State provision and the database state

I think we are probably heading, as a society, for a pretty major decision about our relationship to the state.  As things stand, the database state is starting to be rolled out and there may still be an opportunity to roll it back. Don't believe me? take a look at this:

This 21st century school system, which is beginning to develop, will look and feel very different to the one we have been used to. It will be one in which, to achieve their core mission of excellent teaching and learning, schools look beyond traditional boundaries, are much more outward-facing, working in closer partnership with children, young people and parents; other schools, colleges, learning providers and universities; other children’s services; the third sector, the private sector and employers; and the local authority and its Children’s Trust partners.

Still with me? Read on...

[W]e will further incentivise co-location of wider children’s services on school sites. Better use of the opportunities provided by modern technology will enhance all of the dimensions of a world-class education system.

Do you see where this leads? In the not-so-very-distant future, you will pack little Jonny or little Jill off to school and you will be handing them over to a surrogate parent. Suddenly real parents will start to look rather peripheral to their children's upbringing. In this brave new world, every aspect of their lives will be interfered with by the school: they will be inspected by social services, they will be examined by doctors and nurses and dentists and opticians and child welfare officers and the NSPCC, every detail being written down and recorded on the database from where it can never be removed. Your children will grow up the state knowing everything about them. The school will become the foundation upon which the database state will be built.

This is why state provision of anything is dangerous. So terribly, terribly dangerous.

This is why we must privatise the schools.

The quotes are from here, which I found on a HomeEd Facebook site.

The government's bill of rights and responsibilities

So we find ourselves at the top of a slippery slope, with Jack Straw breathing down our necks and pushing us firmly in the small of the back. Today the government publishes its discussion paper on a proposed new bill of rights and responsibilities. And if any of you were not convinced by my arguments the other day about the danger posed to society by the government and its human rights agenda, take a look at this extract.

The Government wishes to explore whether a future Bill of Rights and Responsibilities ought to have more prominence to principles such as that underpinning Article 17 [of the ECHR, which prevents people using their convention rights to quash the rights of others]; and to the principles of fair balance and the doctrine of proportionality, both of which are inherent threads running throughout the Convention. Such expression would make these principles more transparent to all citizens, and, if enshrined in legislation, could help guide the courts when they come to balance individual rights against limitations necessary in the wider interests of the community.

Note how he neatly elides from a convention article protecting the rights of the individual from the illegitimate actions of other individuals, to a demand that the rights of the individual be subsumed beneath "the wider interests of the community". The idea that the societal interests should take precedence of individuals is of course a fundamental tenet of socialism, and one that has lead to such delights of history as the Killing Fields, the Cultural Revolution and Stalin's famines.

In my book, the wider interests of the community can frankly go and take a running jump. 

Straw's intentions are patently transparent. He intends incorporate socialism into the constitution. He intends to end individual freedom. His bill of rights is the communist manifesto dressed up to look like Magna Carta.

Far better we adopt mine.

Propaganda in schools

I wonder what the kids learned in school today?

According to one of my readers (to whom I'm grateful for the tip) some of them (and I'm relieved to say none of mine) have been learning about...the same thing they learn about all the rest of the time - yes folks you've guessed it - environmentalism.

There's a toe-tapping new musical for primary kids to put on for their parents - it's called Eddie the Penguin Saves The World and it's about (yes, you guessed right again) global warming! (Tada!)

(Actually that's a bit of a surprise - I could have sworn it was Al Gore that saved the world). Anyway, let's find out about Eddie...

Eddie the penguin discovers that the world he lives in is changing and that the ice is melting. He decides to take his family to find a new home at the North Pole, where he meets Peggy the polar bear and discovers that human beings are causing the ice to melt. Eddie goes on a mission to save the planet and let the world know how they can change things for the better.

This fantastic new musical from Niki Davies is a must for any school investigating ecological and environmental issues. Songs can be used in conjunction with the script or stand alone.

Science education has certainly moved on since my day.

At the bottom of this post you should be able to find a sample from the show, helpfully provided by the publishers, Out of the Ark Music. The jaunty number I've picked for your delight is "The Melting Song"

The icebergs where we like to play are melting, melting away

Drip, drop, drip, drop, drip, drop.

and although I haven't copied it over, you might also enjoy "The Recycling Song"

Don't put your cardboard in the trash

Put it in a box, you can do it in a flash

Those of you who want more can visit Out of the Ark yourselves and enjoy more samples from the show, including the smash hits "Trees" and "One World" together with the bonus tracks "Use it again" and "Turn off the tap".

I bet you can hardly wait.

The melting song

DK on Carswell

An important speech by Douglas Carswell, the Tory MP for Somewhereorother, is covered by DK (without swearing once!).

Once upon a time there was genuine scrutiny. Indeed, as some people may know, a war was once fought over the extent to which the House was able to vote to approve supply and Government moneys. However, this House has slowly but definitely lost its power to oversee how the Executive spend our money. The quango state, on which the PAC produces so many of its reports, is in effect beyond budgetary scrutiny. Retrospective audit on the PAC is pretty much all that is left.

Read the whole thing.

Ecofont

Now I know the world has gone stark raving mad:

The prints we make for our 'daily use' not only use paper, but also ink. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges(ortoner) could last longer. SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont.

And it's got holes in it. To save ink. I'm speechless.

And in case any of you wanted to see what it looks like, here's a sample.

Nice eh? Typography is never going to be the same again.

The NSPCC: anti-child

Sometimes It's Peaceful has done an exhaustive three part posting on the NSPCC. It's not a pretty sight.

NSPCC part 1: anti HE?

NSPCC part 2: anti family?

NSPCC Part 3: anti child?

Really, people have to stop giving money to the NSPCC. They are not a force for good.

Human rights and liberties

Lanna at Head Desk has been pondering the question of the universality (or not) of human rights, and I started to write a comment there, but I decided it was worth turning it into a full posting here.

I've been wondering about the distinction between human rights and liberties for some time now and in recent weeks have come to the conclusion that a human right essentially defines an entitlement and therefore a duty on government (and perhaps on others), while a liberty defines a restriction on government (and perhaps on others). I've also concluded that human rights are potentially disastrous.

Here's an example of why.

Lanna's a home educator, and as I've commented previously, there is an ongoing campaign against HE by the government. They have instituted a review of the whole area - the fourth in three years IIRC - and this appears to have been preordained to conclude that there is a need for home inpections by state-approved monitors. Once in place, this will no doubt lead in time to the outlawing of HE. By way of a softening-up exercise, the government has arranged for its client charity, the NSPCC, to make vague insinuations of child abuse in the direction of home educators, which Lanna reckons is a fairly obvious attempt to stigmatise the whole community before regulating and legislating against them. It certainly looks very much like the similar treatment dished out to smokers and foxhunters in the past and so I think she may well be right.

So what has this got to do with human rights? Well, from the HE perspective, how come then the state can demand entry to your home? How come they can force your children to talk to them? How come they can demand that you not be present? Haven't you got a right to privacy? The right to a family life? You would hope, wouldn't you that your human rights would protect you against this sort of thing. But you'd be wrong. The government will argue that the mere possibility of the loss of the child's rights justifies the loss of parental rights to privacy.

And this is the problem with human rights. By creating entitlements, but no understanding of how to balance different people's entitlements off against each other, they create confusion and sow discord and eventually leave the field of debate entirely empty, ready for government to legislate as they wish. 

In this case the government has decided that the parent's rights are secondary. (This rather conveniently coincides with their own prejudices and the needs of their financial backers in the trades unions and the educational establishment, who of course want to stop state schools from haemorraging pupils.) But it is clear that they could just as easily have referred to the right to privacy of the parents and decided something completely different. The same set of human rights can give entirely different outcomes depending on who happens to be in power at the time and the whims of whoever is funding them.

Human rights give governments the power to do what they want.

So how would it work with a liberties-based approach?  The first thing to notice is that a liberty doesn't say anything about any individual's entitlements. But by defining what government may not do, the definition of a liberty implies how the rights of the individuals are to be balanced, and moreover, it implies them in a way that makes the outcome completely clear:  there is only one possible conclusion that can be drawn.

For our HE example, the US Fourth Amendment (this is clearer for explaining the principles) simply says that the government may not enter the home without reasonable suspicion and a warrant. While this doesn't actually seem to address the question at hand - of how to balance the rights/needs/entitlements of parent and child, these things all flow naturally from the elucidation of the liberty. The rights of the child do receive appropriate protection ("if there's reasonable suspicion, we'll come and check things out") as do those of the parents ("we'll leave you alone unless there's reasonable suspicion").

Liberty works. It has worked for hundreds of years when it has been given the chance. Human rights don't. They never have.

Freeing banks

Jonathan Pearce at Samizdata reports on Professor Kevin Dowd's ideas on how to stop banking crises happening again. It's not the same as the way Gordon Brown thinks it should happen.

Quagmires we can do something about

Biased BBC:

Given that more people have died needlessly at Stafford Hospital than in the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan COMBINED, I was wondering why the BBC is not running a new campaign to get the Healthcare out of the "quagmire" that is the NHS? No blood for bureaucracy?

More target setting insanity

Criminals are not being prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) or are being offered deals so that money can be saved and targets can be met, according to the Police Federation vice-chairman Simon Reed.

From here.

I agree with Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone:

The civil service is a malignant conspiracy against the national interest.

How can you possibly be in the Labour party, which tries to expand the influence of the state and opposes privatisation, while at the same time believing the civil service to be a malignant conspiracy against the national interest?

Unless you are in favour of malignant conspiracies against the national interest...?

BBC holds the law in contempt

There is a derogation from the Freedom of Information Act created specifically for the BBC.  When the new bill was wending its way through Parliament, the BBC and Channel 4 complained to the Home Office that they would not be able to do their job properly if covered by the Act. They argued that, if for example their journalistic sources were compromised, they would no longer be able to collect important news stories. They didn't  mention Robert Peston acting as a receptacle every time a minister wanted to make a diversionary leak, but that kind of activity would also presumably have been threatened were the corporation to fall under the Act.

In the event, a compromise was reached and the derogation was written into the act, exempting the BBC from its terms but only regarding "journalistic and artistic" activities. At the time it was agreed that this would cover all of the day-to-day activities of the BBC. See here.

With depressing predictability, the BBC, those lovers of freedom of information, have now set about expanding the scope of the derogation as far as they possibly can. The meaning of "journalistic purposes" has been expanded to cover editorial policy, reviews of editorial and journalistic performance and a host of other activities that can't possibly have been the original intention of Parliament. The Information Commissioner (ICO) has sat back and accepted all this.

Even where an activity is known not to be covered by the derogation, the BBC routinely claims that it is. The ICO has managed to show his teeth on the subject of the BBC's finances, which he has ruled are not covered by the derogation. And does the BBC care? Take a look at some of the decisions of the Information Commissioner.

• Someone asked for production costs of East Enders. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked for the name of the highest BBC earner in Northern Ireland. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked for the 20 highest paid entertainers at the BBC. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about expense claims at BBC Scotland. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about money handed out in game show prizes. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't. 
• Someone asked about spending on radio stations. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about budgets for Top Gear. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about costs of the Children in Need appeal. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about expense claims made. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.

I could go on, but I think you get the drift by now. You have to remember that decisions of the Information Commissioner carry the full force of law: they are equivalent to the decision of a judge. So for the BBC to continually argue that financial information it holds is not covered by the Act can only be described as contempt of court. The powers that be at the BBC clearly feel that the law can safely be flouted, and continually so, without the slightest fear of any comeback.

And meanwhile the Information Commissioner doesn't even raise a squeak of complaint. And why not, we might wonder? It's speculation, but perhaps the BBC and the ICO are both happy with the arrangement since both sides can keep themselves comfortably employed, bloated pensions fed by the poor unsuspecting licence fee payer and the poor unsuspecting taxpayer that they both wilfully ignore.

What to do with big business

Picking Losers says "disintegrate it".

A disastrous idea from BoJo

Boris Johnson holds forth in the pages of the Telegraph, unveiling his latest bright idea. Headlined as

an education policy to gladden diehards, enrage trendies - and preserve the glory of English literature

it is, on closer inspection, just a call to have children learn poetry at school.

Boris! No!

Think about it. The sun is shining, Jonny and Jenny are bored and are staring out of the window wishing they could run around outside. What better way to put them off poetry for the rest of their lives than to order them to learn the first twenty stanzas of Grey's elegy, with the threat of dire punishment for non-compliance.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

I mean, who gives a stuff? The sun's shining! What person of any sensibility or love of nature would want to be inside reading a book?

My children love poetry. They pick up poetry books for fun (yes, for fun) and recite verses to unsuspecting visitors to our home. This is a particularly popular activity when it's raining or when there's nothing better to do.

The glories of English literature are being preserved, in homes all over the country. English literature is safe there, unmolested by the dead hand of the state.

Leave it alone.

Whitewash in Albany

An interesting post for climate watchers over at Freeborn John. It's the murky tale of how dodgy data finds its way into the surface temperature records and the duplicity of the University of Albany, New York in trying to whitewash the alleged fraud.

Read the whole thing.

Word "alleged" added, 18/3 following a comment.