Our gibbering spiteful government wants to bring in a sprawling new registration scheme for all adults working with or having dealings with children, to help stop paedophiles popping up unexpectedly.
Uproar.
But we are told to calm down:
Sir Roger, whose agency will run the vetting scheme, said: "We need to calm down and consider carefully and rationally what this scheme is and is not about…
"It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives and it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children or discouraging volunteering."
He added: "It is about ensuring that those people who have already been dismissed by their employers for inappropriate behaviour with children do not simply up sticks and move elsewhere in the country to continue their abuse."
Parents who ferry children to clubs face criminal record checks
Unregistered adults could be fined up to £5,000 under scheme to prevent paedophiles getting access to children
What caught my eye was this:
Martin Narey, the Barnardo’s chief executive and former director general of the Prison Service, said: "If the vetting and barring scheme stops just one child ending up a victim of a paedophile then it will be worth it."
This argument pops up all over the place. It amounts to saying that there is no limit to what the state should spend to ‘save’ just one victim or life.
It’s drivel.
This new database will cost many millions to set up and run. Does Mr Narey think that it would be worth it if the scheme cost (say) £100m? Or £1bn? £10bn?
The fact is that many lives would be saved if we all wrapped ourselves in cotton wool and never did anything. At least, they would be saved until society slumped into violent anarchy.
Money spent on a scheme like this is money not spent on other things which might ‘save’ children (medical research, swimming lessons or whatever).
It’s called ‘opportunity cost’.
The fact of the matter is that in a country of some 60m people there will be a small number of nasty people who do bad things. We all have to run the risk of those bad things happening to us or our relatives as part of the cost of being human and enjoying the myriad benefits of society. Any government’s success in curbing such bad behaviour can be achieved only by creating new costs and new risks elsewhere
Publicly executing convicted paedophiles might be a far better and cheaper way to deter others from that sort of behaviour and indeed save the lives which might have been taken by such deterred vile people. Plus it would liberate resources to invest in other things which save lives.
But it is not all about ‘saving lives’.
It is about ideology and control. And a sense of inexorable collectivist decline.
Gibbering and spiteful indeed.
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