The Children’s Index will turn all parents into suspects
Andrew Gimson comments in the Daily Telegraph:
As this newspaper reported yesterday, the Government has now decided to give the children of celebrities special safeguards to protect their privacy. Even before the Children’s Index has been set up, two classes of membership have been devised: one for the offspring of people who are well known, and one for just about everyone else. The addresses and telephone numbers of celebrities will be taken off the database if their children are believed to be in danger of being kidnapped. Such details will also be removed for children who are at risk of suffering domestic violence.
Yet, at the same time, the Education Department assures us that there will be “extremely strict controls” over access to the database. If this assurance is true, why do celebrities and their children require greater protection of their privacy than everyone else? The Government has trapped itself in a flagrant contradiction. Either the database is secure, in which case no additional safeguards are required, or it is not secure, in which case we find ourselves presented with yet another reason why the whole wretched project should be scrapped.
Richard Littlejohn, writing in the Daily Mail, makes the link to ID Cards:
In yet another outrageous affront to our civil liberties, the Government intends setting up a database to store the details of every child in England and Wales. The information will be accessible by hundreds of thousands of officials across a wide range of public agencies.
Ministers are pressing ahead with the £241 million scheme despite warnings that the Children’s Index could be in serious breach of the Data Protection Act and European ‘human rights’ legislation.
The justification for this totalitarian level of surveillance is that it will identify children at risk of abuse. If and when the ID cards scheme ever gets off the ground, it will ensure we are spied upon from cradle to grave.
He doubts that this official surveillance will achieve its stated purpose:
The Government says that it is vital to prevent a repeat of the death in North London of eight year [old] Victoria Climbie, who died after repeated abuse and torture by her sadistic great aunt and her disgusting boyfriend.
But there was a mountain of information on this tragic girl. She was scarred from head to foot. Her case was flagged up by two hospitals. Social services had a file thicker than War And Peace on Victoria, who was sent here from the Ivory Coast by her parents because they thought she’d get a better education.
Social workers charged with protecting her decided that ‘ chastisement’ was part of Afro-Caribbean culture and they were terrified of being accused of ‘racism’. So they did nothing. Never mind that she was being chastised to death.
Instead of properly acknowledging preventable human negligence and doing something about the climate of fear which created it, the Government has reached for an expensive and irrelevant technological solution.
The people responsible for Victoria’s horrible murder were those who tortured her – and the gutless officials who let it happen.
We are not all to blame. And we should not all be punished by being forced to submit all our children to scandalous and unwarranted levels of state control.
The Channel 4 documentary “Your Kids under Surveillance”, whose research exposed the double standards on security, airs at 7:35pm on Friday 1st September.
September 1st, 2006 at 14:02
Tony Blair and the Labour party have exhibited a complete and blatant disregard for humanity. It is a daily source of humiliation that the British public could have been so stupid to elect him three times.
September 1st, 2006 at 20:57
Yes a very frightening prospect indeed.Having just watched The Childrens Index on Channel 4,I would like to raise a number of points.
1)Why is information on so called “celebrity “children deemed to be worthy of a higher level of protection than children of us mere mortals.
2)To my cynical mind this is a very underhand way of gathering the information for the N.I.R.Just imagine Blair and his cronies being able to gather all the information from children,they won.t need to gather any information from us oldies opposed to his orwellian fantasies.As each generation grows up they will accept the situation as it is,and eventually say in 60 or 70 years everybody will have i.d cards ,every private piece of your life will be on the N.IR and be available for every busybody in the civil service to read at leisure ,and for sale to every commercial company who wants to purchase it
3)For your childres sake make sure these Neo Nazi Bastards don,t get in at the next election or we might as well give up now.
September 1st, 2006 at 21:57
Yes, you speak well on the subject. The truth is the id cards were the first plan of the home office. The passports the second. And the children are a long term standby for them. I don’t know whether I should be saying this on here or not. But, there are people who are already beginning to think the unthinkable that if we cannot stop Blair by ordinary debate and insisting on our rights maybe we should look for more drastic ways. I refer you to the rise and fall of the third reich by william L. Shirer and some interesting passages on the conspirators’ attempts to get their hands on Hitler.
September 2nd, 2006 at 14:39
Yes you may well be right,nothing or nobody it seems will detet this meglomaniac from pursuing his aim of total power for himself and his bunch of right wing cronies ie Burnham,Blunkett.Clarke and the rest of the control freaks in the cabinet.I rue the day that John Smith passed away.The last labour politician with any scruples or integrity.All this idiot seems to want to do is ingratiate himself with Bush and big business and to hell with the rest of us.
September 2nd, 2006 at 15:09
@David
Good comment, I also saw the channel four program and I entirely agree with you. I think that this legislation could be worse than the ID card bill, although it may be harder to convey the dangers to the public.
@Nina
Blair will be leaving soon. Lets help his policies go the same way.
September 4th, 2006 at 10:47
All this reminds me of that quote of Hitler’s : “When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already. . . . What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
September 4th, 2006 at 21:05
“Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.” -Horace.
September 7th, 2006 at 07:44
It sounds just like what the Republiklan party is doing to the American people. By giving specials to one class and not the next, it’s easy to pit both parties against each other.