Mary Ann Sieghart has written an interesting article about the rush to subject more or less everyone who comes in contact with children to checks by the state. She rightly points out what a paranoid example this sets by presupposing that people are pederasts. I heartily agree with her article and see this as one of the more extreme examples of the state replacing social interactions with politically mediated ones.
One of the nicer aspects of being a child used to be the random acts of kindness offered by adults outside the family: the friendly shopkeeper who ruffled your hair and gave you a sweet; the enthusiastic PE coach who gave up time after school to help with your gymnastics and was constantly – and wholly innocently – adjusting your body position to get the moves right. These adults were generous with their time and their affection. We knew who the pervs were and took pains to avoid them. Now all adults are deemed to be perverts unless they can prove that they are not. Most will now avoid contact with other people’s children and will refrain from touching them for fear of the action being misconstrued.
And then, in the next snippet by her, she writes lamenting the fact more people do not join political parties. Tellingly she mentions the two main (and largely indistinguishable) political parties.
Labour has a leadership contest coming up, in which members have a vote. Wouldn’t it be fun to cast one? And my local constituency is being split into two, so there will be selection processes for both new seats. I would love to have a say in the candidate selection, especially for the Tories. Having lectured them for years about the importance of choosing more women, it would be great to be able to make a difference.
What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it? What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it?
I find that interesting as on one hand she clearly laments the destruction of civil society by the regulatory state and on the other, she urges people to join the institutions who are responsible for doing precisely that. In effect she might just as well be saying: “it is terrible that gangs which threaten people with violence are invading our neighbourhoods and fostering a climate of fear… I wonder why more people are not empowering themselves over other people by joining a gang?”
Why is it that the politics of today is centred around peoples fears? Wouldn’t it be nice if it was centered around peoples hopes and aspirations? All the talk about getting people more engaged with politics never seems to mention that politicians make us feel like we can’t make decisions of any import by taking the unimportant ones away from us. The popultaion has self esteem issues.
I think this is a misreading of the argument. The people’s apathy has allowed the administration to get out of control. Its obsessions have grown unrepresentative – it is a symptom of this that the article notes (surely one of the functions of a journalist). In order to regain control of the administration people need to re-engage with the political process. One of way doing this is by joining a political party.
Your analogy is floppy.
I disagree. Has she mentioned a party other than the damn near identical two main parties, perhaps she might be making a useful point. In any case the process itself is deeply corrupting and what people need to do is not engage with the political process but oppose it. The time for looking at things more radically is well and truly here and all the joining the Tory or Labour party will do is produce more of the same.
Even an extreme libertarian point of view demands occasional councils to thrash out issues of common interest. I’d be interested to hear about a political system that could entirely avoid a process of this kind.
Too right! You don’t dig a different hole by digging the same hole deeper. Britain is turning into a police state before our eyes and the two main parties are the problem, not the solution. Groups like NO2ID are the way ahead, not joining Labour or the Tories. As far as political parties go, the LibDems (which she did not mention) are better on civil liberties and UKIP is better still
It is not ‘political parties’ in general that are the problem but Britain’s entire constitutional system, the supremacy of Parliament and the fact both main parties have converged on a single ideological position of increasingly totalitarian regulatory centrism in which every aspect of life can be regulated and is indeed being regulated.
Yep. Still can’t see a way of altering this state of affairs without mucking in. I think Cameron will prevent ID cards, if he can, after the next election. It may well be too late by then. If this is a credible promise I think it’s worth my vote though. And if he did win on that basis I would feel like my faith in our democratic process had been vindicated.
It is one of the qualities of an obsessive only to be able to work in the abstract, rather than the actual. Perhaps your are still wrapped in an opiate fug.
As Albion said, the future is not in playing the game by the rules of the people who brought this country to where it. I am involved in all manner of activism which is far from absract you pompus prick. It is the people who think ‘Dave’ Cameron is going to save them who are delusional.
The falling participation in the democratic process shows the degree of alienartion from mainstream “sensible” politics. People just do not believe the lies anymore and realise that just like The Who sang, “met the new boss, same as the old boss”. The Poll Tax rioters and Irish terrorists have shown that there are many ways to effect political change in the UK that have nothing to do with the bloated toads in Westminster.
Comstock thinks the party which was until recently chose to be lead by Michael Howard (“a touch of the night”) can be trusted to rescue our civil liberties? Astounding.
We had an argument once before, when I was roundly condemned for admitting that I don’t particularly like my kids sitting on an unknown Santa’s knee.
Since that, I was on a boys’ weekend with some of the dads from school (a fairly arbitrary selection of people), and 5 out of 6 of us had been subjected to some fairly unpleasant form of perversion when we were children, including teachers and others in authority as well as random strangers.
So I again question your basic assertion that this is simply not a problem. If you “knew who the pervs were and avoided them”, well, lucky you, but trying to avoid “pervs” becoming teachers and social workers seems sensible enough to me.
I simply find that hard to believe.
I have no reason to disbelieve Pete, but I do find it hard to believe anywhere near that proportion have really been ‘molested’ for want of a better word, in the broader population.
Moreover I doubt the state is really the best way to achieve this. If the problem is as endemic as you seem to think it is, professional vetting agencies would seem the solution.
Havillard- I take it you censor comments on this site and ban people from answering back as some kind of ironic statement about government control-freakery?
It’s just it looks a bit hypocritical. A well as giving the false impression that you’ve somehow had the last word.
I’d quite liked your site up until now. Put my 12.30 post back why don’t you?
No, I ban people for being rude to me. Get lost.
I think Cameron will prevent ID cards, if he can, after the next election. It may well be too late by then.
Probably not. the IPS is already 5 months behind in its interview programme as far as anyone can tell (because of course it is all secret), and seems even now to be technically clueless about what exactly the IT programme consists of. Or how they are going to get the public to submit to the magic of biometrics.
As long as your vote doesn’t let in a New Labour loyalist, you can vote for anyone at all to prevent ID cards. All significant parties are opposed.
What’s more tricky, and needs lots of pressure on all parties to stop it – and roll it back – is the whole information-sharing, blacklisting, database state agenda. It is hydra-headed and beyond the ken of many pols.
… 5 out of 6 of us had been subjected to some fairly unpleasant form of perversion
That sort of depends what you mean by ‘unpleasant’ and ‘perversion’. And for that matter ‘children’. I’m guessing here, of course, but I sincerely doubt 5 out of 6 in even a slightly oddly self-selected sample would claim to have been raped. Or significantly harmed by whatever ‘perversion’ was involved. I wonder, too, whether the (re)interpretation of the actions of others in possibly distant memories might not be tainted by (1) the paedophile panic that grips countries, and (2) the context of group-therapy.
And even if Pete’s anecdote is generally applicable, does it justify state vetting of just about everyone? And if it does, why assume that state vetting would be successful in achieving its purported goals?
Those with stronger motivations for casual contact with children (or the otherwise vulnerable – the Bill does not just apply to children’s services), are more likely to put up with vetting, and more likely to be prepared to cover up officially disapproved behaviour, are they not?
There is an odd confusion in some people’s minds between “libertarian” and “commercial”.
Certainly a private company is an example of voluntary cooperation (although it may have a non civil society side – for example it may try and get subsidies from some level of government, or get regulations passed to hit its competitors), but a voluntary fire brigade (or whatever) is also an example of voluntary cooperation – even if no one is “making money” from it.
An egalitarian commune is (as long as no one is forced to join or prevented from leaving) just as libertarian as the Du Pont company with all its centuries of operating for a cash profit.
As for political parties. Well as they are examples of civil society in a way (as long as they do not get taxpayer subsidies), even though they are about politics.
Should one join a political party? Well as political parties are about politics (if one wants the social side of interaction there are other ways of getting it without joining a political party – someone who joins a political party to “find a wife” or whatever, could have done this without joining) one should ask oneself a simple question “do I agree with the basic direction of this party – do I trust it to take the ship of state in the direction I wish it to go?”
For a libertarian the question is “do I trust this political party, if it came into office, to reduce the size and scope of government?”
For the Conservative party under David Cameron the only honest reply is “no I do not trust them”. Lord Forsyth may wish to reduce taxes, but he is not leader of the Conservative party – Mr Cameron is, and he will go along with the expansion of the state (in both spending and regulations) just as Labour and the Lib Dems will.
As for “Join a party and change it from within”, this simply does not work. An ordinary member of the Conservative party (about which I have a good level of knowledge) can not change anything for the better.
One need not agree with every policy of a political party, but one should (if one votes for its candidates) have some trust it its basic direction (see above). I might convinced that U.K.I.P. is worthy of a vote – but the Conservatives are not.
And if one would not vote for a party, it seems odd to join it or stay a member of it.
You can dismiss my point as much as you like as non-representative (and I don’t argue that it’s not statistically meaningful), but I assure you that this is not some “group therapy” imagined repressed memory bollocks. It’s nothing like as nasty as rape, but it’s certainly unpleasantness that I wouldn’t want happening to my own children.
What’s more, I can see the argument that state control isn’t necessarily the answer. I simply think that child-molesting isn’t merely a figment of the modern imagination and is a pervasive and extremely damaging phenomenon, and trusting children to “know the pervs and avoid them” isn’t good enough.
Oh I agree that ‘bad shit happens’ and not just in the minds of social workers, so I am all for coming up with solutions, but just not ones that subject all relationships between children and adults to political controls.
Society as a whole has taken to labeling groups of people and making judgements about them which serve no useful purpose and de-value otherwise useful lives.
I speak as someone who was sent to a boys boarding school at 7 years old and left a boys public school at 18. I encountered my fair share of ‘pervs’.
I can clearly remember two rather pathetic men, at different times, who were clearly attracted to young boys. I doubt that either of them did any real harm to anyone. We all knew what they were but we also quite liked them and one of them was a quite inspirational classics teacher.
(There was also one sadistic bastard who got his jollies by thrashing boys bare bums with a rope during his PE classes. He should have been in an asylum – he was actually a special constable when he wasn’t teaching. We all loathed and feared him.)
There are two points to make here. Firstly society cannot protect everyone all of the time and there are always going to be vulnerable people who do not have the nous to know the situations they should avoid. If we try to create a society where no one can ever get hurt we also take away most of the joy and discovery and wonder. The price for freedom is occasional danger. Again, I speak as a father. My son and daughter are now young adults but they are very streetwise.
Secondly a man may be a ‘perv’, in a mild sense, but he is many other things at the same time. Very few people have no redeeming features and are wholly evil. The lables stop us seeing the person and make us see only the category.
Some people are truly dangerous but this number is a fraction of the number that some hysterical commenters seem to think.
I assure you that this is not some “group therapy” imagined repressed memory bollocks.
I wasn’t suggesting that. The choice of the pejorative “group therapy” (or it seems pejorative to me, my experiences with psychaitry being entirely negative) was misleadingly elliptical for what I meant: a situation which required group reinforcement and reassurance among men who had chosen to go on a boys camp and needed the others to know their motives were pure. I do suggest that the specific ethos will have influenced some people’s testimony, and that the Asch effect will also have done its work.
(Which is why group therapy in a formal context is “effective”, of course: people absorb and reproduce the requisite psychiatric models of their mental state and behaviour much more easily when policed by a group.)
Paul Marks: I agree that it may seem like a vain hope to want to change a party from within. However, I do have some faith in way that our electoral system works (when it works).
The tories were unelectable, now in order to make themselves electable they have to change – I don’t hold with the arguments vis-a-vis Howard for this reason, the party cannot remain the same and win, and it is Labour spin that makes you think a change of that kind could be only cosmetic.
Cameron is making noises about the smaller state, not having ID cards, more democracy – I am backing him on the basis of these noises, if they turn out to have been lies then I will withdraw my support. If enough people do this then he will also become unelectable and the process of adjustment will begin again.
There’s a place for optimism in politics isn’t there?
He is “making noises about a smaller state”? Ye Gods, man. He does things like sign Conservative Way Forward and then promptly repudiates almost everything it stands for. The reason so many people realise Cameron is essentially a Blairite has nothing to do with Labour spin, it has everything to do with the things David Cameron himself has said.
I voted Tory for more than 40 years. Never again. I shall vote UKIP for the foreseeable future as it is abundantly clear that a change to a Tory government will not being about substantive changes to the baleful course this country is set upon.
With all due respect sir, the Tory party is not deceiving you, you are deceiving yourself. The leadership has been quite clear that they are now a European style incrementalist regulatory Social Democratic party. You are in denial. None are so blind as those who will not see.
Something odd seems to have happened to my comment.
Editor’s note: sorry, something odd happened to the header tags. I have just reset them manually to show correct name and time and removed the strange garbled symbols.
He’s making a damn sight louder ones about how green he is and how he’ll pass more regulations. That means a bigger, not smaller, state.
Yeah, thank heavens for small mercies, though he was bloody equivocal and took his sweet time to get on that band wagon.
That’s a euphemism for more political interference in people’s lives. We don’t need more democracy, we’re being turned into a police state perfectly democratically as it is.
I view the Blair/Cameron situation as being like two drivers, one in a left-hand-drive car and the other in a right-hand-drive car.
Now, if they both drive their cars such that their respective driving seats are above the central white-line in the road, it does NOT mean that their respective cars are driving over the same parts of the road.
Therefore, living as I do in a marginal Tory constituency (with Labour & Tories making up 90% of the voters) that has recently had a ward of 3000 safe Tory votes gerrymandered into an adjacent ultra-safe Tory constituency by the outgoing Labour administration, I shall definitely vote Tory to make sure that no Labour bastard gets back in.
If I lived in a more electorally open and diverse constituency where I felt able to vote on the positives instead of preventing the negatives, I would certainly vote UKIP.
But not this time. Getting Labour out is my number one priority that overrides all others. Sorry.
Why? Is it because you want to put your seal of approval on a Tory government which will provide continuity with Labour’s policies and ensure that 98% of everything remain the same?
Old Jack Tarr:
The leadership has been quite clear that they are now a European style incrementalist regulatory Social Democratic party
Oh, I see, you’re one of those people that doesn’t think Cameron is isolationist and right wing enough. Please do join UKIP, there can be no more graceful way to opt out of the political process.
Arun Thakur: you provide your (pessimistic) interpretations of what these statements will turn out to mean in terms of policy. Neither one of us actually knows yet. If things do go the way you seem to think they will then fine, but I don’t see how else I can participate politically (as a punter) than by trusting what I’ve been given and adding my support based on the information that is there. Rather than not trusting the information I ‘ve been given, making something up instead and opting out on that basis. Isn’t it called a “belief in democracy” because it requires a positive act of faith?
(yes, I’m 26- just in case you want to make that point, but really, it’s a cheap one).
So you are a supporter of retaining the great majority of the current governments policies. Yes, then clearly Cameron is the man for you. For anyone who is actually a conservative and wants to vote for a party with conservative policies, UKIP is the only choice. Quite how a party like UKIP, which is in favour of a more globalist approach, rather than EU-limited, is “isolationist” is not clear to me however. But then I get the impression you do not actually read policy statements.
I really do not understand your point about positive acts of faith when all you need to do when analysing a political party is listen to what the various people are actually saying and how consistently are they saying it when talking to different people, to get a good idea where they really stand.
As it happens I met Cameron a couple times some years ago and found him not just devoid of principle but clearly unable to even comprehend anyone who was. He is an utterly political animal unmoderated by any broader notions outside that of his career, a man of great ambition and focus but not of remarkable intellect. That the party elected him as leader just confirmed how correct my decision to abandon ship was.
As for your fatuous remark about opting out of the political process, you seem to think voting for either of two parties with few substantive differences amounts to opting in. Well I suppose it is if, as in your case, you are broadly satisfied with the direction in which Britain is headed and just want a fresh set of hands on the tiller to hold the course true. I do not want that and thus nothing whatsoever is achieved by voting for either the Labour or the Tory Party.
“I really do not understand your point about positive acts of faith when all you need to do when analysing a political party is listen to what the various people are actually saying and how consistently are they saying it when talking to different people, to get a good idea where they really stand.”
Well that’s simple enough isn’t it? Sounds logical at least, although rather at odds with your next statement:
“As it happens I met Cameron a couple times some years ago and found him not just devoid of principle but clearly unable to even comprehend anyone who was. He is an utterly political animal unmoderated by any broader notions outside that of his career, a man of great ambition and focus but not of remarkable intellect.”
I’m sorry, you met him precisely twice and managed to acertain all that- what did he say? How long did you talk for? Did you come to this incredibly detailed conclusion by a rational process? Did you listen to what he said to you and then go and listen to him talking to others and then compare it all? Or was it just a feeling you had?
Was it belief or logic that led you to that conclusion?
(And you’re quite right, I haven’t read UKIPs policy statement, I don’t think that puts me in a minority though.)
“Comstock thinks the party which was until recently chose to be lead by Michael Howard (“a touch of the night”) can be trusted to rescue our civil liberties? Astounding.”
Also, you said that you’d voted tory for the last 40 years? Or did that not include while Howard was leader?
Consistency?
It seem I assumed rather more good will in this discussion than was justified. Let me spell it out more obviously then as I prefer to think you are confused rather than an intentionally insulting little snot.
I drew most of my conclusion from his many public statements, not my personal encounters with him. I have met pretty much every significant Tory politician for the last twenty years at some point. My daughter used to work at Conservative Central Office some years ago and to her credit, saw the light before I did. As a result I feel my contempt for the “Conservatives” today is rather well researched.
One of my last acts as an active Tory was to vote against Howard as leader. I voted Tory subsequently at local level (I was a councillor myself for a while) but I will not even do that now. The Conservative party is quite simply not a force for good.
“I met Cameron a couple times some years ago and found him not just devoid of principle but clearly unable to even comprehend anyone who was.”
Sounded like you’d based that on a judgement arrived at when you’d met him. You do contradict yourself rather a lot that’s all.
What I was hoping to do was establish the connection between conviction and political belief. What I seem to have done is made you so angry you can no longer conduct this discussion with civility.
And where exactly have I contradicted myself? You insult people and then seem surprised when they act insulted. You are an odd chap.