The Nanny State: Alive and well in the U.K.

What if, instead of taking children out of the homes of lousy parents (drug addicts, alcoholics, abusers), there was a way you could monitor the family 24/7 and try to influence their behavior that way? Do you think that American family services programs would ever try this?

Well, the U.K. already has.

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far.

George Orwell was so right when he set 1984 in the U.K. Europeans have never had a tradition of individual liberties in the way Americans understand them. The state comes first. It’s the heritage of nations that aged in the tradition of monarchy and the powers of the king, which evolved into the power of the state to interfere in your lives. Which gives us this example of the Nanny State at its worst—trying to influence human behavior by force.

But Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “This is all much too little, much too late.

“This Government has been in power for more than a decade during which time anti-social behaviour, family breakdown and problems like alcohol abuse and truancy have just got worse and worse.”

He is bemoaning the fact that the British government has allowed people to be free. No, I don’t approve of bad parenting, and yes, I sure wish that alcoholics and drug addicts didn’t have children. But in America, the best way to fix that is to take the children out of the bad environment instead of leaving them there with their drug-addicted or alcholic parents. In the U.K., apparently, they intend to force a change in human nature. Yeah, good luck with that.

And here’s the punchline of the entire story: Grayling is a member of the Conservative Party—the so-called conservatives in the U.K., thus proving that you can call yourself a conservative, and actually be nothing of the sort. He’s complaining that the Labor Party has not interfered enough into the lives of Britain’s citizens over the past decade. The program itself is being expanded by the current ruling party.

But we’re not done yet. The government will be sending parents contracts specifying parents’ duties while theire children are enrolled in school.

I think all of us have said, at one point or another, “The government should license people to have children!” The fact that it doesn’t gives us women like the Octomom, who obviously should never have had a single child, let alone fourteen. But the flip side of a free society that allows freaks like the Octomom to thrive is a society in which every mistake you make as a parent is monitored, recorded, and judged—by bureaucrats. I don’t think I’ll ever wish for parent licenses again.

The only bright spot about this story is the comments by British citizens who are decrying this invasion into the lives of their countrymen. But so far, the citizens of the U.K. have done little more than complain. I think, however, a storm is coming. You can only push people so far before they push back.

The really frightening thing about this story is that I’m sure we can find some members of Congress who would love to initiate a program like that here.

(Via Rantburg.)