Arts Minister Margaret Hodge defends child abusers

[TonyGosling]

Look at this silly bit of anti British 'Common Purpose' style propaganda - from a government minister today. Well dressed down by GB.
Remember 2 years ago when the conductor had a brilliant pop at the ridiculous 'liquid airliner terror' plot? The guy that was supposed to be behind it was allowed to escape to avoid a fiasco at the trial.


http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23448170-details/Hodge: +'Proms+are+wrong+kind+of+British'/article.do

Seems Margaret Hodge is clearly some kind of stooge. Maybe we should be compiling a list of them?
Can someone arrest her please for perverting the course of justice while leader of Islington Council! And that's just a start Maggz.

[conspiracy analyst]

She is from an honoury historical family is she not?

Diamonds or gold from South Africa if I can remember correctly.

[insidejob]

Black people's image of the Proms is that it is a place where white people glory in and remember the British empire and that they should steer well clear of the fiesta. The only black people who would go are those who want to ingratiate themselves among such people.

Course, this could be unfair. The Union Jack waving (which still signals empire) only comes at the end, or so we're told. It may be all perfectly open and welcoming to all - although I suspect a bit of delusion will help anyone think that.

So, in one way Margaret Hodge's call is silly: making the Proms diverse and representative of all of Britain is a waste of time. Black people recognise it for what it is - for white, middle-class, 'political correctness gone mad', Daily Mail readers.

But is she not the same woman who said we all ought to start listening to white working-class racism a lot more? Now, she cares about what black people feel. Strange.

Although, there is a question about white working-class feelings about the Proms. They (racist or not) probably don't feel welcome at the Proms either.

[TonyGosling]

Ask Margaret Hodge how horrors can hide

By Jenny McCartney
02/03/2008


nich broach

The police excavation at Haut de la Garenne, the former children's care home in Jersey, has quickly become one of the most sickening archaeological digs imaginable. The items found in its warren of bricked-up cellars - a child's skull, a set of shackles, a sunken bath - are fragments of a terrible mosaic of the past, in which a series of predatory adults seemingly inflicted unthinkable cruelties upon helpless children in their care.
More than 150 former residents of the care home have come forward with their stories, and it will also fall to the police to sift through those grim memories from the 1960s, '70s and '80s. One woman, who spoke anonymously to the BBC last week, recalled the "punishment room" in which children were sometimes held alone for two weeks or more.
There were other ominous chambers but she cannot recall exactly what happened in them. She believes that she was frequently sedated. She had one very distinct memory, however: after she complained of abuse to her mother, who used to visit her there, her mother raised it with the home's officials. They dismissed the member of staff concerned, but told her mother that if she took the matter to the police, she would not be permitted to visit her daughter again.
Such a story may provide some answers to those who are incredulous that horrors on such an apparent scale never came to public view before now. Yet imagine being a child admitted to that home in a more punitive era, already feeling abandoned, and possibly labelled a trouble-maker.
The adult staff who run the home are the only authority you know, and any protest is liable to incur a more severe punishment. Those who complain to the head of the home are ignored (as some former residents say they did, and as they were). Your main experience of authority, indeed, would be that authority is the very last thing you could trust.
Haut de la Garenne was closed in 1986, and it may indeed be unlikely that a system of such widespread and profound torment could operate unchecked for so long today. Yet contemplate this: there is a separate, ongoing investigation into another Jersey children's home now known as Greenfields, for at-risk and vulnerable children aged 11 and above.
Greenfields has been run since 2003 by Joe Kennedy, a man with a background in the prison service and no social work qualification. He instituted a regime called "Grand Prix" in which bad behaviour could incur a minimum spell of 24 hours in "the pits", or the isolation cell. Just to get them used to the pits, the official policy until 2006 was that each child would routinely begin his or her stay at Greenfields with a 24-hour isolation period. What a welcome for a frightened 12-year-old, eh?
All right-thinking people like to imagine, when hearing stories of the maltreatment of children, that they themselves would guarantee sanctuary. But often they simply don't. A senior social worker, Liz Davies, and her manager, David Cofie, first told Margaret Hodge, then leader of Islington council, in 1990 of their suspicions that there was widespread sexual abuse of children in Islington care homes.
Ms Hodge instead believed senior officials who assured her that nothing was the matter. In 1992, the London Evening Standard published extensive evidence of the abuse, which Ms Hodge denounced as "a sensationalist piece of gutter journalism". In 1995, an independent report found that the council had indeed failed to investigate the allegations properly.
In 2003, Tony Blair appointed Ms Hodge the first ever Minister for Children. Some questioned her suitability, including a courageous and articulate man called Demetrious Panton who had been sexually abused in an Islington care home in the late 1970s and whose attempts to expose what was happening had been repeatedly ignored.
Ms Hodge wrote privately to the BBC describing Mr Panton as "extremely disturbed", a remark for which she was later compelled to apologise in the High Court. The first person to categorise Panton as "disturbed" was the paedophile boss of his children's home, Bernie Bain, a man later described by police as "a brutal sexual abuser": Panton was 10 at the time.
Children leaving the care system today face appalling outcomes. Their educational success is markedly low, and they are vastly over-represented among the homeless and prison populations. Ironically, one legacy of abuse scandals is that care-home workers often maintain a deliberate distance from children, preoccupied instead with elaborate form-filling to keep themselves in the clear. When the children leave at 18, they are frequently discouraged from further contact with their carers.
Such results are not inevitable, as proved by other European systems, which employ only qualified, well-paid staff trained in a humane philosophy of child-care. Look at Jersey and weep, and not just for what happened yesterday. We failed our most vulnerable children then, and we're still failing them now.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/02/ do0213.xml