🎀 Formal Rebuttal to Westminster’s PLO Letter: An Exercise in Legal Delusion and Bureaucratic Theatre
By Polly Chromatic
Founder, SWANK – Standards and Whinges Against Negligent Kingdoms
"Because when the institutions fall, one must remain regal."
I. Opening Remarks: An Invitation to Rethink Your Entire Profession
Dear Westminster,
It is with the kind of detached astonishment usually reserved for particularly inept amateur dramatics that I address your most recent PLO letter — a document so replete with projection, omission, and procedural amateurism that it truly deserves framing in a museum dedicated to the lost art of safeguarding.
One might have hoped, naïvely, that when invoking the gravitas of the Public Law Outline, you would at least bother to meet the minimal evidential threshold. Alas — what we find instead is a performance.
II. On Your Mischaracterisation of Home Education
You appear baffled — nay, scandalised — by the fact that I elect to home educate my children according to methods infinitely superior to the intellectually stagnant standards found in the average bureaucratic handbook.
Permit me to remind you: Education Otherwise Than At School is not a crime.
Neither is critical thinking, interdisciplinary learning, nor the radical notion that children flourish when not subject to institutional gaslighting.
Your concern regarding GCSEs would carry more weight had your team managed to spell the acronym correctly during our last meeting.
III. On the Allegation of "Isolation"
Isolation from what, precisely?
From the respiratory infections you insisted on bringing into our home?
From the pseudo-safeguarding visits performed by individuals unable to distinguish tone from trauma?
My children are protected — not isolated.
We dine with philosophers. We read Camus at breakfast. We frequent Hyde Park for midday constitutional strolls. They are not deprived; they are distinguished.
IV. On the Fabricated Concern Regarding Emotional Wellbeing
The only “emotional harm” evident in this saga has been the trauma inflicted by your repeated, unaccommodated, and unlawful interventions.
You mistook physical illness for parenting deficiency.
You mistook boundaries for hostility.
You mistook dignity for risk.
It is not I who require corrective action — it is the institutional lens through which you misread autonomy as pathology.
V. On Procedural Improvisation Masquerading as Professionalism
Your invocation of statutory language would be more convincing if you demonstrated even a passing acquaintance with the duties imposed by the Equality Act 2010, the Children Act 1989, and common decency.
Instead, you offer threats garlanded with euphemism, mistaking coercion for care.
VI. Closing Statement: A Gentle Suggestion
In the future, when drafting documents of such gravity, may I suggest:
Consulting a legal dictionary
Revisiting the concept of proportionality
Considering the difference between safeguarding and surveillance
Until such time, please be assured: my children and I shall continue to thrive, not because of your interventions, but despite them.
Your compliance with the law remains optional, it seems.
Mine with your spectacle, however, is not.
With polite disdain,
Polly