MembersNEWNew in the Members’ Room: James Panton gives talks defending freedom in London and in Edinburgh ; Suzy Dean has a blog on youth engagement; Josie Appleton will be debating booze bans at Sussex University; Michele Ledda's petition against banning of a poem from the school curriculum has more than 100 signatures; Dolan Cummings writes on how anti-smokers are stubbing out liberty; Josie Appleton is discussing cities at a conference in Moscow; Manick Govinda has produced a new London exhibition. New on the Vetting Blog: Tenants turfed out for refusing to fill in forms; CRB checking tooth fairy; Children’s authors under suspicion; Flats halted because balconies have ‘view of school’. Read on… |
BlogsThe sight and sound of children playing could be delightful or irritating, depending on your point of view. Yet now a school has blocked a planning application for new flats in Hornsey, north London, on the basis that the flats’ balconies will overlook a children’s playground. Being a children’s author was once a charming career, building mysterious worlds of fantasy trees and secret adventures. Yet children’s authors do meet a lot of children: they do readings with children, they get letters from children; they are admired by children. And this, according to Ofsted, makes them a potential risk. This email from John Kirkby shows the murky dealings with the Criminal Records Bureau bureaucracy… ‘Last year, the London borough of Kensington & Chelsea discovered a "problem" with my CRB disclosure evidence. Around the same time my credit card had been fraudulently used and I've always assumed there was some connection between the two events. On contacting the CRB department, my enquiries were set aside by claims that my questions could not be answered for data protection reasons...in the meantime the police had contacted me requesting fingerprints & photos. On the light side, this is a funny take on the tooth fairy. It would be funny, were it not so close to the bone... Eric Tweedie reports back on a meeting of the British Aikido Board: ‘I attended a meeting in Warwickshire to discuss "the way forward" as regards the BAB future policy on Safeguarding. Several things have become clear:- This email from Mr M Parker is interesting, and very worrying. It shows how the refusal to comply with the child protection bureaucracy is taken as implied guilt. It also shows how ‘access to children’ is being taken in the broadest way possible, and including people who have no actual contact with, let alone responsibility for, children. The mere suggestion of a possibility of meeting a child is deemed enough… This email comes from a pre-school professional, about the difficulties of taking photos of kids: This post on a police chat forum shows that even the boys in blue aren’t above suspicion: This email just came in, showing the way CRBs are affecting those who are doing most to help society’s most vulnerable: The UK government has done a u-turn on carrying out criminal records checks on businesses that employ or train under-16s – following the publication of the Manifesto Club’s latest briefing document on the culture of vetting. |
The Manifesto Club supports:Historians campaigning against 'memory laws'... 'Enlightenment is humanity's emergence from self-imposed immaturity. Dare to know! Have courage to use your own understanding!' Immanuel Kant 'What characterises man is his extreme abundance of imagination; therefore, that man is a fantastic animal and that universal history is the gigantic, continuous and insistent effort to go, little by little, putting some order into the crazy fantasy.' José Ortega y Gasset |