The enthusiasm of public authorities to introduce Big Brother-type surveillance tactics is a major concern, says Claire FoxI thought the Big Brother Award for Daft Authoritarian Scheme of the Year should go to TV’s Blue Peter. The BBC children’s programme is now issuing ID cards in an attempt to clamp down on the sale of Blue Peter badges on eBay which, henceforth, will be illegal and classified as fraud. However, the Blue Peter producers have been pipped to the post by South Tyneside MBC. It has just announced that Brinkburn Secondary School is installing a fingerprint-recognition system at the dinner queue as a method of payment for meals. South Tyneside is not alone. Derbyshire CC is piloting a similar scheme in five of its schools. One Leicestershire school has already experimented with a similar scheme. Now, call me old fashioned, but allowing the authorities to take your fingerprints was always to be resisted until you’d been charged with a crime. Endorsing fingerprinting en masse for children is a chilling indication of how far the erosion of civil liberties has gone in modern Britain. Rather than expressing worries about such developments, local authorities seem to be proud of their new move into biometric surveillance. Everyone seems wowed by the technology. Maybe, more worrying, is that this surveillance will work too well. It is disturbing how blasé local authorities are about how the fingerprints might be used. Stephen Goan, deputy head of Brinkburn, conceded to The Times newspaper that if there was a court order to release information, the school would have to comply. Of course, these days, notions such as privacy, confidentiality and freedom are absent from policy makers’ dictionaries. Instead, we are told by Dr Phil Ingram, head teacher of Brinkburn, that, ‘there is a really important purpose behind this technology’. These ‘important purposes’ are predictable. The usual overblown obsession with children’s safety is high on the list. Meanwhile, Derbyshire CC says bullying will be reduced because those who receive free meals cannot be identified. Then we’re told that, since children won’t need to carry cash for their lunches, they can’t be bullied for it. And, of course, as Dr Ingram points out, if children have money to spend at local shops, they can be kept ‘secure by keeping more of them under supervision on site at lunchtime’. Oh, let’s just get rid the niceties. Why not just lock ‘em in? But, if protecting children has become a byword for increasing authoritarianism – let’s not forget plans to vet all nine million adults who work with children – healthy eating is the new Trojan horse. Ever since Saint Jamie Oliver entered the fray, you only have to mention turkey twizzlers to justify a swathe of new measures in school, however draconian or retrograde. We’ve already seen the introduction of ‘fat charts’, despite the fact that those who treat people with eating disorders warn against pushing everyone to a weight norm, and the dangers of making ever-younger children anxious about food. So, no surprise then that the main justification for the fingerprinting scheme is that it will help address national healthy school targets by tracking details of a pupil’s diet. Cllr Jim Foreman, lead member for children and young people at South Tyneside, last year repeated an urban myth that: ‘We all know these days that if youngsters exist on junk food, it has an adverse effect on their concentration and behaviour in the classroom.’ So, if Johnny is found to be choosing unhealthy options at dinner-time, might not this be seen as a sign of potential anti-social behaviour. The next thing we know, monitoring fatty food intake in schools will be used as a valid reason to issue ASBOs. n Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas
