Drip by drip state intervention

State intervention into people’s lives has been ratcheted up to a new level of intrusion with Ed Balls announcing a plan to surveil problem families in their own homes.

The Family Intervention Projects will allow authorities to spy on families ensuring that their children are being raised in accordance with state dictat. 2,000 families are to initially enrolled into the scheme with a further 20,000 due to join next couple of years. Participants will be forced to sign a ‘behaviour contract’ with the government known as Home School Agreements before the start of every year. Authorities will make regular checks on these households and the installation of CCTV in each home will allow state surveillance of families 24/7 to ensure they raise their children correctly. In tandem, people regarded by government to be 'responsible' will be encouraged to spy on other such families and report any misconduct so that they can be similarly surveilled.

Regretably, the Tories, currently waiting in the wings to take over the reigns next year, say that the scheme doesn’t go far enough and is ‘too little, too late’ so it’s going to be more of the same from them.

Clearly, those considered to be ‘dysfunctional’ by government are to be placed is state custody and many may welcome the thought who regard the Jones’ at number 24 to be a bloody nuisance having their kids rake the streets all night and who habitually leave all their litter in the front garden. But many respondents to an article on this very initiative published in the Daily Express today, http://www.express.co.uk/comments/viewall/115736 see the much darker, Orwellian reality to this - and rightly so. Just where does it stop and just what might the government next deem to be socially unacceptable - sticking NO2ID stickers on the window or inviting members of action groups to meetings at your home?

Our growing totalitarian state is being enforced in a drip by drip manner, starting at the bottom of the scale with initiatives that are unlikely to create too much opposition, but as a successive generation sees state CCTV surveillance in selected people’s homes as the norm, a platform is then already established upon which a further level of state intervention in our private lives can be constructed and so on and so forth.

That is, until we say NO MORE!