Nursery World - To the point... (110)

Our weekly columnist Beatrix Campbell believes the Manifesto for Children has radical questions that will demand answers The children's charities take this Government very seriously. No Government has put children in the picture like this one. But an unprecedented coalition of more than 50 voluntary organisations working for and with children and young people has taken hold of New Labour's rhetorical flourishes and old fogeyism to paint reality back into the picture.

The children's charities take this Government very seriously. No Government has put children in the picture like this one. But an unprecedented coalition of more than 50 voluntary organisations working for and with children and young people has taken hold of New Labour's rhetorical flourishes and old fogeyism to paint reality back into the picture.

By coming together with a Manifesto for Children they have, perhaps for the first time, projected a manifesto for mainstreaming children's rights.

They've gone further than an inventory of good things, they've offered a way of thinking about children.

The Manifesto for Children should be promoted as a movement equivalent to the 'ethical dimension to foreign policy' announced - to Tony Blair's horror - in 1997. The coterie around Blair shredded that ethical manifesto, but it ignited good feeling across the policitical spectrum. Why? Because it proposed a democratic ethic that everyone understood: international aid and diplomacy were to be disciplined not by charity or big power interest, but by equality and empowerment.

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