Tim Linehan asks why we as the British public are so comfortable with failing to meet the physical, social and mental needs of our most disadvantaged children.
‘Rights’ is a dirty word with the British public. It suffers from the overtones of dodgy Europhilia – after all, it is the European Court of Human Rights that the public seems to rail against, despite the fact it emerged from an initiative of that most British of prime ministers, Winston Churchill. Even worse is the fey global peacenik-ism of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child, despite the fact that it is based on the 1923 declaration of the rights of the child and written by Eglantyne Jebb, the British founder of Save the Children.
Children’s rights have never had a good press and rarely a fair political hearing in Britain. In 2003, under the last Labour Government, Tony Blair abolished the notion of doli incapax, which stated that children under 14 had to show beyond reasonable doubt that they could discern between good and evil. In doing so, he wiped out a law passed by Edward III 700 years previously, leaving England with one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility in Europe. Rather like so many international sports, the English have been world-beaters at inventing but have since basked in failure…