Toddler Terrorists

toddler

A leading Scottish children’s charity has issued a warning about the likely impact of a Westminster Bill in Scotland.

Children in Scotland has expressed serious concerns over plans in the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill for a new duty on organisations and staff to report children as young as two judged to be at risk of becoming involved in terrorism.

Chief Executive Jackie Brock said:

“We would like to know what the evidence is that children in Scottish early years settings and early years specialist provision pose any threat of becoming radicalized. If this evidence doesn’t exist, the proposed nature and scope of the new duty seems excessive and completely unjustified for application in Scotland. We suspect that the proposed duty is, in reality, aimed at parents and carers of children and young people, thus placing staff in services to be covered by the duty in the invidious position of being asked to observe and assess adults as well as children and young people.”

She added: “[These proposals] will only serve to alienate certain families and communities from service providers and have a seriously adverse effect on our priorities around inclusiveness and equality in Scotland – for negligible gain in terms of protecting us from terrorists.”

The consultation on the Bill emphasises the type of constitutional issues Children in Scotland highlighted in comments they made last autumn in response to the Smith Commission recommendations.

Crucially, the charity says the proposals risk further confusion and tension between reserved and devolved functions, in this case counter terrorism (reserved to the UK Government) and education and child protection (devolved to the Scottish Government).

This is another example of how the febrile atmosphere of English politics currently affects Scotland in a completely inappropriate way.

If we had genuine Home Rule, such an intervention simply couldn’t happen.

 

The consultation closes next Friday.

Comments (13)

Leave a Reply to thomaspotter2014 Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

  1. Clootie says:

    Scary!

  2. WTF! Add that to my school day, why don’t you? I give in. Not!

  3. paulcarline says:

    Just another part of the propaganda campaign to make us believe we are under a genuine threat from “home-grown terrorism”.

    If only people would look at the evidence, they would know that none of the official stories about ‘terrorist incidents’ (nowadays exclusively ‘Islamic’) here and elsewhere is true. But by the time people wake up (if ever), the increasingly oppressive police state will have become a fait accompli.

    1. maxi kerr says:

      I know lots of people who still think the 3 buildings on 9/11 fell because of plane’s hitting them . The same applies to the Whitehouse????.

      1. Niall says:

        Including, of course, fire professionals and engineers. The construction of the Twin Towers was such that a downwards domino of the floors was the most serious risk of catastrophic failure from the word go. Once the fire disconnected one floor from the external walls and the internal concrete core, it could only go downwards, as it would act like a disc sliding down a pole. There was a rapid chain reaction as the building was “unzipped”, with each floor torn off the walls and central core quicker than the last.

        People who say demolition charges were needed to bring it down are just not familiar with that type of construction. I remember hearing one engineer on the radio shortly after the incident who felt that no-one else would have got planning permission to build that type of structure on that scale.

        Do you know who built the Twin Towers? The New York Port Authority. Do you know who approves planning applications in that area? The New York Port Authority. In short, the port authority cut corners to build the towers as cheap as possible. The only cover-up was them being absolved of all responsibility. Patriotism meant not blaming Americans. We’re also (see Charlie Hebdo) not allowed to criticise the victims of terror attacks, even when they do something wrong.

  4. David Erdal says:

    This is a photo of my grandson, almost. Surely he has the right to some privacy while playing?

  5. jimnarlene says:

    Are we living in 21st century Scotland, or in Orwell’s 1984?

  6. Monty says:

    Somewhat heavy handed response to a heavy handed and ill conceived proposal that has already been widely attacked by David Davis, Liberty and groups involved in nursery education.

  7. This scary stuff is also very useful in diverting attention away from voting for more nuclear weapons,more austerity ,fiddling the employment figures and saying Britain’s debt is in fact Scotland’s debt e’t’c.

  8. davidmccann24 says:

    ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’
    American writer H. L. Mencken

  9. The stage managed ‘Acts of Terrorism’ are not complete yet and what is guaranteed is that some major ‘incident’ will happen before the GE.
    B

  10. Steve Asaneilean says:

    If true this is simply bonkers.
    Maybe we should be identifying 2 year olds at risk of becoming politicians so we can “root out” this kind of nonsense.

Help keep our journalism independent

We don’t take any advertising, we don’t hide behind a pay wall and we don’t keep harassing you for crowd-funding. We’re entirely dependent on our readers to support us.

Subscribe to regular bella in your inbox

Don’t miss a single article. Enter your email address on our subscribe page by clicking the button below. It is completely free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.