Quick, intervene

We may as well not have an economic crisis on.

Everyone is desirous of taking lots of money to intervene in families.

I mean, families!

Once upon a time, you might say a cheery hello to the bobby on the beat, you might give the bin men a pound or two at Christmas, you might thank your lucky stars that the street lights were shining through the darkness of winter.

Now it looks like the latest buzzthought is that, by INTERVENING in families, the world's evils will be swiftly brushed away.

Expensive? Yes.

Involving armies of box-tickers? Yes.

Legions of social workers, school nurses, doctors, police? Likely.

What was once corrected or encouraged by your Ma and Pa will now be surveilled and standardised by your lovely local authority worker. What a parent did will be done by the ever-knowledgeable non-expert inexpert expert with possibly a day's training in what a child (or indeed a family) should not be and should be doing.

Parents will be defunct. Useful only to support the length and breadth of the increasing rotten structure with more and more of the money they should be employing to live on and enjoying generally.

Mothers and Fathers will be stakeholders (hopefully) in children who are to be reduced to a pennyworth of commodity. Trimmed and revisioned, little ones can step out into the world in the safe and wondrous knowledge that they have passed muster with council officials and the world in general before they take their exalted places as batteries for the masters to drain.

Does your child need intervention?

She needs it like she needs a hole in the head.

Does your son have to endure bossy-boots professionals crawling all over his personal life?

No way.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner said in Freakonomics that parenthood has changed from an art into a science.

We are now the subjects in a gigantic experiment.

It's said that those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

They must hate 21st century Britain then.