Perhaps before implementing this policy the UK government could read the final report from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools. To say that taking kids from their families isn’t a good idea is putting it mildly.
But, of course, if we had such a hotline we’d be calling in the UK government.
So I’m not engaging in a conspiracy theory about governments trying to encourage terrorist attacks to justify more repressive policies, but the effect of policies like this one is exactly that. Orwell’s fictional world is one in which Machiavellian actors at the top intentionally plan perpetual war to keep the people in line. In the real world people act in exactly the same way, but mostly are just too stupid to think through what they are doing.
Excuse me, I think you mean it is an Etonian world view. Eric Blair went to Eton, 1984 has dystopic elements of both Eton College and the BBC. The Party treatment of thoughtcrime is basically senior Etonians torturing fags for not doing their bidding fast/well enough, and the distinction between the Party and the Proles is actually about Etonians in Eton (the town itself) where they don’t interfere with the “proles” (townies) but do interfere with their own.
Blair/Orwell called himself a socialist, but his idea of Soviet tyranny was probably based on his own schooldays at Wellington and Eton.
And of course, as with all the other orwell-inspired laws that Westminster has put in place, we can be sure that this vaguely worded legislation will be used far beyond its initial targets.
I’m calling it now. This will be used on protesters, civil society and other ideological enemies first. After all, the UK government is actually quite keen on religious fundamentalists. We do trade deals with them and sell them arms when they’re in charge of Saudi Arabia and the other gulf monarchies, or we arm them and point them towards secular governments in Syria, (and Afghanistan in the '80s).
I can’t quite make sense of your criticism of the topic.
We’ve seen the arbitrary overreactions from schools who have been briefed and trained ‘how to spot radicalisation’ treating children mentioning ‘eco-terrorism’ in class as potential victims of terroristic radicalisation. Schools who’s explanation is that they are required to report all instances of the use of such language and treat them with zero tolerance.
Now we learnt hat there is legislation, which you condemn, that might remove children from their parents for similar behaviour without any transparent legal process and your first comment on the subject is to criticise the reporting of such as clickbait because it does not fully capture the complexity of the process of judicial review to your liking.
FTA:
essentially giving courts and law enforcement an absolute free pass to deny the court open access and review of the very intelligence that landed the case before it in the first place. This is a memo designed to create a court system by which Muslim parents will lose their children and won’t even be told why, or have the opportunity to rebut evidence against them, as no evidence need be presented.
This would seem to be the crux. Why are you focusing so immediately on the process of judicial review?
Serious question. I acknowledged your criticism of the legislation (which I imagine implies your contempt for the type of behaviour which the Tories seek to encourage) but can’t quite see why you’ve chosen the ancillary component of the piece, the judicial review process, as a hook upon which to hang the rest of the article as clickbait.
And even if we are to accept your criticism of the article being unclear on the official Judicial review process, I’m not really even sure it constitutes being germane to the central (or even really a tangential) point of Cory’s article…
“… now the other shoe has dropped, with the Family Division of the Judiciary promising to steal those children from their parents.”
Which is absurd - and not what the Judiciary are even able to do.
No, we didn’t. This isn’t new legislation - the only new part is the judicial guidance, which is, in itself, a reasonable response to an appalling situation. My objection is to suddenly blaming the judges who are, by definition, impartial.
Fair enough, many of them are. Doctorow’s error is confusing the “Ministry of Justice” with the Family Division - which is a system of courts. But he has the excuse of not living here.
Cory increasingly proves that if you try to fight hyperbole with hyperbole, you end up sounding exactly like Fox News. Which shouldn’t be that surprising.
Would it be OK if they modded the law(s) to take all kids away from any & all parents who practice religion? Some of us (you know, atheists & Pastafarians) would really rather not allow the continued practice of brainwashing and indoctrination that takes place in a rather large percentage of all households.
Cory lived in the UK for a long time. He only moved back to North America this past summer, after living in London for quite some time (since… 2008 I think?)
I guess this is like the sorting hat at hogwarts. LOL. :shrug: Typing too fast.
Perhaps I should have worded that better (!) but isn’t it true that the proceedings won’t be open to the parents to participate in? I can see how you might think this is not ‘not open’ as there is judicial review and whatnot but surely the terrible part, about which we are all surely aghast, is the closed nature of the proceedings to the family?
ETA:
And yet… still they participate. How unjust must a law be before a decent human-judge-being refuses to preside over it?
Raising children in many parts of the world is considered to be a process of “socialising” them to the values of their community. This tends to be a conditioning - or brainwashing - exercise in any case. I find the use of money to be based upon superstition as well, which would result in more than 99% of the human population being shipped offworld.
As well-intentioned as they may be, I try to avoid reactionary solutions, as a general principle. It tends to result in merely swapping one arbitrary social schema for another.
