Best interests of the blah

A review for the UN by children’s commissioners for the UK says that British society is demonising children. My favourite part is this:

Public bodies are legally bound to put the best interests of a child first in decision-making. But the commissioners said this key legal safeguard had failed in some parts of the youth justice system for England and Wales.

This may well be because the key legal safeguard does not exist, since the phrase “the best interests of the child” DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING. It has no legal meaning. There is no way of measuring or enforcing it. The “best interests of the child” are whatever pops into the head of the person dealing with the kid at the time—which, catastrophically, usually means a social worker.

MPs and peers bat the phrase around the building all the damn time. If debates about children are a full English breakfast, “best interests of the child” is the ketchup; people inevitably reach for it, and usually end up pouring on far too much. There are other irritating verbal tics that infest people’s speeches, such as “on the face of the Bill” (you’ll find that’s been changed to “in the Bill”, my Lord; trees don’t save themselves), but none of those phrases can boast of having wormed their way into legislation without anyone noticing that they DON’T MEAN ANYTHING. You might as well bring in a Loveliness Act with strict penalties for anyone who “does not behave in a manner that is deemed to be, in whole or in part, lovely”. Yes, you’ll have proved to everyone that you would like everything to be lovely, but the resulting confusion will make everyone just that little bit worse off than they were before.

The O******l Rep*rt

You may recall the incident at the end of January when LibDem MP Greg Mulholland [right] called health minister Ivan Lewis an “arsehole” in a debate about hospice funding. (Mulholland’s further colourful remarks are sadly not on the record as he chose to make them after the debate had finished.) Commons Hansard, still jittery in the wake of “Absolute bollocks”-gate, printed his lively intervention as “He’s an a*******”. This might raise intriguing possibilities for researchers in the far future (“Why would he call the minister an anteater?”), but it sets a bad precedent in the present. Hansard is there to print the substance of what they say, not to emasculate or bowdlerise it because someone might not like it.

It has been suggested that profanities should be censored if they are directed at someone in the room but not otherwise. This is arbitrary and ultimately silly as the old rule that some magazines ended up with: a swearword was acceptable as a noun but not if it could be used as a verb, so “fuck” had to be asterisked but, bizarrely, “cunt” was okay.

Anyway, my point is that in these stakes Lords Hansard currently “pwns” Commons Hansard, thanks to an unexpectedly sweary Earl Erroll:

Earl Erroll: If you put big money out there and give it so some quangos to decide where it is allocated, it will not be farmers sitting on them because farmers will not have the time or inclination for the bullshit that goes on in these committees and they will not understand it—

A noble Lord: Really!

Earl Erroll: It is a technical term.