The government is under pressure to come up with a strong vision for its children's policy after negative stories about its handling of the lost child databases, as well as the Northern Rock crisis and the political funding scandal ...
Amid evidence that children from the poorest backgrounds are struggling to catch up academically with their wealthier classmates, and that their parents are the least engaged in their education, ministers want schools to help piece together a community of support for families. In the next 10 years, ministers want mental health facilities, parenting support classes and housing and benefit advice centres to be located nearby, with the school at the centre.
We've been here before.
"The government is desperate to get these going," he said, "because they've realised that in the cities community has collapsed. The school is literally the only place where everyone comes together. It's the only community there is - all we've got."
And we find that since Labour came to power, it turns out that 80% of new jobs created have gone to foreigners.
The Department revised its figures from 800,000 foreign workers to 1.1 million in October. The Statistics Commission report concluded that, of a total increase in employment between 1997 and 2007 of 2.1 million new jobs, more than half were taken by foreign citizens. However, it added that the actual proportion of the employment increase accounted for by foreign workers ranged from just over 50 per cent to just over 80 per cent, depending on the definition of a migrant.
The 50 per cent figure was applicable if foreign citizens alone were counted. The 80 per cent figure was based on a definition by the Office for National Statistics of all those who said they were born overseas, including those who had since become British citizens.
Naturally Polly Toynbee has welcomed the new children's "vision", involving as it does the opportunity for large numbers of middle class do-gooders to live high on the taxpayer while bossing parents about.
Laban added a comment of his own :
"He will order new guidance to advise on mergers between schools, libraries, sports centres, police stations and health centres to try to rebuild communities. The 170-page report covers every aspect of children's lives ..."
God help us. I thank Him that I've managed to raise mine without too much interference from these cretins. My current advice to them is 'make sure you get decent qualifications, so you can get out before it all goes pearshaped'.
And why are the communities in need of rebuilding, Polly ? Hasn't eveything been getting better and better for the last 40 years ?
But be fair. The tremendous news is that on current definitions of "poverty" (60% of median earnings) the poor will always be with us. Unless most of the wealthy people emigrate, thus lowering median earnings and poverty at a stroke.
No wonder "the heads of all the big five children's charities, plus Unicef, Rowntree, Oxfam, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, vicars, rabbis and child poverty professors - a roll call of the most influential organisations" - are looking chuffed. Another few years of taxpayer funding for them, they keep their power and importance - it's a great result for the poverty industry.
It's a multi-pronged strategy. More sex education should up the numbers of young single parents, we can build on the enormous success of drug education, a criminal justice system that intervenes robustly only long after the "youngster" has become confirmed in his criminality and in his status as a role model for impressionable peers - Britain can continue to build, consolidate and nourish its mighty underclass, the envy of the world.
And it all means more jobs for outreach workers, child psychologists and the other beneficiaries of the "no knowledge economy".
Naturally these New Britons - I call them Toynbee's Children - will not be employable in any meaningful sense of the word, but what matter ? We can import more workers - and that's just what has happened over the ten years of Labour's "British Jobs For Foreign Workers" scheme.
But this is where the plan becomes really cunning. At present these Poles and Lithuanians are polite and hard-working, do not do crack or firearms, nor are they likely to blow up Tube trains.
But that is a function of the culture they have arrived with. It tells us nothing about what their first and second generation descendents will be like after twenty years exposure to the cultural vacuum of the UK, a vacuum of which Ms Toynbee is so proud - as she should be. After all, she helped create it.
After all, the Windrush generation were as good a bunch of people as you'd find anywhere. What happened to so many of their grandchildren ?
The 60s wave of immigrants from Mirpur to the Yorkshire and Lacashire mills were a hard-working, law-abiding bunch who came to integrate. Why did 600 of their descendants try and burn 22 elderly Labour voters alive in Manningham Labour Club in 2001 ?
The children of these new workers - and more their grandchildren - will not have the religious faith or the memory of Soviet oppression which sustained their grandparents. They will have TV, a UK State schooling, cultural vacuum, and the Welfare State. It may well be that their children won't fancy a Portakabin and a fiver an hour. I look forward in my old age to reading about a whole new cohort of underclass recruits. By 2040, British employment will consist of
a) the City. All their workers live in gated communities.
b) underclass - in a state of permanent low-level war with each other. Run by warlords who are half 'community spokesmen', half gang leader.
c) social workers. Also in gated communities, travel in armoured vehicles. Merged with the police in 2020.
Carry on !
