Yet more Government interference masquerading as a charity

Via the Cynical Libertarian we learn about another bunch of interfering busybodies purporting to be a charity, but really paid for you and I, using this cover to call for yet more state control of our everyday lives:

Schools and councils are being urged to make it harder for children to swap their school meal for a takeaway.

Rising levels of obesity are being fuelled by the ready availability of junk food, said the School Food Trust.

It wants schools to close their gates at lunchtime and councils to stop new fast food outlets opening nearby.

..

The trust has issued a "league table" of the local education authority areas with the most takeaway and sweet shops per secondary school.

Topping the list is Brighton and Hove, with 46 per school, closely followed by Blackpool and Hull.

This is a statistics free report from the beeb, no surprises there, so I will also make a statistics free observation before getting in to more detail about these control freaks. As it happened I was driving through Marlow yesterday afternoon and whilst I saw loads of school kids I wasn't aware of any of them being overweight, let alone an epidemic.

So lets have a look at this organisation who want to not only control school kids but tell the rest of us how we can trade. As you would expect they have a flashy web site:

The School Food Trust was established by the Department for Education and Skills
in September 2005. Its remit is to transform school food and food skills, promote the education and health of children and young people and improve the quality of food in schools.

So how did they come to this high number of wicked capitalists doing the devils work of tempting our kids to eat themselves to death. I would have expected this to have been burger joints (helpfully the beeb gives us the ubiquitous picture of a burger) and fish and chip shops within, say, 500m of the school:

Local authorities have been ranked by the number of junk food outlets
in their area, divided by the number of secondary schools in that areae.g.
Brighton and Hove:415 junk food outlets divided by 9 secondary schools =
46.11

That will be every shop in a town that sells crisps, chocolate of beefburgers. That will include all supermarkets, newsagents and garage, no matter how far it is from the school that these bastards want to control. Where I went to school one of the fish and chips shops that will be included in this study is over 2 miles from the school, I can't think of any schoolkids that would be willing to walk that far for their junk food fix.

So in one fell swoop we have a bunch of interfering busybodies :

• Telling 18 year-olds what they can and can't eat
• Jailing 18 year-olds behind school gates against their will and for committing no crime other than offending the Government
• Licensing every shop or food outlet in the country to ensure that they only sell what is approved of by them

And all this using our money:

The School Food Trust was set up in 2005 with £15 million of funding from
the Department for Education and Skills to promote the education and health of
children and young people by improving the quality of food supplied and consumed
in schools.

Despite having a good look round I haven't been able to find one statistic that tells me how many of our children are obese to justify this money and interference. If it really was that bad I would have expected them to be screaming the figures of every page of their web site.

All that money and we have the sloppiest of reports that wouldn't acceptable as an 11 year-olds science report.

I'll leave the Cynical Libertarian to sum up:

I'll finish with this thought: the School Food Trust has compiled a 'league table' of those areas with the most fast-food outlets and 'sweet shops' per school. It could, presumably, have compiled a 'league table' of areas with the highest rates of child obesity and compared the two. If they're right, there should be a strong positive correlation. Why leave out such a damning piece of proof if you're right?

Give 'em a good slap

Not the kids, the parents.

This is obviously a self serving story put out by the TUC to support their claims for more of whatever it is they want - money, time off, teachers; but it is still a sad reflection on the way we live.

Research for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) suggested a minority of children threw tantrums, swore and were physically aggressive.

No mention of how big the minority is, but we'll let it pass as I have other things to do. Anyway, we are treated to some fine examples, possibly the only ones in the report, but good for their cause:

It described a mother who celebrated the fact she had been able to get her five-year-old to bed at 1am instead of his previous bedtime of 3am.

..

It also told of a seven-year-old who smashed up his Playstation in a tantrum, then spent a week pestering his mother until she bought him a new one.

The researchers said some parents simply could not say "no" when their children demanded televisions and computers in their bedrooms.

Yes children do that, they push things to the limit, but it really isn't the child's fault, they are programmed to get away with what they can.*
Then we have the blindingly obvious quote to pad out the story:
"Others would do "anything to shut up their children just to get some peace", it said."
Of course we all know who to blame really, don't we. yes, it those horrible free marketeers:

Mr Sinnott said the problem lay with parents who were struggling with little or no help to bring up their children in a heavily commercialised world.

He wants a ban on advertising aimed at children.

"Parents are trying to cope by indulging, or by over-indulging, their youngsters," he said.

Ahaa, that's what this is about, more bansturbation. No thought to the parents who aren't struggling and have no objections, no, just ban it. Lets not forget that they did claim that it was only a minority of parents who were struggling, so they are talkking about baning the majorouty from going about their lawful business.

I'm getting bored now so I'll finish with the reason for the post title:

NUT boss Steve Sinnott is calling for more advice for parents who struggle to say "no" to their children.

No, Steve, they don't need "help", and by that I assume you mean more civil servants and higher taxes, they just need a good slap and to be told not to be so soft.

*The Economist carried an interesting article a couple of weeks ago which showed that babies will cry more if they think that the adult nearby will feed them more. They cry less if the adult refuses.

For a long time such signals have been considered honest—at least by childless zoologists. The more noise an infant makes, the hungrier it is. However, Matthew Bell, a zoologist at Cambridge University, now suspects that a degree of dishonesty and manipulation may be involved.
There is, he says, a conflict of interest between parents and offspring, with offspring frequently wanting more resources than the parents would readily provide. But because the parents do not know for sure how hungry their child is, they are liable to manipulation.

..

He thinks the findings are more broadly applicable. In human infants, there is the same kind of “information battle”, in which parents try to understand the cues that accurately convey information about what their offspring needs, versus what they can get away with. Parents of over-fussy babies, or tantrum-prone children, will not be pleased to discover it is their very attentiveness that is making matters worse. It is painful to acknowledge, but marketers were right all along: pester power works

Another example of research confirming what we know.

BBC irony on childcare

BBC News excelled itself this morning and provided us with a good laugh.

In the first article we were told how spoilt children are disrupting schools. To accompany the story we were given lots of pictures of children pestering parents in toy shops. The online version is here:

Primary schoolchildren spoilt by their parents can cause disruption in the classroom by repeating manipulative behaviour used at home, a report says.

Maybe more on this one later

In the next story we are told that parents are having trouble meeting the costs of childcare during school holidays. Again the online version is here:

A leading childcare charity is urging the government to force schools to make term times more co-ordinated.
With this Easter falling so early, different schools' holidays span a four-week period.

The Daycare Trust said the system was costing parents whose children have different Easter holiday times hundreds of pounds extra in childcare costs.

We then had pictures of an obviously middle class mum who is struggling because her children have different holidays and she was having to cope with the extended period. We were obviously supposed to pity her and then without a trace of irony we are told that two of here children are at private school!

FFS, having children is a big decision and requires sacrifices by the parents not be the rest of us. I accept that as a society it is best we pool resources to pay for education and that we do need a constant stream of doctors, nurses, electricians etc, to maintain us in our dotage, but that is far enough. I don't see why I should pay more taxes to parents that a) spoil their children because they are on a guilt trip or B) want to send their kids to private schools without sacrifice.

No doubt some soft headed politician or social commentator like Polly will take up their cause and demand that we be given even less pocket money from our munificent governement.

Is Jeffrey Skilling innocent?

Yes, that Jeffrey Skilling of Enron fame! I followed this story and watched the film and like most was convinced of his guilt and as someone who had many privileges I felt his jail term of 24 years was harsh but it did send a message to other people in similar positions.

Well, incredible as it may seem the Economist is carrying and article that suggests he could have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice:

On March 14th, evidence emerged that government prosecutors may have misled the court and Mr Skilling’s defence team about the content of interviews with key witnesses, including Andrew Fastow, Enron’s former chief financial officer.

Mr Fastow’s testimony was widely regarded, not least by the prosecution, as crucial to securing Mr Skilling’s conviction: it was the only direct evidence that Mr Skilling actually knew about the various frauds at Enron for which he was found guilty. Yet the new document reveals that, at least in his early interviews with the FBI, Mr Fastow did not appear to implicate Mr Skilling as unequivocally as he did when he testified in court. Indeed, on crucial points, his original answers appear to exonerate Mr Skilling.

So how did this come about and why has it taken so long?
Why is this inconsistency only now coming to light? Rather than handing over the original interview notes, the government instead produced a composite summary. This is standard practice, but the summary must accurately reflect what was said. Mr Skilling’s defence team, after eventually persuading the court to order the government to hand over its original notes, makes a strong case that the summary of Mr Fastow's interview omits details in a way that consistently favours the government.

Now if this is true this is, IMHO, just as big a scandal as the original offence. It shows the State has no regard for the truth or due process and was just after a conviction, come what may. And people wonder why we get so wound up about the need to control the state and have safeguards in place.

Having said that, for a CEO to have not known what was going on is still somewhat incredible and if he didn't he deserves some punishment for incompetence, but that would be up to the shareholders not some zealous prosecutor.

ID cards, DNA databases and political activism

I was chatting to the sprog (well he's 21 and has a level politics) about the control freakery of this Government and modern society in general. We started the discussion because of the calls for the national DNA database to solve crimes.

Whilst we may come from different parts of political spectrum we both agreed that this is the worst kind of state control. What he really wanted to know was why wasn't the general public up in arms and demonstrating at the barricades as they were in the '60s. This was a fair comment and I did point out that it was the equivalent of his generation that did all the demonstrating - so where are they. The upshot of the discussions was, as far as I can remember, were:

1. The demonstrations in the 60's were anti-USA/capitalism, using Vietnam as a pretext, although some were generally only demonstrating about Vietnam. Nothing new there then.

2. That generation who did the demonstrating are now the ones in control! This is the real scary bit - from radical to fascists!

3. For some reason the police have moved from being part of the defenders of freedoms to being the ones calling for more controls. As someone pointed out on another blog, apologies but I can't find it again, the police didn't call for a national fingerprint database in the 50's as a matter of policy. Indeed few politicians did either.

4. Politicians are scared to hold principled positions and want to be popular. The best way to do this is to follow the herd and echo their moo's louder than others who want to be politicians.

5. The will of the people has been knocked out of them through statism and constant tales of nightmares to come that can only be averted by giving politicians and the self important leaders of quangos more power.

It looks like we could both be voting the for the nascent Libertarian party if they get out to us by the next election