There's more than one way to kill

The latest potential victim is education of children at home.

They and their parents seem about to fall under the heavy hand of government regulation.

Proposals accepted by the government will require parents attempting to teach children at home to register with the local authority, produce a written plan with a statement of their objectives and how they intend to achieve them, and be subject to inspection visits by Ofsted and/or local councils.

Parents thinking that they had removed their children from the bad influences of local politicians and their advisers, and also the over burdening diktats sent down from Whitehall, will now find that they have not escaped entirely. Local authorities will have powers to enter homes and exclude parents while the inspector interviews children, a power which even the police lack.

Behind all this are a number of left wing principles which include:
- All children must be made equal - ridiculous, as anyone with knowledge of children will agree
- The state and its politically motivated advisers and inspectors know better than parents what their children need.
- No section of society may operate which does no conform to our plan.

Thus home education will be confronted with some of the regulation which confronts business, - form filling, inspection, diktat etc. These will disrupt education sufficiently to deter home education. There will also be monetary costs to parents, to cover the high cost enforcement and compliance costs.

If they want to stop something, a government can always ban it, this however will diminish their liberal and democratic credentials.

Alternatively they can load it with such bureaucratic controls and costs, that regulation kills what the government does not like. They are doing it with banking, they have done it with British industry generally and they have done it with the NHS and education. Now the effect of these proposals will extend it to the small segment which at present avoids these stultifying burdens, and reduce it to failure or extinction.