Family Butchers Facing Prosecution For Taking Children Out of School to Avoid Closure During Busy Christmas Season
A couple who run a butchers shop in Lancashire are being prosecuted by their local authority for taking their 10 year-old daughter out of school in the run-up to Christmas last year. They were concerned that if they left her and their other daughter, aged 14, in school there was a risk they would be sent home to self-isolate and they, in turn, would be ‘pinged’, forcing them to close their shop during their busiest time of year. Ryan and Faye Moffat have explained what this would have meant:
A business closure at that time of year (the run up to Xmas) would have been financially devastating for our business and family. In addition to the loss of sales profit (which helps to sustain our business during the quieter times of year), we were carrying an exceptionally large volume of perishable stock which was at risk of write-off. Also, failure to fulfil Xmas orders could have had a long-term impact on business goodwill, potentially resulting in a complete business failure.
Failure to pay our mortgage could have resulted in the loss of both our business premises and living accommodation.
The school of their 14 year-old daughter had no objection to her being taken out and home schooled for the last 13 days of term, but their 10 year-old daughter’s school refused permission. Quite extraordinary, given that the school had no compunction about sending children home from March to September. Why was it okay for children to be home schooled for half the year – completely pointlessly, I might add – but not for 13 days to save a family business? Had the Moffats told the school their daughter had Covid symptoms, the school would have instructed them to keep her at home. But they told the truth.
Very sensibly, the Moffats decided to take their 10 year-old out of school anyway – and now they’re being prosecuted by the local education authority. It beggars belief that ratepayers’ money is being spent on this vexatious case.
When the Moffats contacted me, they were planning to represent themselves in court because they couldn’t afford a lawyer. I put them in touch with an experienced criminal solicitor and urged them to start a fundraiser to pay the legal fees, estimated to be £3,000. I’m happy to say they’ve now done this. Please do make a donation so Ryan and Faye are able to fight their corner. You can find the fundraiser here.
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There are some real dimwits in local authorities, getting the job isint hard and then even harder to get rid of them
Correct. They inhabitant a self-righteous parallel universe where they believe their own bullshit and take pleasure in punishing the very people who pay for their inflated salaries.
They are always moved sideways to annoy someone else and prevent those who do the hard graft achieving anything.
My wife used to work as an HR officer at our local council. She explained to me that the recruitment process and interview procedures are specifically designed to level down the process. The council would set impossibly low standards to be met by the candidates, thus ensuring that every vacancy would be hugely oversubscribed. They would deal with this by randomly selecting a dozen or so applicants to be interviewed, one of whom would end up being employed, with predictably hilarious consequences!
School is not compulsory in England so just off roll any kids.
This gives a window into the psychological and economic assault that is contact tracing. Anyone seen the video of Bill Clinton discussing the importance of contact tracing about, ooh, 3.5 minutes into the ‘pandemic’? Parasite class knew this would be an agent of chaos and would create:
And a population primed to:
In summary: Reject contact tracing. Ignore; ignore; ignore.
I hope this girl becomes the John Connor of the technocratic takedown.
This is ludicrous of course, but what should really be on trial is the rules underpinning all of this – the enforced quarantine of healthy people etc
I hear that, here I am sat at home 6 days into a 10 day Amber quarantine, my day 2 test which was sent off on day 2, to a Government approved provider and has as yet failed to report, even when I called them, the call centre said our results would be with us today. No still not here. I cannot get a 5 day early test to release (another 80pounds) because I need the day 2. My day 8 is due to be done and posted saturday, on current form I won’t be released then on day 10 it will possibly be around day 16. In the meantime I have been visited on a number of ocassions by T&t, cannot leave the garden. I cannot go to work, and the lady who comes in to walk the dog for me whilst at work has lost income. Oh and by the way I am as healthy and fit as a Butchers dog, But as I am not vaxxed I have to be puniished,
Never forget. Never forgive.
I wonder what would happen if you just ignored all that and did your own thing? What times of day do these checkers come round? Couldn’t you just not answer the door?
If they lose this case on the grounds that children must attend school unless they are unable due to illness I would hope that schools will not be allowed to close their doors to all except ‘key workers’ and ‘vulnerable’ children (those with social services input) ever again.
However, I won’t be holding my breath.
Plus it should have ramifications for sending home healthy children to isolate. I’m not sure the local authority thought this through before deciding to flex their muscles.
These sort of people are basically bullies – they rely on people not standing up to them (or not being able to stand up to them). Let’s hope that they come unstuck here!
My MP assured me that my grandchildren would receive lessons to balance the advantage that children of the ‘vulnerable’ and keyworkers had by continuing to be taught during closures. She assured me, in writing, that schools had been allocated the money for this ‘catching-up’. This was over a year ago and, to date, nothing has been put in place.
This boils my blood. It is an absolute disgrace for a state to prosecute individuals and for those individuals to be out of pocket having to defend themselves. Even in cases where the State LOSES, those targeted will not be reimbursed for all of their costs, only a portion.
Good luck to you, hope the judge sees right through this
try and find a Lawyer to take a case against the Government, they don’t want to know. So much for the human rights act
unless they have a bought off judge
Who gets pinged, idiots with an app?
It’s not a case of being pinged, it’s schools sending whole classes into isolation. And if locals know your kid is at home isolating and you’re at work in your shop you can bet some moron would contact the authorities.
I wonder if its a one off, but the primary schools in my area have started to send the Kids home and insisting they take PCR or stay at home. Never happened in the past 18 months, but call me cynical I suspect its because Zahawi wants to come after the primary school kids with his injection
I’m actually on the fence about this one, as I’m a vegetarian and hence don’t believe in butchers.
However, I believe so strongly that the state should not monopolize a child’s education and that their upbringing should principally be the remit of the family that at the age of 10, a few days home-schooling now and then can only be a good thing.
So on balance, I think I will donate to this fundraiser despite my meat-free ethics!
Plus, I may be vegetarian, but I’m still not about to evangelize the world into being so, and would not visit ruination on anyone’s livelihood for the sake of a fairly inconsequential 13 days in school.
Full credit to you for not being a zealot on the issue, despite obviously believing in it strongly enough to base your diet on it.
You have restored my faith in vegetarians!
You may not believe in butchers, but I can assure you that they exist. This is not simply a matter of faith… :-))
What exactly are you on the fence about? I’m a vegetarian too, but this could have happened to a florist or any other business for all that matters.
Yet again, we are seeing government zealots putting the boot into small businesses. The people doing this are of course secure in their government-funded roles. It really is contemptible behaviour.
I wonder if a green grocer would have been treated the same?
Support their action and their situation. But was it compulsory for them to have the track & trace nonsense? I’ve never had it nor really taken it seriously enough to look into it in detail, but I seem to remember something about isolation only being required by law if you’d been contacted by the t&t enforcers.
Couldn’t they just have separated themselves from the system? I daresay things might have been different for shop owners than for others.
I appreciate this is after the fact counsel, but I do wonder what their view is now? Do they recognise the complete bullshit all the regime covid nonsense has been?
In ordinary times this is a cause I would support, but I don’t feel it would be right to donate to this fundraiser until I have some idea of their wider political stance on the covid panic. A major concern of mine is finding businesses run by sceptics to use wherever possible, and I’d hate to support these folk only to see them collaborating with some regime “vaccine pass” scheme in the future, or enforcing mask or distancing nonsense in their shop.
Schools sending groups home to isolate is nothing to do with track and trace.
But the issue according to the report above wasn’t the children getting sent home but the adults being subsequently required to “self isolate” and therefore having to close their business.
Now I’ll freely admit to being a bit vague on the details of these totalitarian laws, having ignored them throughout, but I understood this was done via t&t.
You don’t need T&T when you have locals who will be happy to report you if they think you should be isolating. If one family member tests positive the whole household had to isolate, being a business owner everyone knows you. I know I grew up with my parents owning a corner shop.
Doubtless, but as I said, my recollection was that the only law actually requiring this was the one relating to t&t that said you must self isolate if you’ve been contacted by t&t. Hence the many people saying here that the solution was not to answer phone calls that might be from t&t.
Happy to be corrected if my recollection is wrong.
If I’m correct, perhaps it was just that they felt they would have been faced with an impossible social situation in their village with staying open, if everybody knew they had a child at home with the big bad demon covid.
If the school get a positive result everyone in that child’s ‘bubble/class’ is sent home to isolate for 10 days. Absolutely nothing to do with T&T the school send out an email/message.
Hope this clears it up..no track and trace, if your child has symptoms you have to isolate.
For Mark, not you Catee!
And to clarify, this isn’t a particularly important issue for me, just an interesting detail.
More important, as I set out above, is what the attitude of these people is to the covid panic generally, and whether they do things like enforce masks in their shop, or would consider cooperating with a future regime vaxpass system.
Yes, on this issue I am a zealot, and I make no apology for that. This is not about lifestyle choices or advocacy of moral reforms, it is a matter of defence against aggression, where it is perfectly legitimate to be a zealot. Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.
Again I suspect this is “guidance” not law. Could you get a ticket for this in the pre-Chrismas period last year? I suspect not – that was before we were put back into full lockdown for the New Year, wasn’t it?
I’m perfectly prepared to believe my memory is incorrect – as I said I wasn’t that interested in the details even then, I ignored as much of it as possible. But an awful lot of the bullshit people were told they had to do was just “guidance” not law, and I suspect this was a case of that.
1.If your 10 year old is off school you have to look after them.
2. Why the hell would you get a test just because you have symptoms? If you’re ill enough to require hospital you can be sure testing you is the first thing they’ll do.
Again as I pointed out previously, it’s not the school sending people home that was the issue, it’s the household then having to self-isolate, which I believe at the time was only guidance unless you had been pinged by t & t – as indeed Toby implies in the piece above.
Amazing how the authorities don’t mind when THEY repeatedly sent kids home for days/weeks on end often for no good reason – not caring about their education or the impact of families, but when the parents do FOR a good reason, they are hauled in from of a judge.
Kids (or teachers) should have only ever been sent home if they are actually sick – and I don’t mean with a siffle or a slight cough either – especially when all the teaching and ancillarly staff have had the opportunity to be vaccinated.
Amazing only now that the ‘experts’ are changing their tune to say that the vaccines don’t stop transmission, but are there to significantly reduce the severity and longevity of being infected.
Given children (under 18s) who are otherwise healthy should never have been masked up, no social distancing, no bubbles, no distance learning or self-isolating unless they are sick enough to not be able to work at school, rather like adults when working.
Idiots.
Agreed!
Jeez. What a crapfest. Donation made (you can use PayPal).
“Quite extraordinary, given that the school had no compunction about sending children home from March to September. Why was it okay for children to be home schooled for half the year – completely pointlessly, I might add – but not for 13 days to save a family business?“
Certainly the state has no moral leg to stand on now, in coercing parents with children in school to send them in every single day, regardless of family needs, on pain of fines.
We’ve just seen them sent home en mass for months on end merely to pander to hysterical and cynical teaching unions.
I always thought it was a massive contradiction that before Covid teachers would admonish parents for wanting to take their children on holiday in term time, even fining them, and basically saying that kids can’t afford to lose even a single day in education. Then when Covid hit all that goes out of the window and it’s perfectly OK to sent a whole class or year home for nearly two weeks, frequently, just because a child tested positive on an unreliable covid test.
It was a massive contradiction, because activist teachers, and especially their union representatives, are massive hypocrites.
Precisely!
Nelson is on my doorstep, and the domain of our spineless MP Andrew Stephenson who will be hearing about this.
https://odysee.com/@en:a5/PK_Tot-durch-Impfung_english:a
This is a special conference led by Vivaine Fisher from the Corona Committee.
It goes into proper medical detail on what is in these “vaccines” There are slides which show metallic objects moving in the “vaccines” It suggests to me that the “mad” theories about transhumanism could have merit, as some of these objects are clearly engineered nanobot type objects.
The part on the vaccine contents starts at about 1.19.
There is a good presentation from a German surgeon who is working with a group of international doctors to investigate and publicise this.
Much of the conference is hard to follow because of the translation, which is hurried out, due to the importance and urgency of getting this information out as soon as possible, given the need to protect children from being experimented on with these deadly injections.
Please publicise and share
Sceptics know the bureaucracy is irrational, abusive and hypocritical.
This story is ultimately only interesting if it reaches others and wakes them up.
In any case, I wish them the best fighting off the regime.
The jobsworths who work from home for the Government couldn’t give a stuff as to what happens to the peoples lives they disrupt and potentially ruin, for them its all about ticking the box and completing the task, like the good little drones they are.
The poor Butchers taxes pay these peoples wages, it seems to be something this Goverment and the civil service seem to forget.
That butcher doesn’t look Halal.
School closures and sending pupils home when not at much risk, has taught all schoolchildren that school (and, therefore, education) is not really very important to them. It is a bit rich to then punish parents for keeping children off school…for any reason. Btw I am a retired Headmaster.
There is no need for crowdfunding or engaging a solicitor at a cost estimated to be in the region of £3,000. To tell you why is simple. Provided you have written to the school correctly, (See under Deregistration from a school (England) on the internet). neither the LA or school can refuse. If they do then they are committing a CRIMINAL OFFENCE where the Headteacher can be fined £200 and receive a criminal record for refusing permission for the child to leave school. There are only three reasons for this permission to be refused. If the child is registered with a Special School, is subject of any School Attendance Orders, or Education Supervision Orders. Send to the school in writing your statement that you object to the suggestion of a prosecution, countering with a threat of reporting the commission of a criminal offence and they will seek legal advice and find they are at fault, dropping the case like a hot potato. The reasons for the child being removed from school are irrelevant so long as you provide for the home education of the said child. As you are educating your older daughter, it is obvious that home education will… Read more »
Toby, you’re doing really good work.