No place in our family homes for snoopers

IT’S a rare day in politics when the SNP performs a U-turn. In fact, the party has a nasty habit of digging its heels in once it has come up with an idea, no matter how daft it is (independence, the much-hated car parking tax, Ian Blackford saying, ‘The people of Scotland’).

Like the amorphophallus titanum, the corpse flower at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, which blooms on average only once every eight years, the announcement this week that the SNP is axing its wrong-headed Named Person scheme is highly unusual.

Soak it up, folks. You won’t see the like of it again for some time.

How the Named Person scheme was ever allowed to get as far as it did remains utterly baffling.

This was the Norland nanny of nanny state policies (Norland nannies are the ones dressed in uniforms and who spend years training – the Cambridges have one, you get the picture).

This was an idea that was so bad, so devastatingly awful, one marvels at how a government could come up with it in the first place.

Forget don’t drink too much, eat your greens, stop driving your car, put down that can of fizzy drink – all orders the Scottish Government likes to bark at people on a regular basis – this policy was on a whole new level when it came to burrowing into our private lives.

State-appointed Named Persons (while we’re at it, what a clunky, grammatically irritating title that was) would, under the guise of child ‘well-being’, be allowed into every corner of family life in order to make sure our children were being raised in a way the Scottish Government deemed fit.

According to an official handbook on the subject, they could be expected to ask families about their money worries, their TV-watching habits, even how much sun cream they used.

Guidance suggested that children should be asked about the choice of wallpaper in their bedrooms.

Their wallpaper? I’m sorry, but what business is it of the Government whether wee Jimmy McGlinchy has Star Wars paper or pictures of dinosaurs on his bedroom wall? Clue: none whatsoever.

NO wonder five judges at the Supreme Court in London blocked the plan in 2016, declaring that ‘the first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is get at the children’.

The whole plan was so divorced from reality that, at one point, the SNP had informally (and quite madly) discussed bringing in author JK Rowling as a potential celebrity champion of the scheme.

Can you imagine? Harry Potter and the State Snooper. It’s got quite the ring to it.

But, aside from all that, there is the irrefutable evidence that the SNP’s Named Person scheme simply would not work. There is, tragically, now a roll call of vulnerable children who had been in contact with a Named Person who nevertheless went on to die in horrific circumstances. The initiative did not work for our most vulnerable children, and it did not work for the ones raised in families where the parents try each day to do their best. There are certain things that have no place in a family home. A stateappointed guardian is one of them.