HItchcock's Sabotage (1936) and the 7/7 bombings

Talking Pictures TV continues to be a marvel. The other day it showed Hitchcock's Sabotage, made in 1936 before he left for Hollywood.

The film is loosely based on Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, which I blogged about in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. As the film shows the destruction of a bus, it is even more reminiscent of those outrages.

Reading that post 15 years on confirms the past is a foreign country, because I quote an article by Brendan O'Neill with approval.

Well, I did write a couple of articles for Spiked in 2001 and I would still recommend Frank Furedi's Culture of Fear as an analysis of what happened to Britain in the 1990s. 

His view has much in common with that of Adam Curtis in that it emphasises the role of government in talking up threats so that it can then claim credit for protecting us

Sabotage is on YouTube and I recommend it, just as I recommend Conrad's novel.

After you have seen the film you may enjoy the Hitchpod episode on it. It contains spoilers (which I have tried to avoid here), but the two hosts both rate if highly among Hitch's films.

Finally, don't worry about young Stevie, the unwitting carrier of the terrorists' bomb. The actor who played him, Desmond Tester, grew up to be a big name in Australian television, particularly children's programmes, and gave Rod Hull and the Bee Gees their first breaks.

Is there a future for liberalism?

This is the opening session from the Battle of Idea last Saturday. I did not arrive until after it had taken place.

The blurb on Youtube runs:

Classical liberalism has very few friends on either side of the Atlantic. The ideal of free speech is frequently trumped by the claim that it must be regulated in order to protect the powerless. Even the liberal principle of tolerance has been criticised for being too judgmental. 

In this compelling panel discussion filmed at the Battle of Ideas 2015 at the Barbican, Professor Frank Furedi, Dr Katrina Forrester and Steven Erlanger discuss with a packed audience where this leaves liberalism today. Furedi’s call for a new judgementalism is inspiring. Claire Fox Director of the Institute of Ideas is chair.

Six of the Best 506

Jay Rayner on the uncharacteristic silence of Keith Vaz.

"Boosting economies and vindicating the human rights of women and girls is the very real impact of aid in developing countries. The UK being the first G7 power to enshrine in law a commitment to spend 0.7% of its gross national income (GNI) on aid every year is something of which the British people should be justifiably proud." Jenny Tonge celebrates overseas aid.

Did Nick Clegg drop two clangers yesterday? Keynesian Liberal thinks so.

"Adolf Hitler said: 'I have sent my Death’s Head units to the east with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language ... Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' Giles Fraser asks why the government is so afraid to speak of the Armenian genocide.

Frank Furedi rehearses his familiar (and correct) argument that modern society curbs children's freedom to a ridiculous extent.

Duncan Weldon examines the economics and politics of Thomas the Tank Engine.

How our concern about child abuse makes children less safe

From the Northants Herald & Post:

A stranger grabbed hold of a boy who was trying to retrieve his football in Kettering. 

Police in Kettering are appealing for witnesses to the incident that took place in St Mary's Road on Wednesday afternoon. 

A seven-year-old boy was playing football when he ran into St Mary's Road to retrieve the ball and a man, who was walking along the footpath grabbed hold of him before letting him go and continuing on his way towards London Road. 

The boy was not injured in the incident and returned home with the football.

Perhaps this incident was sinister - even at attempt at child abduction - but there is simpler, more plausible explanation to hand.

A man is walking along the pavement when he sees a small boy chasing a ball into the road. Because there is a car coming, or he fears there may be one coming or just out of instinct, the man grabs the boy to keep him out of danger.

Last week I blogged about Frank Furedi's book Paranoid Parenting. One of his central arguments in it is the breakdown of what he calls "adult solidarity". This is a good example of that phenomenon.

Until recently other adults were allies in bringing up your children. If you were not around they would look out for your children, tick them off or take them in.

Now other adults are seen as a threat - just look at the involvement of the police and the local paper here - and children live diminished lives as a result. If one

And if some are still allowed to play out, our concern about child abuse means that they are more at risk than ever. How can they ask for help when every adult is a stranger?

Meanwhile, what should an adult male do if he sees a child running into the road?

Frank Furedi: Paranoid Parenting 13 years on

Frank Furedi published his Paranoid Parenting in 2001.

In today's Independent he looks at what has happened over the ensuing 13 years. He does not paint an encouraging picture:

In 2001, when I published my book Paranoid Parenting, I was genuinely surprised to discover that virtually all experiences associated with childhood came with a health warning. 

At the time, Paranoid Parenting documented the growing tendency to extend adult supervision into every aspect of children's lives. It was apparent that the outdoors had become a no-go area for many youngsters and that the majority of parents did not even allow their offspring to walk to school on their own. 

The idea that children were too vulnerable to be allowed to take risks had already become entrenched. That was bad enough. But since the turn of the century, the regime of child protection has become steadily more pervasive and intrusive. The relentless erosion of children's freedom has been paralleled by the constant tendency to politicise parenting. 

During the past decade or so, the banning of a variety of activities associated with children's life has acquired a relentless dynamic. I still remember, when in February 2007 after a group of children were suspended from school for throwing snowballs, an angry mother writing to me to ask: "What will they think of next?" 

Regrettably, the obsessive impulse to regulate children's life ensures that the next target of child protection is already on the horizon.

The problems with Cinderella's Law

In recent days I have seen Liberal Democrat MPs tweeting in favour of Cinderella's Law - a proposed new law that would make the 'emotional abuse' of children a criminal offence.

Frank Furedi spelt out some of the problems with such a law in the Independent:

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children offers a definition of emotional abuse that includes some very real and unambiguous acts of harm, such as "conveying to a child that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate", but it also includes forms of behaviour that, depending on the context, may or may not be harmful to a child. 

For example, the NSPCC includes in its definition of emotional abuse the "making of fun" of what a child says or how they communicate. I am not sure what universe the NSPCC inhabits, but in the real world, the making fun of one another is the stuff of family life. When parents and children interact, they are likely to make jokes at each others' expense. 

Where does good-natured banter end and destructive verbal joking begin? Whatever the answer is to this question, it will not be found in the law courts.

I would like to add two questions of my own.

The supporters of Cinderella's Law envision parents who break it being sent to prison. What arrangements will be made for the children in such circumstances and how confident are the law's supporters that they will be any better for the child?

Because there are plenty of accounts of children in the care system suffering just this sort of abuse. So my second question is to ask whether local authorities will be subject to Cinderella's Law too?

Six of the Best 339

"Coedffranc Community Council recently took advice from One Voice Wales as to whether it is possible for one of its members to publicly disagree with its decisions. Councillors were reportedly shocked that the answer was in the affirmative." Peter Black on community and town councils in Wales and their problems understanding transparency and accountability.

Frank Furedi contributes an essay on education to Spiked: "We have a paradoxical situation, where politicians seem to take the teaching of subject-based knowledge more seriously than educators do."

"The widespread acceptance of ADHD as a mental illness/chemical imbalance has no scientific underpinning, but rather is based on marketing and promotion. The ADHD 'diagnosis' is particularly destructive, in that it targets children, and serves as the justification for 'treating' these children with dangerous drugs." Dr Philip Hickey on his Behaviorism and Mental Health blog.

Geoff Andrews writes on Paolo Di Canio and the new respectability of Italian Fascism.

"In the 1920s, two projects, one government-run, the other privately-designed and built, battled to build an airship that could link the Empire. The rivals, codenamed R101 and R100, were nicknamed the Socialist and the Capitalist. The Capitalist team involved the engineer Nevil Shute, better known today for his novels, and Barnes Wallis, the genius behind the bouncing bomb. Cruelly, the fate of the Socialist R101 damned both projects." Marc Sidwell discusses collectivism, the free market and airships.

Caroline's Miscellany presents some of Leeds' architectural curiosities.

Security mania makes us feel less secure

Oliver Burkeman had an article in yesterday's Guardian Review section arguing that the modern obsession with security has had the paradoxical effect of making us feel less secure.

This is not a new argument: Frank Furedi has been making it since he published the first edition of Culture of Fear in 1997.

But Burkeman has a useful passage in which he points us to three recent books touching upon this phenomenon:

Three very different books published last year might help us rethink our troubled relationship to insecurity. 

In Against Security, the New York University sociologist Harvey Molotch focuses on "airports, subways, and other sites of ambiguous danger," arguing that in the long run, treating strangers with more kindness and less suspicion, rather than assuming the worst of every traveller, would actually increase security. 

Nassim Taleb, in his exasperating but compelling book Antifragile, praises "things that gain from disorder" – people, policies and institutions designed to thrive on volatility, instead of shattering in the encounter with it. (That the misanthropic Taleb seems to demonstrate increasing fragility when being interviewed by journalists is curious, but hardly undermines his point.) 

And in Daring Greatly, Brené Brown, a professor of social work who specialises in the psychology of vulnerability, considers the many ways in which "the courage to be vulnerable" is a precondition for fulfilling relationships, good parenting, conflict resolution and creative expression.

Saturday at the Battle of Ideas

I spent Saturday at the Battle of Ideas, an annual two-day intellectual event put on by the Institute of Ideas, It is best described like a party conference without the main hall –  you are offered is several streams of enticing fringe meetings throughout the weekend.

And the lack of partisanship is welcome. Last year, for instance, I listened to a panel that included Anne Atkins. She is not to my taste, and I suspect she was not to the taste of most people in the audience, but she was received with perfect politeness, which is something hard to imagine at a Labour or Liberal Democrat event.

The Institute of Ideas grew out of the website Spiked, which in turn grew out of the magazine Living Marxism (LM). In the days before the internet that magazine brought a welcome draught of libertarianism to the debate, even if those ideas are now pretty commonplace.

And Living Marxism grew out of the old Revolutionary Communist Party. For this reason some see the group of people around Spiked and the Institute of Ideas (Clare Fox from The Moral Maze is now the best known amongst them) as sinister. But I once wrote a couple of articles for Spiked! and never received any Serbian slush money.

My complaint against Spiked these days is that it offers contrarianism by numbers: you know it will take the consensus view on any subject in the news and argue the opposite. But at least these people are being good Marxists in wanting to see the capitalist system developed to its fullest, because Marx himself argued that revolution would not come until that stage has been reached.

Anyway, Saturday. The event took place at The Barbican in London, and everything they say about the place being a maze is correct. But I managed to navigate it tolerably well even so.

After collecting my free press pass I entered the room halfway through a discussion with Frank Furedi (another key Spiked! and LM figure), Zoe Williams from the Guardian and David Lammy the Labour MP.

When I came in the discussion was cantering on Lammy’s recent book Out of the Ashes: Britain after the riots. In it, someone was arguing, Lammy recognises that the last Labour government’s attempt was trying to do too much – attempting to “nationalise society” – yet he ends by calling for the state to have more powers.

Zoe Williams was having none of it: Labour had not nationalised society but privatised it. Look at local authority children’s homes. Perhaps this is another instance of Calder’s Second Law of Politics: the more power the government takes for itself, the more arbitrary the exercise of that power becomes. So Labour took on too much and found it had to make some functions over to the private sector.  We should not be so surprised that those functions were chosen more or less at random.

I found Lammy more impressive than I expected, with his emphasis that poor children need help that goes beyond the purely academic if they are to make their way in life. He also said that if you come from a middle-class family and have good parents and a good school then a little gangsta rap will do you no harm.  But if that is the only influence you are subjected to then you are in trouble.

Given the labyrinth of the Barbican, I decided to stay in my seat for the next session. This was a panel discussion on parenting that included the filmmaker Roger Graef. The panel contained a wide variety of views, which was good in its way but meant that there was little meeting of minds. If a theme emerged it was in the contributions from the floor that suggested that, yes, some families did need professional help, but that the most extreme cases were being treated as though they were typical and showing that no parents could cope.

After that I wandered off to a pub for lunch, unwinding a ball of wool behind me as I went. When I returned I happened upon a discussion on the situation in Syria.

Then I went to a session on “Telling off the grown ups”. Again the panel held a very diverse set of views, but this time the discussion took off. And a lot of it chimed with my fogeyish view that our modern concern to hear the views of children is in part due to our lack of confidence in ourselves as adults.

Finally, I listened to Frank Furedi talking about the Jimmy Savile affair. I have long been an admirer of Furedi and his 1997 book Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation in particular. Its analysis of the way that our preoccupations with abuse and risk have harmed society and left us feeling no safer was acute and prophetic when you looked how Britain developed under Blair.

But on Saturday Furedi offered a canter around these themes without really engaging with the strangeness or enormity of the Savile story. Only when he touched upon the absurdities of celebrity culture did he add something new

Still, Saturday was a good day and I am grateful for the free press pass I was given. If you find yourself frustrated by the tribalism of party politics, the Battle of Ideas offers a welcome change.

The problem with children today: The Liberal Democrats and children - Part 2

Yesterday I posted part 1 of this essay, which I contributed to Graham Watson's 2006 collection Liberalism - Something to Shout About. Here is the second and final part - again, I have turned the original references into hyperlinks for this blog.

You can find details of how to order the book in that earlier post.



Towards a Liberal answer

Ask Liberal Democrats if they believe in children’s rights and they will say they do with some vehemence. In most Liberal and Labour circles, a reference to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is seen to settle any question, much in the way that a quotation from the Bible does for Southern Baptists. Yet we have seen in recent years that, the more rights children have, the less freedom they have.

One reason for this paradox is the extremely odd notion of children’s rights that we now entertain. The last time there was a significant children’s rights movement in Britain was during the late 1960s and 1970s, when political radicalism was in the air more generally. That movement was largely run by children and teenagers themselves and had as its targets abuses like corporal punishment, petty uniform regulations and the keeping of secret records by schools. The youngsters taking part were clear that their rights were to be asserted against the state and the schools that it ran.

In today’s children’s rights movement, there is no place for children themselves and no question of challenging schools – indeed the keeping of confidential professional records is central to the movement. Instead it is parents who are seen as the threat to children’s rights and the state as the body that upholds them.

This odd view explains how a commitment to those rights can coexist comfortably with the remarkably restrictive policies with which we now surround children – curfews, ASBOs and the like. If the 1960s movement was an attempt at a Kids’ Liberation (as it would undoubtedly have been called in those days), then our present-day version has more in common with the child-saving efforts of the nineteenth century.

For this reason, the children’s rights movement is quiet on the strange modern concept of ‘antisocial behaviour’. This construct lumps together serious criminality, which should be dealt with by the courts, and the sort of low-level nuisance that communities should be able to deal with themselves.

Sadly, these days Liberal Democrats are as keen on the concept as anyone: Ming Campbell’s first speech as leader was on crime, and he was at pains to emphasise that his party now supported ASBOs.

Yet when ASBOs first came in, Liberal Democrats did not oppose them because they curbed people’s liberty: we opposed them because we argued that the Antisocial Behaviour Contracts pioneered by Islington Borough Council were more effective. As these essentially applied only to council tenants, and threatened to evict those whose children misbehaved, it is hard to see them as a great improvement.

How do successful communities deal with low-level nuisance behaviour by children? In his Paranoid Parenting, the sociologist Frank Furedi coined the term ‘adult solidarity’. He wrote:

In most communities throughout the world adults assume a modicum of public responsibility for the welfare of children even if they have no ties to them. When the local newsagent or butcher scolds a child for dropping a chewing-gum wrapper on the road, they are actively assisting that boy’s parents in the process of socialization. When a pensioner reprimands a young girl for crossing the road when the light is red, he is backing up her parents’ attempt to teach, her the ways of the world. These displays of public responsibility teach children that certain behaviour is expected by the entire community, and not just by their mum and dad. … 

As every parent knows, in Britain today, fathers and mothers cannot rely on other adults to take responsibility for looking after their children. British adults are hesitant to engage with other people’s youngsters. This reluctance to assume responsibility for the welfare of the young is not simply a matter of selfishness or indifference. Many adults fear that their action would be misunderstood and resented, perhaps even misinterpreted as abuse. Adults feel uncomfortable in the presence of children. They don’t want to get involved and, even when confronted by a child in distress, are uncertain about how to behave.

This is the real reason why children lack freedom in Britain today: an almost total absence of adult authority and adult solidarity. We need a government that increases adults’ confidence in dealing with children, not undermines it by using children’s rights as a stalking horse to increase the state’s power over families.

As Steve Webb and Jo Holland might put it: “All is not well with the nation’s adults”.

Nick Clegg falls out with Gina Ford

Tomorrow's Sunday Times reports that Nick Clegg has fallen out with the child-rearing guru Gina Ford. The paper quotes the Lib Dem leader describing his and his wife's attempts to follow her suggested rules:

“It was like following a sort of Ikea assembly instruction manual. It made us feel strangely passive as parents.”

It goes on to quote him as saying:

“With our first one ... like all new parents, we religiously followed Gina Ford. Instructions like, stick him in a broom cupboard at 7.46am. At 7.48am, take him out, do not look at him ... Absolute nonsense.”

As an admirer of Frank Furedi's views on the tyranny of parenting experts I am pleased to see Nick making a public stand on the subject. (I did try to contact the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans to elicit his views on the subject of sticking babies in broom cupboards, but I was told he was not available.)

Besides, the article does not suggest that Gina Ford is an immediately appealing character. It quotes her as saying:

“What is sad about this statement is that it comes from a supposedly intelligent man who would have us believe that he is capable of running Great Britain. Clegg may think his comments are funny — and indeed in one way they are, as he has just insulted the parenting choice of more than 2m British voters.”

To which one can only reply: Calm down, dear, it's only a light-hearted newspaper article.

But then it seems Miss Ford has a thin skin when it comes to criticism. In 2006 the Mumsnet website, which has recently come to prominence through interviewing the three main party leaders, was faced with the prospect of having to close when she threatened it with legal action over postings made on its message boards.

One of those the postings, it seems, suggested that she "straps babies to rockets and fires them into south Lebanon".

Somehow I doubt this was meant seriously and Wikipedia says the dispute was resolved with Mumsnet paying some of Ford's legal costs but remaining open.

Still, I did again try to contact the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans for an opinion on this latter idea.

This time I was given a written statement:

These allegations against us were looked into at the time and found to be a gross exaggeration. I don't know why you are dredging them up now.

Government guidance on children and alcohol will make things worse

A consultation document launched by Ed Balls, Alan Johnson and the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, is expected to advise parents not to allow children to drink any alcohol before they are 15.

Donaldson was promoting this line on the Today Programme this morning but, as Costigan Quist points out:

He didn't seem to be able to point to any evidence that children being given the odd drink by parents in a controlled environment actually did any harm.

What would such evidence look like?

It might show that children allowed to try alcohol at a young age by parents, in a controlled way such as at meal times, were more likely to drink to excess as teenagers or adults; or perhaps that such children had more health parents as adults than their peers who were forbidden alcohol at home.

Liam Donaldson didn't even suggest that he had anything like that. The best he could point to was anecdote and being on the safe side, both of which may simply be wrong, as he must know.

Elsewhere, on the Off Licence News website to be precise, Donaldson is quoted as saying:

"This guidance aims to support parents, give them the confidence to set boundaries and to help them engage with young people about drinking and risks associated with it."

But how will issuing such guidance give parents confidence?

A significant feature of British society over recent years has been the collapse of parental confidence. And the principal cause of that collapse is surely the flow advice from experts - many of them state-sponsored - telling parents how to do their job.

Donaldson's today interviews are just the latest contribution to this. I recommend Frank Furedi's Paranoid Parenting for an analysis of the phenomenon.

Meanwhile, Liberal Revolution shouts:

parenting is a responsibility to be EARNT - and I think parents should prove it if their abilities are so poor that the child’s future is put at risk.

How is it possible to sack people who fail abysmally at their jobs when the bar is so low for the crucial job of being a parent.

After nearly 12 years of Labour government such a view is neither terribly Liberal and it is certainly not revolutionary.

Universities: Schools for biologically mature children?

In July 2005 Frank Furedi reminisced in the Times Higher Education Supplement:

In 1997, I completed my book The Culture of Fear. Most of the comments my copy editor made about the manuscript were routine questions about grammar, incoherent formulations and inconsistencies. But one of the comments stood out as an explicit challenge to the authenticity of the text. The contentious passage informed the reader of a relatively new development - the arrival of parents on campus. To illustrate the changing character of university life, I pointed to what was then a relatively novel phenomenon: students arriving on campus for their interviews, accompanied by their parents. "This cannot be true," exclaimed my editor.

At first, I was taken aback by her implicit challenge to my integrity. But after we had discussed this issue, I was able to understand where she was coming from. As someone who was an undergraduate in the 1970s, she could not reconcile her experience of a parent-free university with the subsequent changes.

He returned to the same theme today in a BBC report on parents chasing university places through the clearing system on behalf of their children:

Frank Furedi, social commentator and professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says that controlling parents are "destroying the distinction between school and higher education".

"All universities now have to take the parent factor into account. On university open days you can see more parents attending than children," says Professor Furedi.

He says there have been cases of parents who arrive expecting to attend their children's university interviews.

Professor Furedi says that he tells parents that they have to leave, but there are other academics who "accept that this will be a family discussion".

"There is a powerful sense of infantilism, where parents can't let go."

This extends to universities having to handle complaints from parents over grades awarded to students, he says, and a constant over-involvement during term time.

"We have to remind parents that there is a professional relationship between academics and students," he says.

Professor Furedi expects this parental pressure to grow - with the risk of turning universities into "schools for biologically mature children".

It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on just what a change in this. When I went to university in 1978 - and even during the interviews over the year before that - the whole point of the exercise was to strike out on your own and escape the influence of parents and schools. The change that has taken place makes me deeply sceptical when I am informed that young people grow up much faster these days.

James Graham thinks the process happened so long ago that it is hardly worthy of comment. But then he is younger than me.

Incidentally, I am not convinced by James's view that the answer to everything is to change the system so that university applications take place after people know their A level results. This seems to carry the assumption that A level grades are to be the only factor in the offer of a place.

Back in the 1970s I received remarkably generous offers from five good universities despite being armed with no more than a rather ropey set of O level results. That was because they were prepared to interview me and to back their own judgement of my potential. If you leave everything to A level results I am not sure that my equivalent today would be half as well treated.

Now parents need police checks to be with their own children

The other day I quoted a posting from the Civitas blog about a new report Frank Furedi has written for that think tank:

The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study released today by Civitas.

Overstated?

You don't know the half of it.

Today's papers have been full of reports that a mother has been denied permission to travel to school with her own son because she has not had a Criminal Records Bureau check. Try the BBC version.

Barking. Just barking.

Frank Furedi and Licensed to Hug

The report that Furedi has written for the think tank Civitas has received a lot of publicity today. There is a good article on it by Furedi and Jennie Bristow on the New Statesman site, and you can find links to other media coverage on the Civitas blog.

As that blog says:

The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study released today by Civitas.

In Licensed to Hug Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues that children need to have contact with a range of adult members of the community for their education and socialisation, but 'this form of collaboration, which has traditionally underpinned intergenerational relationships, is now threatened by a regime that insists that adult/child encounters must be mediated through a security check' (p.xii).

The scope of child protection has become immense. Since its formation in 2002 the Criminal Records Bureau has issued 15 million disclosures, but the whole operation has now been ratcheted up several notches by the passage of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006. This has led to the creation of the Independent Safeguarding Authority which, when it is rolled out in October 2009, will require CRB checks of 11.3 million people - over one quarter of the adult population of England.

This is an issue that the Spiked set - quite rightly - has been banging on about for some time. Their arguments inspired one of my House Points columns a couple of years ago.

Frank Furedi on Labour's campaign in Crewe

From an article on Spiked:

New Labour’s ‘anti-toff’ crusade in Crewe and Nantwich is only a caricature of old-fashioned class politics. Traditional class politics was not simply about targeting the rich – it was also about providing an alternative vision of the world, where what your family did for a living need not determine your destiny. This class-based politics promoted and argued for a real and positive vision of the future. The current anti-toff campaign, by contrast, simply encourages resentment towards the better-off.

It is actually about targeting those who are different or who are outsiders. So it is perhaps not surprising that New Labour activists have not only targeted toffs in Crewe and Nantwich but have also tried to foster local chauvinism against Polish immigrants in a scare campaign about ‘uncontrolled’ migration. In this sense, far from being in any way progressive, the anti-toff campaigning has much in common with current attempts by populist politicians to politicise antipathy against immigrants and outsiders.

Cann Hall Primary and the smiley faces

Blimey! In my day all we got was milk...

It is against the Bloggers' Code to use the phrase "Political Correctness gone mad" but sometimes it is tempting.

Cann Hall Primary School has been in the news today after using Acid House-style smiley faces to conceal the identities of pupil pictured on its website.

As ever, the voice of sanity comes from Frank Furedi. He is quoted by Metro:

"Every time a school takes silly measures, it says we see the world through the eyes of a paedophile."

Keep "denial" in Egypt

At the start of the year I quoted with approval an article by Frank Furedi:

Disbelief in today’s received wisdom is described as ‘Denial’, which is branded by some as a crime that must be punished. It began with Holocaust denial, before moving on to the denial of other genocides. Then came the condemnation of ‘AIDS denial’, followed by accusations of ‘climate change denial’. This targeting of denial has little to do with the specifics of the highly-charged emotional issues involved in discussions of the Holocaust or AIDS or pollution. Rather, it is driven by a wider mood of intolerance towards free thinking.

This week's Private Eye contains a couple more examples of the way the concept of "denial" being used in an attempt to prevent free discussion.

At the Daily Telegraph, anyone who questions what the Eye calls the "techno-utopianism" of the editor Will Lewis is described as "a digital denier". And Lord Gnome also reports a consultation between home secretary Jacqui Smith and the Tories' David Davis:

Smith's idea of consultation became apparent as soon as David entered the room. "So," she said accusingly, "you are still a 28-day denier, are you?"

You read it here first.

Andrew Phillips makes citizen's arrest - of a 10-year-old

You don't want to get on the wrong side of the Lib Dem peer and former Jimmy Young Show "legal eagle" Andrew Phillips. Even if you are only 10 years old.

The East Anglian Daily Times reports that the incident took place in Sudbury town centre yesterday. In Lord Phillips's own words:

“I first saw the youngsters biking along the narrow path from the Borehamgate Precinct and told them that they couldn't ride there as it could be dangerous for young mums with prams.

“They swore at me but it was nothing more than small change from some silly boys. But when I saw them then throw my bike on the floor, I thought 'I'm not having that'."

Phillips grabbed one of the offenders by the scruff of the neck and asked a passer-by to call the police. The paper reports that the police arrived within 10 minutes and spoke to the youngsters.

As a commenter on the paper's website says, Phillips is lucky that he did not spend a night in the cells himself, but I think he did the right thing.

The sociologist Frank Furedi has written about the decline of what he calls "adult solidarity":

Adult solidarity is one of those used to take for granted. Most of the time, in most places, adult solidarity is practised by people who have never heard of the term. In most communities throughout the world adults assume a modicum of public responsibility for the welfare of children even if they have no ties to them. When the local newsagent or butcher scolds a child for dropping a chewing-gum wrapper on the road, they are actively assisting that boy's parents in the process of socialization. When a pensioner reprimands a young girl for crossing the road when the light is red, he is backing up her parents' attempt to teach, her the ways of the world. These displays of public responsibility teach children that certain behaviour is expected by the entire community, and not just by their mum and dad ...

As every parent knows, in Britain today, fathers and mothers cannot rely on other adults to take responsibility for looking after their children. British adults are hesitant to engage with other people's youngsters. This reluctance to assume responsibility for the welfare of the young is not simply a matter of selfishness or indifference. Many adults fear that their action would be misunderstood and resented, perhaps even misinterpreted as abuse. Adults feel uncomfortable in the presence of children. They don't want to get involved and, even when confronted by a child in distress, are uncertain about how to behave.

So all power to Andrew Phillips for standing up for that solidarity. In an earier age you could just have told the children off, but sadly I don't think that would work today.

I found this story via the Tory blogger Ellee Seymour. Thanks to her, but I was puzzled by her observation that Phillips was awarded the OBE for setting up the Citizenship Foundation and implication that there is some conflict between this work and his actions yesterday.

She writes:

I wonder why Lord Philips doesn’t try and engage these young lads with the ethos of citizenship, let them learn and benefit from his experience with the foundation’s support? ... I wonder whether Lord Philips simply got out of bed the wrong way yesterday.

This "hug a hoodie" stuff really goes deep with today's Tories, doesn't it?

Incidentally, there was something deeply depressing about the statement on the matter by Suffolk Police:

“With the introduction of Safer Neighbourhood Teams right across the county, our aim is to target, in partnership with other agencies, anti-social behaviour and incidents which cause problems for local problem [sic]. We also want to bolster our high-visibility, frontline presence in towns right across Suffolk.”

It's not exactly George Dixon, is it?

They grow up so slow these days

A couple of years ago I quoted a passage from an article by Frank Furedi. It ran:

In 1997, I completed my book The Culture of Fear. Most of the comments my copy editor made about the manuscript were routine questions about grammar, incoherent formulations and inconsistencies. But one of the comments stood out as an explicit challenge to the authenticity of the text. The contentious passage informed the reader of a relatively new development - the arrival of parents on campus. To illustrate the changing character of university life, I pointed to what was then a relatively novel phenomenon: students arriving on campus for their interviews, accompanied by their parents. "This cannot be true," exclaimed my editor.

At first, I was taken aback by her implicit challenge to my integrity. But after we had discussed this issue, I was able to understand where she was coming from. As someone who was an undergraduate in the 1970s, she could not reconcile her experience of a parent-free university with the subsequent changes.

I thought of this when I read an article in today's Guardian by Anne Karpf. It was in the frequently gruesome Parenting section. I too was an undergraduate nearly 30 years ago and because of that the article's opening seems bizarre to me:

I wandered around a university campus with my oldest child the other weekend. It was an open day and our first university visit, so where had I seen this parade of other eager parents with their children before? And then I got it. For most of us, this was the fourth time we'd scrutinised a place to see if it was good enough for our kid, or assessed their chances of landing a place

The idea of your parents would accompanying you when you went for interview at university would have seemed laughable - literally laughable - when I was in the sixth form.

Yes, times change and in a comment on my original posting Tabman offered some ideas on why they have changed in this case. But such change should make us guard against simple-minded assertions that children grow up more quickly these days.