A school has installed CCTV cameras in classrooms in a bid to avoid disputes between teachers and pupils and to tackle theft, the deputy head has said.

Mr Rush said that the reaction from staff, children and parents had been entirely supportive.

"The children are very happy here because they know they are on a school site where they are safe.

And this is the problem, that children 'feel safe' because they are under the watchful eye of a CCTV camera. They are being trained to believe that.

Likewise they are being trained that it is only right that your fingerprints can be taken so that you can borrow books from a library, that carrying ID cards is the norm and that you should feel safe now that you are put on a database as soon as you are born.

State control of your data is increasing and they people concerned have realised that 'getting them while they are young' seems to be the easiest way to slip these databases and surveillance systems in to place.

Seriously, look at the responses to the library fingerprints link - shouldn't we be concerned that we are creating children who will accept anything for the sake of 'safety'?

The question therefore is what can we do to educate children about the flaws in such systems?

My immediate thought is to make Orwell's '1984' and Doctorow's 'Little Brother' compulsory English texts. But what else? Perhaps ORG/FIPR/No2ID should start setting out their stalls at school fetes, and town shows, or start making child friendly websites?

But what else can we do?

I'm open for suggestions.

(And the first person to say that 'if you've nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear' will have their net curtains removed, their walls replaced with glass and be made to sign a declaration stating that they trust this, and all other future governments, as well as every soul that works for the civil service, the NHS, social services, transport your local council etc...)

What has happened here is tragically sad and my sympathies go out to the family.

A GRANDAD lay dying of a heart attack in his home — while a paramedic stood outside for 16 minutes filling in risk-assessment forms.

And last night Roy Adams’s heartbroken daughter Sarah claimed he would still be alive if there had not been a delay.

She added: “It’s awful. The medic could have saved my dad but instead he stood outside for 16 minutes. All that crucial time was wasted.”

I'm yet to see a 'Health and Safety' form that we fill in on the road - yet more 'Sun' exaggeration. But then they do seem to have a real hatred of people actually being safe at work.

When I was working solo, you made your 'health and safety' assessment in your head - if it felt safe to enter on your own then you would enter, if there was something about the call that made you nervous, then you would wait for backup. From the story in the newspaper, it would seem that the solo thought it was unsafe to enter - but after waiting sixteen minutes for a police escort to arrive, decided to enter on their own.

Probably what happened was that the solo wasn't happy to enter on their own for whatever reason, waited for the police and after they didn't turn up for a while entered the household at their own risk.

From the Times Online article about the same job.

The ambulance service spokesman described the risk assessment as a “mental checklist” which included considering the safety of the scene, types of risk and whether extra help or equipment was required.

“We have a duty of care to treat patients but we also have to look after our staff,” he said. “In this case the medic conducted the assessment, had safety concerns and decided to call for back-up.”

Well done that 'spokesman' for getting the real situation across to at least one paper (even if it is the toilet paper 'The Times')

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But it's not just about the poor reporting - what really sticks in my throat is the comments by the Great British Public who take the rubbish that is printed in the Sun as gospel. When every story becomes a trial by media it's interesting how quickly people are to judge something based on 380 words that they have read in a tabloid paper.

this idiot should be given life in prison

This medic should be struck off straight away, no questions ...

Typical Britain today,what a b****y disgrace, everything is Health and Safety, Hitlerite jobsworths ...

These people want us to risk our lives to save them when they make comments like that? What next? Moaning because I have two perfectly good kidneys and I should give one of them up for transplant so that someone else can live? Offering to be stabbed in place of someone else because we 'save lives' and are 'paid for it'?

How many of these commentors, after seeing the damage a knife can cause, would volunteer to walk into a place where there is a real fear of losing your life. They are very brave sitting behind their keyboards, but I bet they couldn't walk a mile in our boots.

And calling us 'Hitlerite' - well, I hope that whoever made that comment makes that viewpoint known to any ambulance crew that comes to help you in the future...

I do despair sometimes.

And should the Solo be vindicated, how many column inches would the Sun spend on that?

'Swine flu', which for those following me on Twitter, seems to be one of the things I'm encountering more and more often these days. Let me explain some of the ways in which it is impacting my working life of late.

• While the government leaflet says that masks offer no protection from the 'flu, our latest flowchart for dealing with it mentions not only masks, but also aprons and gloves. We have gone from having a pair of masks and a pair of aprons in our infection control kit to having as many masks as you want. To be fair we did have to steal resource masks from the hospitals that we went to at the start of this outbreak, but supply problems seem to have been sorted out.
• Our call rate has gone from the normal 4,200-4,500 calls per day to around 5,200-5,700 in the last few days. This is an increase of around 26% Rather obviously this is having us run ragged. I have no idea if our sickness rate has increased (with staff being off with the Death Plague). What this has done is raise our DEFCOM level to 4. Which I don't think makes a huge difference to those of us on the road.
• Hospitals are refusing to see Swine 'flu patients unless they are incredibly unwell. I was nearly turned away from the hospital when taking in a woman with vaginal bleeding and dizziness because she had possible Swine 'flu. Do GPs do vaginal examinations and diagnosis? Or would this woman have been sent in by the GP anyway (given some of the... 'quality' GPs we have in my area it wouldn't surprise me if she were just sent up to the hospital without an examination). There is huge paranoia about letting anyone with a high temperature and the sniffles within hospital grounds. My question is, will hospitals be turning patients away in the Winter when the more dangerous 'flus are epidemic?
• We are seeing plenty of people who call us for Swine 'flu symptoms, as well as those who just mention 'chest pain' to our calltakers - thus guaranteeing an ambulance response. Quite a lot of people think that Swine 'flu is a death sentence even though this particular strain of 'flu seems to be a lot less dangerous than the normal seasonal 'flus.
• We have the normal increasing number of people collapsing from the heat - often their first thought is that they are dying of Swine 'flu.
• We are being told to leave people at home to look after themselves (heh, people actually looking after themselves, whatever fantasy scenario will our people think of next); this makes us ambulance staff somewhat nervous - after all there is the perception (if not the fact) that leaving people at home will only have us losing our jobs when someone dies.
• An example of one of our 'clients' - she called four ambulances over four days as her child has Swine 'flu, which isn't 'getting any better', despite being told that it can take over a week to feel better. Needless to say the child involved is fine if a bit generally unwell - certainly nothing that requires hospital treatment. Multiply this by the number of people across London and you can see one more reason why the number of calls is raised.

So, lots of panic, lots of fear, lots of misinformation along with the normal misuse of the ambulance service has resulted in many more calls for us, which then results in delays for people actually needing treatment. For example the police were with an assault patient for an hour waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

Unfortunately there isn't much that we can do, we can't suddenly make the public realise that they may be capable of looking after themselves without us holding their hands - and we can't magic up new ambulance staff from nowhere.

Except maybe get all the officers (that were road trained) up in Waterloo Control to man resource up trucks and get out on the road - I'm sure that for a few weeks we can do without the assistant staff officer to the staff officer for the diversity department* (or similar) and that they might be more use on the road at the moment.

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*I have no idea if this is a genuine position, although it sounds about right - I couldn't tell you how many levels of management there are between me and my boss, nor all the 'performance improvement' staff that float around up there in Waterloo.