Then They Came For The Parents

It's quite incredible that no matter the depth of the hole in which Labour find themselves, they still can't loosen their grip on the spade.

The collapse in their voter approval once the post-smoker ban winter set in (remember Brown had been thinking of a snap election before it turned nippy) didn't seem to alert them to the fact that they had lost the smoker vote for a generation or more. It still hasn't sunk in yet, either, if the barrage of anti-drinker rhetoric in recent weeks is anything to go by - those who enjoy wine and beer will have noticed by now that they are next in the crosshair (yes, even CAMRA). Brown (or his replacement) can probably kiss goodbye to any home schooler votes at the next election too.

Yet still they continue. Infuriating one section of society after another with radical and comprehensively unpopular restrictions on their chosen way of life. But to threaten volunteer parents with paedo vetting is the most audacious, and foolhardy, yet.

I'm late on this one after a day of brain-frazzling occupational exams yesterday, but the reaction of Trixy will no doubt have been echoed by parents the length and breadth of the country. And Raedwald quite rightly urged his readership to listen to oleaginous civil service shitstick, John O'Brien, being eaten alive by John Humphreys in six glorious Radio 4 minutes. Seriously, listen here as he expects us to swallow this astonishing bastardisation of logic.

The state isn't saying you're dodgy. What we are saying is we need to make sure that people working with our children and vulnerable adults don't have anything known about them that would give us concern. That is not an assumption of guilt.

I wrote a guest piece at MummyLongLegs's blog the other day which mentioned potential expansion of CRB checking, and the fact that with each hysterical authoritarian step, we lessen our own lives that little bit more, and reward the bad guys.

Miniscule minority that they are, they have already gained a major victory with the comprehensively fucked-up CRB check system which Ian Huntley built. According the The Register, such checks now affect 14 million people, almost a quarter of the population. Huntley’s name will forever be remembered for that, and I bet the sick fuck is rather pleased with himself about it.

Once all men are considered guilty until proven innocent; once a few bad eggs have poisoned the whole of society; community is screwed. Enjoyment of life is transformed into unrelenting fear of it. The good will have been cowed and demoralised by the evil.

And personally, I don’t think we, the good, should ever let that happen.

This new measure seeks to add another 11 million to that tally of kiddy-fiddling suspects, many of whom would have been the ones who were quite happy about the original system, but who will be looking at it rather differently now - like the person who suggested it in the first place.

A massive vetting system set up to safeguard children and the elderly has come under fire from Sir Michael Bichard - the man whose report into the Soham murders led to its creation.

Bichard, the former Whitehall mandarin who conducted the inquiry into the Soham killings, called for a review of the ISA's rules, suggesting the new restrictions on millions of ordinary adults were a disproportionate response to the threat posed by paedophiles.

Faced with such a backlash, Labour, it would seem, are unrepentant.

Yesterday Baroness Morgan insisted they represented a ' proportionate, common-sense system'.

It's not proportionate and it certainly presents no common sense, so there must be one of two options for us to consider.

1) Labour simply don't ever want to be elected again. And while I would applaud their selfless political suicide for the good of the country if that were the case, it's a bit difficult to imagine that such control freaks and power mad, dictatorial tax spongers are that community conscious, so it only leaves us with ...

2) Labour are so mired in fake charities; self-appointed, state-paid moral guardians; personal-enrichment obsessed quangoistas; personal politics motivated civil servants, and single issue fruitcakes, that they believe - and I mean truly believe - that the millions who are turned off or enraged at their lunatic ideas are unrepresentative of the population.

It's an inevitable result of 12 years listening only to those who agree with Labour policy (many of whom they pay to do so). They haven't heard us, the average voter, for years because they don't want to. Well funded lobby groups have learned how to get a minister's ear while the voice of the electorate has been restricted to direction-managed focus groups and cleverly-constructed public 'consultations' which, to all intents and purposes, exclude the public.

Yet still they push on. Punishing and alienating huge swathes of the public with every vested interest whisper in their ear that is turned into illiberal and unnecessary bureaucracy, red tape, denormalisation and suspicious condemnation.

I would usually end a polemic such as this by suggesting that no-one should vote Labour. Ever. It doesn't need to be said, though, when their own policies are exhorting the public to do exactly that without any prompting at all.

UPDATE: Oh dear, here's Tom Harris illustrating exactly the sentiment mentioned above.

Don’t confuse the blogosphere with the real world. There’s certainly a huge amount of fury and paranoia in blogs’ comments boxes but I’m not sure that’s representative of the real world.

They just don't get it, do they?

Pic H/T B3ta