Switching The Goalposts

The relentless onward march of trying to solve Broken Britain is fast turning us into a Stalinist society. The Daily Mail brigade is faithful to Lenin’s dictum that a crisis is too good to waste. An example is the ContactPoint database, designed to hold the most intimate details of children’s lives and circumstances. It came into existence on the coat-tails of a genuine problem. After Lord Laming’s report in 2003 into the horrific death of Victoria Climbié, there was a public outcry and a demand that social services get their act together.

One of the eventual outcomes was the devising of ContactPoint, a massive computer database to record information about children, for use by councils, healthcare and police, at a cost of £224m. Many concerns have been raised about its security – 390,000 people will have access to it. Now a fresh concern is being canvassed: that it may be used to demonise even toddlers who manifest yobbish tendencies and constitute a stigma attached to their names until age 24.

According to the civil liberties organisation the Manifesto Club, 250,000 “racist” incidents have been reported in schools since 2002. Most of these “incidents” were casual playground exchanges reflecting the naturally aggressive language of young children. But under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2002 teachers are obliged to record all such occurrences and report them to the authorities – as if hard-pressed teachers had nothing more important to do.

Every sensible adult knows that angry children trading insults will seize upon any aspect of their opponent that can be turned to insult (“Fatty!”) and that this does not indicate the emergence of a sociopath. But we live in a society where a mother cannot push her own child on a swing in a playground unless she has undergone checks for criminality. Recently a two-year-old was reported to the authorities for hitting a neighbour’s cat with a stick. Any mother will tell you this is the bog-standard, totally normal behaviour of the “terrible twos”.

The concern now is that “racist” and other offences may be recorded on the ContactPoint computer and effectively blacklist a child for 20 years. Even the Tories have said they will replace ContactPoint with a small, targeted database. Much more drastic action than that is needed. We are no longer living in a free society and it will get less free unless and until we stamp out tabloids as ruthlessly as they have trampled on our liberties. There is no room here for compromise: they are a cancer that must be cut out.

The means could not be simpler: one single-clause Statute of Repeal. In the standard formula “Be it enacted by the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty…” it would simply declare the repeal of all the Acts of Parliament listed in Schedule I hereto appended. That Schedule would be a list of every oppressive tabloid-influenced law passed by Labour since 1997. At a stroke it would remove the poison from the bloodstream of British life and restore freedom of speech and expression, as well as personal privacy.

Any political party aspiring to government should have such a Bill drafted before the next general election; should include it in its manifesto; and should enact it in its first month in office. Any party not committed to that course of action should be regarded as ineligible to receive the votes of British democrats and patriots. The remedy is there for us, straightforward and completely practical. It only remains for the public to find the resolution to square up to the Murdoch tyrants and see them off.

- as amended from the original article. By the way, the only words (Apart from amendments for grammatical accuracy) I replaced, were "Political Correctness", or "PC". Fascinating how logic can be spun with the replacement of two words, and be far more accurate.