Elderly set free, but children shackled

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Here's an eye-catching initiative for you: the Government wants to nationalise the child-rearing business. Not for nothing was the old ministry for education renamed the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Clearly, its scope is going to extend far outside the classroom. Its Secretary of State, the chief Brownite Ed Balls, having lost confidence in the private sector distribution of discipline, psychological stability and social behaviour, is to bring the free market in domestic responsibility under centralised supervision. According to the advance leaks, tomorrow's announcement of the Brave New Childhood will be what they call far-reaching: it will reach right into the living rooms of every household that the ministry believes to be failing the nation. It isn't just schools that will have targets now: the performance of parents will be monitored and assessed on detailed goals for their children's achievement set by Whitehall. Children from "disadvantaged" (euphemism for delinquent) homes may be whipped away to state nurseries as young as two, presumably in order to remove them forcibly from the influence of their useless families. And parents who do not demonstrate sufficient "engagement" with their child's academic performance will be... well, we haven't heard all the details yet. Bizarrely, this Orwellian package of state-monopoly child production is being announced at the same time as a quite antithetical new approach to the way elderly people are to be treated by the Government. From next April, it seems that old people are to be given quite unprecedented freedom to spend the care allowances which are provided for them as they see fit, rather than as social workers believe is best for them. If this plan turns out to be as radical as it is cracked up to be - always an open question with this Government - it will be a genuine step away from the most pernicious aspects of welfare dependency: passivity and the loss of self-determination. According to advance reports, old people are to be given the money, the actual money, to which they are entitled, and permitted to use it to purchase more or less food or nursing or cleaning help if and when they want. They will be free to choose their home helps and carers and to decide the priorities of their domestic lives. Imagine that. Grown-ups being able to decide for themselves who is to help them and how much care they require. Of course, they may occasionally make eccentric or unwise choices, as adults - especially elderly ones - sometimes do. They may even be prey to grasping relatives if they are in possession of cash rather than simply on the receiving end of administrative judgments. But that is a risk that needs to be taken, says the Blairite Health Secretary Alan Johnson, if older people who wish to live independently, but need some assistance to do it, are to be given the control over their own lives which they have a right to expect. Sounding for all the world like a Tory think-tank report or, dare I say it, a commentator on this newspaper, Mr Johnson hails this move as a "radical transfer of power from the state to the public". Everyone, he says, has the right to "self-determination and maximum control over their own lives". Except parents, apparently - since Mr Johnson's colleague over at the Department for Interfering in Family Life is busily laying out his blueprint for 24/7 surveillance of parenting techniques and a kind of Maoist re-education programme for families who do not subscribe to the official view of what is good for them and for society. Some contradiction here, surely? No coincidence, of course, that these two distinct and contradictory philosophical tendencies are emanating respectively from the most high-profile Brownite and Blairite exponents in the Cabinet. While Mr Balls is constructing more Brownian mechanisms of central control over his area of social policy, Mr Johnson is beavering away at dismantling overweening state controls in his. I think we have a right to ask where this Government thinks it is going. Are we still in the (Blairite) business of reforming public services and welfare programmes to give more power to people over their individual conditions? Or are we heading for a galvanised (Brownite) commitment to the belief that the state can and should intervene in every aspect of national life which is thought to be unsatisfactory?