1984 was not just the pigment (yes I know!...just me amusing myself with a play on words) of George Orwell's imagination, it seems to be becoming reality.
Nanny has decided to formalise the surveillance of all children, including information on whether they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.
The new Big Brother monitoring system comes in the form of a £224M database, which will track all 12 million children in England and Wales from birth.
Nanny expects that the system will go live within two years; given how crappy Nanny is at implementing IT systems, we can safely assume that this deadline will slip somewhat!
The system will require doctors, schools and the police to alert Nanny about a wide range of "concerns". Two warning flags on a child's record could start an investigation.
There will also be a system of targets and performance indicators for children's development. Children's services have been told to work together to make sure that targets are met.
God only knows what they are!
Dr Eileen Munro, of the LSE, is not happy and notes that if a child failed to make progress towards state targets, detailed information would be gathered. That would include subjective judgements such as "Is the parent providing a positive role model?", as well as sensitive information such as a parent's mental health.
Dr Munro said:
"They include consuming five portions of fruit and veg a day,
which I am baffled how they will measure.
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'."
Dr Munro makes a very good, and indeed obvious point, how the hell do you measure if children are eating 5 portions of fruit and veg?
Bowel exams maybe?
The Children Act 2004 gave the Government the powers to create the database.
Arch, the children's rights organisation, put it succinctly:
"Government databases have a dreadful record."
Nanny's lackeys in the Department for Education and Skills said:
"Parents and young people will be able to ask to see their data
and make amendments
and will retain full rights under the Data Protection Act."
By then it will be too late, their child will have been carted off by Nanny's child catchers.
I suspect Nanny is stretching a concept here to try to hide its true intention.
ReplyDeleteWhich is, of course, simply to try to keep a reasonably complete record of Keith MacDonald's personal tribe as part of an extended scientific experiment on heredity.
He has a few more years of breeding potential I would guess. They should generate about as many records as a typical Nanny database can handle.
They would then b able to report it as ther first Nanny IT success story.
Maybe.
Another £224 Million in the back pockets of Crapita no doubt.
ReplyDeleteWhy do I remember the famous data base of Hoof & Mouth disease a few years ago, where there was a large outbreak in the North Sea?
ReplyDeleteBut what the hey, more jobs for the bureau folk entering all that data into the database. GIGO
I'm glad I am not a child to be tracked by this sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteYou see, I am allergic to many vegetables.
And too, I am in the US. Where New York City is now tracking diabetics to be sure they fill their prescriptions. Being diabetic, this is one more reason not to move to the city...
I think Nanny has an Agenda here, hidden under the mask of "child protection" (as the database was first proposed in the wake of the Victoria Climbie investigation). If children grow up under Big Brother surveillance, by the time they reach adulthood they'll take it for granted, never having known anything else.
ReplyDeleteI believe Nanny has already begun her "5 a day" investigations in the form of the new "Healthy Schools Initiative", part of which includes "encouraging healthy eating". On 10 June in his "Tuck Off" post, Ken wrote about the head teacher confiscating crisps from kids' lunchboxes. Last week, as part of its "healthy schools initiative" activities, the headteacher of my child's school spent a lunchtime talking to children about the contents of their lunchboxes to see if they knew which foods were healthy and which were unhealthy, and encouraging them to bring fruit instead of crisps or biscuits.
I actually like the guy but hey, he works for Nanny. When the database comes online, he's one of the people who can post flags of concern on my child's record. Grades slipping? Oops - one flag. Stroppy parent p*sses him off? Hmm - two flags. The potential for abuse of this system is diabolical.
And the security of the data can never be guaranteed, particularly if Crapita is involved, which makes this database not just intrusive but potentially dangerous.
Stop Dave.
ReplyDeleteStop.
Put down that fizzy drink, Dave.
I can feel it Dave.
My mind is going.
Would you like me to cook you some tofu?
Does anyone else still find it disconcerting that Tony Blair is enacting the concepts the Eric Blair attempted to warn us about?
ReplyDeleteDid Oxford University have some sort of weird objectives in the 60's and early 70's, products of the strangely connected minds of the most able thinkers back then? (Allegedly).
Or is this pure coincidence?