In Loco Parentis

As we know, the Vicar of Downing Street has little patience with the idea of innocence. In this fallen world, into which his reverence has been thrust in order to suffer for all our sakes, there can be no true innocents; there can only be the guilty, the suspected and the potentially suspected. Accordingly, the Government intends to set up yet another database so as to ensure that all of Britain's under-eighteens are properly categorised. The database will be linked to lots of other databases, will be voluntary until the rules of the game are changed, and "will provide a complete directory from birth, including all the agencies with which children have been in contact and whether they have had an assessment as a result of concerns about their development". Expressions of concern will be enablified by a facility for viewers of the database to flag up a problem, a suspected problem, or a potential suspected problem. Two such flags could result in an investigation. It is to be hoped that any instant and utter protectiveness by police would be more economical than the seventy-eight officers who were recently required to arrest a man and some placards, and more restrained than the two hundred whose recent dawn raid may have led some young people of a certain religious persuasion to doubt the customary self-restraint and institutional anti-racism of the great British police. Given such glowing examples of level-headedness and regard for human rights, it can only be a matter of time before we begin to see the sequels and extended, expanded remakes of this little incident, which took place around the time his reverence was admiring Margaret Thatcher's third election victory.