Taking yourself to the vet

Been a delay in posting for the last week or so, technical difficulties. Meaning a mild bout of depression. Had it since my twenties and it’s never properly gone away. Think it’s related to the kids and the fact of living apart from them.

All that aside I was making an effort to tidy the house and listening to the radio, maybe radio three or BBC Manchester, and they carried a report on the news that the NSPCC had objected to the government’s recently announced parent/adult vetting plans.

For those of you who don’t live in the UK, the NSPCC is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (how rich the world is in irony) and has proud and distinguished history of scaremongering in general and bullying the working class in particular. The vetting plans are proposed by the government for any adult who has ‘frequent and intensive’ contact with children, to protect from the possibility of cruelty and abuse.

How you define child cruelty depends entirely on the extent to which you can enforce your own values, and in turn on the relationship between those values and the conditions in which you live. As far as the NSPCC are concerned the majority of the world’s poor are guilty of child abuse, not least because they define childhood as an inherently vulnerable state requiring protection. In the UK they sidestep the issue of evidence, the exact magnitude of the risk, and the consequences of getting involved.

Yeah, I remember the protection myself and my friends needed when we spent the summer holidays roaming for miles, getting into trouble, falling out of trees, trespassing on school grounds, stopping round at mates’ houses containing all kinds of undesirable working class men and women. Took risks, made mistakes, that’s how you learn. We knew who the miserable old codgers were, and the dodgy geezers, and the he’s-alright-but-make-sure-you-don’t-get-left-on-your-own-with-him guy. We knew who they were and our parents knew who they were. Of course shit happened, as kids we knew that. We knew about violence and abuse and neglect but we didn’t frame it in those terms. We knew some of our classmates kept secrets. But the main thing is they survived, they found their way through. They didn’t think of themselves as damaged or vulnerable and no-one’s life was in danger. If they were your mates you hated their parents as much as they did and didn’t quite understand how they could also still love them. Mixed up, crazy world; still don’t understand it.

The point is, if a kid’s life is in danger fair do’s if the state gets involved, but we have to be clear by what is meant by danger and what alternative is being offered. Looked after children as they’re now called (couldn’t carry on calling it being in care because it was obvious to everyone care is the one thing it didn’t do) are the only group of children in the UK who’s life chances go down compared to their peers. That includes their peers who are in abusive households but stay at home with support.

Children are resilient, families are resilient, extended families even more so. They’re resilient because they’re not alone, they have a community around them. Destroy that and you might as well take every child that’s born into the custody of the state. Of course things go wrong, that’s life, but you can’t prevent most of it after the fact. After the fact of dismantling informal support networks. After the fact of politically, socially and culturally persecuting people and living off the fear that that generates. After the fact of hundreds of years of exploitation of the working class, including their children. After the fact that every single person in the UK lives off the labour of children in the developing world. After the fact that the welfare of children is an economic more than a moral crusade.

In our hearts we know this and the NSPCC knows this, but only for its own kind. I wonder, does its objection to the government’s vetting plans have something to do with the fact that it will affect middle class parents as much as working class ones.