Spinning, bumping and grinding

So Mr. Badman has noted the serious interest taken in his pseudo-intellectual recommendations and the furious pace of home educators who have brilliantly and effectively dismantled the edifice on which they stand (or totter).

He has had to shout for his pals in the LAs to come and help him as he sinks further into the mire upon which he set out his stall.

If you take a report so poorly written that becomes a platform upon which a government builds changes in the (already perfectly good) law, and in the report you use dodgy statistics, irrational proposals, hopeless illogic, and seek reckless destruction of laws that serve us well by providing a balance between the power of the state (local authorities) and the power of the people (parents), then you can expect to be questioned, have your work eyed up like a stripper's g-string, and thoroughly and roundly criticised.

That we allow a man who is so blatantly and obviously prejudiced to write such damning and completely inane and dangerous drivel is a strike against the heart of this country.

That he has the nerve (I nearly said balls!) to flail about like a drowning weasel to ask for more evidence to back up his insanity is another strike against the living tissue of this land.

That he is allowed more time to receive this help, to regroup his forces of darkness to continue this disgusting and evil power-play against law-abiding, caring parents is a thrust of the dagger down into the very soul of Britain.

So let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes. How many consultations? How many ultra vires LAs? How many happy children who home educate? How many home educators on the review panel?
How much money has been drained out of the coffers for this utter vile travesty? How many children are better off for this DCSF and its spin meisters?

Consultations? Four or five. Others that concern home educators. Too damn many. We actually have lives, you know.

Ultra vires LAs? Dozens? I have been a member of a few lists for four years and can recall agonised parents shouting for help so many times. My own LA representative lied to me about having the right to come into my house (but, cunningly, I had checked with a member of a national home education group so I knew that she had no right). She lied to me. A public servant, whose rations I help to pay for, brass-faced and staring me in the eyes, LIED to me.

Happy home educating children? I don't know an unhappy one, and have never heard of a child who doesn't unfold like a pinched plant leaving the darkness and reviving in the sun as they grow into home education.

Home educators on the review panel? None. Eh? Yes, none. The true experts. The non-school, home educating as I live and breath experts. Representation in Badman's group of bad advisors? Not one.

Tax payers' money? Well, my 88 year old mother probably contributed her share. The bill will add to about £275,000. Of course, this is a guess; informed by Tanya Byron's equally stupid review of computer games. We, who pay for these things, don't know the true total because the DCSF won't tell us. Telling us how much we've coughed up is a form of harassing and vilifying Badman apparently.

How many children are better off? None. In fact, they are worse off. Quite a few concerned mothers have told me that their children are terrified to see officials alone, don't want to be showing their work, don't want to perform for schooly agents like performing fleas, and are scared of the Badman.

They've cried themselves to sleep.

Cried. Children. Shed tears.

Some of them are petrified that they will be forced - frog-marched - back to school from which safe and glorious hell hole they had previously been removed because they were in danger.

Safeguarding?

Yeah, right.

Pull the other one.

Helpful comments from 'Just Law'

Baroness Helena Kennedy has produced a hum-dinger of a book called 'Just Law.'

Here are two snippits from it.

'Sir Peter Heap, a former ambassador, suggested in an article in the Guardian on 2 October 2003 that 'the whole system of intelligence gathering is all too often prone to producing inadequate, unreliable and distorted assessments, often at considerable cost...''

'Sources that claimed to be reliable were often being paid substantially and had incentives to lie.'

Of course, in law, these sources would be totally discredited. Their testimony would be struck off and overlooked. The sources' reputations would be finally and absolutely tarnished and soiled, and no one would even think of asking their opinions on anything, probably not even something as trivial as how long to boil an egg.

Would that the government followed the rules.

Here we have a huge document, the Home Education Review by Graham Badman - paid for by taxpayers' and condoned by the DCSF. The Secretary of State for the DCSF accepted all of the recommendations on the same day that the report was released to the dismay and detriment of home educating families who had no right of reply at all. The old email address used by home educators to send material to the DCSF was, apparently, staffed by people who were unconcerned that a minority group was being flayed alive and couldn't even raise a voice, let alone a finger, to defend themselves. The DCSF staff didn't want to know. No one seems to have thought anything through. No one seems to have checked the obviously flawed statistics. No one seems to have realised that the recommendations will cause a fundamental shift in the relationship between person and state with the state irreparably damaged at the end of the earthquake (or maybe they have).

With Tanya Byron's 'review' into the availability of inappropriate digital material available to young people costing £275,000, are we truly to believe that the Badman review (as it is unaffectionately called) will roll in at the comparatively miniscule price of £72,000?
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/30355/Byron-Review-cost-Government-275000
I think not.

As Walter Sobchak in the movie The Big Lebowski says to the funeral director who wants him to pay a huge amount for 'our most modestly priced urn',
"GOD DAMN IT! Look, just because we're bereaved, that doesn't make us saps!"

So, look, just because we're home educating, that doesn't make us saps!

Has the government learned nothing from the years of trying to lassoe home educators, attempting to run them in the same deep grooves as school families follow, to smear and blacken their reputations, to call them abusers and only in it to avoid truancy fines? Do you not know I would shovel shit in hell to pay truancy fines if it saved my children from one moment of discomfort, of the torment that they endured in those swill houses called schools? Do you know nothing? You know nothing, nothing.

You don't know me. You don't know all the 'me's' who make up 'us' - the home educating community. You know nothing; you know absolutely nothing.

Once again, a quote from 'Just Law' : 'The principles of equality before the law and of fairness demand that we extend the same rights to everyone. Whenever we deny to one class of suspects rights that we treat as essential for others, we act unfairly. especially when that class is politically vulnerable, or identifiable racially or by religious or ethnic distinction.'

With a little tweaking, that quotation could apply to home educators. We are being denied rights that are extended to other parents: rights that are treated as essential for all other parents (parents of schooled children) and thereby politicians are acting unfairly, and there is no doubt that home educators are politically vulnerable, and we are certainly identifiable because our children are out and about in the free air and not cooped up in some noisy, horrid-smelling classroom prison.

We are vulnerable but we have the hearts of the strongest lions, those most mighty fighters. We are militant in defense of our young. We are determined not to see our children's lives morph into some freak show to please an ever-greedy-for-circuses populace and their masters.

You do not know us and our strength. Our might. Our force.

But you will.