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Professor John Robertson OBA

Welsh Labour above with help from BBC Wales stand up for Wales in the debate over Labour’s ID proposals.

Scottish Labour and BBC Scotland?

Toilets.

Anywhere else in BBC Scotland?

The flag gets no mention and the SNP become the target with:

The Scottish Conservatives said Labour’s plans were flawed and would lead to “state control” which violated the right to privacy. But they also claimed John Swinney was guilty of “blatant hypocrisy” and “playing politics” in his opposition to the scheme.

MSP Murdo Fraser said: “He was the architect of the hated named person scheme which was a form of state control even worse than what Keir Starmer is now proposing.

“He was also Nicola Sturgeon’s right hand man when the SNP proposed their own digital ID scheme in 2021.”

Remember the named person scheme, the one that every expert supported?

What it might have achieved:

From Sky News, 11 years ago:

The former head of a paedophile group said Harriet Harman “didn’t even try” to stop his organisation’s involvement with the civil liberties council she worked for. Tom O’Carroll, who was chairman of the now defunct Paedophile Information Exchange, said neither Ms Harman or her Labour colleagues wanted to “rock the boat” for fear it might damage their careers.¹

Many younger readers will wonder what on earth can this be.

The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was a British pro-paedophile activist group, founded in October 1974 and officially disbanded in 1984. The group campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent. It was described by the BBC in 2007 as “an international organisation of people who trade obscene material“. Although it had a few women paedophiles as members, the organisation’s membership was mainly young, professionally educated male paedophiles, including youth and care workers. Its membership in 1977 was around 250, mainly in London and the South East;  the same number for membership was also reported in 1981…..A document penned on the organisation’s behalf by Harriet Harman (later deputy leader of the Labour Party), working as a legal officer at the time, placed the onus of proving harm on prosecutors and warned of the dangers of increasing censorship²

Many younger readers will still be wondering what on earth those boomers were thinking.

From the 1980s and well into the 21st Century, several ‘grooming’ gangs (mass child rapists) were operating across, especially the Midlands and North of England. Thousands of young girls, mostly from care homes run by unregistered staff, unlike in other parts of the UK, were raped repeatedly and a relatively small number of men, mostly Asian, were jailed. During that long time, successive Conservative and Labour governments did nothing to protect these children.

Only in 2022, was there an independent inquiry.³ It’s recommendations have not been applied and the same Conservative politicians now calling for a new inquiry, were the same ones responsible for the failure to do so then.

Although there have been no comparable scandals in Scotland and although all child care home staff must be registered here, the SNP Government tried in 2016, to further protect all children, with a Named Person Scheme:

It is a scheme that would assign every single child in Scotland under the age of 18 a state-appointed “named person”, with the aim of creating a single point of contact for parents or children who need advice, information or support relating to the welfare of children and young people.⁴

Despite widespread professional, expert and research support for the scheme, Scottish Labour and Conservative MSPs called for it to be paused⁵ and the UK High Court ruled against it.⁶

I find it difficult not to wonder how many young and vulnerable girls in England might have been saved terrible abuse, if the Labour and Conservative governments had cared more, if long before, they had insisted that care home staff must registered and if a scheme like the SNP’s Named Person Scheme had not been blocked for petty political point-scoring before then being copied across the UK.

Sources:

1. https://news.sky.com/story/harman-did-not-act-over-paedophile-group-10415858
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedophile_Information_Exchange
3. https://www.iicsa.org.uk/
4. https://archive.news.stv.tv/politics/1362047-what-is-the-named-person-scheme-and-why-is-it-controversial.html#:~:text=It%20is%20a%20scheme%20that%20would%20assign%20every,to%20the%20welfare%20of%20children%20and%20young%20people.
5. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-36903513#:~:text=Judges%20at%20the%20UK%27s%20highest%20court%20have%20ruled,the%20Court%20of%20Session%20in%20Edinburgh%20last%20year.
6. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-36903513#:~:text=Judges%20at%20the%20UK%27s%20highest%20court%20have%20ruled,the%20Court%20of%20Session%20in%20Edinburgh%20last%20year.