GROTESQUE INTRUSION INTO FAMILY LIFE WAS DOOMED

THE greatest mystery of the Named Person saga is how such a blatantly Stalinist scheme was ever allowed to get out of the starting-blocks.

After all, it proposed nothing less than mass state surveillance of all under-18s and amounted to a gross intrusion into the sanctity of family life. The likeliest explanation is a kind of ‘mission creep’: ministers and their officials were seduced by New Age rhetoric about child ‘wellbeing’ that slowly morphed into an Orwellian nightmare.

Children would be assigned a Named Person, a point of contact to monitor their development and ensure key yardsticks were met.

If these ‘wellbeing indicators’, such as the child’s emotional health, were deemed to be lacking, intervention from the Named Person was threatened.

In perhaps the most terrifying example of the planned scope of the project, these state guardians would be allocated even to foetuses.

One senior civil servant warned that parents who do not show enough ‘love, hope and spirituality’ to their children should be targeted by Named Persons. An official handbook revealed the guardians would be expected to grill families on topics such as money worries, sun cream and TV-watching habits.

OTHER guidance stipulated children must be consulted about the choice of wallpaper in their bedrooms. Training for prospective Named Persons included a working knowledge of the 221 ‘risk indicators’ and the 308item list of ‘wellbeing indicators’.

These contained questions about whether or not a child ‘smiles a lot’.

Teachers were to be ordered to tell the Named Person if a pupil confided in them about having an abortion, rather than passing the information to the parents. In a series of workshops, children as young as five were encouraged to think of themselves as ‘plants’, with the Named Person as ‘ head gardeners’, in an echo of the kind of brain-washing found in totalitarian states.

Named Persons would be able to request access to confidential and sensitive medical records.

More than 600 taxi drivers in the Borders who take young people to school were instructed to pass on information about their welfare.

Senior teachers, while trying to tackle the literacy and numeracy crisis in crowded classrooms, were left in no doubt their role would change. As much of ‘civic Scotland’ turned on the scheme – with critics including the Faculty of Advocates, the Law Society and indeed Police Scotland – SNP ministers had their fingers firmly in their ears.

The fate of Named Person should have been sealed in 2016, when five judges at the Supreme Court in London blocked the plan in a devastating judgment, backing campaigners who had raised £300,000 to fight a lengthy legal battle.

Pivotal parts of the initiative, allowing information about children to be shared between public bodies without parental consent, were ruled ‘defective’, as they fell foul of European human rights law.

The ruling memorably warned that the ‘first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is get at the children’ and ‘within limits, families must be left to bring up their children in their own way’.

Minutes after the judgment was published, John Swinney’s officials had issued a press release headlined: ‘Swinney commits to roll out service as legal bid to scrap NP [Named Person] scheme fails.’

It still ranks as one of the starkest examples of SNP doublethink, which also saw Nicola Sturgeon berating individual journalists on social media for characterising the decision as a defeat for the Scottish Government.

Like Monty Python’s Black Knight, who insists the sword blows lopping off his limbs are ‘but a flesh wound’, the SNP continued to insist there was no major flaw, and the problem detected by the judges was superficial. Ministers were to stay in a state of denial for the next three years.

In one of the shabbiest episodes in Holyrood history, Mr Swinney denied that Liam Fee, a Fife twoyear- old murdered by his mother and her partner, had been subject to an early version of Named Person.

But this claim was quickly rubbished by official documents showing the so-called success of the Fife pilot was proof that the initiative should be extended nationwide.

The mortal blow for what had become a zombie policy came last month, after minutes emerged of a meeting of Mr Swinney’s advisers, in which they discussed how to salvage Named Person. They concluded the rescue plan – devising a statutory code of practice on information-sharing – was unworkable.

In the end, the scheme’s demise was entirely in keeping with its troubled evolution.

An ill- conceived enterprise that was hated from its inception was chaotically managed by a Government blinded to its myriad faults.

So it was no real surprise that, when the axe fell, ministers appeared to make a complete mess of sending it into rightful oblivion.

NEWS that it was finally to be put out of its misery was leaked to a friendly newspaper in a bid to ensure the ensuing row at Holyrood focused on why MSPs weren’t told first. But it is fitting that parliamentarians – who, let’s not forget, approved the idea – should have missed the point in such spectacular style.

In time-honoured fashion, the leak was a deflection strategy to play down the extent of the humiliation the SNP now faces. A Government that was wedded to a disaster-prone plan refused to contemplate axing it because it feared the resulting furore would be highly damaging.

What remains unknown, for now, is how many vulnerable children were failed by the state while the Named Person farce unfolded.

But what is certain is that the row has irrevocably shattered the faith of parents in hubristic politicians who never understood their legitimate concerns – or never cared about them in the first place.