Our government is determined that we shall be numbered and identity carded no matter how long it takes or how much opposition has to be ground down, and if they can’t do it by persuading adults, they’ll do it by habituating (and I can think of ruder words than that) children.
Every child in England is to be given a credit card-style ID number in reforms aimed at preventing a repeat of the murder of Victoria Climbie, the Government has announced.
The long-awaited Green Paper on children’s services also included a proposal to create a Children’s Commissioner for England, whose job it will be to speak up for under-18s and ensure their views are “fed into” Government policy.
It set out a large number of changes to the structure of children’s services, which will see education, health and social care combined and dispensed from neighbourhood schools.
Tony Blair said the proposals were a “significant step” towards ensuring there was no repeat of the Climbie case.
One thing is very certain about this new ID numbered world which they are determined to create. It will still contain outbursts of evil like Victoria Climbie’s murder. ID numbers won’t stop that. This is but one more example of what the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker has described as the “Hidden Europe” effect. What this means is that every major political decision in Britain these days is (a) aimed at bringing our institutions and legal procedures in line with those of the rest of the European Union, but (b) never justified as being done for that reason.
It has reached the point where, if you are puzzled by any item of political behaviour, you simply ask yourself: how does this fix Britain more firmly to Europe? Usually there is an answer. And if there is such an answer, that’s why they’re doing it.
I get the definite impression that about a month or two ago, the pro-EUnionists in Britain decided that they had had enough of Mr Blair’s simultaneous apparent enthusiasm for their cause with his demonstrated enthusiasm for continuing close ties between Britain and the USA, and they decided that they would dump him. I further believe that Mr Blair is now doing as much for the EUro-cause as he can, in order to try keep his job. Things like this ID numbering system for children, which is just the sort of thing that politicians normally steer clear of because it could prove so very unpopular and unwieldy and expensive and pointless, are, I believe part of this kind of process.
If you read “Christopher Booker’s Notebook” (just type “Christopher Booker” in the Telegraph search engine) you are bombarded with a steady stream of this kind of stuff. I can’t read Booker too often, because I find what he reveals too depressing.
As for the idea of having a Children’s Commissioner, if the government is so keen to be influenced by the opinions of children, why don’t they just give children the vote? Well, no, that wouldn’t be good, because it might get out of control. What might they vote for? What if they were not pro-EU in sufficient numbers? Best to have a Commissioner, to “feed” children’s ideas into government, in the desired manner. Besides, EUro-kids don’t have votes, so ours shouldn’t either.
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
This is typical of government. They will seize upon any story with strong public sympathy and use this to further unpopular impositions.
Witness the Dunblane incident used to remove pistols from the law abiding. We will no doubt be subjected to similar drival about saving children.
This purely and simply another step on the road to compulsory biometric identification. Next up will be ID tags implanted at birth.