This government is beyond belief - suggesting that the refusal of perfectly sensible and rightly searching Freedom of Information requests is acceptable because of the mere existence of critical commentary that is freely available on the internets.
You do not need to be a home educator to be enraged about this.
Make no mistake - if the state cannot police the precious online world (and Ed Balls cannot remove uncomfortable truth blog posts by making a single angry phonecall) then it will make full use of the endless legislation it has constructed to make things as difficult as possible.
Lovely Ali has written a post well worth reading here. She makes reference to this pertinent quote from the late Tim Field:
"When close to being outwitted and exposed, the bully feigns victimhood and turns the focus on themselves - this is another example of manipulating people through their emotion of guilt, e.g. sympathy, feeling sorry, etc."
The government continually uses the discrimination card to silence freedom of speech and fair criticism - whilst continually encouraging or engaging in discriminatory activity itself.
If a government department thinks that it is acceptable to refuse Freedom of Information requests because:
- someone has told the truth,
- someone has been mocking, and
- a child has produced a piece of animation
and this might, conceivably, hurt the feelings of an extremely powerful, highly experienced, well-paid independent expert, then this tells me that the real bully is not the truth-teller, one who mocks, or the young animator. The bully is the government, using its legislation to protect itself from scrutiny once again.
