PARENTS MUST DO AS THEY'RE TOLD !

There was a time when we elected Governments to deal with matters to do with the running of the country. Those elected dealt with the defence of the realm, the national finance and economy and international trade; they also set overall policies and targets for national services such as health and education. Sadly, those days are long gone, and Governments now increasingly interfere in our everyday lives, claiming that they now what is best for the population who, by definition, must all be morons.

Yesterday, the High Court ruled that a fairly recent initiative that has led to parents being fined and pilloried for daring to take their children out of school during term-time has been wrongly applied. The Court effectively said that the local authorities and school heads, who have been merrily raking in the pennies from parents who have refused to kowtow to the diktats of these petty bureaucrats, have been acting well beyond their powers. One wonders if parents who have been forced to cough up hundreds of pounds may not now be demanding their money back, and one also wonders what the response will be.

Shockingly, the immediate reaction of the Government has been to say that they will have to change the law to ensure that they can continue to tell parents what they can and cannot do regarding their children's school attendance. The current law requires that parents ensure that their children attend 'regularly'; it seems that the Government will now change this to some form of wording which will make it ILLEGAL for children to be taken out of school in term time without absolute proof that the child is ill or for some other 'approved' purpose.

If this isn't dictatorship, I don't know what else to call it. Children are the responsibility of their parents, not of the state. Of course, parents should make sure that their children go to school regularly and the vast majority do; parents tend to have the best interest of their children at heart and know instinctively what is best for them, the Government does not. The Government has no knowledge of individuals and can only set frameworks which, by the very nature of frameworks, must have flexibility and room for manoeuvre. For Government to set down rules which will criminalise parents who refuse to accept life in a state-imposed straight jacket and dare to rebel would, itself, be criminal.

More and more, our personal, everyday lives are controlled by a handful of self appointed experts and by those in power who are sure that they know what is best for the rest of the population. Is it not time that the people who are so put upon make their voices heard and cry 'ENOUGH' ?