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The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Details: Category: Free Citizen; Published: 12 February 2025; Hits: 841

2025-02-12

This Bill, currently wending its way through Parliament, looks set to reach the Statute Book just as soon as their Lordships have finished with it and passed it on to the Monarch for his Royal Assent.

Given that the Labour Party has a stonking majority in the Commons, there will be no delaying its arrival before their Lordships.

Given also the Government's obsession with ultimately centralising all powers of any note unto itself, it's no surprise that this bill is long on rhetoric and very very short on devolution (after all, if it started devolving powers to, say, parents, there would be a chaotic free-for-all and the government would have nothing to do except twiddle its thumbs and dream of powers forsaken).

Let us in the interests of brevity quote directly from the government's own "Policy Summary Notes" document:

The ambitions of the Bill are set out in seven key parts:

- Making a child-centred government
- Keeping families together and children safe
- Supporting children with care experience to thrive
- Cracking down on excessive profit making
- Driving high and rising standards for every child
- Removing barriers to opportunity in schools
- Creating a safer and higher quality education system for every child

OK, it's feel-good verbiage that coming from politicians, tells us nothing useful, but ... what exactly is a "child-centred government", and why should we want it?

Happily, the first part of this question is answered robustly:

Make a child-centred government by facilitating a statutory framework to authorise the deprivation of liberty of children with complex needs in accommodation provided for the purposes of treatment and care; strengthening Ofsted’s powers in relation to children’s social care providers by giving them the power to issue fines for breaches of the Care Standards Act 2000, including to unregistered providers, and enabling them to hold provider groups to account for quality issues in the provision of care; regulating the use of agency workers in children’s social care; and protecting 16 and 17 year olds from ill-treatment or wilful neglect.

So ... if my child has "complex needs", the government's first instinct will be to look after my child by locking him/her up in an institution of its choosing, then regulating such "providers" to ensure that they are fined and inspected and punished and work within the statutory guidelines and on no account take any dreadful untried and unsupported initiative outside of those guidelines, because being government-mandated guidelines they are of course perfect for my child - who will now be deprived of the reassuring consistent presence of his/her parents, whilst feeling totally insecure and unprotected in new and strange surroundings under ever-rotating unfamiliar carers who attend according to changeable schedules.

I don't doubt that for the most severe cases of parental neglect or parental incompetence such measures may in extremis be warranted, but if this is setting the tone for thinking about "children's wellbeing" then I am concerned.

Keep families together and children safe by mandating local authorities to offer family group decision making so that all families with children on the edge of care have an opportunity to form a plan of family-led care, improving information sharing across and within agencies, strengthening the role of education in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and implementing multi-agency child protection teams. 

We can see where this is going. If the local authority (advised by its 'sharing and caring' agencies) in its wisdom decides that a child is being inadequately managed by its parents/guardians then it can effectively compel parental behaviour more to its liking, with the implied threat that if compliance isn't forthcoming then the child can be removed from their care.

The whole family thus becomes subject to state control, and state control means control by AI.

Today, the AI is the Statute book and its surrounding agencies (local authorities, care providers, NHS behavioural specialists, etc, all supported by a plethora of rules guidelines and protocols).

Tomorrow (or at current rate of "progress", later this afternoon) the "family group" will be clustered around the screen to receive its latest "advice" from their AI-Family-Chatbot care-advisor app, which will issue penalties for missed appointments and forfeits for wrong-think, or in the worst case it will notify the goon-squad to come knocking.

Perhaps I exaggerate a little just now ... but would you bet on it?

And so far I have only looked at the the first couple of paragraphs. We ignore this Bill at our children's peril.

Like most government initiatives, it is based on the presumption that a better world will result if we can only legislate for everything that could possibly go wrong and every risk that we will possibly encounter, and that by following the expert advice we will stay safe and happy in a government-mandated Utopia, enjoying our government supported freedom to comply with all its inevitably-proliferating rules and regulations.

There is no such thing as absolute safety. The first law of the Universe is " If it can go wrong, it will".

The best we can hope for is for it to go wrong safely - but even that can never be ensured.

Bringing up children is best handled by those who have brought them into the world, who have cared for them through helpless babyhood and happy toddlerhood and who share a loving trusting and intimate relationship with them. As kids grow older they will interact with the State as necessary under the direction of their parents, who naturally take responsibility for their behaviour until they become adults.

At what age and for what causes does it become acceptable for Government to override parental responsibility?

There are risks associated with parental responsibility, and there are risks associated with government responsibility, and it seems to me that total avoidance of risk is impossible.

Where the relationship is based upon love, the risk is lower overall than where it is based upon monetary reward. Motivation is everything.

Draw your own conclusions.

(See links for more information. Read the Bill here)

David Starkey Analyses the State of Britain Today

Details: Category: Free Citizen; Published: 11 February 2025; Hits: 730

2025-02-11

"Here is a man who has never read anything apart from a legal textbook, and an Arsenal Programme"

This may start a bit slowly, but David Starkey makes an interesting and perceptive analysis of our current state/State, and clearly puts across the value of our (now neglected) historical heritage - we don't know what we have until it's been lost.

" ... we f****ed up partly because we became 'experts' ... "

Expertise in a narrow field is no substitute for breadth of knowledge and experience.

He gives us much to think about, and in the process, helps us realise that what we as a society now lack is the influential wisdom of experienced and knowledgeable elders - we no longer value the depth of understanding that such aldermen (using the word in its historical sense) should bring to our new and upcoming generations.

Can anybody seriously imagine that the absurd UN Climate Change Agendas-21/25/50 would ever have survived contact with such aldermen?

Could our electoral systems ever be capable to facilitate their reintroduction?

(57 minutes)

Like / Dislike this video here.

USAID (and more) Explained

Details: Category: Free Citizen; Published: 11 February 2025; Hits: 852

2025-02-11

USAID is much in the news as the Trump Administration sets about righting the federal ship of state, and America and the world finds out what has been going on, seemingly for ever.

So what is it all about?

Well, it's a bit wider than merely USAID ...

Scott Ritter paints the picture. Listen up!

(49 minutes)

Like / Dislike this video here.

Digging the Dirt, Clearing for Action!

Details: Category: Free Citizen; Published: 11 February 2025; Hits: 740

2025-02-11

Behind the scenes in Washington DC, in "the belly of the beast", a quiet blitzkrieg is reportedly overwhelming the bureaucracy.

Enabled by IT and up to eight years of meticulous planning and preparation, Elon's Marauders are mapping the money and deconstructing the byzantine layers of obfuscation and delay, replacing all with fit-for-purpose control systems designed for real results in real-time.

The US equivalents of Sir Humphrey Appleby are still reacting in accord with their eternal paradigm, that change cannot, indeed must not, be rushed. Flat-footed is to overstate their response.

If this report is true, they are being swept away with no meaningful chance to resist.

Trump set the standard with his initial blizzard of executive orders, meanwhile Elon's stormtroopers are tearing into the bureaucracy that never thought it could be discovered analysed and remapped in so short a space of time.

Well, that's the story, and I don't doubt that it isn't necessarily quite so clean and clear-cut in practice, but ... Heck, it's a good story!

Read it for yourself.

USAID - Where Did the Money Go?

Details: Category: Free Citizen; Published: 09 February 2025; Hits: 906

2025-02-09

Elon Musk's investigation of the USAID payees has been extraordinarily revealing, showing just where the resources have been directed - and apparently not toward the well-being of the average US citizen.

If reports are to be believed, funds have been channelled through UN agencies and NGOs (and elsewhere), making USAID more akin to a slush fund for illegal activities everywhere.

And yet ...

"Most of the money subsidizing these human-trafficking NGOs does not come from USAID, it's from the United Nations"

The UK spent £12.79 billion on the UN's Official Development Assistance scheme in 2022 (including assistance to mitigate the dreaded "Climate Change") excluding other expenditure on items not considered to qualify as ODA assistance (eg: military aid, peacekeeping expenditures, and some cultural programmes that primarily aim to enhance the donor country’s image).

"the top three recipients [of UK bilateral ODA disbursements] in 2022 were Afghanistan (£352mn), Ukraine (£342mn) and Nigeria (£110mn)"

It's a reasonable assumption that we don't know what exactly happened to all this "aid" in any of these countries, especially in the Ukraine, where Mr Zelensky has stated that much of his US aid is unaccounted for. Whether it disappeared before or after arrival is a good question. Unless such payments are audited, it is going to be subject to "disappearance".

It's also reasonable to question how much of the UK's £12.79 billion was also subject to "disappearance"?

I suspect that the UK tax-payer might well have an interest here. Who is responsible (if anybody) for auditing value for money on behalf of the UK taxpayer?

And for reporting back to Parliament?

Well, it's a complex area ...

But are there other shadowy revenue streams that nobody quite knows where the monies end up?

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