Most UK readers will now be more than just a little
au fait with Gordon Brown's apparent fetish - and that of his wretchedly Orwellian, one-trick-pony government - for getting every living species in the UK tested and scrutinised for any suggestion of
paedophile proclivity, regardless of how tangential their contact with school children may be.
I think it's fair to say that most reasonable people understand that children are parents' most prized and precious possession, and have no problem at all with society needing to ensure their overall safety - and it's for this reason that the public broadly support some form of straightforward and standard background checks for adults whose day-to-day job entails them spending a large proportion of it acting
in loco parentis when supervising young children in some way.
That much is reasonable, responsible and proportionate: what is none of these things is what follows - as it now begins to transcend reasonable necessity and, like a grubby 'Mac-Man' hanging round a school gate at home time, begins to resemble an unsavoury desire on Brown's part which now risks becoming a general preoccupation.
Given the nature of the man, just as he cannot bear to stand idly by when he sees any open opportunity that me might pick the scab further, and as if prove were needed, he then goes and introduces this new demand:
Paedophile checks even for those not working with children.
This then begs the question: at what point do
we say "No! Enough is enough!" Where' precisely do we draw the line which ceases civil liberties being eroded more than they have been already under this preternatural shower of shambolic shysters?
The security of the nation's children is paramount, but this kind of government-sponsored paranoia cannot be healthy for children either; ingraining within them, as it does, at such an early age the instruction that every adult is to be, by default, viewed with suspicion; and the expectation set that adults cannot be trusted without having gone through the rigmarole of a series of tests set by some foetid mind in a government-ordained public servant's office. How can this be emblematic of a healthy society?
But, and just like the Tories before them in 1997, Labour have now outlived their current worth and been in power too long; they have got to the stage where they are flat out of fresh ideas and any political or policy inspiration (as if killing the UK economy and saddling the nation with a debt so large it will take a generation to pay off weren't enough); they've now begun to tinker with everything and change nothing - and when a government gets to the stage where it's beginning to reinterpret policies it introduced in the first place - and not for the better - it's time to go.
But just how far will this man's baleful ineptitude and abuse of our collective civil liberties go? Ignoring for the minute that we, the UK, are the most closely watched - via our nationwide network of nation CCTV cameras - nation on earth.
Not content with making suspects of us all, for things we haven't done, Brown's now gone one step further: not only will anyone whose life brings them within so much as a country mile of anyone under the age 16 need to be background-checked, but anyone seeking to pick up their neighbours' children from school will now face being subject to the same background checks - and potentially those friends wishing to babysit for their neighbour's kids too.
The man displays an epoch-redefining paranoia whilst trying to lend it an air of urgent respectability in claiming the excuse "it's for the kids' safety!"
It's a discouraging irony, then, that Brown is often - although only half-jokingly - referred to as 'Stalin'': but the joke begins to wear thin when you consider that Stalin's henchman-in-chief,
Lavrentiy Beria, mixed the equally loathsome penchants of being a pederast, a child rapist and killer and all-round deranged monster, with amassing a huge database (or simply 'files' as they were then called) on just about every target of Stalin's deranged and paranoid mind - and then some... indeed it ran into the millions. It makes for an uncomfortable parallel.
And where and whom is to be the next 'target' to come under Brown's myopic glare?
For instance, will your IP address be logged if a friend on Facebook posts an altogether innocent picture of their child in Halloween garb, and then asks you what you what you think of it, and you then hit the 'Like' tab - ordinarily understood to be a sign of approving encouragement to said parent? More importantly, who's the arbiter who says where that line is to be drawn?
In truth, I doubt even Brown has thought about the list of possibilities his paranoid policies-made-on-the-hoof might take under their objectionable ordinance. And that being the case, we can only be happy that he has only until May 2010 - at the latest - to do his worst (if that's in any way possible, given what we've already suffered at the man's incompetent hands), until he and his sorry cabal of sixth-form-minded ideologues are booted soundly from office and into, it is to be hoped, a generation in Opposition.
Gordon Brown's Paedophile Fetish
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