By Neil T
I am responding to a report, from memory, by a home educator of a recent meeting with the APPG for elective home education, so if I have misrepresented the gist of what was conveyed I apologise in advance and would be happy to be corrected.
This is a message from an angry home educator in no mood to be told that, whoever the next administration is, the war against us will be continued.
If that is so, then I give notice that I will not vote for any party in the general election and have been advising others for some time to respond likewise.
The fact that the profile of home education has been raised (by this control freak government), and that there are no issues that have surfaced with any credibility that justify doing something, does not add up to any substantive reasons for new legislation, especially legislation that removes existing liberties. No problem with home education, other than that it is outside the control of government, has been demonstrated but not from want of trying very hard to pin something on us, by fair means, or mostly foul. The use of repetition and a long war of attrition in order to inure us to the inevitability of change, is not a tactic worthy of dignifying, and I believe we have a right to demand proper reasons for change. That the Tories can determine that they will continue this illegitimate attack, without proper reason is the strongest indication I have had in the truth that ‘there is just the permanent government’, a claim I first heard over 10 years ago.
We have been told the LAs will want to know how the children are doing and won’t leave this alone.
My understanding of pyramids is that they stand on their bases and not on their points. Therefore the idea that LAs are a force that government will be unable to resist when it comes to their making demands for inspecting and regulating us is a nonsense. Indeed our own LEA once told me that ‘you don’t answer back to OfSTED’ and by clear implication not the government either, which brought them into being and has been threatening to either abolish or emasculate them for some time. So please don’t treat us as if we were stupid: we know which way is up and how hierarchies work.
We have also borne witness over many years to the ways in which government incite LEAs to behave in the despotic ways that they do, and assume powers they do not possess, to which end keeping them in such egregious ignorance of the law that is supposed to define their duties has been very convenient for advancing the population control agendas, that same population successfully prevented government from imposing in law in 1870. The government was defeated in 1870 over making school, not merely education compulsory. This resulted in the 140 year old big lie that ‘school is compulsory’, or ‘compulsory school age’ to quote the phrase used over 80 times in the 1996 education act being made to do the job the law was prevented from doing honestly by force of public opposition to such totalitarianism. The grossly leading questions in the Badman so-called ‘review’ questionnaire to LAs included asking them what measures they were already taking to overcome our resistance to their illegal monitoring of us, so we understand full well why LAs behave the ways they are intended and incited to behave. By the same token government should have no problem persuading them of their proper functions, should it choose to do so.
Now the point at which I get murderously mad is with the suggestion that, while current levels of intrusion into family and citizen privacy would not have been tolerated a few decades ago, ie. closer in time to when a generation fought and died to supposedly defend freedom and their ‘free country’, this is not the situation now. I agree this is not the situation now, but this is a problem in itself which needs urgent remedy and a reawakening of the indispensability of essential liberty, not capitulation to the situation as a given we have to work within. My mother’s favourite brother, and Uncle I never knew, knowingly went to his death in World War 2. He phoned my mother up the night before the mission to tell her he didn’t expect to return, and he didn’t. Why do we imagine he did that? What did he think he was doing? Wasn’t it the defence of a free country, ‘for freedom’, that my parents’ generation were prepared to die for? And one generation on, am I to understand that it is OK for me to turn my back on that hope, that sacrifice, that desperate to the death fight for freedom?
Sorry, no can do. ‘See to it that they did not die in vain’ it exhorts in stone above the roll of honour bearing his name. That’s why you are hearing from me now, and why those of us who have learned the true meaning and indispensability of liberty from our own children, will never cease this fight to preserve it for future generations. That is why there can be no compromises with it without overwhelmingly compelling evidence for the necessity, which there is not, nor probably ever could be.
I understand that Lord Lucas and I were born in the same year, and that he has a special interest in liberty, so would rather assume that his reported dislike of this creeping acceptance of state erosion of liberty extends as far as actively fighting it, rather then merely regretting it and being prepared to work on such a slippery slope? For me it cannot be a question. You see I have witnessed what freedom from schooling has resulted in for my children, and so I have seen the unimaginable benefit that my Uncle believed in enough to die for them, but without ever knowing it himself. If he and so many others could do that for us, I have no choice but to continue their fight when called upon to do so, this time against an enemy within! I cannot and will not compromise with those pure principles, and no one has any right to do so.
Thank you for advising us that now is the time to be getting a discussion going about home education in order to set the terms of the debate rather than wait for a prejudicial ‘debate’ to be started by government. I agree. I think that when we win this battle, which has been fought against us flat out with everything the government could throw at us, every dirty trick in the book, the government, neither this one or the next, has any right to imagine it can merely pick up where this left off after a ‘decent’ interval. That the expectations of government are still being talked about in terms of erosions of liberty not enhancements of them prompts me to remind those present that victors do not then normally negotiate the terms of their own surrender to the vanquished! The Badman review announcement, and the disgusting manner of its introduction with the projection and incitement: ‘is home education a cover for child abuse?’ was experienced as harassment on top of years of being bugged by government for control over us, but this then turned into an exhausting year-long dirty war. There is no coming back from this for government that has lost, nor for any future pretenders to the throne. It will not be tolerated, it’s as simple as that. The effect of war is to politicise and empower those who fight, and that is what this government has done by declaring war on us. By now we all know perfectly well that government, of whatever party, does not work for us, it works for the elites that control it and it has ever been thus. We have puppet government that takes its instructions from Lisbon, and pretends it is domestic policy.
Even a cursory examination of European policy documents reveals this truth. That the Tory party hopes we will vote for it to then continue this war against us after a decent interval is unspeakably insulting. It also betrays an unshakeable conviction in a divine right to rule a subject people.
Apparently we have been told that ‘We need to keep in mind that parliament are the ones that write the rules that will be applied to us’.
I think parliament needs to keep in mind that we are the ones that pay their salaries, and put them there, and that we could very easily lose interest in continuing to do so if they don’t start really working for us!
There are no OKish ways of being monitored by government, just as there is no ‘ish’ on the end of ‘free’. For over half a century LEAs have been precisely the local despotisms that government has wanted and engineered them to be. Change the culture of LAs and maybe we could talk then about better safeguarding, but not while they remain a threat to children in their own right, as does government itself, the culture of which would also have to change.
Many of us have also come to recognise that there is a sickening pretence and hidden agendas behind so much public policy supposedly designed to protect us and our children. The children’s database starts to look not just like the paedophile’s address book by default of stupidity, but by deliberate design. Children’s Rights itself starts to resemble a trojan horse when you see the principle use it is put to to drive a wedge between parents and their children, encouraging the idea that for example children’s rights have to be balanced against parental rights, as if there were some necessary conflict between the two. Many of us are not prepared to enter into the phoney debates that dignify cynical, foot-in-your-door instruments like ‘Every Child Matters’, and when we start to look at some of the architects of these policies, their records can shock, and enrage, as we really start to see the real world of elite monopolisation of the abuse of all children, and the projection of that onto their victims.
The people now know too much for government to continue business as usual into an indefinite future, but we also recognise that power and privilege is mightily afraid of being rumbled through the ICT revolution and that it is fighting for its very survival, which explains the unprecedented increased surveillance and repression, and draconian legislation granting fiat powers to ministers thus eradicating any last vestiges of an already compromised rule of law. I haven’t heard any Tory promises of repeals of such legislation. The two party system looks remarkably like a hard cop, soft cop double act to me, when all it can promise us is war against us.
For those MPs who have real integrity and a desire to serve the will of the people as it has been so unambiguously expressed by home educators for example, I would urge consideration of standing as an independent, if parliament is not to descend into even further disrepute and menacing of the people. The operation of the party whip over the CSF Bill has been a revolting spectacle, and is a travesty of the idea of having a representative in parliament.
State compulsion schooling is and always was a toxic institution and a scam. The state, as John Stuart Mill well understood, has no business involving itself in providing and compelling education, and he rightly described such governance as tyranny. Just as we are being told now that the regulation of home education is inevitable because the idea is in the air, thus also was the vacuousness of the excuses for foisting state compulsion schooling on an unwilling population that were doing just fine without it in 1870. ‘An idea whose time has come’, frothed Mathew Arnold. Well, only after long war of attrition, just as now. This will not do, and we are not falling for it.
[All those who wish to add their support to this open letter are invited to do so in the comments box below]
This article is re-blogged from HEF, where it attracted 102 comments.
