Kids with walking swipe cards

The news being reported today that Andrew Lansley is going to endorse Wimbledon Council's walk to school bribery campaign is very worrying.
It is true that children should do more exercise. But it seems to me to be pushing it to think that walking to school is the right way forward, especially not formally bribing them to walk to school.

This is 'Nudge' politics taken to the wrong extremes,

Firstly it is wrong in itself. It is not the business of government to tell us how to live out lives. Thus the key reason for children not walking to school is because of fear. We had the recent example of the man threatened with social workers for allowing his child to walk a whole 45 yards to a bus stop.
More worrying is how this will be policed,

Under the scheme, pupils will be issued with electronic swipe cards that they use to touch receivers on lampposts between their home and school, in much the same way that Oystercards work on the capital's transport network.

Errr... Oh yes right now that is a great idea. We the people trust the Government and its agencies to keep data safe. So what we have here is the people who run this campaign having access to precise data about how children walk to school, their routes, their times the works.

And why would anybody want that data? Now I am not one who panics about pedophilia, but seriously guys, which idiot thought this one up?

So now we have the school as a new kiddie police state.

You log in on the local lamppost, walk to school, repeating your card swipe all the way. Then you get to school, where you are fingerprinted. Then you have to show your lunch box to prove that you are only eating the approved meal.

And that is before the politically correct rubbish that pretends to be education these days.



And this is a so called Conservative Government heaven help us.



Lansley has to be stopped from this proposal. It is deeply illiberal, it will be ruinously expensive and is just not necessary.