand it over."

Oh, and mothers too, they also should not be held responsible for some reason. It is all down to too many bad movies and Britain's 'gun culture', whatever the fuck that means in a country which probably has less civilian guns in total than almost any single US state other than the very smallest ones. I wonder of God's Idiot would describe a nation without much in the way of musicians or musical instruments as having a 'musical culture'?

However would we manage without the Church of England to guide us, eh?

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The plans by the state to extend the period of educational conscription in Britain could well be the issue that helps radicalise future generations in a most useful way, at least if you see the world the way I do.

“Here is a Government that has toyed with the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 in order to promote a greater sense of citizenship amongst our young people. Yet it proposes to extend compulsory education or training to 18, to compel the already disaffected to, in their perception, prolong the agony.”

She said that making teenagers “conscripts” was likely to “reinforce failure, leading to even greater disaffection. Enforcement could lead to mass truancy, further disruption to other learners and staff, maybe even needless criminalisation if ‘enforcement measures’ are imposed,

I am also delighted to see someone in the mainstream media making the self-evident point that state education is indeed conscription. The absurdity of trying to teach children who are determined to not be taught is evident at sinkhole schools across the country so why the state thinks digging the same hole deeper is going to solve anything is not obvious to me. Still, never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake as there is a clear upside to all this. What the government intends to do will engender disaffection and hostility to the impositions of the state at an early age, and without doubt mischievous political activists will fan the flames by pointing out to the internet savvy blog reading schoolyard conscripts of the future that they are not wrong to feel angry and they are not wrong to refuse to cooperate. Excellent.

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Alice Thomson has writen an interesting article called Be a 'bad' parent and let your children out in which she decries the enervating risk-averse trends in which parents, with the encouragement of our political masters, try to supervise and regulate every aspect of their children's lives.

The comments are also quite interesting. One of them , calling herself 'Mum', bristles at the suggestion Thomson makes:

People who don't have children are always telling those of us who do what we are doing wrong. I also had a free and easy childhood, but got flashed at, followed home twice and had numerous near misses at being run over. I don't let my child play out, although she has the run of the garden where she can make camps, climb trees and do all the usual outside things, and usually has a number of friends out there with her.

Well 'Mum', I do not have any children either but I am very happy you were not my 'Mum. Moreover I, like everyone else, am fully qualified to have on opinion on how children should be raised because believe it or not, I and everyone else was once a child.

I agree totally with Alice Thomson and think it is time people stopped indulging their neurotic need to control everything and just let children grow up without panoptic supervision.

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I would like to suggest that Jonathan's "Missing the point over grammar schools" below, itself misses the point. I am as in favour of grammar schools as anyone. But I do not think Cameron's decision is any more than another piece of political pragmatism (read my comment on Jonathan's piece for the rationale.)

I agree the new Tory policy does nothing significant for education. But I suspect Jonathan's policy prescription - compromise vis-a-vis properly voluntary schooling it may be, is doomed. Introducing vouchers now would be worthless and the Tories are sensible, therefore, not to tie themselves to that. Not least they would risk discrediting vouchers: vouchers could be a move in the right direction, but not yet.

This is why. Here is a sensible lefty, Jenni Russell, reporting in the Guardian's bloggish Comment is Free:

[A] father with an 18 year-old daughter at one of London's famous public schools is shocked by her fear of anything beyond her narrow syllabus. She pleads with him not to tell her anything he knows about history or classics or literature, because she understands by now that knowing anything beyond the points on the examiners' mark schemes will jeopardise her chances of getting top grades. She has learned that education is not about discovery, but the dutiful repetition of precisely what you have been told.

However good the school, however motivated the pupil, there is no choice to be had. There is a chemin-de-fer, directions predetermined, signals to be passed at the prescribed speed. No entry to university at 16, Mr Brown. No ignoring unutterably tedious and repetitious schoolwork and passing the exams at the end on the basis of your own reading. Step off the lockstep elevator once, and you are out for ever. (Mr Fry, the University regrets that we require a clean Criminal Records Bureau certificate.)

All Britain's education is under the supervision of a suffocating bureaucracy, that serves itself and its conception of proper development. There is small choice in rotten apples; the sadly pocked sharecrop goes to uniform damp barrells.

Who is to blame? The conservative defenders of both grammar schools and 'family values', that is who; and the utilitarian industrialists who now complain workers can't read or count. It was they who sought to save the population from indoctrination by radical Local Education Authorities, so delivered the entire population into the hands of pseudo-progressive educationalists by creating the National Curriculum; they who worried that universities could not be trusted to set sufficiently 'practical' exams, and did the same with syllabuses.

My modest proposal for English education:

Scrap the National Curriculum. Do not replace it. Scrap league tables and DoE "Key stage" testing. Do not replace them. Scrap rules on school admissions and allow schools to exclude or expel pupils as they choose. Scrap the QCA. Do not replace it. Scrap the Teacher Registration Regulations. Do not replace them. Scrap the office of the Access Regulator. Do not replace him. Wait five years, continuing to run and fund schools otherwise the same, which means a mix of Local Authority, central government, voluntary aided, and private schools. Only then, when people have got used to making their own decisions again, consider vouchers.

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Nice piece in Wired magazine by Clive Thompson coming to the defence of video games, frequently a target for the culture scolds ("Quake made my boy a killer!"). This gives me the perfect excuse to remind readers of this fine book, Killing Monsters, which shows the beneficial side of playing such games for children's development. Come to think of it, children - and not just boys - have played rough-house games since the dawn of time, so I do not quite see how computer games represent a major step towards cultural depravity. As a boy I played all manner of war games, not to mention staple favourites like chess.

Of course, in the case of chess, there are other considerations.

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Had the defendant actually murdered the children whose images have (presumably) given him so much furtive pleasure, would he be any worse off now?

The US Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by a high school teacher from Arizona sentenced to 200 years in jail for possessing child pornography...

If the 52-year-old had been tried in a federal court or lived elsewhere he would have received a lighter sentence.

190 years tops. With good behaviour he could have been out and about in, say, just over a century.

Indeed, the prosecutor had asked for a 340-year sentence but the trial judge imposed the minimum of 10 years for each of 20 images - to be served consecutively for a total of 200 years without the possibility of probation, early release or pardon.

So he gets what amounts, for all practical purposes, to a death sentence for possessing vile and twisted photographs. I wonder if there is a historical parallel here? Or does it set one?

(4)

Labour MP Tom Watson is undecided as to whether or not vein scanning and other biometric technology being forced on Britain's schoolchildren is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps you can share your views on the matter with him. Please note that Watson told me a couple of years ago that his view on ID cards was actually changed by the persuasive arguments he read on various blogs, so this is a man who is willing to listen to reason.

(36)

Mary Ann Sieghart has written an interesting article about the rush to subject more or less everyone who comes in contact with children to checks by the state. She rightly points out what a paranoid example this sets by presupposing that people are pederasts. I heartily agree with her article and see this as one of the more extreme examples of the state replacing social interactions with politically mediated ones.

One of the nicer aspects of being a child used to be the random acts of kindness offered by adults outside the family: the friendly shopkeeper who ruffled your hair and gave you a sweet; the enthusiastic PE coach who gave up time after school to help with your gymnastics and was constantly - and wholly innocently - adjusting your body position to get the moves right. These adults were generous with their time and their affection. We knew who the pervs were and took pains to avoid them. Now all adults are deemed to be perverts unless they can prove that they are not. Most will now avoid contact with other people’s children and will refrain from touching them for fear of the action being misconstrued.

And then, in the next snippet by her, she writes lamenting the fact more people do not join political parties. Tellingly she mentions the two main (and largely indistinguishable) political parties.

Labour has a leadership contest coming up, in which members have a vote. Wouldn’t it be fun to cast one? And my local constituency is being split into two, so there will be selection processes for both new seats. I would love to have a say in the candidate selection, especially for the Tories. Having lectured them for years about the importance of choosing more women, it would be great to be able to make a difference.

What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it? What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it?

I find that interesting as on one hand she clearly laments the destruction of civil society by the regulatory state and on the other, she urges people to join the institutions who are responsible for doing precisely that. In effect she might just as well be saying: "it is terrible that gangs which threaten people with violence are invading our neighbourhoods and fostering a climate of fear... I wonder why more people are not empowering themselves over other people by joining a gang?"

(8)

The threats to liberty in Britain are too numerous to keep track of. Thanks to Josie Appleton on Spiked! for this, which I had entirely missed before now:

The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, due to return to the House of Commons next week, will mean that 9.5million adults - one third of the adult working population - will be subject to ongoing criminal checks.

It is a House of Lords Bill, but has Government backing.

The Bill would create an Independent Barring Board (IBB), which would maintain "barred lists" preventing listed individuals from engaging in "regulated activities". "In respect of an individual who is included in a barred list, IBB must keep other information of such description as is prescribed." [cl.2(5)]

As the Bill was originally presented, you would have no right to damages if you were mistakenly or maliciously included in a barred list, and nor would anyone else. And the IBB would have been an absolute finder of fact, with appeal allowed only on a point of law. So among the things the IBB would have been independent of is responsibility for its actions.

Now things are slightly better, but there's a cunning pseudo-compromise. You can sue. And you can now appeal the facts. But the criteria applied in the application of policy to an individual case - the core of what the IBB would do - is expressly (with a shade of Guantanamo) deemed not to be a matter of law or fact, and are therefore not to be subject to examination by the courts [cl.4(3)].

The schedule of "regulated activity" is 5 pages long in the printed copy. So you'll have to look it up yourselves if you are interested.

The practical effect? Well, as an example, as I understand it, if the Bill were currently law, I would be committing a criminal offence in paying someone I trust to look after my elderly mother, who is currently convalescing from an operation, without both of us being made subject to official monitoring first.

Once it is in force, if you wish to be self sufficient - even if you don't value your privacy, and are confident that theree's nothing about you to which an official could possibly have objected in the past, and that you might not be confused with anyone else - you'll need to know if a family member is going to be ill in sufficient time to fill in all the forms and wait for them to be processed. Better leave it to the state - which is of course always perfect.

(3)

Roy Hattersley, in a short piece in the Guardian today commenting on this story, illustrates how the fundamental difference between Old Labour and New Labour, is not in their attitude to governance. It is the willingness of the former to express themselves clearly, and their angry confusion at the rhetorical deformations that New Labour uses to lead the public by the nose:

How likely is it that a mother who (whatever her motives) insisted on her son having unhealthy food will be either willing or able to ensure that he is educated at the right school or treated at the best hospital? The Rotherham sausage makes the government's "choice agenda" look rather overdone.

What Lord Hattersley does not get is that the government is equally contemptuous of people's ability to make 'the right' choices for themselves and their families. That is precisely why the Rotherham sausage smuggling is taking place. Government has removed choices that it does not approve of from the school menu. The 'choice agenda' is a three card trick. The method is misdirection; the effect is dirigiste.

(26)

Riding the 211 bus from Hammersmith to Chelsea yesterday, I was in a good mood, anticipating a tipple or two with Samizdata Overlord Perry de Havilland. As the bus drew up beside Borders, though, my mood took a significant tumble upon spotting this:

Paperchase is a British stationery chain which also operates within Borders stores, having been acquired by Borders Group in 2004. If you click on that link, you will see that the "Top Marx" line of back to school supplies is the central feature of their new season's products. The product descriptions refer to the red stars and other iconography as "Chinese emblems". I suppose that is true, much in the same way that the swastika became a "German emblem".

It was only a few months ago that a number of people decided to boycott Borders, due to the chain's decision not to sell the issue of Free Enquiry magazine which featured the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammad. The reply I got to my complaint letter to Borders about this was exactly the same as the one Dale Amon received. It read, in part:

[W]e place a priority on the safety and security of our customers and our employees.

So is it safe to presume that Borders would cease to carry the "Top Marx" line if they were subject to sufficient threats of violence over it? Is it possible that no Paperchase or Borders employee voiced concerns about the wisdom of this line at any time? Or is it more likely that the people at Paperchase and Borders are really that ignorant of such recent history? I am curious what Samizdata readers think of this one.

(20)

It is the duty of the local authority looking after a child to advise, assist and befriend him with a view to promoting his welfare when they have ceased to look after him.

Section 19A in Part II of Schedule 2 to the Children Act 1989 - as inserted by the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000

(26)

A victory in the Netherlands for freedom of expression:

A political party formed by paedophiles cannot be banned because it has the same right to exist as any other party and is protected by democratic freedoms, a Dutch court has ruled. The Brotherly Love, Freedom and Diversity party (PNVD) was launched in May to campaign for a reduction in the age of consent from 16 to 12 and the legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals, provoking widespread outrage in the Netherlands.

The Solace group, which campaigns against paedophiles, sought a ban on the group, asserting that the party infringed the rights of children, and that its ideas were a threat to social norms and values in a democratic state. But a court in The Hague held otherwise.

Good for the court. Even easy-going Dutch society is prey to populism, it seems. Without constraint on 'democracy', then eventually non-majoritarian views will squeezed out; not defeated in argument, but denied even consideration.

Worth noting (1): Solace [can anyone find a web-site? I will link it if so], who would rather nobody hear the views of the PNVD, made their claim based on some putative 'rights of children'. I would like to know quite how it enhances anyone's rights to exclude from the political sphere discussion of policy on the age of consent, pornography, the treatment of animals, or the use of drugs - those questions that have aroused populist ire. Have any actual children complained? And if so, how have they been injured by ideas?

Worth noting (2): What is causing most frothing at the mouth both there and here is the idea of lowering the age of consent from 16 to 12. But that is the most plainly arbitrary, indeed vapid, of all the fringe policies on offer. While opponents can not bear the idea of even discussing a change, the precise age (unlike in Britain or the US) has not been agressively and rigidly policed in the Netherlands, and prosecutions of cases without actual rape or breach of trust are very rare. Those exceedingly law abiding teenagers who can not wait until they are 16 can hop on a subsidised train to France (15), Germany (14), or Spain (13) for a dirty weekend.

(His Most Catholic Majesty's Kingdom of Spain is not generally pointed out by moralitarians as on the brink of social collapse - but then 13 is a rise from the Franco era, so perhaps it is more democratic...)

(20)

Overseas readers often scoff at my pessimism about the state we are in in Britain. Scoff may be the wrong word. Scoffing is now under close supervision:

David Ashley, headmaster of Greenslade primary, says that pupils who bring in packed lunches “are allowed chocolate on a biscuit but not a Mars bar”. If such sweeties are spotted, parents are called in for a quiet word.

At Charlton Manor primary, the head, Tim Baker, says: “Children get stickers for healthy boxes . . . If a child brings in a chocolate bar, we take it out of the lunchbox and give it back to the parent at the end of the day.” Pupils give each other away, he confides: “They say, ‘Miss, he’s got sweets in his box’.”

Perhaps the scariest thing about the article from which that comes is the vaguely approving tone. Here is information about what is being done, no questioning that it needs and should have government attention.

(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?

(59)

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?

(85)

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.

(56)

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.

(24)

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).

(17)

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.

(13)

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.

(24)

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?

(13)

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?

(5)

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?

(16)

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.

(10)

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.

(21)

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.

(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.

(12)

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.

(10)

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.

(9)

'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.

(25)

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.

(9)

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.

(34)

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.

(45)

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.

(34)

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.

(9)

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.

(31)

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!'

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).

(8)

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.

(43)

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.

(38)

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.

(14)

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.

(1)

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.

(13)

...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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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