A fortnight ago, The Spectator asked if Cameron was fit to fight? We wondered if he had the gumption to use the political moment created by the riots to push
through the radical reforms the country needs. So, it’s only fair to note that the government has today actually done something—as opposed to just talking about—the excesses
of the human rights culture.
The Department for Education has stopped the implementation of new regulations that would require teachers to log every incident in which they ‘use force’ with children. These new rules would have made teachers record every time they had pulled apart two kids in a corridor or intervened to break-up an over-enthusiastic game of football.
The withdrawal of these regulations will cause a political stink. Already, the two coalition parties have had to agree to disagree on the matter. We can also expect howls of anguish from the human rights lobby in the coming days. But if these rules had come into force schools would have been even less inclined to deal with badly behaved pupils. Many teachers would have simply decided that it wasn’t worth the bother to break up playground fights and the like. The result would have been a further breakdown in discipline.
Michael Gove, the education secretary, has today also announced that as part of his work on reducing truancy, he is going to look at the sanctions that the courts have available to them to deal with the parents of truanting pupils. At the moment, the courts can impose fines but they have to be adjusted for income levels and so can often end up being so small—a couple of pounds—that they fail to act as any kind of deterrent.
I understand from Conservative sources that there is interest in the party about cutting off the welfare benefits of parents who refuse to do anything to make their children turn up at school. This idea, though, would be heavily opposed by the Liberal Democrats.
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