ContactPoint

Via No2ID, my attention is drawn to this article by Jenni Russell.

Imagine that, as an adult, a health problem or argument at home means you are not working effectively. You or your boss decide you need help. Then you find that before you can be offered a counsellor, physio, or executive coach, you must submit to an intensive interrogation about every aspect of your life, from your sexual experiences, early attachments, friendships, peer groups, fears, motivations, drug use and relationships with parents and siblings, to your family’s income, spending, history of illness, and its size, culture and routines.

That’s only the start. The account of this interrogation is to be held on a national database, and the fact that it exists can be shared with every public service you use: doctors, hospitals, educational bodies, social workers, or the police. Indeed, if you want extra help from any of these services you’ll be told it’s in your interests to allow all these professionals to read your interrogation, because it’s only if they have a holistic understanding of your problems that they’ll be able to help you. And to make it easier for them to discuss you if they need to, someone has set up a handy computer file that they can all consult, giving your address, where you work, and contact numbers for everyone else who deals with you.

This is not a distant fantasy. Only one element of this scenario is inaccurate, and that’s that it applies to adults. This is the system of intrusion and surveillance which will be imposed on all England’s schoolchildren later this year. While we have been worrying about ID cards, the government has been quietly using its statutory powers to collect an unprecedented range of information on every element of our children’s lives.

To say that this is chilling is to understate by a parsec or two. As an adult, faced with such intrusion, I would tell them where to stick their database – as, indeed, I have done with the NHS spine (with the blessing of my then GP who was equally disturbed by the whole data mining behaviour of HMG). Children, however, are softer targets and are more malleable, so will be prepared for a life of intrusive surveillance having known nothing else. This dystopia was once merely the outpourings of the fevered imaginations of science fiction writers. I know there’s an old adage about today’s SciFi being tommorrow’s reality, but this is one too far.

All 11 million children are going to have their contact details, with links to the public services they use and the individuals who treat them, held on the hugely expensive and insecure Contact-Point database. Then, to add to the breadth of knowledge the state makes available on a child, it’s estimated that for a third to a half of children there will be depth: the eight-page interrogation known as CAF, or Common Assessment Framework. That’s now what the government recommends carrying out for any child who isn’t flourishing, and who has additional needs – perhaps due to dyslexia, hearing problems, depression, bullying, or disability.

As regular readers will be aware, I don’t have children. Regular readers will also be aware that a little under a year ago, I finally left Albion for France. If I was a young parent now, I would be looking to do just that as soon as humanly possible. Anything to avoid my children ending up on this insidious database and subject to profiling by the agents of the state. This, with the added benefit of growing up bilingual.

At Cambridge, Ross Anderson, professor of computer security, is equally scathing. He says the government is attempting mechanised compassion. The databases are a darkness at the heart of state; a belief that if we could just know everything about everybody, everything would work.

A darkness at the heart of the state indeed, but then it is a dark state, so a black heart is what we should expect. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Labour will not reverse this;

Well, there’s a surprise.

…only the Tories might. They promise to review CAF database, ditch ContactPoint for a small, targeted database, and invest in strengthening people’s relationships instead.

They might. If they keep their promises, then good. The sooner this wicked administration is removed from power, the better for the British people. But with three main parties that look much like the pigs and humans in the final lines of Animal Farm, the future doesn’t look bright…