What gives these so-called sex education advisers in East Sussex the right to try to dictate to headteachers which guests they should invite to talk to children?

The negative response of Eastbourne's Sexual Health Forum, part of the National Children's Bureau, to a recent visit by the Canadian Challenge Team to eight Eastbourne schools is an example of the busybody nanny state at its interfering worst.

The challenge team is an Ottawa-based volunteer youth group which travels the world with its message that the safest sex is no sex, that there is nothing wrong with celibacy before marriage.

Its actors use sketches and jokes to reassure young people there is nothing wrong with abstinence, an important and comforting message to those teenagers, under enormous peer pressure to try anything and everything, feeling they are the only ones in the world not being sexually active.

However, such teaching is entirely unacceptable to Government bodies with their liberal agendas clutched firmly in their fists.

While the concept of pre-marital abstinence is gaining popularity in Canada and the United States, our Government's Teenage Pregnancy Unit (Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe) and the Sex Education Forum are against advocating celibacy.

You may find it astonishing but the forum has even published a report called Just Say No - To Abstinence Education.

It treats the whole concept of celibacy as some dreadful social disease.

It says, quite reasonably, young people are entitled to a balanced educational programme of sex and relationships teaching.

Then, quite unreasonably, it goes on to suggest that abstinence education falls short of this established good practice and fails to meet the needs of young people.

It even throws in the predictable red herring that groups of young people such as gays and lesbians are excluded.

More nannying thought police, the East Sussex group of Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), sent members along with their sniffer dogs to inspect the challenge team's work.

They apparently did not like warnings that condoms were not always safe, especially as protection against disease.

And they took exception to the way in which some facts about HIV/Aids were presented.

They then came out with the arrogant assertion they would be unhappy to support another tour.

In spite of that, I am delighted to hear the challenge team will be back later in the year to Eastbourne College, Moira House, Bishop Bell and the Causeway School - and possibly other Eastbourne schools as well.

The woman who originally invited the Canadian group, Sue Relf, has resigned in protest from the Eastbourne Sex Education Forum because of its intransigence and points out the PSHE has now circulated guidelines in an effort to preclude visits by such "unsuitable" groups to Sussex schools in future.

Are you surprised so many headteachers rail against the intrusive activities of such petty bureaucrats?