Died Because he was Gay
Many of you will today have been exposed to the filth that is Jan Moir’s article, insinuating that Stephen Gately died because he was gay. Want a taster?
The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again.
Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered.
And I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy.
After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards.
Cowles and Dochev went to the bedroom together while Stephen remained alone in the living room.
What happened that night? Only Gately’s civil partner, Andrew Cowles, left, and Georgi Dochev, who they took back to their apartment, know the truth
What happened before they parted is known only to the two men still alive. What happened afterwards is anyone’s guess.
A post-mortem revealed Stephen died from acute pulmonary oedema, a build-up of fluid on his lungs.
Gately’s family have always maintained that drugs were not involved in the singer’s death, but it has just been revealed that he at least smoked cannabis on the night he died.
Nevertheless, his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family.
Another real sadness about Gately’s death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.
Be gay? Sleaze! Be gay and get married? DEATH WILL SOON FOLLOW! Gays can’t help but be hedonistic and do drugs, are rampantly unfaithful, unhappy and DIE! Evidence? Who cares about that? Coroner’s reports? Who needs them? Secrets are being kept! That’s what gays’ families do!
But hold on a minute. I’m gay. I’ve been sleazy in my time, but since when has a consensual sex life a bad thing for anyone – straight or gay. I’m also married, and I haven’t died yet. I’ve been married for nearly 4 years, been together with the same man for nearly 8, but I’m confused what this ‘happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ is. Where did it come from? Is it spread round the watercoolers at the Daily HateMail? Was it something Tony Blair evangelised about one day when drunk?
Enough. This vile homophobia must be smashed. Complain about this odious cow to the Press Complaints Commission here. Article 12 of the code has been pretty thoroughly breached, and she and the HateMail must pay a price. Far be it from me to suggest a flashmob outside the Daily HateMail, where we all tear up copies of the rag (but who’s with me?) A retweet from Charlie Brooker says it all I feel:
RT @disappointment: Jan Moir manages to walk the difficult tightrope between being a bitch and a cunt http://bit.ly/1GGI4S
Twitter Did Not Win It
Wikileaks, a site at the centre of the fightback against Trifigura and Carter-Ruck’s attempt to prevent the Guardian reporting on Jack Straw’s response to attempts to suppress the Minton Report in parliament, suggests Twitter didn’t end up saving free speech:
This ill-informed back-patting follows the dropping of a secret UK High Court gag order blocking the Guardian’s reporting of parliamentary questions by Paul Farrelly MP. Farrelly’s questions related to press freedoms and in particular, a leaked WikiLeaks report, the so-called “Minton report” which exposed a toxic dumping disaster inflicted on the Ivory Coast by oil trading giant Trafigura, which is reported to have hospitalized over 100,000 people.
However, a more substantive secret gag order against the report, granted in September, entirely prevents the reporting of its contents and remains in effect. It is not the only one. Last month, the Guardian revealed that it had been served with 10 secret gag orders—so-called “super-injunctions”— since January. In 2008, the paper was served with six. In 2007, five. Haven’t heard of these? Of course not, they are secret gag orders. The UK press has given up counting regular injunctions.
To understand the crucial events in this case, we need to go back to September when commodities giant Trafigura obtained the original “super injunction” preventing discussion of the leaked Minton report into the Ivory Coast disaster.
During September and the preceding months, investigative reporters from the Guardian, Norway’s NRK TV, the Independent, the BBC’s Newsnight, the Dutch press, Greenpeace and lawyers for the victims were collaborating to show Trafigura’s culpability.
It’s a blistering editorial, which everyone who cares about the freedom of the press and free speech in general should read as a priority. In essence the Guardian (amongst others) was hit with a gag order preventing reporting on the Minton Report on September 11th. Paul Farrelly MP was then understood to have intended his parliamentary question to draw attention to the order, given that libel laws are not applicable in the Houses of Parliament, so Carter-Ruck went for a second injunction in effect to shut him up too, and against all expectation succeeded. The Guardian made the second gag the national issue and drew the worldwide blogosphere in on its side, but Wikileaks believes the second injunction fell despite the massive Twitter intervention (the subject of earlier posts); with politicians amongst the targets it was inevitable. The lawsuits and gags in place before the attack on Farrelly remain untouched, and politicians are now largely disinterested in the subject. Free speech in the UK remains laughable, when it can be suppressed with a big enough chequebook, even over matters of vital public interest such as Trafigura’s dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast.
The Minton Report can be found here.
Yes We Could, No We Won’t?
Peter Tatchell asks whether Barack Obama really has the will to repeal the US armed forces’ ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (DADT) ban on openly gay people serving:
What’s holding back Obama? His reticence to lift the military ban can’t be due to public opposition. More than two-thirds of the American people want it lifted, according to a Gallup poll in May. Is the president afraid that straight soldiers will resign if the restrictions on gay service are repealed? That’s what some British top brass feared when the UK allowed gay soldiers, but the resignations never happened.
The truth is that the gay ban is underming military efficiency. It often allows homophobic harassment to pass unchecked and this harassment damages unit cohesion and morale. A study this year by Cornell University also found that gay personnel ordered to hide their sexuality perform worse than those who were not ordered to do so.
To optimise military recruitment and effectiveness, General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Clinton, now believes that gay people should be allowed to serve openly. Even a former hardline opponent, ex-US Secretary of State Colin Powell, has come out in favour of reviewing the gay exclusion policy.
I know Paul was more supportive in his earlier post about Obama’s position on gay equality issues, but I really do wonder. He, like Clinton, knows how to talk to the talk, but is remarkably retiscent about walking the walk. What is holding him back? He could have ended it by Executive Order by now. The armed forced don’t care. The American public doesn’t care. Pretty much all other developed countries’ armed forces have rescinded similar bans, so why even continue to pursue court cases which discriminate against desperately needed LGBT service personnel? Of course the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party will fight this tooth and nail, but they’re fighting against healthcare because they think Obama’s a Nazi for goodness’ sake. A president who truly gives a damn about human rights really needs to move now.
Obama’s No Messiah
Alex Massie at the Spectator has Obama’s Nobel win down about right:
What is mystifying, however, is Obama’s decision to accept* the award. Better by far to have quietly told the Nobel organisation that, while generous, their award was presumptious and, by any reasonable standard, premature.
Accepting a prize of such magnitude in return for little in the way of real achievement makes Obama look foolish. He’s not a latterday political messiah and, despite what some people, including some in the White House, seem to think it’s not all about him all the time. That being so, it would have been wiser to decline awards that reinforce the notion that it is.
Expecting politicians to be embarrassed by adulation is, in many ways, a mug’s game. And no-one has ever accused Obama of being without ego. Nevertheless, while the Nobel Committee are free to behave like King Canute’s courtiers**, it would have been better for all concerned if Obama had shown the wisdom of Canute and refused this preoposterous bauble.
*Perhaps he still can turn it down. He certainly should.
He has accepted a $1.4 million prize for having achieved nothing of note in 9 months. Guantanamo is still open. Drone attacks are continuing to kill significant numbers of innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Torturers have been protected; domestic surveillance defended and extended. He may want to rid the world of nuclear weapons and to get nice and cozy with Iran, but their nuclear programme hasn’t ended, despite the abortive uprising in June. Does this make Obama the new Kissinger?
The Tories Should Embrace the Human Rights Act
Peter Oborne argues Cameron’s Tories, instead of repealing New Labour’s signature piece of legislation, should embrace it because it fits in with their traditions and ethos:
The rights set out in the act are taken directly from the European convention on human rights, which was signed by the UK in 1951. They were inspired by a Conservative politician, Sir Winston Churchill, and drafted under the guidance of another one, David Maxwell-Fyfe (later Lord Chancellor Kilmuir) in the face of considerable opposition from the Attlee government. The act should thus be regarded as the creation not of New Labour, but of the Conservative party.
Moreover, Conservative critics are wrong to say that the rights of the act are in general socioeconomic entitlements. In fact, they are absolutely fundamental to the British common law tradition. They include the right to life; the prohibition of torture, first enacted by the Long Parliament in 1640; rights to liberty and security of person; the right to a fair trial, which dates back to Magna Carta; the right to respect for private and family life; rights to freedom of expression and religion; and the right to freedom of association. These rights are not radical: they are deeply Conservative.
And finally, the act itself operates in a peculiarly Conservative way. It confers no new right that has not already been long recognised in common law, or to which parliament has not already long committed the UK. Its rights are not inviolable, but can be set aside at will. Where there is an inconsistency of law, it leaves it to parliament to decide how to resolve that inconsistency, and only if it chooses. A more Conservative approach could hardly be conceived.
Jack Straw may have tacked rightwards since the 1998 Act, but the fact remains that the European Convention on Human Rights is enshrined in British law. Repealing it wouldn’t end the ECHR, nor would it end Britain’s human rights obligations under the Convention, but it would mean countless people once again being unable to afford to access their rights. There is no need to repeal the act; the only point of creating a British-only document to replace it would be to restrict human rights on nationalistic grounds. We should all be terrified of the prospect.
Tories Sidestepping Electoral Reform?
It may not be a foregone conclusion that David Cameron will be Prime Minister by this time next year, but the odds are pretty good. And should we move from an authoritarian New Labour government into a Tory one, the issues of privacy, civil liberties and constitutional reform will be pushed from half-hearted (and belated) support from Brown to severe mistrust from Cameron. His latest plan however sounds promising:
William Hague will tomorrow announce that the Conservatives will introduce a new stage for parliamentary bills, known as the public reading stage, that will allow voters to reject and rewrite clauses.
The scheme will be based on the US mixedink website, used by Obama last year. Under the Tory plans, a parliamentary bill would be introduced in the way it is now. The first and main debate – the second reading stage, in which the broad principles of the proposed new laws are debated on the floor of the Commons – would be held in the normal way.
But once MPs have held this debate, the bill would be thrown open to voters before it is considered line by line at the committee stage. A website would allow voters to comment on and rewrite the broad principles of the bill, and individual clauses.
Err hang on. We’d get a say in legislation while it’s being debated? Isn’t that what we elect representatives for? How are we supposed to have elected representatives and then have a mechanism for sidestepping their decisions unless…do you see where I’m coming from? It’s either a recipe for gridlock or it’s a sop to the now ever-present clamour for parliamentary reform, which they could easily ignore in practice. Surely the only solution in getting the decisions you want from your elected representatives is to have an electoral system which actually delivers people who closely represent your wishes. And surely the only way in which the select committee stage (where the real scrutiny for bad legislation comes in) can actually work is if party whips stop determining their composition. These aren’t options being talked about by the Tory party, and until they are I wouldn’t trust Hague’s new proposal for a heartbeat.
The ISA Breaches Offenders’ Human Rights
When I say the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) contravenes the rule of law, this is what I mean. The Human Rights Act 1998, which brings the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into British law clearly states:
Article 7 No punishment without law
1 No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal offence was committed.
And yet that’s exactly what the ISA is all about – the ISA is set up to be a judge, jury and executioner for everyone’s employment rights. By its own admission it operates to a lower standard of proof than a criminal court for its Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS):
Some applicants will be given eight weeks in which to make “representations” against the move to bar them, but those with serious convictions against their names will have no opportunity to do so.
However even those who are allowed to tell their side of the story may struggle to clear their names, as ISA guidance states clearly that it operates to a lower standard of proof than a criminal court.
“Assessing whether something happened on the ‘balance of probabilities’ means, simply, whether it is ‘more likely than not’ that something happened,” the document says.
If an individual’s representations fail and they are barred, they will be unable to work with children or vulnerable adults and face prosecution if they seek jobs in these fields.
They then have three months in which to launch an independent appeal to a body called the Upper Chamber, which will comprise a judge and two “non-legal members”.
However the applicant cannot simply appeal against the decision to bar them, or the subjective opinion of the risk they pose made by the ISA.
Guidance states: “You can only seek permission to appeal against the decision of the ISA on the ground that it made a mistake no any point of law, or in any finding of any fact which it has made and on which the decision was based.”
This could be that it interpreted a law wrongly; made an error in its own procedure; or had no evidence to support its ruling.
The guidance adds that “the decision whether or not it is appropriate for an individual to be included in a barred list is not a question of law or fact”.
If this appeal fails, individuals may try to take their legal fight to the Court of Appeal.
But they may have to wait for as long as a decade before they are allowed another chance to challenge the ISA’s ruling – with older applicants facing a longer wait than younger ones.
The guidance states: “A decision to include a person on a list means that they will be barred from the entirety of the workforce affected for a minimum period of one, five or ten years depending on the individual’s age.”
Under-18s will be barred for a year before their cases can be reviewed; 18- to 25 year-olds will have five-year bans and anyone over 25 must wait 10 years. They must prove they no longer pose a danger before they are cleared to work with children [or vulnerable adults - Ed]
In other words even if the justice system hasn’t determined that certain offenders (and this government has created an unprecedented number of those) should be denied the freedom to work with children and/or ‘vulnerable adults’, the ISA, without even using evidence which would be admissible in a court of law, can. It’s a flat-out contravention of the Human Rights Act, with a torturous (and threadbare) right of appeal, and for what benefit? The ISA wouldn’t have detected Vanessa George – how could it? For that matter when its entire operation is based on determining ‘risk’ by means of a graph matrix how will it ever catch people who genuinely pose a risk to vulnerable groups?
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.
The ISA Will Always Fail
What Vanessa George, Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen did to those children is so heinous I can barely grasp it:
Nursery worker Vanessa George and her accomplices Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen face lengthy jail terms after admitting a string of sex offences yesterday.
The three – who had started a bizarre relationship online – met for the first time in the dock at Bristol crown court, where they pleaded guilty to abusing young children and sharing the images of that abuse with each other.
It also emerged there had been online discussion between the three about abducting a child. Officers believe this may have been nothing more than a fantasy but expressed relief that finding and catching them had halted any nascent plots.
A serious case review has been launched to look at how George, previously considered a stalwart of her community in Devon, was able to abuse children. There have been calls for the use of camera phones in nurseries to be looked at again and for more checks to make sure workers do not get such easy and private one-to-one access with children.
(via ScoobsChris)
This isn’t a post about how unusual child abuse conducted by women is. I want it to be abundantly clear that Vanessa George passed her Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check and she almost certainly would have passed the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). This whole case makes a mockery of the Home Office’s strategy of child protection – expecting a database or a bureaucracy to detect an abuser who doesn’t have a criminal record, and who has probably become skilful at concealing their behaviour is lunacy. Instead these three were able to commit their horrific crimes against children because:
“The nursery was not run properly. The problem was there were about 10 staff and they are all good friends – so standards got really slack.”
Parents knew standards were slack, the nursery was run poorly and then there’s Ofsted, which said after George’s arrest:
“Ofsted was unaware of the recent allegations about a member of staff at Little Ted’s Nursery in Plymouth which we understand has led to its immediate closure.
“We have had one recent complaint relating to the nursery. This complaint was not of a level that would require police involvement and did not relate to the content of the allegations made public today.
“Ofsted is investigating this matter in line with our normal procedures and it would not be appropriate to comment further until the outcomes of that investigation are complete.”
Could children’s services or the Local Safeguarding Children’s Board have stopped this? Maybe not, but it’s an indication of just how many services are out there tasked with safeguarding children, who actually have involvement with children, and even they weren’t able to detect this abuse until it was too late. Expect the ISA, with its starting presumption that everyone‘s a paedophile, to do any better will end in disaster for the genuinely vulnerable.
Labour Party in Denial
I couldn’t agree with with Mick Hume at Spiked more:
The storming reception accorded to Mandelson on Monday was widely hailed as the moment when New Labour’s fortunes could start to turn. To me it signalled the opposite. The sight of Labour activists cheering their Blairite bête noir showed how bad things have got, and how desperate they have become. After all, Lord Mandelson is the unelected, widely reviled symbol of all that the old Labour left is supposed to despise about the Tony Blair years: a backroom fixer and backstabber for whom politics is about positioning and image more than principles and ideas. That he has been brought back into the centre of government owes less to his own self-styled status as a giant of politics than to the standing of the political pygmies around him.
It is not Mandelson who has changed. He remains the embodiment of the fact that New Labour believes in nothing beyond its own re-election. Yet there were the rank and file Labour Party delegates, cheering him to the rafters. It sounded like a death rattle, a case not so much of whistling past the graveyard as singing from the grave.
And this is why they are going to lose next summer. It’s also entirely avoidable. They could wipe ID cards out today, but they’d rather pretend otherwise. They could end the ISA today, but they’d rather ‘review’ it instead. They could improve their environmental standing, but would rather stick with the neoliberal idea of growth and pretend there’s a reason for a new runway at Heathrow. They could deal with the issues such as a terminal lack of new social housing, which the BNP are feeding off, but even the Home Secretary would rather just stick his head in the sand. Electoral reform? Try a solution which will boost their fortunes rather than the Greens or Lib Dems. Reform the House of Lords? In a generation or so. House of Commons? Not any more…
The party which introduced the Human Rights Act is going to sacrifice itself needlessly to one which has insisted it’s going to repeal it, and is best friends in the European Parliament with the far right. Proportional representation couldn’t be more needed to help get a better deal for us.
Why Attack the Calais Refugees?
When we dehumanise other human beings we lose part of what makes us human. If I had the time and resources I would have gladly attended the protests at the ‘Jungle’ outside Calais, the camp from which the mainly Afghan refugees were forcibly removed this week. Sadly though I had to watch from afar again, as people in search of a better life were deemed unacceptable, and unworthy of the human rights to which they are entitled. Jason Parkinson’s piece below shows you the brutal reality of what happened:
When French immigration minister Eric Besson calls the Calais “jungle” camp clearance a “dignified” success, Alan Johnson expresses his “delight” and immigration minister Phil Woolas questions whether these refugees deserve sanctuary, they expose the asylum system as profoundly broken.
What I saw at 8am on Tuesday was not dignified or humane. Men were wrestled and thrown to the ground, others head-locked and throttled. One boy collapsed and was removed. Not by the police, but by protesters.
As Parkinson points out, EU law says that asylum seekers must claim asylum in the first country they land in. But it’s an horrific cop out to suggest to people genuinely fleeing persecution in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq or Eritrea (few of whom will do so by air) can only claim asylum in member states which are essentially the closest to them. Italy? With its current persecution of Roma? Greece? With its treatment of refugees? That system has resulted in:
illegal push-backs of migrants at the Turkish border, the puncturing of boats in the Aegean Sea, deplorable conditions of detention, police brutality, and various legal and administrative tricks to keep asylum seekers from lodging a claim, all of which Human Rights Watch exhaustively documented in two reports published late last year.
The Dublin Convention is clearly a failure, yet Britain and France express delight at the prospect of sending refugees back to the first EU country they entered, which in many cases for refugees formerly living in the Calais ‘jungle’ was Greece. This is particularly alarming considering many fellow EU governments have stopped transferring asylum seekers back there. Yet immigration minister Phil Woolas:
rejected suggestions that (even) those (merely) with family links should be allowed to come to Britain to claim asylum: “If they were asylum seekers they would have claimed asylum in France or in the first country they came to,” he said. The home secretary said “genuine refugees” would be offered protection if they claimed asylum in the first safe country they reached. The rest were expected to go home.
Such compassion. No doubt there will be economic migrants in their number, no doubt hardened criminals too. But to dismiss the genuine needs and concerns of refugees, and falling back on an asylum system which benefits neither refugee nor host country is just monstrous. Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MEP has spoken out, saying:
“Rather than fulfilling their responsibilities to seekers of asylum under both EU and international law, the French and British governments are turning a blind eye to the suffering taking place on their own doorsteps. Home Secretary Alan Johnson‘s glee in the wake of this aggressive police raid is particularly disturbing.
“The plan for mass deportations of these refugees rides roughshod over the European Convention on Human Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Geneva Convention. And given that so many facing expulsion are children, the plans may also breach the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“This short term ‘solution’ is not only inhumane – it will not work. The French are not playing their part in allowing people to claim asylum in Calais, and must commit to making the official procedures for seeking asylum more accessible to those in need. Equally, other EU Member states must recognise their duty to share the responsibility.”
Protests against the UK Border Agency have taken place here, here here and here. There is continuing coverage by Calais Migrant Solidarity here.
Bullying the Argument Away from Copyright Reform?
Lily Allen’s shrill and ultimately hypocritical argument that filesharing causes blanket damage to musicians, and that Peter Mandelson’s threat to throw users off the internet is a valid one, is masking the true problem here. Doctorow suggests:
Copyright is problematic for everyone: musicians, fans, bloggers. The absence of clear affirmative rights to make personal copies, to share with your friends, to copy for the purposes of discussion and commentary (as opposed to the fuzzy and difficult-to-interpret fair use guidelines, which have been further confused by the entertainment industry’s bold attempts to convince us all that they don’t matter and can’t be relied upon) means that we’re all in a state of constant infringement.
A law that no one understands and no one abides by is no law at all. Parts of copyright — the right to regulate how commercial licenses with industrial entities work — are really important to me and to all working artists. But if we continue to try to expand copyright to cover everything, every interaction that involves a copy (which is every interaction these days), then the broad consensus that copyright is nonsense will continue to grow, and we’ll lose the good stuff as well as the ridiculous stuff.
He has a good point. The precursor blog to this site was once set upon by a newspaper journalist whose (uncredited) piece I used (and fully linked to/did not take credit for) to illustrate the impact of an entirely unrelated story. Was I breaching copyright? I don’t think so – he was of an entirely different opinion though. The issue at hand in this debate about filesharing is surely about copyright reform – addressing the enormous gap between creators and rights holders. I’ll see if I can nudge The Secret Musician into posting their opinions about that! Why though has the Featured Artists Coalition moved closer to Allen/John/Barlow/Blunt et al’s argument?
We the undersigned wish to express our support for Lily Allen in her campaign to alert music lovers to the threat that illegal downloading presents to our industry and to condemn the vitriol that has been directed at her in recent days.
Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.
Weird. The difference between that and Mandelson’s position is marginal, and it’s not what they were arguing at the beginning of the month.
edit: I’ve just seen this story. Fascinating, and it blurs the issue even further. Why would the FAC have a different position to Allen one day, then “cheer her” as she entered their meeting last night? Intriguing that she should be there, even more curious that what appears to be a massive compromise (read Ed O’Brien’s comments) should be in her favour…
Three Party Politics is Dead
Vernon Bogdanor claims three party politics is over, but that our first-past-the-post is masking our perception of it:
There has been a prodigious alteration in the public perception of parties, but it remains unnoticed because the electoral system fails to register it. The system refracts rather than reflects opinion, emphasising the major party vote and de-emphasising the vote for minor parties and independents. It enables Westminster to remain a closed shop, so allowing the major parties to postpone confronting the crucial question of how they are to regain their lost members and voters.
Fragmentation has already led to calls to open up the system. In 2007, Gordon Brown offered government posts to Liberal Democrats and to those of no party affiliation; and Labour seems to be edging towards a referendum on electoral reform. The Conservatives instituted an open primary in Totnes to replace Anthony Steen. To require the parties to hold primaries would open up candidate selection, while a more transparent electoral system would allow the Commons to reflect opinion more accurately.
I don’t agree with Bogdanor’s thesis about primaries. Whilst I think it would open up candidate selection, it would likely be within a perilously narrow band. I do agree though that the days of big party dominance are largely over. The nature of large parties is to appeal to a large demographic and to maintain a broad church of agreement, but this is clearly no longer appealing to large portions of the electorate, whose needs are falling through the cracks of this compromise – see the rise of the Greens, the sudden rise of the Pirate Party, and the historically high profile of the BNP. The reasons for the ‘broach church’ compromise being over are probably many, but chiefly in the UK right now it’s down to the failure of the first-past-the-post voting system. As the larger parties have competed for an ever smaller band of swing voters in order to get elected, they have largely walked away from conviction politics; Bogdanor is right – take a look at the membership of traditional parties and you’ll see that doesn’t suit the majority. Their choice is to allow a referendum on proportional representation to allow people’s interests represented as they are rather than how traditional parties would like them to be, which would allow them to find a new role in 21st century political life, or to continue to wither and die and be responsible for the total atrophying of British political life.
(image from Cartoon Life)
An Open Letter to Children’s Secretary Ed Balls
Dear Mr Balls,
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.
I as much as any other reasonable person accept the need to protect children and other vulnerable groups in society, but the ISA isn’t the way to go about it. In your letter to Barry Sheerman MP, Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee, you say:
Our aim throughout has been to develop an approach which is proportionate, balanced and effective, with the scheme operating in a way which is neither burdensome nor bureaucratic, or off-putting to potential volunteers in children’s settings – while still meeting the concerns of parents.
I’m terribly sorry but if those were your aims you have a very funny way of attaining them. The ISA in practice is already neither proportionate, nor balanced, nor effective. It is indeed bureaucratic, is already off-putting to potential volunteers and couldn’t possibly meet the concerns of parents. After all, how could it? For risk credibly to be determined, it needs to be assessed on evidence which is fair and, as you say, balanced. The ISA doesn’t do that:
The risk assessment model starts by identifying a series of possible ‘hazards’, which may come about as a result of a person taking a job/volunteering position, and listing them in a table. It gives the examples of ‘inappropriate physical contact with a 12- to 16-year-old pupil during a lesson’, ‘building a relationship which is exploited out of school resulting in underage sex’, and ‘taking photos of 12- to 16-year-old pupils (eg, during swimming lessons)’. Once they have identified the hazards, the case worker will give each a figure from one to five for the impact it would have on a child (in the examples above, it gives these hazards the figures of four, five and two). Then, they will give it a figure between one and five for the likelihood that the event will occur.
Once they have these two figures for each hazard, they will transfer the figures to ‘a matrix’, which seems to involve basically plotting them on a graph. So for each individual they are considering barring, they will end up with a graph with a series of dots on it: ‘The risk matrix gives a picture of the risk assigned to each hazard as a result of the likelihood and impact assessments.’ Then – somehow, it doesn’t exactly specify how – the ISA is supposed to be able to tell from this graph whether the person is a risk or not, and whether they should be barred.
Clearly a system like this, with caseworkers who don’t even know the people they are vetting through any personal involvement, who are free to take heresay, supposition, prejudices and evidence which wouldn’t be admissible in a court into account, is damaging to the rule of law. It also suggests to children that they can only have safe relationships with adults if those adults are vetted by the government first, and discourages the vast majority of adults (almost all of whom are safe to work with children) from contact which in times gone by would have been considered normal. The ISA is poisoning the social fabric.
To set up a vetting scheme which doesn’t allow employers any individual leeway to risk assess their employees and potential employees is to miss the point of where abuse against children and other vulnerable groups actually takes place. Numerous child care experts in recent weeks have acknowledged that almost all abuse against children is perpetrated by someone close to the family. Esther Rantzen herself said:
“Most abused children suffer at home, at the hands of people very close to them; the risk provided by strangers is minimal.”
The founder of Childline says that the ISA is damaging to the national psyche and thus contributes to putting children at risk. It’s an understandable outcome when you have an all-pervasive scheme such as this, run as a bureaucracy with the outgoing presumption that everyone is a paedophile/abuser unless they can prove otherwise (at their own cost). This isn’t a question of ‘striking the right balance’ or ‘drawing the line’ somewhere else in vetting and barring people from work, it is about a bureaucracy which is immensely damaging, which will make it harder to detect genuine abusers, and make it much harder to teach our young people to risk assess for themselves. A review isn’t needed here – the ISA must go and go now.
I would welcome your thoughts on the points I have raised, but there is no room for compromise about whether the ISA should continue. If you want to protect children and vulnerable adults you should:
- let existing professionals in HR, the police and social services do the jobs they know how to do. It’s insulting to them to suggest that a barely accountable bureaucrat only (for the most part) observing the world of work is able to protect the vulnerable more effectively than them;
- reform the management of local police services (particularly the Metropolitan Police) and courts, whose record keeping is incompetent at best, outright dangerous at worst;
- get the inter-agency communication which is supposed to protect children and vulnerable adults to actually happen uniformally. Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez would never have been murdered in New Cross if that had taken place as it should have.
Finally you and your cabinet colleagues need to accept that risk cannot be eliminated in society, in protecting us from terrorism, from identity theft, or from the abusers in our midst. Even the (then) senior detective who set up the surveillance operation which led to Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr’s arrest acknowledges Huntley didn’t kill through his job working at a school. The ISA’s remit ignores that fundamental point; it’s ludicrous then to suggest that a £170 million bureaucracy, which even you admit has barely any need, could ever succeed at stopping people like him, certainly without enormous collateral damage. I’m shocked at your apparent willingness to write off the people already being damaged by the ISA; to suggest the ISA is like a seatbelt is an insult to those being strangled by it.
Yours sincerely,
Cosmodaddy
Three Voices Against the ISA
Three prominent writers (at least two of them Tories) have lined up against the Independent Safeguarding Authority:
“Independent” Safeguarding Authority indeed! Independent of whom? Paedophile networks? One would hope so. Rather like the Independent Electoral Commission in Afghanistan (its boss appointed by President Karzai), “independent” seems to have become the adjective of choice for politicians anxious to slap a patina of objectivity on to their latest acronym.
I’ve racked my brains for sinister vested interests from which the ISA might be independent: certainly not the Home Office, which appoints its chairman. What’s the betting that when the authority stumbles, as all authorities do, and ministers seek shelter from the media storm by appointing an inquiry, it will be called the Independent Inquiry into the Independent Safeguarding Authority?
The ISA scheme and its enabling legislation were a response to the Soham murders. Those murders would almost certainly never have happened were it not for the incompetence of the police, social services and education authorities. The result is that in consequence of the failure of three state authorities, a fourth state authority has been set up.
If we can pull back from the manipulation of fear and the exaggeration of risk, the madness of the scheme is evident. Not only Scoutleaders, choirmasters and football coaches will need to be certified, but so will parents who give a lift to other people’s children to school, and authors who enter schools to chat about their books (including me). If you give a lift to school to a neighbour’s children a few times without beiing certified, you will get a criminal record and a £5,000 fine.
Relatives, of course, are exempt – which as they are statistically by a huge degree the most likely people to harm the kids, only further points up the nonsense.
I hesitated to write that, lest the government has the wheeze of bringing in a certificate you need to be an uncle.
The scheme represents a monstrous new bureaucracy and yet a further radical extension of government databases on ordinary people. It will not stop child abuse at all. To take as one example the recent high profile case of Vanessa George, Plymouth nursery teacher accused of child sex abuse. Ms George could have easily obtained a certificate as she had no prior convictions.
What kind of sick society is it that puts its entire adult population under a cloud of suspicion? Does the word Trust not mean anything at all? An entire generation of kids will be brought up without that particular word in its vocabulary. We have lost all sense of perspective.
The fact of the matter is that nine out of ten instances of child abuse occur within the family or the family’s circle of friends. What would our government like to do about that? Introduce family visiting orders, whereby only “approved” members of one’s family is allowed to visit? Because that’s the logical next step.
Predatory paedophiles will always find ways to get to their prey. That”s not to say society shouldn’t do everything it can to make it more difficult for them. But this scheme not only won’t achieve its aim, it will actually make life worse for kids.
Ian Dale makes a valid appeal to Chris Grayling – the likely next Home Secretary, and I’ll repeat it here. The ISA is unfair, wrong-minded and counter-productive. You want some easy votes to get you into office, and then prove the leftie naysayers wrong when you win in May/June? Promise to stop the ISA. You’re into law and order? Promise to manage the police better, social services, the CRB; get local public services to talk to one another the way they should. Labour’s had 12 years to do this, but gave up early on and started forming bureaucracies to look as though they were doing something – that should be anathema to a Tory administration. Repeal the Safeguarding Groups Act 2006 and start getting society to accept once more that we can’t get rid of all risk, and that we should be teaching our children to risk assess for themselves rather than hope for the best from a bureaucracy that measures risk from a meaningless matrix, and won’t have the reach to stop real paedophiles accessing children.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.
