Should schools provide young children with lessons about pornography?

“Young children should hear about the dangers of pornography as soon as they have access to the internet, leading head teachers say. The ready availability of explicit material online has prompted serious concerns from the National Association of Head Teachers. General secretary Russell Hobby said “the conversation should start” when children started going online. But he stressed this was not about showing pornography in class.”

I think that this idea is wrong. Schools should not be having “a conversation” about porn with pupils. It isn’t the business of teachers to discuss porn. Responsibility lies with the PARENTS. It’s time the State stopped trying to act as the parent.

The sheep like mindset of people here is beyond parody. At a time of severe economic recession, the Stormont diktat is to raise taxes on people…and hit the poorest hardest.  But hey, they are saving the environment that makes it ok – on and mimicking the Republic, equally important for the Nationalists encamped at Stormont.

THE 5p bag tax comes into force in Northern Ireland stores on Monday, and while some shoppers see it as an inconvenience – and others as “another stealth tax” – most agree that something must be done to clear the Province of the scourge of the unsightly litter caused by 160 million bags every year. In a survey of shops in Portadown, the attitude was: “It’s a bit of a nuisance, but we can live with it, and it has to be said that plastic bags cause untold damage to the environment and are a terrible eyesore everywhere.”The levy is 5p per bag, rising to 10p after the first year..”

Let’s leave aside unscientific asinine surveys and just admit that this leftwing social engineering will hit everybody, cost us all extra £££, and at a time when people have less cash than ever before.

The puerile comparisons with what happened in the Irish Republic conveniently ignore the pesky detail that a similar tax was introduced FIVE YEARS before the recession, in boomtime days. Is anyone seriously suggesting that such a consumer tax would be introduced NOW by an Irish Government? The clowns at Stormont are using their powers to punish, it is all they can do. To introduce such a punitive tax in good times when people can perhaps at least afford it is one thing, but here in Northern Ireland we have a VERY stretched economy with record levels of unemployment. Who in their RIGHT mind would decide this is the moment to take cash from consumers?

As for the issue of rubbish, I also find plastic bags lying around abhorrent. I live in the countryside and each morning, on the strip of grass outside my house and parallel to the main road, I have to remove plastic bottles, plastic fast food containers, crisp bags, and other unsavoury things thrown out of cars by the crass unwashed who just don’t care about any form of self responsibility. Will the Minister now move against all these things? What next to BAN, Mr Attwood?

You cannot ban the feckless and inconsiderate. I wish you could. However we could make sure that those who litter PAY for their crimes – but why make the rest of the population also pick up the bill??

This seems a superficially good idea and of course it does contain some merit but it is fatally flawed;

Should benefit claimants be prevented from spending the money given to them by the state on alcohol, gambling, cigarettes and other “vices”? A poll commissioned by think tank Demos suggests most people would support such a move. But the findings have been met with horror by anti-poverty campaigners, who have questioned whether the British public really feel that way, or whether they have been denied the full facts on poverty by the government and certain newspapers.

There are several aspects to this worth considering;

1. Since when does the State have a right to tell you what sort of food you should eat or what you should drink? Who decides this and on what basis? Who monitors it and at what cost? This is pure Nanny Statism and I resent any politician telling anyone what sort of groceries they should buy. It is clearly a power grab by the State, dreamed up by the left wing think tank Demos group,  and I would not tolerate their impudence.

2. I am a libertarian and so I believe people, individuals, have the right to make wise or stupid choices with the money they get. So, IF someone wants to spend all their Welfare unwisely, I think they have that right to be foolish. The tricky bit is that their folly is being funded by my taxes. Of course that then means that one then has to question WHY they need such Welfare in the first place if it it is solely cater for their drinking, drugs or gambling. All the howls of outrage from the so called Anti-Poverty activists cut no ice with me.  The real issue here lies with the nature of Welfare. What was once designed to provide the most basic comfort blanket for the most needy has become a lifestyle choice for far too many. Simple as that. Vouchers wont sort that malaise out only radical surgery can do that job.

It’s that inner totalitarian instinct that Bloomberg just cannot bring himself to resist  - but hey – it’s for your own good!

New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to be obscene Nanny Staters combat rising obesity.

The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March

Nanny Bloomberg and his apparatchiks know best.  First they came for the smokers…then they came for the soft drink consumers…

David Cameron is such a natural patrician, detached from reality;

David Cameron is planning to stem the tide of child yobbery blighting Britain – by giving families £100 vouchers for parenting classes. Mothers and fathers will be able to collect the free vouchers at some branches of Boots from tomorrow, entitling them to up to ten two-hour sessions on how to bring up their children. The Prime Minister hopes the scheme will combat the breakdown in family discipline blamed for last year’s riots – and that using a High Street store to distribute the vouchers will end the stigma attached to parenting lessons.

£100 vouchers for parenting classes? I wonder how my parents and indeed my wife and myself managed to bring up children without ANY help from the State? The idea that THE STATE will instruct people how to be parents is revolting. The problem we have is that as the institutions of marriage and religion

I don’t smoke. I have never smoked. I hate the smell of smoke. But I despise the Nanny State even more.

Making houses and cars smokefree is the only way to protect children from second-hand smoke, according to a new government campaign in England. The TV and radio adverts show how pervasive invisible second-hand smoke can be. Breathing it in can damage lungs and cause cancers, research has shown. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is calling for smoking in cars where children are present to be made illegal. Second-hand smoke is the smoke breathed in from other people’s cigarettes. The new TV campaign is based on research which shows that most secondhand smoke is in the form of invisible, odourless gases.

This is the State seeking to order you what you cannot do in your OWN home, on your private property. It is an outrage but a natural extension of the sort of thinking that led to the smoking ban in offices in the first instance. Look, IF smoking is so bad so awful – BAN it. And lose all that lovely revenue that Government can’t get enough of. Hypocrites.

Selfridges, the department store for those with a slight excess of cash, has been in the news twice in four months for selling the ‘wrong’ sort of foods’ In December, a celebrity butcher was fired because he was selling the ‘top people’s food’ Foie Gras ‘ literally under the counter. Now there is nothing illegal about the sale of this foodstuff, but lots of people get their collective knickers in a twist because of the way it is manufactured. Foie Gras is made by ‘force-feeding’ geese or ducks with a reinforced diet, a practice which ‘animal rights activists’ condemn as being cruel. So Selfridges ruled that Foie Gras was off the menu. The butcher decided otherwise, as he was asked by customers to continue supplying this delicacy, and he was fired for his troubles.

This week, Selfridges was again featured in the headlines, but this time for the practice of selling cartons of unpasteurised milk. Again, there is nothing illegal in this sale, but various sections of our ever-industrious Government’s Nanny Section have decided that raw or unpasteurised milk is ‘not a good thing’, and should only be available in special circumstances and in certain farm shops. You are  also ‘allowed’ (how gracious of them) to buy this milk over the internet, and at the farm gates.

Food Standards Agency’s  Dr Henrietta Campbell said “I would go further and look for a ban on the sale of raw milk.”

Now I personally have no oar in this water, or milk for that matter, but it seems to me to be purely a matter of being aware of the risks. As Charlie Watson, the hero of my novel ‘Single to Westminster, via Berlin’ stated “If the Heir to the Throne gets up on his soap box and says he likes to drink unpasteurised milk, he should be allowed to do so! If the risks are plainly stated, if someone likes something, they should be able to eat or drink it! People have got to be treated like grown-ups, with common sense; if they can read, they can make their minds up! We are not in the business of treating everyone like a three-year old child!”

We have the facts, and we should be able to make our own minds up whether there are risks attached to certain activities, and whether we should continue with those activities, or cease on the grounds that ‘others know best’!

To the residents of the Islands formerly known as Great Britain and Northern Ireland; We send you Greetings.

As is well-known, we in the Supreme Government have your best interests at heart all the time, and anything we may promulgate, announce or order is for Your Own Good, and we don’t like it very much when people start sniping at us, or calling us ‘Nannies’.

We therefore have decided to bring a large list together, at the one place and at the one time, in order that the population may be ‘educated’ as to the realities of life in the newly re-named Offshore European Islands.

The following items may, will, should, can, probably or might kill you; or reduce your life expectancy from the longevity which you may have come to expect from all the propaganda previously published by the traitorous but compliant Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dem Parties formerly in Government.

Red meat, white meat, sausages, pork and ham, fish, game birds, corn, wheat products such as bread, all vegetables except lentils; alcohol, wine,  beer, all sorts of booze, cigarettes, tap water, not enough exercise, too much exercise, sex inside or outside of marriage with anyone at all; anything not included in this list but thought about later on.

We don’t want to ban anything or everything, mainly because we know that ordinary people will immediately commence using the item in question out of sheer cussedness, and partly because we gather huge amounts of tax from things like cigarettes, booze, processed food, water; but we feel that you ought to know what is good for you.

Regards

Commissioners of the European Union’s BIG Brother (junior grade)

Interesting to read that “children at risk of “going off the rails” and descending into a life of crime can be spotted at the age of two. Oh really? Well, that’s what the Government czar “Behaviour Czar” Charlie Taylor says and he is a very wise man…

The primary prerogative of the Stormont Assembly is to ban things. That appeals to the notion that it  must be seen to “do something” and so bit by bit it chips away at liberty;

Cigarettes will no longer be sold in vending machines in Northern Ireland from 1 March 2012. MLAs agreed the move during a debate in the assembly on Tuesday afternoon. It is being introduced to drive down the number of children and young people who smoke by limiting their unsupervised access to the machines.

Nanny always knows best.