Jenni Russell writes in The Guardian:

Imagine that, as an adult, a health problem or argument at home means you are not working effectively. You or your boss decide you need help. Then you find that before you can be offered a counsellor, physio, or executive coach, you must submit to an intensive interrogation about every aspect of your life, from your sexual experiences, early attachments, friendships, peer groups, fears, motivations, drug use and relationships with parents and siblings, to your family’s income, spending, history of illness, and its size, culture and routines.

That’s only the start. The account of this interrogation is to be held on a national database, and the fact that it exists can be shared with every public service you use: doctors, hospitals, educational bodies, social workers, or the police. Indeed, if you want extra help from any of these services you’ll be told it’s in your interests to allow all these professionals to read your interrogation, because it’s only if they have a holistic understanding of your problems that they’ll be able to help you. And to make it easier for them to discuss you if they need to, someone has set up a handy computer file that they can all consult, giving your address, where you work, and contact numbers for everyone else who deals with you.

This is not a distant fantasy. Only one element of this scenario is inaccurate, and that’s that it applies to adults. This is the system of intrusion and surveillance which will be imposed on all England’s schoolchildren later this year. While we have been worrying about ID cards, the government has been quietly using its statutory powers to collect an unprecedented range of information on every element of our children’s lives.

This entry was posted by andrew on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 02:42 and is filed under Anti, Database state, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.