The Tories aren't interested in closing this kind of totalitarianism down, they're interested in more of the same!
From the Wikipedia entry for Victoria Climbié:
It is suspected that Kouao [her great aunt and guardian] started abusing Climbié soon after her arrival in the country, and the abuse worsened when Kouao moved in with Carl Manning. Up to her death, the police, the social services department of many local authorities, the National Health Service, the NSPCC, and local churches all had contact with her, and noted the signs of abuse. However, in what the judge in the trial following Victoria's death described as "blinding incompetence", all failed to properly investigate the abuse and little action was taken. She died in February 2000, aged eight.
The desire for the Contactpoint database is justified by the Government as a direct response to the problematic death of Victoria Climbié. However, the cause of her death had nothing to do with a lack of knowledge of abuse, and associated risk to her wellbeing, by the appropriate Government agencies: only their lack of competence in doing sufficient about it.
Thus, we have an (all too common) example of double government incompetence: an original failure compounded by taking the wrong corrective action.
Not only does this wrong corrective action waste resources that could be better spent elsewhere; we now have one of the usual wrong government tertiary actions arising therefrom: the overzealous and misdirected application of unwarranted law. Here this is to further surveil and oppress those who are, in the vast majority, law abiding on the issue of existence (the children) and bringing them up (their parents).
Is it any surprise that the police, the law and the government fall ever further into disrepute.
Best regards
This story will not help the blood pressure of our regular readership, I am sure
I don't think it will surprise many of us either.
Seriously, though, don't mention blood pressure. The government will feel the need to further intervene.
Raise blood pressure? Umm yes a bit. What will raise the blood pressure is when the incompetents running the database manage to lose all or part of it. With the track record of other databases this is almost bound to happen.
And the people who were rightly claiming that this is the sort of monstrosity that would result when the underlying legislation was being proposed were probably derided by our worses as not caring about the children. (I would submit that you cannot care about the children if your actions bequeath them a world with a decreased rule of law.)
There's also the ghastly joined-up "ContactPoint" [sic] -- this sort of GDF concatenation of words is exactly what Orwell described in his essay on Newspeak.
I second what Nigel said.
Pedantry Alert! "Minority Report" was a short story, not a novel.
This will be the target of paedophile rings worldwide,a most dangerous data base to make.
Strangely the government makes no mention of benefit farming,where children from third world countries are sold to benefit recipients in the UK.
Wonderful - another increase in the chaff-to-wheat ratio! Ditto Nigel's post.
"Not only does this wrong corrective action waste resources that could be better spent elsewhere"
It depends on your point of view whether this is a waste of resources. If the intention is to protect children, then it is a waste of resources. However, if the intention is to further and massively extend the power of the state by piggy-backing on the convenient, and atrocious murder of a child, it is a marvellous investment.
The really funny thing is that it probably won't actually help the police do anything. Let's face it: all this information will find up being a collossal mress to sift through. All the pertinent information is available, often in a local phonebook.
At some point, a government essentially just makes records and grabs power that it can't even use, simply to have some theoretical power and for no other reason.