As Orwell warned, children now spy on adults

Brendan O’Neill says that New Labour is deploying Maoist tactics to use children’s ‘pester power’ to crack down on the ‘eco-crimes’ and alleged anti-social behaviour of their parents

When I was a child, ‘pester power’ meant stamping one’s feet in a shop. It involved little more than begging one’s mum in an irritating voice for the latest He-Man action figure or for one of those unusually thick pink milkshakes from a place called ‘McDonald’s’. It was a feeble force, this alleged power of the pest, easily squished by a clip around the lughole or by that most ominous threat issued by mums-in-distress: ‘Just you wait until your dad gets home…’

How times have changed. Today, ‘pester power’ is a powerful political tool. The New Labour government is explicitly recruiting children to its climate change and respect agendas — its illiberal, conformist, thought-policing programmes of ‘good behaviour’ promotion — in the hope that they might, quote unquote, ‘use their pester power in a positive way: reminding grown-ups how to behave’. After coating Britain in CCTV cameras, the government is now nurturing a battalion of Child Spies, an army of ethically minded Veruca Salts, to harry and hector the badly behaved adults of 21st-century Britain.

Earlier this month the New York Times reported the emergence in New York of ‘pint-size eco-police’: ‘very environmentally conscious children’ who ‘pour scorn’ on their parents for everything from leaving the lights on to failing to sort their egg boxes from their bottle tops when recycling the weekly rubbish. Experts refer to them as an ‘army of eco-kids’ who have been ‘steeped in environmentalism at school, in houses of worship, through scouting and even via popular culture’.

This is no American curiosity.