Monday 28 September 2009

Arm Against "The Parental State"

"From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions - objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child."

Helen Brook, letter to The Times, February 1980

In 1967, this weirdo handed out contraceptives to underage girls, behind the backs of their parents and their GPs. Most people were deeply shocked.

In 1995, the Tories gave her the CBE.

It is not yet clear whether this poor girl in Coventry was killed by the cervical cancer vaccine. But the wretched scheme itself - not the drug, but the scheme - is now back in the spotlight. We either have proper parents, accompanying their daughters to their family doctors in order to be vaccinated against cervical cancer. Or we have "The Parental State", vaccinating them at school without any parental involvement, when not also imposing ID cards, DNA databases, CCTV cameras, prolonged detention without charge, and all the rest.

But not, of course, actually running either schools or hospitals, nor railways, nor utilities. Yet they still have to fill up their time somehow. These are some of their ways of doing so. Another is the waging of pointless, unwinnable, and therefore endless wars.

6 comments:

  1. The Times archive for February 1980 contains no such letter.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's not online. So what? A lot of things aren't.

    ReplyDelete
  3. No such letter appeared in The Times in Feb 1980.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes it did. I have seen the paper copy. You are going to have to do better than this.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Peter Hitchens says it was on 16 February 1980, Ann Farmer says 10 December 1984. Do you know which?

    ReplyDelete