Living opposite a park, thinend often takes the small wedges for an hour or so on the swings. Thinend also often glumly ponders ‘The State of the World We Live in Now’ and the resulting impossibility of letting them go to the park by themselves.
Is it not reassuring, therefore, that Community Wardens in some areas now have the power to challenge adults without children walking in public parks?
Should I not be grateful to the Brown regime for protecting my kids, and everyone else’s, from the danger inherent in single adults?
You’ve probably worked out the answer already, but just in case: no, I bloody well should not. Labour has displayed its fetish for social control via the amplification of public fears for too long now for anyone to need any more examples, but this one does have a very special flavour of authoritarianism, assumed guilt and mendacity.
Of course, the only people to be challenged will be male (a very specific target of Labour’s hideous new world). They’ll be walking or sitting in a public park (so must be guilty of something – at the very least they will arouse suspicion because they are not taking advantage of 24 hour drinking or worshipping at the New Labour altar of consumerism in their local shopping centre).
And the mendacity is palpable. Like any other parent I have wild fears of weirdos watching my kids, but I also have other, higher priority, concerns such as local gang violence, traffic menace and the decayed structure on which the swings limply hang. Labour, and its motley crew of bizzarely dressed wardens, wouldn’t and couldn’t tackle any of these real problems so they go for the soft target, even if it does have an end result that would be acceptable not in the East Germany of the stasi, but more appropriately in its obscene predecessor.
Tags: authoritarianism, community wardens, labour, parks, social control
