Well, that’s what Jenny McCartney argues in the Sunday Telegraph, anyway. McCartney argues that although stabbings of the kind that have dominated headlines in recent weeks remain extremely rare, there’s still no getting around the fact that “our children lead those of all the industrialised nations, by some distance, in teenage pregnancy, early and unprotected sex, smoking and drinking”, with obesity rapidly emerging as an additional concern.
But, she continues, beyond a shared emphasis on the importance of parental responsibility, Labour and Conservative policy on what to do about all this diverges sharply. Where the Conservatives “appear keen to return direct responsibility for bringing up children to parents, the extended family and the wider community of responsible adults, such as teachers”, Labour has developed proposals for a much more statist approach: a new, computerised ‘Children’s Index’.
Each file would contain records of a child’s health checks and other development. Doctors, schools and the police would be obliged to alert the database with a wide range of “concerns”, and two such incidences of concern could be sufficient to trigger an official investigation. The existence of this database would be closely linked to Mr Blair’s explicit determination to identify and intervene in a minority of so-called “problem” children at a very early stage, even before they committed any crime. Parents could be compelled to attend state-run parenting classes, or accept counselling from an army of state-employed psychologists or “super-nannies”. Indeed, upon his return from his summer holiday last year, Mr Blair indicated that he believed preventative action could be taken “pre-birth” if necessary, presumably by detecting and targeting pregnant mothers whom the state deemed likely to become a bad parent.
This debate is about more than just the obvious undertones of Minority Report. It’s also about whether the state can actually have much effect at the front line of behaviour, values and social paradigms. So far, the evidence – on a whole host of issues, including not just antisocial behaviour but also safe sex, reducing personal carbon emissions and tackling root causes of radicalisation as part of anti-terrorism efforts – is patchy. Learning to do better is likely to become a key skill for governments to master. On which note, Demos has a new report out on the timely subject of the collaborative state.
