State Database Madness

You will bring up your children the way The State thinks you ought to or else:

Government surveillance of all children, including information on whether they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, will be condemned tomorrow as a Big Brother system.

Experts say it is the biggest state intrusion in history into the role of parents.

Changes being introduced since Victoria Climbié's death from abuse include a £224 million database tracking all 12 million children in England and Wales from birth. The Government expects the programme to be operating within two years.

OK, Government IT, make that 2 billion and 5 years. As Dr. Eileen Munro says:

"The country is moving from 'parents are free to bring children up as they think best as long as they are not abusive or neglectful' to a more coercive 'parents must bring children up to conform to the state's views of what is best'."

Yes, there are all sorts of civil liberties implications here (who, for example, thinks that people will be dropped from such a register when they are 18?) but what isreally flabberghasting is that it doesn’t actually address the problem it was set up to solve.

Eight-year-old Victoria Climbié died in 2000 while living with her aunt, Marie-Therese Kouao, and her aunt's boyfriend, Carl Manning, despite having been seen by dozens of social workers, nurses, doctors and police officers.

That’s the case that led to the whole nonsense....and there was no problem in identifying Climbie as being at risk. The problem is that no one did anything about it. How will monitoring the 12 million children in the country do anything useful at all if still, nothing will be done about those identified?