WHEN Esther Rantzen says she has serious doubts then you know it must be flawed. Nobody can question Esther’s prioritisation of child protection through her role in the establishment of Childline, and of course the vast majority of ordinary, decent folk believe that we do have a duty to look after the most vulnerable in society.

But even when the basic intention might be laudable, the present Government seems to have a propensity for turning action into a bureaucratic nightmare in its unstoppable aim of gathering data about the perfectly innocent, law-abiding millions of people who live in this country.

It has done it again with the new quango planning to set up a massive child protection register containing the details of 11 million of us, notably the good folk, the good neighbours who just want to help.

Children’s Secretary Ed Balls this week wrote to the head of the Independent Safeguard Authority — in itself a sinister Stalinesque-sounding organisation — calling for a rethink of the almost incomprehensible rules that would force parents and club volunteers to register on a database run by faceless officials with arbitrary authority to blacklist without explanation.

Any person who comes into regular contact with children and the elderly, through work or as a volunteer, will have to be approved by ISA officials, who will have the power not only to check for criminal records, but also for disciplinary action or even unproven allegations.

Whether it’s cameras in the street and in your bin, or with proposed ID cards, our political rulers are hell bent on gathering information on us that will probably disappear from computers or end up being left on a train by some forgetful high-ranking official.

This latest idea is at best misguided. It won’t help children at risk. It will further destroy their trust in adults and erode the ethos of helping others.

In years gone by we told our kids to find an adult if they were lost or in trouble. Now children are being brought up to believe that every grown up is a pervert lurking on the street corner just waiting for an opportunity to do them harm

Really dangerous paedophiles are clever enough to slip through the net. Most child abuse cases come from within the family anyway. This is all about adding to the climate of fear with the implication that all adults are abusers.

Plus it will be expensive and many clubs and their volunteers will wonder if it’s all worth the bother of continuing to invest their spare time and energies.

One woman contacted the BBC last week to say that, as someone working with young people in her job and as a volunteer, she had been through at least 10 criminal records checks in the past two years. Another example of how ludicrous these ideas become once vested in the hands of unelected bureaucrats with an almost ferocious zeal.

Ed Balls might liken the system to wearing a seatbelt in the car. Stupid comments like that show how out of touch ministers are. All the Government will achieve if this goes ahead is the creation of suspicion and a further diminishing of our British tradition of being good neighbours.

SEND FOR CLARISSA

I SUSPECT that the story about the lamb being slaughtered for its meat at what sounds rather like a posh middle class school in Kent would never happen in this neck of the woods.

There probably aren’t many kids called Liberty who come from a farming background in rural Cumbria and cry themselves to sleep while mum threatens to sue the school over the death of an animal.

Most kids round here know that Cumberland sausage was once running round a farmyard snuffling in the mud and that the roast beef joint on the table next Sunday, or the Christmas turkey, were reared not as pets, but as part of the food chain. I suppose children like Liberty think that meat was born ready packaged in clingfilm in Sainsbury’s. It must be a shock to realise that those McNuggets were once stuffing themselves in a chicken rearing unit and that most of that full English breakfast was once living and breathing.

Personally, I think the school was mad to think that it could keep Marcus the lamb as a pet, then give him the chop without causing an emotional kickback.

On the other hand it has been a real life and death experience for children to learn where their food comes from. Some of them will naturally be upset for 24 hours — until they get hungry and carrots and lettuce don’t seem quite as appealing as pie and chips.

And in any case, for those converting to vegetarianism, aren’t carrots a living entity, too? Doesn’t broccoli have human rights?

The damage to Liberty Grant and others like her is done by their over-reacting parents, not by learning a tough lesson about real life and death. The headteacher has even been branded a murderer by one parent. It is truly a mad, mad world.

I think what these precious mothers need is a corrective visit from “One Fat Lady”, namely Clarissa Dickson Wright, fresh from her ticking off in court over a bit of hare coursing in Yorkshire, to put them straight on the ways of the countryside.

BATS IN OUR BELFRY

IF we aren’t quite as mad as our southern counterparts over a lamb, we are definitely a bit batty. Roosting bats have been blamed for pushing up the overspend on preparing the site for a new school in the north of the county.

Admittedly this accounts for a relatively modest amount compared to the hundreds of thousands of pounds involved, but by the time they commissioned a bat survey and removed a colony it put the work back by four months.

When you look through the Lake District National Park Authority’s planning lists these days, the words “bat survey” crop up fairly frequently. I’m all for preserving at-risk creatures, but let’s be honest, bats aren’t exactly Cumbria’s equivalent of the white rhino. We haven’t yet seen Stephen Fry lurking in the Newlands Valley hoping to spot the last of a rare breed of nocturnal fliers.

What sometimes happens is, we protect species which then become too successful. At one time it was exciting to see a badger. Now they litter the roadsides as weekend accident victims, being run down by cars as they stagger home from the pub.

Good luck to the bats, but I wonder if they aren’t becoming over protected and we are all getting a bit bats in the belfry over the issue.

EDDIE’S GREAT RUN

IN my book transvestite comedian Eddie Izzard is about as funny as an ingrowing toenail. But I’ve got to hand it to him after he completed 43 marathons in just 52 days this week.

Izzard, whose Sport Relief fund-raiser took him through Cumbria, achieved what very few trained athletes would have managed. I know because many years ago I used to do long distance events, including 100 miles in a day, and I can tell you it hurts.

How on earth Izzard did it on five weeks’ training I have no idea. It makes a pleasant change to see a celebrity in the papers for the right reasons.s