The Manifesto Club has made a written submission in response to the Protection of Freedoms Bill – arguing that vetting and barring reforms have not gone far enough in rolling back red-tape and mistrust. See the Written Submission in response to the…
The Manifesto Club welcomes the suspension and review of the vetting and barring scheme. We have been calling for this review for the past three years: all of the many people who have been involved in our Campaign Against Vetting have done something to win this important gain. The massive vetting database – which would mean subjecting 9 million adults to constant criminal records vetting – would do little to protect children. The main result would be to further damage adult-child relations, encouraging suspicion and mistrust of anyone who offers to help out in their local football club or nursery. It would…
The Manifesto Club has made a submission to the Anti-CCTV Strategy of www.no-cctv.org.uk. The submission, by Dolan Cummings, is below. The Manifesto Club is opposed to the use of CCTV in public places, primarily on the grounds that it induces inhibition and undermines the spirit of public space. CCTV is often justified explicitly in terms of preventing not only crime but loosely-defined ‘antisocial behaviour’. Even if successful in its own terms, which is doubtful, this is achieved by replicating the atmosphere of narrowly-defined commercial spaces, so streets and squares begin to resemble outdoor shopping malls. The effect is to limit the public’s…