The SNP is wrong, as is the Supreme Court
It is tempting to welcome yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court to block the introduction of Scotland’s named-person service. The legislation is terrifying. The SNP wants to give every child access to a named point of contact who can offer information and advice and, in effect, be a thirdparty authority in the child’s development. This is the stuff of Stalinist Russia – a grotesque invasion into family life and part of the SNP’s design for a heavily centralised Scottish state.
Like many authoritarian projects, it would not even help those it is supposed to. In 2014, a boy called Liam Fee was murdered in Fife by his mother and her civil partner – despite the fact that the two-year-old had a health visitor who operated, in effect, as a named person. Horrors will always occur. While it is right that government updates legislation as necessary and protects the innocent, it cannot and should not try to usurp the organic bonds of civil society that fill a child’s life with many named people: parents, doctors, teachers, family friends.
This might seem obvious, yet the invidious Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 was still passed with cross-party support in Holyrood, in deference to the “something must be done” culture. Empowering the state to sit in judgment over law-abiding families will lead to injustices. Recall the case of an English foster couple who had three children removed from their care in 2012 because they supported Ukip. That decision was taken by Rotherham council, not long before it was exposed as having failed to prevent one of the largest child-abuse rings in history.
Therefore, this newspaper ought to be happy that the Supreme Court has ruled that the namedperson plan is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. But we are not. Like it or loathe it, the legislation was part of a manifesto upon which the SNP won an election. Attempts to block or rewrite it smack of legislating from the bench – and the judicial reach is already far too long.
Yesterday, the High Court ruled that Jeremy Corbyn should be able to participate in the Labour leadership ballot. What business was this of a court? And what would the consequences have been if it had ruled that he could not? Democracy should not be subject to interference by unelected judges. We have no more desire to see courts thus elevated than we do the SNP and its nanny state.