It’s Time to Engage with the Bigger Political Picture!

CWS Bill is “Labour’s most draconian” amongst several ‘Tyrannical’ Bills currently before Parliament

What’s been said?

Former political strategist and part-time citizen journalist JJ Stark joined some significant dots in his 30 May Substack post Every Bit of ‘Tyrannical’ Legislation the Labour Government has in the Works. Four months later his observations remain relevant.

Stark systematically worked his way through four bills, summarising the aims of each piece of legislation, highlighting those clauses of greatest concern to him, and saying how close each Bill is to being enacted.

First in his list comes the Crime & Policing Bill, which was at the time awaiting its Second Reading in the House of Lords. Of particular concern are the dangerous and intentionally ambiguous Respect Orders, increased police access to DVLA data and the Police usage of reportedly inaccurate facial recognition technology. It has since been announced that usage of the latter is to be extended.

“The bill contains some arguably solid ideas,” Stark opined, “But, true to form, ministers, civil servants, and OPC [government] lawyers have slipped in vague clauses that quietly hand the state sweeping new powers.” [Emphasis added]

Next Stark addressed the Employment Rights Bill – which started in the Commons and has its Third Reading in the Lords timetabled for this coming Wednesday (3 September). Noting how this Bill is likely to upset the balance of power between employers and employees, Stark expressed particular concern about the Harassment by Third Parties clause regarding potential censorship of speech.

Unsurprisingly, the Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Bill was next to come in for scrutiny from Stark, and he didn’t mince his words:

“In reality, it may be Labour’s most draconian bill yet – something that dramatically expands state authority at the direct expense of parental rights.”

This one, as we know, is currently grinding its way through Committee Stage scrutiny in the Upper House and is due to debated next on Tuesday (3 September). Stark homed in on Clause 30’s requirement for local authority consent to remove a child from school in certain specified circumstances, carefully picking up the significance of the authorities’ desire to make their representatives rather than the parents the ones who decide what is in a child’s “best interests.”

He was quick to spot the lifelong implications of issuing children with consistent identifiers too (Clause 4), noting the view of Steve Topple in The Canary that these measures would treat children “less as members of a family and more as subjects of the state.”

Clause 32 is pithily described as “escalat[ing] the assault on home education.” Stark has a good grasp of the complexities of child protection, readily acknowledging that “where there’s abuse or neglect, the state has a role to play.” Nevertheless, he asserts:

“this Bill accommodates state intervention like never before, almost by default, not as a last resort.”

Breakfast clubs (Clause 27) come under his spotlight too, with the astute observation that:

“Labour is subtly redefining the parent-state relationship, turning citizens into collective providers for other people’s children – whether they agree or not.”

And his summary of the way Sara Sharif’s murder was appealed to at the launch of this Bill is pointed:

“Invoke tragedy. Expand state power. Shrink personal freedom.”

Finally, Stark turned to the Planning & Infrastructure Bill, also resuming its Lords Committee Stage after recess. Notably, he described “a governance model where ‘public good’ trumps personal ownership,” citing worrying details about potential compulsory purchase orders or powers of entry allowing officials to survey land before it’s ‘force-acquired.’

Why does it matter?

Stark is a thorough and perceptive analyst. Amidst the quiet advance of this “raft of new legislation across various sectors,” he’s spotted an overarching tendency to enlarge the powers of the state and override the freedom of the individual. He recognises that the civil service is “deeply politicised.” He ‘gets’ the shifting balance of power between family and state.

The usefulness of his article lies in the way that it sets the worrying details of the CWS Bill that we are so familiar with into the context of the bigger picture. This is exactly what is needed. Here are some reasons why.

Firstly, home educators have a tendency to disconnect their concerns from what else is going on in wider society. Life already keeps us busy, and our main focus is on the difficulties of DfE policy or hostile LAs. But the danger of failing to ground our concerns amongst those which wider society is grappling with is that we too readily appear to be outliers, rather than champions of personal responsibility and freedom for all.

A second advantage of engaging with the wider picture is that others – be they family members, neighbours, parents of schooled children or whoever – may more easily understand that what is happening for home educators is actually intensely relevant to them. For people are slowly becoming aware that there is a broader state assault on individual freedom and privacy.

For decades, home educators have perceived themselves as a misunderstood minority who, if it were only understood that they wanted the best for their children, would be respected and left alone. But since 2009 and Ed Ball’s initial attempt to bring in a national registration scheme for home educated children, it has become increasingly clear that the civil service and government after government are actually very uncomfortable with children being educated away from state oversight.

Surely, given everything else which is now happening, home educators should not be pretending that with a little effort on our part we can smooth out the road ahead. It is vital to recognise that in recent decades we have been seen as flies in the state’s ointment, and that the growing numbers of families opting out of their school system for whatever reason is causing the powers that be to want to suppress the problem before it undermines their objective of forcing every child into school.

Since Stark wrote his insightful analysis of these four Bills before Parliament, a new drive for a national digital ID system has been announced. Commenting on such proposals in a conversation with Rebecca Vincent of Big Brother Watch, former Labour Home Secretary, David Blunkett, recognised that connecting driving licence details with NHS data and even the existing Unique Pupil Number in a digital ‘wallet’ will create a system without a safeguard. He tried to mitigate that fear, but Vincent pushed back with “For us, the red line here is the question of mandatory and universal digital ID.”

It is clear that the CNiS registers as set out in the CWS Bill are an unashamed attempt at state surveillance of every home educated child. It has also now been confirmed by Baroness Smith of Malvern that the Single Unique Identifier will follow children as adults. Responding to points raised by Peers on the second day of the Committee Stage, she stated:

“I take the point about what happens at the age of 18. Of course, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, identified, if the consistent identifier is the NHS number, that obviously would continue into adulthood.”

It should be obvious by now that this Bill and the challenges faced by home educators in recent years are not isolated from a wider political narrative. The question is, can HE communities help others to see that what we have been battling for the last fifteen years has now been revealed to be part of a larger attempt to impose intrusive state oversight on every citizen – or, to put it another way, further steps on the journey described by Friedrich Hayek in his seminal 1944 work “The Road to Serfdom”?

What can I do?

Stark manages to capture something of the Blitzkrieg flavour of what has been going on. Read his round-up, and keep his approach in mind for any future conversations you may find yourself in with those outside the HE scene.

Despite the busyness of everyday life, try to keep an eye on wider news, noting examples where similar sorts of state overreach are taking place in other sectors.

It’s not always easy for the wider public to identify with protests or concerns about the CWS Bill in isolation, but the more the issues connect with their potential concerns about matters in general (increased data collection, protection of free speech or aspects of the Online Safety Act, perhaps) the easier it is to demonstrate that the issues raised for HEs by the Bill are actually a few dots in a much bigger picture that is directly and urgently relevant to us all.

Besides the articles linked to above, you might find some of the following useful as thought-provokers or discussion starters: