The nursery rhyme police - British parents to take lessons in reading and singing

Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said. Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children's future and the state must put them right, Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said. Their children's well-being is at risk 'unless we act', she declared. And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new 'parenting workforce' to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and 'supported'.

The call for state intervention in the minute details of family life followed a series of Labour efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children. Mrs Hughes has established a national curriculum to set down how babies are taught to speak in childcare from the age of three months. Her efforts have gone alongside a push by other ministers to determine exactly how parents treat their children down to how they should brush their teeth.

Tony Blair has backed the idea of 'fasbos' - efforts to identify and correct the lives of children who are likely to fail even before they are born - and new laws to compel parents to attend parenting classes are on the way. This autumn is likely to see an extension of parenting orders that can force parents to attend parenting classes so that they can be used on the say so of local councils against parents. For the first time, parenting orders are likely to be directed against parents whose children have committed no criminal offence.

The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair's 'national parenting academy', a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the 'parenting workforce'. Mrs Hughes said that it was necessary for children to develop 'emotional intelligence and flexibility, and to have good problem-solving and interpersonal skills too.' She added: 'These attitudes start with good family experiences, in the home, with strong, loving, aspirational parents. So supporting parents and providing good early years education can pay dividends here.'

Mrs Hughes said: 'It is now clear that what parents actually do has a huge impact on children's well-being and capacity to succeed, both at the time and in future. 'Some parents already know that reading and singing nursery rhymes with their young children will get them off to a flying start - often because this is how they themselves were brought up. 'For other parents without this inheritance these simple techniques are a mystery and are likely to remain so - unless we act and draw them to their attention.' She added: 'If friendly and skilful early years practitioners work in partnership with disadvantaged parents, as co-educators of their children, these gaps in children's development and achievement can be narrowed.'

The National Academy for Parenting Practitioner, Mrs Hughes said, would operate from next autumn to train a parenting workforce and 'support the Government's parenting agenda as it develops'. She did not mention any figures for the cost of the scheme.

Mrs Hughes condemned the way governments before 1997 thought they had no role in the upbringing of children, which it 'regarded as the entirely private arrangements families make.' She praised the Government's record of pouring billions into state benefits for single parents, into providing subsidies for childcare, into pushing mothers into work, and into the 'Sure Start' children's centres. 'Over the past 10 years what I have described is, I believe, an example of the enabling 21st century state in action,' Mrs Hughes said. Without Labour's policies, she said, 'we would be on the road to ruin, that is back to where we were 10 years ago.'

Mrs Hughes did not refer to independent reports on the success of Sure Start commissioned by Whitehall which say that despite £20 billion of planned spending it has been a failure in helping the most deprived children who are its target.

Critics of Government family policies condemned the 'nursery rhyme' intervention plan as intrusive and arrogant yesterday. Jill Kirby of the centre right think tank Centre for Policy Studies said: 'This is the micro-management of family life. 'They have told us the books that our children should read and how to brush their teeth. Now they tell us what we should sing to them. 'This is what happens when a government has failed to do anything at all about the real problems of family breakdown, fatherless families and neglect of children. It is setting about wasting its time and our money.'

Anastasia de Waal of the Civitas civic values study group said: 'The problem in the real world is not that people are bad parents but that they are not parenting at all. We know that some children hardly see their parents and many don't have two parents at all. 'This is just one more worthless scheme that will have no impact at all on children's lives.'

New powers for councils to impose parenting orders are expected to be announced in the Queen's Speech tomorrow. Part of Mr Blair's 'Respect Agenda', they extend current powers for courts to instruct parents of children who commit crimes to attend parenting classes. Mrs Hughes' parenting workforce will include local council social workers who are likely to have the new powers.

Her speech to the National Family and Parenting Institute - an organisation set up by Labour eight years ago to further its family agenda - ignored the question of two-parent families which has begun feature in left-wing debate. Mr Blair's Government has long declared that all families are equal. However, in recent weeks Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has acknowledged that children with two natural parents fare better. Last week the Blairite think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, also acknowledged that children brought up by single parents are more likely to end up without jobs and on state benefits.

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PEOPLE DYING FROM FAILURE TO QUARANTINE AIDS

Recently, the Centers for Disease Control announced its recommendation that the entire population be regularly tested for AIDS. The implications of this recommendation demonstrate the deleterious effect that political correctness has on logical, earnest and truthful inquiry. The CDC has always been touted as the ultimate source for information and decision-making in public healthcare. With their track record they seem invincible. Now they are calling for routine AIDS testing of everyone. This is tantamount to throwing in the towel and admitting that their strategy to control the AIDS epidemic has been an utter failure.

The frequency of not only AIDS, but the whole panoply of sexually transmitted diseases is a catastrophic calamity on the level of global warming. How did we get in such a state where we cannot even limit the spread of fragile diseases that cannot live outside the human body for more than a few seconds?

Despite the propaganda to the contrary, it hasn't been for lack of money or concern. Mortal disease, especially when spread by sexual contact or blood, gets everyone's attention quickly. Any sense of complacency was based upon physician-encouraged confidence in the medical establishment to do the right things to cure or contain the epidemic.

When AIDS was first recognized in the early 1980s it should have been treated in the same manner as any outbreak of a transmittable disease, but it wasn't. The standard public health model required the people with whom the patient had made contact of the type that could transmit the disease to be interviewed and - if necessary to controlling the spread of the disease - quarantined. All through the prior years of the 20th century civil rights issues had been raised concerning the use of the public health model. In every case the benefit to the public was determined to be paramount and the concerns were reasonably addressed; and it worked.

Why was this "silver bullet" plan not used? Because it wasn't politically correct. The CDC, in its official history of AIDS, cites political pressure from gay activists as a major factor in not utilizing the proven standard public health model. As the administrator for the first AIDS clinic in the Pacific Northwest I know this to be true from my own professional involvement.

Political correctness then and to this day often precludes the use of best measures in disease control. All human life is precious. The CDC - of all organizations - should have not been influenced by politics. It should have led the charge for treating this awful syndrome of diseases the same as it did for other epidemic diseases.

Instead it gambled with the social engineering approach - and it lost. The CDC caved in to power politics. And now it's officially admitted defeat.

What shame we bear to all those who have died and will continue to die of this and the other sexually transmitted diseases that have become not just epidemic, but endemic to us now.

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Since AIDS in Western populations seems to be almost entirely transmitted by anal intercourse, I doubt the author's apparent inference that the population at large is at risk -- but the CDC is undoubtedly being PC in its call for universal testing. It is trying in an indirect way to deal with the fact that failure to quarantine AIDS is killing many homosexuals who might otherwise have survived



"DIVERSE" COMPANIES FAIL TO DELIVER IN SOUTH AFRICA

"Hallelujah!" I said to myself yesterday as I listened to a radio report on Trevor Manuel's speech to the National Council of Provinces on Tuesday. There was more than a hint of concern in my mind too, but let's deal with the happy bit first. In case you missed it, and it wasn't difficult with all the screaming arguments around the Civil Unions Bill, which passed on the same day, this is what the Honourable Minister of Finance said, in essence: government tender awards should not only consider being race and gender representative, but also meet the tender specifications. Hallelujah!

He went on to produce two proofs, one concerning a road that fell apart after two years of use and the other being the substandard build quality of RDP houses on a site in Mpumalanga. Both projects were completed by companies that satisfied all the PDI requirements but were lacking in everything else.

It may not sound like much to the outsider, but I'd like to see a possible swing that may just change the direction of the economy in it. You see, the government and its parastatals are by far the biggest customers in this country. This is a fact of life. So is the empowerment. Combine with standardised and heavily scrutinised tender processes and you have our system where fitness is judged on a combination of ability to deliver and political correctness.

The whole country benefits from a situation where the biggest purchaser actively encourages companies to transform by making it easier for them to win business. That's theory. In reality, as the Hon Minister would seem to agree, things are a quite a bit different.

Political correctness is a form of cancer that takes over any system it touches. It lives only to grow. Introduce it into the tender system and soon BEE requirements are favoured above everything else, including actually being able to get the job done.

And reason why things are like that are simple: Bureaucrats need to keep their jobs. In the information technology world there used to be a saying: nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. (Today, it is more likely Microsoft.) In South Africa today, award a tender - any tender - to a non-transformed company, even if it delivers a brilliant job, internal controls or the media will kick off a storm of epic proportions. Fingers will be pointed, and jobs may be lost. On the opposite side, award a tender to a transformed company and you're safe, even if billions are lost. And bureaucracy exists first and foremost to keep bureaucrats from losing their jobs. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. So everybody plays it safe.

That may all have worked out okay(ish) if our government coffers were bottomless. Sadly they are not, and South Africans are getting somewhat vocal in demanding delivery. Frankly they couldn't give a damn that the house crumbling around them was built the politically correct way. What would make them happy is even if a "politically incorrect" company built the house to spec but was then obliged to spend a significant chunk of the profit made in the process on helping the community out in other ways. But that kind of lateral thinking is too dangerous to even contemplate articulating within the halls of government. Too much tinkering with the dogma. And the careers could be wrecked.

Which brings us back to that worry that comes with Manuel's sudden insight. Anyone who cherishes a political career would never, ever, touch this issue. What are you going to achieve, beyond giving the opposition (internal and otherwise) plenty of ammunition by daring to suggest that tax money should be spent effectively?

Trevor Manuel is on top of his game at the moment, a minister that actually delivers, and he clearly doesn't mind going head-first into the hornet's nest. Laudable. Maybe his speech is a beginning of something bigger, maybe it was planned at the government meetings and given to the country's favourite minister to announce. If it happens to be the initiative only of his own, I wonder what it does for his future career, though.

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