Communicating With The Young

Even at the best of times, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a politician trying to “communicate with the young”. But Ed Balls managed to take this one step further by engaging a bunch of manufactured gangsters to spearhead a ‘beat cyber-bullying’ campaign, as depicted in the artist’s impression opposite. The fake hoodlum standing alongside bully-boy Balls is Dappy, of N-Dubz, who shortly afterwards stole the mobile number of a Radio 1 listener who sent in a less than complimentary message about him, and used it to harass her, culminating in sending her a death threat. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Behind the farce though, lurk more serious problems. How did we reach this sorry state where, in order to try and convince school children to stop bullying each other, it seems like a good idea to enlist the help of dubious role models who make a living pretending to be (or in this case actually being) illiterate thugs?

Balls, in his role as Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, presides over the state machinery that’s entrusted by most (and imposed by force on others, if he gets his way) with the education of their children. This is carried out in institutions (that’s the schools part) that tend to breed a culture bullying and violence – hence the need for this kind of campaign, and for metal detectors. Children are sectioned off into groups, all the same age, and left to formulate their own social structure, culture and rules, Lord of the Flies style, while lone adults known as teachers attempt to impose order – a task made more difficult as Ed and co relentlessly continue to turn the teaching profession into a job of administering tests, ticking boxes and imparting snippets of politically correct knowledge meticulously detailed by Westminster bureaucrats. Any other adults are suspected paedophiles, only allowed within a mile of children if armed with a “CRB check” – proof they haven’t been caught yet, and a nice little money-spinner for various parties too.

In the meantime, ever-younger children are force-fed sex, violence and “gangsters are cool” by the media and the music industry, and while the government Ed is a prominent member of meets the demands of this industry by imposing ill-conceived legislation to prop up it’s failing 20th century business model, Ed himself acknowledges the failure of the whole system by standing there next to one of these self-styled gangsters in a desperate and doomed attempt to get a message across to the inmates of his failing schools.

So there’s the schools part. What about children and families? Hang on a minute, aren’t they the same thing – aren’t children part of families? You might think so, but Balls is very keen of late on positioning himself as an arbitrator between parents and their children, as if he knows best and has some kind of right to say so. Phrases like “striking a balance between the rights of parents and the rights of children” crop up frequently in the rhetoric of Ed and his cronies. What? But in Ed’s world, families are not to be trusted with their children – they need to be monitored and inspected to be sure they’re not beating and starving them, or worse still teaching them things not in keeping with the politically-motivated dumbed-down drivel proscribed by the DCSF. Do you think it’s an accident that Schools comes in between Children and Families in the department’s title? I’m not so sure.

The modus operandi is the same as what we’re seeing with the dubious spectre of terrorism that seems to have us cowering, snivelling and slipping further into a police state for our own protection. In the past, when there was a real threat in the form of the IRA, this kind of thing would have properly been seen as giving in to the terrorists, letting them win. But not when it suits the agenda of a government obsessed with controlling everything and everyone. Likewise with children, one-off incidents are whipped up into a media frenzy and used to justify all manner of state intrusion where it doesn’t belong, all in the name of protection.

I think the Dappygate fiasco perfectly sums up this government and the nasty culture they’ve nurtured – characterised by bullying and incompetence, and like the majority of people in this country I can’t wait to see the back of them.