NEWS THAT our legal guardians in the Government are now planning classes to teach nursery rhymes — to parents — is enough to make any adult throw a tantrum.

Beverley Hughes, Minister for Children, plans a national academy for parenting practitioners to train a “parenting workforce” of teachers, psychologists and social workers. Among other priorities, she wants them to educate “disadvantaged parents” about how to sing nursery rhymes and read stories. You surely could not make it up. At least, not without the support of your professional “co-educators”.

This new academy is meant to develop an evidence-based view of “what works”. If Ms Hughes had done her homework, she might have learnt that years of research shows no clear evidence that an interventionist approach to parenting works at all. Yet the parenting industry pursues its agenda regardless, always insisting that “more research is needed”, presumably until they get the “right” results.

New Labour’s justification for its academy is that many parents have lost confidence in their ability to raise children. As proof, Ms Hughes cited the popularity of parenting TV programmes such as the House of Tiny Tearaways (there’s serious evidence-based research!). This looks like a self-fulfilling ideological exercise. You keep telling parents that they lack confidence and bombard them with often contradictory advice. Then, when many end up confused and unconfident, you set up shop to intervene further into family life — and undermine parents further.

We don’t really live in a nanny state. More like a Supernanny state where, as in that programme admired by Ms Hughes, the experts are invited in to help struggling parents, who are then required to make a spectacle of themselves in parenting classes, if not on national TV. I recall catching the end of one episode of Supernanny where the parents concluded that, while their children’s behaviour had not changed at all, their own certainly had.

Still, some good may come of it. The Government’s crackdown on incitement to religious hatred could start by teaching parents some new words to Goosey Goosey Gander; do we want children to think that throwing an old man downstairs is any way to resolve disputes over prayer? As for the farmer’s wife who thinks it OK to cut the tails off blind mice, or the old woman in a shoe who thinks bad housing an excuse for whipping her children, surely they are prime candidates for the parental correctness re-education programme.

• AFTER THAT charming pair from the British National Party were rightly cleared of inciting racial hatred, our prime-minister-in-waiting’s remarks about outlawing words that “offend mainstream opinion” were more worrying than anything uttered by the impotent bigots of the BNP. Freedom to say that which does not offend mainstream opinion is no freedom at all. Indeed it is only “extreme” views that need protecting, since the mainstream can look after itself. Free speech means what it says — no bans on right-wing demagogues, Islamist firebrands or even sexist football managers.

  Worse still was the suggestion that the law should be altered to ensure that, next time the State stages a trial of political dissidents, they will be found guilty. Such cynical manipulation of the justice system for political ends is something we might normally associate with the “public safety” committee of some little police state.

• LAST POST on Jon Snow’s complaints about “poppy fascism”. Whatever one might think of national conformism over wearing them, the Channel 4 newsman’s face should have been poppy-red for using the F-word. To rephrase Orwell’s “imagine-a-boot-stamping-on-a-human-face” vision of a fascist future from 1984, “Imagine a pin attaching a paper flower to a TV presenter’s lapel — for ever!” And strangely for Remembrance week, Snow seemed to have forgotten his own record. He claims to have a principled objection to wearing any “symbol” on TV. Yet last year he boasted about his willingness to wear his white Make Poverty History wristband while interviewing Michael Howard, then Tory leader, arguing that symbol was “beyond contention”. When will a hero of the Autocue save us from the “fascism” of plastic wristbands?

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