The 'Transformational Government Programme'

There really is such a programme, and its title is intentionally, and scarily, accurate; its aim is to transform the relationship between the Government and the people. The whole population is to be logged, followed, managed, and 'transformed', once again demonstrating that - if not in the matter of slaughter, but certainly in terms of state ambition and control-freakery - New Labour has no rival other than Stalin.

An example is the National Pupil Database (NPD). This is a staging post on the road to a national ID card, with children and young people being used as a form of 'mission creep' - as you can see in the report on the No2ID link on the left. The NPD tags all children with 40 pieces of information - from behaviour to ethnicity - without consent, and in perpetuity, and a similar database does the same for teenagers. The Government's Every Child Matters programme also logs everyone until the age of 18, with children 'at risk' being 'tagged' for further intervention.

Meanwhile the Education Secretary Ed Balls - that maniacal, evangelical stare can only belong to somebody attempting to attone for a lifetime of surname-related abuse (and his wife Yvette Cooper's refusal to take his surname is either an admirable symbol of feminist independence, or for some other reason that must cut him to the quick...) - has denied, despite overwhelming published research, that Government interference and mismanagement in primary and secondary education over the past decade has irretrievably damaged the numeracy and literacy of a generation of schoolchildren.

So, a child aged 5 in 1997 has been subject to countless initiatives, tested to distraction, taught by ever-more-stressed teachers desperate to achieve marks rather than education, and now emerges at 16 liable to be less numerate and literate than a teenager from the generation before. And, if their lack of development has contributed to some 'behavioural problems', they're marked for the rest of their lives. As a letter-writer in today's Independent remarked, in terms of damage to Britain this could - really - be the worst Government ever.