Save the Children

I must be just one of many Manx parents relieved that the Department for Miseducation and Child Abuse have dropped a controversial attempt to introduce a ‘Children's Bill’ which would have given numerous halfwits carte blanche to snoop, tittle-tattle in secret and in general screw up the lives of Manx children even more than they do already.
In a press release put out last thing yesterday in the hope nobody will read it until next week (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/childrenbillwill.xml) we learn that:
“The then Department of Education consulted the public over the Bill last spring and there were 76 responses, with views submitted by Tynwald Members, Government Department and Boards, local authorities, teachers and teaching unions, church groups, organisations and individuals.
Eddie Teare MHK, Minister for Education and Children, who extended the consultation period when he took over at the Department midway through the exercise, today announced that with 76 per cent of those who responded against the Children Bill, and a further 10 per cent having reservations about it, he wouldn’t be proceeding with it.”
The thing that hacked most off – which we only found out about due to the efforts of a determined local civil libertarian, Tristram Llwellyn-Jones - were the plans for a secret database to log information about children, which would have been comprised solely of contributions from cretins who no sane parent would allow in the same room as a child. This database, linked to sweeping new powers which social workers and other, equally unschooled, busybodies intended to award themselves, had the capacity to break up families and put kids in care, yet no child or adult mentioned on the database could have challenged the information - or even discovered what lies had been spread about them.
Sadly though, this is not the end of the matter. What the Manx Kinderstasi cannot get by public consent, they still intend to get by a legal process which none of us will have the chance to object to.
There is a hint of this when the press release mentions, almost casually, that:
“..the Department of Education and Children will, via a new Education Bill, proposed for some time after September’s General Election, establish an alternative to the Safeguarding Board, if it’s considered appropriate, and may use the Bill as a vehicle to establish a post similar to that of commissioner to look after the rights of children.”
Actually, given their past record for ‘protecting’ children so well that a double murder took place in a state children's home (run on the cheap by criminally incompetent godbotherers, which they dealt with by appointing another bunch of even less competent godbothers to take over the contract, for even less money), the only serious thing the Manx government could do to protect local children is to issue a shotgun to every parent. Then they could give a legally binding pledge that if a politician, civil servant or any other drain on public funds comes within a mile of a child parents can blast away with impunity.