The Government Knows Who You Are!!!

...which is ironic, since it's more than I do. At some point in the near future I will be posting a play (or rather bits of a play) up here called "Hell and High Tide" (it's a line from a Smiths song so alternative suggestions will be very warmly welcomed!) You are of course welcome to ignore it, in fact ignoring it will probably be a good bet. But the background to it is...

This year the Government, in its infinite wisdom, put forward proposals to change the adoption system. At the moment, adopted people can trace family members but not vice versa. Technically speaking... however, some manage to. The upshot is that under new proposals birth parents and relatives, however distant, of people put up for adoption are welcome to trace them, through an intermediary (the government insists this makes it ok). Roughly what happens is the intermediary contacts the adoption agency who are obliged to pass on the details of the adopted person. Then they contact the adopted person and asks them if they want contact (all very well but how do you say No and not let it bother you once someone's asked?!) But here's the best bit: if you do say no, it is "at the discretion" of the intermediary to pass on "non-identifying" information about the person who doesn't want contact. As an adopted person, quite frankly, that sucks. The lovely Margaret Hodge (what is it about politicians called Margaret? They should be banned) did reassure me, mind you, by telling me that they had "consulted widely" with interested parties. (My parents and myself are apparently not interested parties: the relevent consultation document, which we never got anyway, listed academics and social workers above even birth parents, then adoptees at the bottom.) I am quite happy to cling to the Brontean notion that my father was an Emperor of China and my mother an Indian Princess (even though I was born in Blackburn and have fair skin and insipid light-brown hair that keeps trying to turn blonde.) Perhaps I am a psychological misfit, but I have no desire to meet up with random people I've never even heard of and discover that I was unwanted/ruined someone's life/killed my mother/have relatives strewn across East Lancashire. Well, would you?

So...