You know you are in a police state, when children are having their fingerprints taken without having committed a crime.
Holland Park School recently proudly became one of the UK's first school to fingerprint every pupil, in an effort to monitor their attendance.
It plans to build a database so that children can be identified, and their time of arrival recorded in a "Live Register", by pressing a finger on an electronic pad.
Children who do not press the pad will be recorded as absent.
Here is a page from the school's website explaining the system (it also has a photo of the fingerprint "gizmo"), Holland Park School.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in which Holland Park School is located, denied that the database is being developed as part of Nanny's proposal to build a Children's Index, a national database of under 12s.
Quote:
"All data is retained in the school
as part of our current database
and will not be shared with any third party."
So that's alright then!
Am I the only person who suspects that the privacy controls over this "live register" will be open to abuse and interference by Nanny and others?
The issue with all of these "improved" IT methods of monitoring us etc is that there is no way to trust the current government, or governments in the future, not to misuse the data being collected.
As has always been the case, the less the state knows about the private lives of it honest citizens, the better.
Why not drop the council a note expressing your views on the subject?
Here is their email address information.services@rbkc.gov.uk
Here is the list of concillors, with their email addresses, Councillors.
Is there not one parent (or guardian) with the gumption to stand up and refuse to allow their child to be finger-printed? Is there not one parent so outraged that they want to organise a boycott? These fascist controls cannot work if enough people refuse to co-operate (hopefully the fate of ID cards).
ReplyDeleteThe British people have become supine, they are an affront to their ancestors. How far does this anti-freedom government and its acolytes in local government have to go before the people stand up and declare "enough is enough"?
Britain is truly sleep-walking into a police state. The police don't have time to investigate crimes against you because they are too busy investigating you.
This might not be as sinister as you think. I used to work right next to this school, in what was then Queen Elizabeth College on Campden Hill. A right load of thievin' sh*tbags they were. I once saw a pupil jump over the wall, with something stuffed his t-shirt, right in front of me as I was walking to Holland Park Avenue. Loads of stuff constantly went missing from the college. It seems that not much has changed since then.
ReplyDeleteSo, DWMF, you subscribe to the view that because a few members of a population are criminals, everyone must be treated as if they are criminals. Britain has (or at least had) a legal system which considers people to be innocent until proven guilty. To prove someone guilty it is necessary for the state to gather sufficient evidence to convince a jury or magistrate that the person is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The system may not always work quite like that but that is the process in a nutshell. One of the downsides is that the guilty may well walk free but that is a price that has to be accepted in democratic societies. In dictatorships of the left and right such people might simply disappear.
ReplyDeleteI still think it is sinister when the state says "because we cannot do our job and control wrong-doers, we are going to infringe on everyone's rights and liberty and control everyone". A classic case of this, I believe, is drinking alcohol in public. The police can't control a small minority of yobs so everyone cannot consume alcohol in public even though most of us can do so without causing any harm to others.
This government increasingly sees itself as a ruling elite and the citizens as subjects rather than the servants of the people they are supposed to be. Unfortunately, too many citizens appear to be accepting the governments view of itself. Whatever good this government may do, its threat to the fundamental freedoms that have been hard won by the British people over centuries is sufficient justification to replace them with another government with greater respect for democracy, rights and liberty, even if that government were less competent in the day to day running of the country (which on recent evidence is unlikely).
From what DWMF observed it sounds like this is merely career guidance. Some form of job experience in preparation for later life.
ReplyDeleteThere must be a number of schools around that could gain a few inspection points from using such ground breaking ideas.
One might have more concerns if this information was directly linked to the Police National Computer. But since almost everything else is these days. on e way or another, and in the case of these pre-adults such a provision would seem to be little more than a slightly earlier data entry than will be the normal case, I'm not sure there is a problem.
Now if this were linked through to any number of handout payments to the child's family so that non-attendance meant non-payment one might almost warm to the idea.
On the other hand it they just wait a while thy can install cctv cameras with face recognition software and nobody will have any say over how they are tracked.
I predict a great opportunity for sales of latex face masks - Bliary Poppins and Captain Tax Grab will, I am sure, be very popular.
Of course the other alternative would be to entice the kids into the school and then not let them out. At one time this too would have been seen as training for their futures though these days such a statement might well result in both positive and negative observations about the results.
i am a student at holland park school and i had to put my thumb on that thing alot of timesi do not think its right and i also think that they are giving are prints to the police which is a breach of our human rights
ReplyDelete