You can be a gangland killer and get £44,000 compensation for toothache.

You can throw your baby out of a window to her death because you’d had a row with your boyfriend and walk free from court.

You can kill another driver on the road because you were drunk and drugged up and get 4 years in prison (which means you are out within two years)

But if you want to watch your son compete in the races on his school’s Sports Day you must have been cleared by the CRB (Criminal Records Bureau)

A SCHOOL was yesterday accused of “lunacy” after it emerged that parents were not allowed to attend sports day without undergoing criminal records checks.

A horrified parent was turned away by teachers at De Lisle Catholic Science College in Loughborough, Leics, when he arrived to see his son compete.

The father was told he would need to have a criminal records bureau check to cheer on his 12-year-old.

He was incredibly angry but agreed to leave because he did not wish to embarrass his son by getting involved in a public confrontation.

This Kafkaesque nightmare springs out of legislation designed to ensure that convicted or suspected pedophiles are not able to mingle with children.

These laws have had no impact on the current levels of child abuse. Large numbers of children continue to be regularly raped, tortured and trafficked throughout the UK. On TV graphic sexual imagery and coarse language is now an integral part of many programmes. Retailers and designers  and children’s magazines encourage the sexualisation of young girls in order to maximise profit.

For the real abusers it’s Christmas every day.

But, via the CRB, a Mount Everest of bureaucratic paper has to be climbed by the law abiding guiltless while the guilty merely slither around it.

Never mind – it has created a nice little empire for several thousand jobsworths to get paid by the taxpayer to annotate files and tick boxes.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too critical of the school. In today’s world turned upside down wise teachers with an eye on their career prospects are inclined to err on the side of caution in such matters.  Too often they have seen colleagues hauled before courts or pilloried by the media for displaying what in another age would be described as a nelsonian eye – otherwise known as basic common sense.

Oh –and one final ironic twist to the story of the dad and his son on sports day.  He is a taxi driver and therefore is regularly checked by the CRB…..