I’ve been thinking! Dangerous I know – but with a new portfolio such asInternational Development – that’s my role. And out of all the briefings I’ve had about all the injustices and challenges of the developing world, the one that jumped out at me was the plight of children – orphaned, displaced and traumatized, sometimes for generations.

When war wrecks a child’s life – be it the murder of their families, loss of their home, displacement or injury – they are left vulnerable and fragile. Where natural disaster, war or protracted conflict rages the world rushes in with medicine, food, water and shelter – obviously. But there is something more that is needed – even at that first point. It is education. Despite the life-saving benefits of education, in emergencies and in protracted conflicts where war can deny children a future for decades – children are missing out because education is currently not part of the humanitarian response.

According to research conducted by Save the Children, 39 million of the 77 million children still missing out on primary school education are in conflict-affected states. When I questioned Hilary Benn (Secretary of State for International Development) on this recently he agreed on the record that education should now be considered part of humanitarian response.

The physical and material destruction of war and conflict is bad enough, but the lack of access to education sometimes for years and decades has a devastating effect on the (re)building of any sort of future for the people and the country.

Focusing on education in a conflict zone is vital in order to establish a future for that region. War only teaches war. Children need not only the therapeutic medicine of learning itself but also – as they emerge from the carnage – children need to be given the skills and capacity to become anything from farmers to pharmacists.

Moreover, the relationship between education and community and political participation is well established. Participation in education contributes to community action and national political life. Teachers can also help children to develop new skills and knowledge necessary for survival and coping in a post-conflict environment, including landmine awareness and safety, negotiation and problem solving, and information about HIV/AIDS and other health issues.

In the long term, education can lay the foundations for lasting peace and development by providing a whole generation with the skills to build their country. After conflict, an educated population offers people the skills to rebuild their lives. However, if education is missing for years and generations during conflict, then you will not have the educated population to establish peace, civic society and economic prosperity needed to create a future.

So – the big idea is to create a sort of education version of the Red Cross to go into regions ravaged by conflict to deliver an educational capability in the same swift way that the humanitarian organisations like the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontiers go in to provide humanitarian aid. Teachers Without Borders would provide a first response to the educational needs and build capacity in the locality – because this would be about meeting immediate needs rather than staying for years and years as a substitute education service.

Similar arrangements already exist in other areas. For example, police officers are often deployed on peace support operations. Through advising, training and monitoring, they help support fragile states and help make and keep the peace.

Practical models already exist for the short-term release of education professionals for other purposes. For example, a system of deferred payment allows experienced Australian teachers to take time out from their schools for professional development, industry placements, or international community work.

Perhaps the best part of this concept is that a few weeks after I first started floating it, Gordon Brown – he of Number 11, wishing he were at Number 10, Downing Street – voiced support for the concept in Parliament. Thus – this idea is going with the grain of what is possible to achieve even under the current political management.

To help flesh out the idea I have set up a special website http://www.teacherswithoutborders.info with more details and a chance for people to submit their views on several of the key points. Please take a few moments to visit, read and let me know your thoughts – especially if you are involved in development or education issues yourself. And if you don’t have internet access, just write to me at House of Commons, London, SW1A 1AA.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007

If we are now saying that fingerprinting children is the best way of ensuring that they get their library books back to the school library – then the world has clearly gone mad! But this is what is happening both nationally and locally.

One of my local schools was catapulted into the media this week for having fingerprinted its children and retained the fingerprints on file – even though in this case the scheme had to be dropped because it didn’t work.

The technology being used on British children is similar to the identification systems used in US prisons and for the German military. This system is now being used in thousands of UK primary schools up and down the land – sometimes in conjunction with digitised photographs – to replace library cards and – so it is argued – to increase efficiency of library management. Each child is required to place a thumb onto an electronic scanner, and the identity of the print is then stored in a computer.

In my view, treating children like criminals is unlikely to be the best way to imbue the sort of values we should be instilling in the next generation. Fingerprinting and digitised photographs for protecting the Crown Jewels – fair enough – but fingerprinting and digitised photographs for a children’s book about them? That is a hideously disproportionate response to the issue – and a sense of balance and judgement is one of the many things we should actually be teaching children!

Remember also that the infant book-borrower is not a random passer-by – I don’t think even in the most extreme media world stuffed full of crime wave scares have we got into drive-by booknappings by joyriding offspring from neighbouring schools. So schools have things like name, address and contact details on record already – which means it is not as if some sophisticated identification and checking system is needed.

And yes – children do lose their library cards; but learning not to lose things is part of becoming a developed grown-up as is taking the responsibility for borrowing a library book and then dealing with the financial penalties if it is not returned.

That the Government is encouraging this is perhaps not surprising – given that this is the very same Government that wants to spend billions of pounds on mandatory ID cards – tagging the innocent rather than putting the resources into catching the guilty. Who knows – perhaps there is a view that they need to get kids used to being monitored and tagged at an early age so that when they come to voting age they will think nothing of a Big Brother surveillance state!

The Government is belatedly bringing out some guidelines for schools and encouraging schools to seek parental consent. It is all rather half-hearted so far, and the retention of this very sensitive and personal information on a computer database also raises the spectre of security (how many schools have the IT expertise to keep their systems really secure?) and future use and abuse.

So I have signed an Early Day Motion at Parliament (sort of a petition for MPs) against this growing practice. (If you aren’t one of my constituents, you can lobby your own MP too very easily via www.theyworkforyou.com). We need a proper debate – with teachers, parents and children involved – and then effective and comprehensive new guidance if such a system is to be used at all.

And we need it soon – because imagine the temptation to keep on expanding the use of fingerprints and access to them. Otherwise it won’t be long before security and safety are rolled out as reasons to give the security services and the police access to the fingerprint records. And then – remembering Labour’s public backing for so-called “early intervention”, which means identifying those children at risk of becoming criminals later in life – it could so easily be extended to monitoring children, however young, thought at risk of one day becoming a criminal. And then of course you wouldn’t want to leave out any child would you, because what if you assessed the risk wrong and the one you didn’t fingerprint went on to commit a crime? So it’d be full fingerprinting and monitoring across the board. Not so much Big Brother as little Kid Brother perhaps – but just as bad. And all because someone wanted to make sure they got their library book back.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007

I always wanted to have daughters. Being of a Jewish family, but completely non-religious myself (in fact – going in the other direction) it was no bigdeal to marry a non-Jew. However, had I had sons I would have had tohorrendous battles with my traditionally religious mother – from refusing to have my child circumcised or at age thirteen, Bar Mitzvahed.

Luckily for me I had two daughters – thus avoidingserious conflict with my mother. If they had been boys – and I had gone my own sweet way (as I most certainly would have) – it wouldn’t have been the end of our relationship and I certainly would not have faced family disgrace or been killed for bringing dishonour. I would simply have been an embarrassment and my mother would always have had to fend off comments from friends and neighbours – at least at that point in time.

Of course – since then – times have moved on again and fewer and fewerpeople hold those views as strongly now as they did thirty years ago.However, amongst some members of some communities – Jewish, Christian, Muslim and others – there is still a strong determination to keep to the very strict mores of their original traditions, motivated in large part I suspect because people fear assimilation or dilution of their beliefs amongst a multicultural society.

Hanging together in the face of adversity – and often in the face of havinga community flung into different parts scattered around the world – is anadmirable trait. But it can lead to some customs, traditions and religiouspractices that cross a line of what can be accepted in a civilised society- and so where the state does have (in my view) a duty to intervene andprohibit.

The dilemma for those making the state’s policies is where to draw theboundaries as to what is considered appropriate and civilised behaviour ina permissive and tolerant society that respects cultures, practices andtraditions of other religions and races.

Forced marriages – and the so-called honour killings that sometimes followthose who fight against that tradition – have now been put on the politicalagenda. Not, as promised, by the Government – but by my Liberal Democratcolleague Lord Lester, who introduced a Private Members’ Bill in the Lordsjust recently.

It was an innovative move, in that rather than looking at this from acriminal perspective, the Bill enables civil action. This is probably agood thing – as the intent of this legislation is not to criminalise ordemonise British Asians but to move to inhibit what cannot be tolerated and- of course – it affects many religions, in fact, not just Asian communities.

By bringing this into the civil courts, it puts the whole issue in therealm of ‘victim centred human rights approach’ and adds to the protectionsunder the existing laws. The Bill received its second reading and hopefullywill continue on through to law in due course – demonstrating thata tactful yet effective path can be followed between respecting traditionswhilst not neglecting the basic standards that make up our society.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007

Have you ever felt like screaming ‘it isn’t fair’ when – regardless of the whole neighbourhood being up in arms – the Government runs roughshod over local peoples’ wishes and carry out its own wishes regardless?

Well, although it doesn’t have a sexy title, the Sustainable Communities Bill could help bring about a major change in the way we are governed so that in future local people can more often say, “hang on, you don’t have the power to do that.”

The Bill has been presented to Parliament as Private Members’ Bill (fronted by Nick Hurd, a Conservative, though the Liberal Democrats too are backing it). These types of Bill are hard to get through. In particular, they need a good turnout of MPs to support them on a Friday morning – but that’s a time when many MPs from outside London have already travelled back to their constituencies for a busy and long weekend of meetings and events in their constituency. But on one Friday last month, enough members from all parties came together to try and get it through to the next stages.

There is an overwhelming feeling, whatever the political persuasion of an area, that we are all fighting this dreadful fight against centralist steamrollering of local wishes. The Bill puts forward a proposed mechanism whereby local people can put forward their wishes and so long as it is within reason, the Secretary of State should approve the plan. It’s more complicated than that – but a simplified summary is as follows.

This Bill is primarily about sustainable communities – including making sure our little parades of shops and local village high streets survive. For example – high rents from the big multiple chains could threaten our local shops, driving out our individual shops. Perhaps we locally would want to put particular controls on development in Highgate Village or Archway Road. We might want to say we didn’t want any more estate agents (there are seventeen already) – and that new estate agents wishing to come to the area could only replace existing ones. Or perhaps we locally would want to put particular criteria on development in Muswell Hill to protect its special character. Or over in Wood Green we might want to ensure that new developments which would put too much strain on local public services don’t get the go ahead.

Well, this Bill might allow us to make that local decision. During the debate MPs told of parts of their constituencies where 80% of the homes were second homes – making for virtual ghost towns. Well – of course – there is an argument too that when those homes are filled in the holidays they bring economic benefits – but this Bill would allow local people to argue out which is the best way forward themselves.

Of course, there are lots of other areas where we may well feel that the national Government should keep its nose out and let local people be in charge of the decision making instead. Planning is a classic of the case. So many local residents are only too used to objecting to a planning application, the Planning Committee of the local Authority refusing the application – and then the Government’s Inspector overturns the decision. It doesn’t just make for bad decisions – it also makes for a bad democracy, because you can always vote out of office a council which makes bad planning decisions, but the Planning Inspectors are beyond the reach of the ballot box.

So part of the Bill is about sorting out what can be decided locally and what must remain a central function. It’s a start to giving power back to the people – and having got through its first legislative stage, the Bill now travels on to the Committee Stage in Parliament, hurrah!

Watch short film: My colleague Julia Goldsworthy has been leading campaigner in the Liberal Democrats on this issue and you can watch her talking about it on Google Video.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007

A few days ago I woke up to the latest (then) scandal emanating from the Home Office. More records in a mess; more criminals lost track of. Immediately I jumped out of bed to put the line together and prepare for the onslaught that each such revelation brings as a Home Affairs spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats. Then I remembered -that’s not me any more! I have a new job; now I’m Ms International Development.

On the Monday before Christmas, Ming had telephoned me to offer me the job of International Development in his Shadow Cabinet. Given that I had thought he was ringing to wish me Happy Christmas, that was a very pleasant surprise!

Having spent five years in transport, six and a half years in policing, this is largely new territory for me. So I am in the middle of what probably equates to an ‘A’ level in International Development but without the information absorbing brain of an eighteen year old and with only a few weeks to get up to speed.

My Parliamentary political world up until now has been peopled by Home Office ministers, officials, police, judiciary, youth offending teams and my vocabulary by ASBOs, DNA, stop and search and terrorism. Now it is DFID (Department for International Development), Non-Governmental Organisations, International Development Officers – and AIDS, poverty reduction, sustainable development and so on.

In Home Affairs the daily diet is one disaster after another for consecutive Labour Home Secretaries and a Government that believes new initiatives that sound tough on crime are what matters. Over 3,000 new criminal offences have been created by Labour since they came to government. No wonder the Home Office is falling apart under the strain of continual change and over-demand. By contrast, international development is virtually a legislation free zone and there is much more cross-party agreement.

Flood and famine, drought, disaster, war and destruction – trade, aid, corruption and disease – these are now the currency of my new world. As I read into my new portfolio I am busy thinking how I can make a difference in my new role. Holding the Government to account for what they have promised against what they have delivered – obviously. Pointing out divergence between what they say and what they do – of course. Seeing where I can offer positive proposals – as there’s more to politics than point scoring. And examining carefully the issues around the need to ensure development is green – at the same time as ensuring economic growth.

I think for many people international aid used to be largely a matter of a guilty conscience – a nod in the direction of helping countries less fortunate than ours. But now for a whole host of reasons – including greater international travel which means so many more places feel familiar and the way in which events overseas can help cause terrorism on our doorsteps – I think people more and more see international development as being not just about helping other countries, but helping ourselves too.

It is quite clear to me that in this global village we live in now: whatever happens anywhere in the world reverberates on our own doorstep.

So I am putting a strategy group together at Parliament, and I am studying and learning and listening and looking. So if you have a particular view or interest or think there is something I should know about – then please get in touch.

I would be very interested to hear what you think.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007

I write a weblog. For the uninitiated – this is an online diary. A comment that was posted by a young man who lives locally encapsulated – albeit accidentally – the confusion and conflation between ‘terrorist’ and ‘Muslim’.

The comment was in response to my last Asian Voice column which had been basically about the Labour government throwing away millions on the Identity Card scheme because it wastes those millions on tracking innocent people rather than spending the money on catching the guilty.

In the article I say: “One of the things terrorists want is to get rid of liberal society. It’s their enemy. So stripping away our freedoms is not fighting them – it is doing what they want”.

My commentator then berates me and says that ‘terrorists despise us not for our freedom, but that most suggest their hatred emerges from our occupation and participation in the Middle East.’ He goes on then to argue that the main reason for anger within the Muslim community is as outlined by Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer and an Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada:

“As Muslims it is our religious duty to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are suffering in Palestine, Kashmir and every part of the world; we must also show solidarity with the oppressed in any part of the world regardless of their religious or racial or ethnic affiliations. Therefore, our disappointment and anger will remain until we resolve the most pressing conflicts in the world”.

He misses the point. Of course our (Labour’s) foreign policy is causal. Liberal Democrats make this point at every opportunity. But the response in terms of the use of terrorism in this country is totally unacceptable albeit thus caused – and any loss of our civil liberties is a victory for the terrorist.

But the real issue here is that my commentator has conflated – even juxtaposed – ‘terrorist’ for ‘Muslim’. I wrote about terrorists and my respondent was talking about Muslims. That to me is a dangerous conflation. Or is my correspondent really saying that the anger in the Muslim community is so great that terrorism and acts of murder in this country is justified? Let me know what you think.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007

I was discussing horse racing with my sister. She had come over for a coffee between Christmas and New Year and we were talking about possible outings. She suggested going to the races and advised studying the form before going. I said I didn’t know how to read form. Racing pages and form are not my specialist subject – though she pointed out that our mother had taught her how to read the form. When I go to the dogs at Walthamstow, I bet on the trap number – I am that sophisticated, not!

Then she really surprised me and said that she remembered our mother taking her to the horse racing at Ally Pally. Well – firstly – why wasn’t I included? Possibly because I was only about five at the time. And secondly – how extraordinary given how well I know the history of the Pally – that I didn’t know that my own mother had taken to going to the horses and gambling there!

Of course, when the Palace is contracted out to developer Firoka for one hundred and twenty-five years and there is no plan, as far as I am aware, to re-introduce racing. However, there was a big row about the preservation of the birthplace of television – and it still continues.

Whilst there a clause that there will be a museum of TV, there is no contractual obligation to preserve the historic site itself and its one-off artifacts like the Director’s Gallery. There are moves I heard rumblings about, to try and get its listing changed as at present the listing only preserves the outside. And the Charities Commission has had a 30-day consultation to which people I hope submitted their views.

A TV program called me the day before New Year because they wanted to run a story on the TV studios and had picked up that I had tabled an Early Day Motion about this in Parliament. From my early brush with the new owners who were not happy that I had tabled such a motion or that the media had got the story (being about the birthplace of television it’s not that surprising) I gather that they are not keen on media attention – so luckily for them, the TV station decided anyway to go with another story.

But as the Pally passes into new hands, I hope that those who now have this amazing building in their care remember the importance of working with local people and considering their needs and their well-being at the same time as trying to turn it into a viable development for themselves.

And as for horse-racing…

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007

It’s New Year’s Day as I sit down to write. Christmas has come and gone in the usual familiar way – frenetic build up and then the luxury of the world itself (mostly) stopping.

I love the familiarity of Christmas. I’m not Christian – but I adopted Christmas long ago. It really has everything you need for a good family tradition – if you are lucky enough to have a family.

The rhythm and pattern of life and its familiarity anyway is important to me. I sometimes think that’s why I ended up living in Highgate, having grown up here (in Highpoint on North Hill) from the age of five. Much of my childhood was spent in the gardens there or in Waterlow Park – where my uncle took me each Saturday to feed the squirrels and the pigeons. I used to love to put some peanuts in my hand and hold it out for the pigeons to fly up and land on my hand whilst they ate. Now nothing would horrify me more! I am clearly moving towards Grumpy Old Woman status!

I went to Highgate Primary School and played kiss-chase in Highgate Woods – occasionally even letting myself be caught! I was taken to Highgate Police station once when young and lost – and yes it was once open and working – and the officer ‘phoned my mother to say ‘I have your little girl here’. Very Dixon of Dock Green.

So – do we all hanker after familiarity and days gone by? No – I just get sentimental on New Year’s Day. The front page of the Guardian this morning carried the picture of Saddam at the moment of death with the noose around his neck and an account of the mobile phone footage sound track, which was unedifying and distasteful. Back to earth with a bump.

I was horrified that anyone would film such a moment and put it on the net – almost equating it to entertainment. And horrified too on reading that some of those present had hurled abuse and taunted Saddam – as if they were taking part in an act of violent revenge rather than the final stage of a legal process. That way lies even more trouble for Iraq.

So as 2007 marches forward -I wonder and worry about the way the world is going and resolve, as ever, to take more exercise and work even harder to make the world a better place.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007