The Nanny State Gets Nasty
Britain is experiencing the literal embodiment of the nanny state — the government telling you who can watch the kids.
In Britain, parents face prosecution for looking after their friends’ children without government approval.
If you’re a parent who has to leave your child with someone while you go to work, you’d probably think that a friend with a child of the same age would be an ideal choice — and if that friend happened to be a police officer, it would certainly be no bad thing. More generally, you might take the view that you’re better qualified than government officials to take decisions about how to best raise your children. However, if you hold such views in Gordon Brown’s Britain, you’re likely to find yourself on the wrong side of the law.
Fellow police detectives and close friends Leanne Shepherd and Lucy Jarrett thought they had a pretty handy arrangement. For two-and-a-half years, they took it in turns to look after each other’s children whenever one of them was on duty. Now education watchdogs have ordered the pair to end the arrangement — and threatened them with prosecution — because neither is registered with the government as a qualified childminder. They’ve even been warned that their homes will be placed under surveillance to make sure that no illicit caring goes on.
It’s the literal embodiment of the nanny state — the government interjecting itself into private childcare arrangements between friends. And this is not an isolated case of some bureaucrat being a little overzealous in applying the rules; it’s par for the course under Labour’s coercive and inquisitorial regime, whose officials feel compelled to interfere in and regulate every aspect of citizens’ private lives.
The clampdown on Shepherd and Jarrett comes just a couple of weeks after the government announced that parents who ferry children to sporting activities and other after-school events must submit to official vetting, on pain of an $8,000 fine and a criminal record. The scheme will eventually cover more than 11 million people and will create the largest database of its kind in the world — which, given the government’s appalling record of losing and misusing the mass of personal information it collects, is in itself cause for concern.
Although inspired primarily by crude authoritarianism, such initiatives are also the products of Britain’s increasingly risk-averse culture. Officials prefer to pass draconian legislation in an attempt to remove even the slightest possibility that someone might come to harm or commit an offense, rather than dealing with problems as and when they occur or catching and prosecuting offenders. (There are, for example, proposals to curb drunken violence by raising the price of alcohol and closing pubs — thus punishing the innocent along with the guilty — rather than by arresting the culprits and imposing sentences on them).
The government has been assisted in its endeavors by a media which knows that lurid stories of kidnaps, murders, and children in danger sell newspapers and boost viewing figures. Together they’ve created an increasingly paranoid society, in which parents and children are encouraged to believe that danger lurks around every corner and that every adult is a would-be abuser just waiting for an opportunity to strike. Paralyzed with indecision and fear, parents turn to unqualified officials and unaccountable, state-appointed “experts” to tell them what to do.
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Mike McNally blogs at Monkey Tennis Centre.
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20 Comments
1. DavidN:We’ve had similar discussions over on this side of the pond, about whether neighbors should be allowed to look after local kids. One suggested reason that the authorities are so opposed to such a thing would presumably apply on your side of the ocean: there’s a local daycare center, and either its owners want more business, or the union members who work there don’t like the competition. It gets pathetic, though, doesn’t it?
Oct 9, 2009 - 1:43 am 2. Mary Jackson:This is the way Labour always behaves. Why people were stupid enough to think, twelve years ago, that it would be any different, is beyond me. When the Tories get in, the first thing they should do is repeal every single law that this wretched government has passed in the last twelve disastrous years. Then sack anyone with “diversity” in their job title, and begin culling the quangos and shrinking the bloated public sector.
The paranoia surrounding children stops them having normal relationships with adults while doing nothing to stop real abuse. I have written about this subject here at PJM. How many paedophiles are there, for God’s sake?
Oct 9, 2009 - 2:11 am 3. HonestJon:It seems to me that if these two ladies are capable of being parents then they’re capable of being babysitters for each others’ child. Big Brother is watching you!!!
regards
Oct 9, 2009 - 2:45 am 4. Danger Girl:and you don’t think this is happening in the US? Ask the families in Michigan
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/30/national/main5352028.shtml
Oct 9, 2009 - 3:30 am 5. Old Soldier:I would feel sorry for the two Cops in the story if they were not themselves voluntary instruments of this kind of oppression.
Oct 9, 2009 - 4:38 am 6. Thomas Fleming:This insanity isn’t confined to the UK. As I discussed at length at http://histruthis.blogspot.com/2009/09/talk-about-your-nanny-state.html, state officials in the US are threatening fines and jail for neighbors who watch each other’s children for less than an hour a day, without becoming licensed day care providers, and elsewhere are imposing reporting and training requirements on day care providers so burdensome that small-scale, non-professional providers could not possibly meet them. The “nanny” state, indeed!
Oct 9, 2009 - 5:33 am 7. KB:“Paralyzed with indecision and fear, parents turn to unqualified officials and unaccountable, state-appointed “experts” to tell them what to do.”
There it is right there. But you can’t really blame the government for simply delivering what the people are so desperately clamoring for.
Oct 9, 2009 - 5:50 am 8. Ken Besig:Beating up a dysfunctional state like Great Britain is like beating up a blind man. Perhaps in less than a decade, Great Britain will no longer even exist as an organized country and will probably deconstruct into it’s component parts.
Oct 9, 2009 - 6:02 am 9. gboisjo:There is nothing with the exception of Muslim ranting that stinks worse than listening to Europeans moralize. The truth is that they must in fear of producing anthor abomination like Hitler or Mussillini. Before that Europe with the help of gods morality plundered the world. This moral highground that these British leaders pretend to have is arrogant. It is an illusion rooted in grandiosity and superiority. They should refocus that energy on what to do with all the radical immigrants they let populate there country.
Oct 9, 2009 - 6:02 am 10. Common Sense:The situation in Michigan with the mother who got into trouble for watching her neighbor’s children for a couple of hours before the school bus came shows that the nanny state is infultrating the US as well.
I thought the phrase was “it takes a village”, not “it takes the government”.
Oct 9, 2009 - 6:09 am 11. Lynn Arlene Rossiter:As the Liberals endeavor to eliminate Christianity which is the anchor to right living, we are seeing the State replace the conscience in people in our society. Judeo-Christianity is the core that prevents the meltdown into sexual and individual rampantness – runaway behavior into thuggishness. Without the gentleness of Christ (Christianity) and the Love of His Father (Judaism) we have no self anchor. Therefore people are lost and at the mercy of those who would ride over us in the most intimate of ways through our children. We may have had all the sexual freedom that we wanted, but now we will lose our children.
Oct 9, 2009 - 6:29 am 12. ian:We have no such UNBELIEVABLE official statements in France (but we have others completely in the same crazy “mood”). Anyway, not so sure that, if our french administration would tell the same as portrayed in this article, it would not success. Here, the people rights are also very much assaulted by a bunch of technocratic demands. Keep faith in yourselves, anyway !
PS : By now, your hope and salvation consist in «rewilliaming» the english roots. How ? The idea is to reappropriate william symbolism, but updated to todays situation. You have to become the “invaders” of your own country (and not only the keepers)!
Oct 9, 2009 - 6:47 am 13. Tolbert:(not sure my english is good enough to be understood when i talk about metaphysic ^^ )
This is what happens when you give bureaucrats power.
“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” – Grover Norquist
Oct 9, 2009 - 6:50 am 14. Dazed:Same thing happening right now in Michigan…… Luckily, our law’s being changed. Film at 11.
Oct 9, 2009 - 10:33 am 15. LS:“Beating up a dysfunctional state like Great Britain is like beating up a blind man.”
No, beating up a dysfunctional state like Great Britain is like beating up a blind man who has been beating his kids.
Oct 9, 2009 - 10:34 am 16. Poor Citizen:Britain is a nanny state. And it is behind the times. However, in my opinion, it is not dysfunctional. Its biggest problem is that it attempts to cling on to oldy feely values and lifestyles that just do not fit in the 21st centurey and they are way to easy pleezzy toward everyone, which makes almost nobody happy. At least they dont have as many shootings… just a few a year compared to thousands and thousands shot and wounded in the U.S annually. So america could use a shot of common sense and learn something from them..if they ever listened… at least the new president is a start in the right direction.
Oct 9, 2009 - 12:24 pm 17. Anonymous:Tyranny: The Secret Sexual Fantasy of Liberals Everywhere! (Watch, the Democrats will want something like this here next.)
Oct 9, 2009 - 2:32 pm 18. njcommuter:A ‘civilization’ that acts this way will soon reach the point where it deserves to collapse. And if it does not correct its ways, it eventually will collapse, for that will be the lesser of two evils. But neither the survival nor the collapse of such a ‘civilization’ is good. Return to virtue is the right way, but for some reason the Loony Bin left fears it beyond torture and death.
Oct 9, 2009 - 3:08 pm 19. Stew:I wonder how much longer my children will be allowed to visit and play with their friends without certified government approved oversight.
Oct 9, 2009 - 3:21 pm 20. Ray:Actually they are following our lead, please read USA Nanny State knows best..
http://elder-abuse-cyberray.blogspot.com/2009/10/usa-nanny-estate-knows-best.html
Oct 9, 2009 - 5:24 pm