We've Come for Your Children

The British government's announcement, at the behest of Gordon Brown, that it is to financially award British yoofs [sic] for good behaviour is yet another cynical bribe. It is quite simply an attempt to increase the government's client state, indoctrinating misguided and impressionable teenagers to believe that they cannot survive without the state's guidance.

Aside from that initial thought, and after some cerebral activity which didn't involve being hit over the head with a stick, I came to the conclusion that these "reward-cards", the concoction of some half-wit, were also ethically erroneous. Mr. Brown states that he is attempting to reward individuals who behave in a civilised and conventionally correct manner; but, surely we should be encouraging the ideal that individuals should be brought up to believe that respect, tolerance and deference are ends in themselves, not a means to achieve financial reward.

As Mark Steyn states:

"Respect is a two-way street, and two-way streets are increasingly rare in British town centres. The idea that the national government can legislate respect is a large part of the reason why there isn't any. Almost every act of the social democratic state says: don't worry, you're not responsible, leave it to us, we know best. The social democratic state is, in that sense, profoundly anti-social and ultimately anti-democratic".

If that is the case, and I am inclined to agree, how does the state expect us to respect each other when it doesn't even trust us to make the right decision in our own lives? The straight forward answer is that they don't.

Apart then from being an attempt to secure more Labour votes, the "reward-card" seems part of a systematic and coherent policy. That policy is to undermine the institution of the family, and to supplant that parental authority with the coercive instincts of the state - and never mind that the taxpayer is subsidising it.

Why would Labour wish to achieve this? The reason is that real Socialists are not only committed to equality of opportunity, but also to equality of outcome. Promoting equality, like most of the hard things in life, has been won over a sustained period of time and with great difficulty - it is inherently a soporific activity. Labour though has realised that lowering standards, rather than raising them, is an easier way to achieve a semblance of equality of outcome. The inevitable result is that children, who through no fault of their own happen to attend a grammar school or reside in a loving stable family, are penalised to make up for the short-comings of less fortunate individuals. Rather than taking away these advantages, these virtues should be actively encouraged and extended to as many children as possible. Labour wishes to lower everything to the lowest common denominator: if one child can't go to a grammar school, then no child shall have the opportunity.

Having then seemingly given up on providing our children with an adequate education, the government wishes to interfere in the domain of the family, whereby they are able to properly monitor, regulate, equalise, and teach thoughts that are consummate with government orthodoxy.

For those of a Burkean persuasion human society is something rooted and organic; and to try to mould and shape it according to the plans of an ideologue, however well-meaning, is to invite unforeseen disaster. "Nothing can be more absurd and dangerous," wrote Edmund Burke in 1761, "than to tamper with the natural foundations of society, in hopes of keeping it up by artificial contrivances."

It just so happens that the Left's unremitting policies and prejudices have successively degraded these organic institutions - most notably marriage - that sustain a respectable social order. We must wake up to the fact that apart from being mere "coercive gimmicks", as the Tories suggest, these "reward-cards" have a far greater deep-seated purpose: the nationalisation of childhood.