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An absurd affair I have been trying to get myself all worked up about how the UK Education Minister, Ruth Kelly, approved the appointment of a convicted sex offender to a job in a state school. All very terrible, she is obviously an ass, blah-blah. But nearly every commentary on this shabby business seems to be missing a wider point. What on earth is a politician doing approving or blocking the appointment of a teacher in the first place? There are tens of thousands of teachers, supply teachers and assistants. How on earth is a politician, or even a reasonably competent personnel manager, expected to keep track of all these folk?
The centralisation of our state education system has brought this sort of problem to pass. We need to return to the point where individual schools hire and fire teachers, and where parents have the freedom to put their children into a school or pull them out if they are not satisfied. It is not exactly rocket science.
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Actually, Jonathan, that is the point which has been baffling me. The Education secretary is personally picking teachers? Is she mad?
The other thing that surprised me, even for this government, is, she should have resigned a month ago. These people cling onto power by their teeth.
The part of this that shocked me was the original teacher who started all of this panic had received a caution just because his credit card had been used on a single kiddy p**n website. As far as I have read in the papers no pictures were found on his hard disk or anywhere else. No doubt he choose to accept the caution to avoid the possible jail sentence and probable naming in the papers. But other peoples credit card numbers can be obtained from all kinds of criminal sources or simply by rooting through someones rubbish looking for old statements. It would appear to be amazingly easy to do this to set someone up.
Also, someone else on the list was a teacher who – yes, of course it was wrong but some 15 yr old girls are very aggressive (which doesn’t excuse him; he was the adult) – had an “affair” with a 15 yr old pupil, who he subsequently married, had children with and the marriage lasted for 19 years.
Yes, his behaviour was stupid, but he was never going to do it again. You think of all the rapes out on the streets and the nightmareish rapes and murders of little girls and you have to wonder about this government’s agenda and its role in creating topsy-turvy values.
1327, with all respect to your comment, do you know how to access a paedophilia website or to find these things online, since I’ve been using the web for a pretty long time now and I sure as hell wouldn’t know how to find such a thing.
The fact that this Gibson individual ‘found’ a website peddling paedophilia and then used his credit card to access it implies to me that he probably knew what it was and where to find it and thus, in my opinion at least, he negated any sympathy anyone might have for losing his career. Bearing in mind that Gibson accepted a caution from the police for his actions; the axiom “an innocent man has nothing to fear from the law” comes to mind here …
I reckon I could find a web site accepting payment by credit card offering images of child abuse, man and beast laying together, *insert perversion here* within 10 minutes. Given access to freenet, usenet or any of the major p2p networks, probably within 5 minutes. I wouldn’t know where to start looking to buy an illegal firearm but that doesn’t mean there is no black market for firearms.
Also, if Gibson was arrested as part of Operation Ore then there is a good chance that the arrest was not righteous. Claiming that all those on the Operation Ore list were paedophiles is utterly untrue. They paid for access to a site that contained links to thousands of other sites containing adult photography, a tiny fraction of which contained content aimed at paedophiles.
As for ‘an innocent man has nothing to fear from the law’, when the agencies responsible for enforcing said law are emotionless robots who care naught for tabloid headlines that might be true. As it is the Birmingham Six, Guildford 4, Jean-Charles de Menezes, Sally Clark and countless others have been either locked up or killed because of glory-hunting by the Police, CPS and court system.
(My apologies for the slightly odd phrasing of some of the above, the spam filter doesn’t like the homonym of the most common piece on a chess board)
Imposition of registration requirements and denial of access to cetain professions is a proportionate and appropriate sanction against dangerous deviants. But, like any other punishment, it should only be applied by a court of law, never by a politician.
Hello Julian I’m not saying he found the kiddy p**n website but that someone with his credit card number did. I presuming had he accessed the site traces of it would still be found in his browsers cache (unless he had cleared it) and he wasn’t a collector of pictures either.
My thanks to Steve for his comments. I hadn’t realised that the people arrested in Operation Ore had bought access to just a site full of links.
An excellent point Johnathon.
We all know that NuLabour types are hopeless at running anything (perhaps because they have no experience outside politics) but even if they were the world’s most talented administrators it wouldn’t matter. Trying to run everything centrally will always be a disaster – it can’t be done well.
But they bring it on themselves – if they claim to be able to run everything and take our taxes to do so, they can hardly complain when everyone blames them when things go wrong. When are our politicians going to stop trying to run everything themselves, give us back our own money and when asked “what are you going to do about X?” say “Nothing – I’m not competent to run these things so I don’t try – sort it out without my help at a ‘lower’ level”?
Incidentally, rocket science is not particularly complex. Rocket engineering, on the other hand, is
An excellent point Johnathon.
We all know that NuLabour types are hopeless at running anything (perhaps because they have no experience outside politics) but even if they were the world’s most talented administrators it wouldn’t matter. Trying to run everything centrally will always be a disaster – it can’t be done well.
But they bring it on themselves – if they claim to be able to run everything and take our taxes to do so, they can hardly complain when everyone blames them when things go wrong. When are our politicians going to stop trying to run everything themselves, give us back our own money and when asked “what are you going to do about X?” say “Nothing – I’m not competent to run these things so I don’t try – sort it out without my help at a ‘lower’ level”?
Incidentally, rocket science is not particularly complex. Rocket engineering, on the other hand, is
Neither was I aware that Operation Ore was just about the credit card recipient being linked with paedophilia, rather than subscribers actually having had to access a particular website themselves.
Now I begin to wonder if Pete Townshend was probably innocent as well …
It is indeed remarkable that this one person should be doing such a thing, the more so given the public’s attitude to pols: quite how John Bull reconciles his contempt for politicians with his boundless demand that they should do everything for him, better than could he himself, is a paradox of Holy Trinity proportions.
Incidentally, the whole Jamie’s school dinner thing was of a similar nature: there you had parents from Aberdeen to Falmouth apparently expecting a minister in Whitehall to ensure that their sprogs were properly fed. What kind of a parent expects to be parented?
Yet, they do.