CR spoke with the Christian Institute about Scotland's named person scheme

Simon: I have a concern that there are some within the children's rights sector, who have responsibility in this area, whether in academia or in commentating for the media, as well as those in Government, there are some who I just think have a wrong-headed view about the family. They have, I think, an unduly pessimistic view about the family because they have probably in their professional experience seen a lot of things go wrong. I think they can have a very statist view where they do see this kind of inversion as a good thing, the idea that the state should take a lead in all families, rather than allowing parents to take the lead unless and until they evidently get it seriously wrong. It concerns me that some of those people are always pushing for more laws, more power for the state, more authority for officials, and a greater reach for the Government into the private lives of individuals. And it surprises me that we as the general public aren't reacting against that more.

I make a sort of general point that politicians aren't necessarily the most popular people and yet these kind of schemes are giving politicians even more say over our private lives. It seems odd that there isn't more of a sense of people saying: there needs to be a limit to how far the Government can invade into our private lives; there needs to be a limit to what the Government knows about our private lives; that some things are private - and children, when they come back to their home, to their parents, they need to know that they're in a safe place where they're able to talk about things and open up and those things are private. Otherwise, if they feel that Government officials have a right to know about everything that's going on with them, that in itself can have a damaging effect on children.

We had a near miss recently when the Government seemed to signal that it was going to introduce a general parenting law that some of the children's charities were calling for, which could have made it illegal for parents to do anything which was deemed to be emotionally harmful. Well, emotional harm is such a vague and general concept, it could mean anything: yes, it could mean being brutally unkind to your kids, which is appalling and we'd like it to stop, but it could just mean not giving them things that they want, it could mean bringing them up as devout Christians in a culture which is hostile to that. Now thankfully we dodged a bullet on that one: the Government scaled back its plans and did not introduce this general parenting law, but there's always a push for that.

I think probably parents need to step up and let it be known that we're the ones who know what's best for our own kids and so long as we aren't putting our children at significant risk of harm we should be allowed to make our own decisions about how we educate them, what philosophies or beliefs we teach them, what we will and won't allow them to do: that's always been for parents to decide and that should continue to be the case.