Posted by conmoto on Friday, 16 February 2007 23:09:13

Firstly, the format of the weblog is a surprisingly good idea and shaping up nicely-a constructive alternative to "ThoughtforThe Day" . It's a good thing that the participants are throwing their hats in tghe ring
and talking about ideas in the spirit ofd intellectual spadework.
I spend part of my working life trying to assist survivors of indifferent parenting and social structures. I think a paradigm of the Punk-Pollyanaish way our society thinks at the moment is the way the word
'care' is bandied about-as a sentimental dinosaur of a concept. The 'care' system thrives above all on human attentivemess and the recognition of nurture as an art and craft needs continuing support.
All too often cultural initoiatives such as those of Black Men mentoring disadvantaged Black young men collapse through unde-funding,local political stelemates and turf wars. Some core programmes
need near-statutory assurance of continuity if they are generically working, and while good in principle, the statistical accountabilityu of service uptake needs simplifying and to be interpreted locally.
Not long ago I encountered a local authority commisioner meeting ervice userson their ownpatch for 90 minutesand following up their concerns directly. This person also made a point of talking regualrly
with care providers and stakeholders, professional and lay on the basis of the provision of Skil and Value.
Cameronoan '..We areall in this together' is the key useful phrase I think. This needs following through with the treatmentof professionals and familiea as respoinsible mature entities. A particulkarly
good way of folliowing this good thinking through would be for one or more of DC's team to volunteer alongside professionals involved in front-line delivery in Care. This similarly goes for any other
cultural field. Portillo did this commendably in his 'single parent' TV experiment, hence the potential to do more goal-oriented actioin research.The modesttransparency of the WebCameron dialogues lead me to think thjis could work as more than a video-opportunity.Good start, Guys.

Posted by ReverendJasonGraves on Friday, 16 February 2007 23:09:47

Beautiful, wonderful, yes David, reaching out to those who are really at societies core!

...and did you say 33?

LOL


Ya, we are working for divinity and to that end... peace and love comes from within and without.


Rev. J

Posted by THEHARDTRUTH on Saturday, 17 February 2007 01:49:08

UNESCO produces a report that says that our country is the worst place in the world to bring up children. As if we did not know that already! Well, at least, those of us who have a real life and do not live in some middle class bubble of cafes and endless bullshit talked over wine around the dinner table, did. What has been the governments response to this shameful news that has broadcast the real truth of the ineptitude of British politicians and their hateful, self interested, corrupt behaviour, that has left our kids in a huge mess and our families devastated?

THEY ARE GOING TO EMPLOY PEOPLE TO SPY ON SMOKERS AND GRASS THEM UP!

THAT.., IS THEIR NEW POLICY INITIATIVE ANNOUNCED THE DAY AFTER MOST DEVASTATING INDICTMENT OF THEIR RULE EVER PRODUCED!

THEY ARE GOING TO CREATE A SORT OF, NICOTINE SECRET POLICE, WHILE OUR CHILDREN FIGHT TO SURVIVE IN A COUNTRY THAT IS NO LONGER WORTHY OF THEM AND IS NUMBER FOUR ON THE WORLD WIDE RICH LIST!


WELCOME TO THE REALITY BEHIND THE SLOGAN, "THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER."



It's enough to make a saint vomit in disgust.


Aren't you all so proud you voted for and supported this bunch of *&%*!" Has it dawned on you yet why so many of our people did not bother to vote? As this bunch try to force radical feminist politics down our throats, steal children, control our thoughts with their 'new speak' PC bullshit and break up our families, it was your votes placed them there.Your bloody pathetic propaganda! It was every single journalist that had a wet dream on the night that Blair and his bunch of -------- got into power. Who has supported everything this political jackal has said and done, who have been behind the moral and physical destruction of our children.

C H I L D R E N!


C H I L D R E N!


DID YOU GET THAT?

While Blair has smiled his toothy grin and lied, deceived and cheated like every other damn lawyer ever born, you journalists and broadcasters, who pride yourselves on being so bloody clever, have placed into power the biggest bunch of slime balls this land has seen since Charlie got his head chopped off for doing the same things to our people, by the round heads.

AND JOURNALISTS AND POLITICIANS WONDER WHY THE PEOPLE HATE THEM!

THEY HAVE NOT FIGURED OUT IT IS BECAUSE JOURNALISTS AND POLITICIANS ACT AS IF THEY HATE THE PEOPLE!

THEY THINK EVERYONE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY ARE AS MORALLY CORRUPT AS THEY ARE, SO THEY TREAT THE REST OF US AS FOOLS AND IDIOTS TO BE LIED TOO BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT THEY DO TO EACH OTHER!

THEY ASK FOR RESPECT BUT ONLY OFFER THEIR CONTEMPT.

Do you politicians and journalists understand what you are doing to our people, our families....To our kids? You always whine about people blaming the media and politics and you justify every excess by stupid cheap slogans such as, "We only have the best interests of the child at heart." Or, "Well people buy our papers so they must enjoy the content." Yeah....like the way people only buy heroin because they enjoy it. Being addicted to your crap does not mean it is not crap! You peddle it and you help to destroy our lives.

OUR CHILDREN'S LIVES.



YOUR CHILDREN'S LIVES ARE FINE BECAUSE YOU LINE YOUR POCKETS WITH OUR MONEY.


BBC journalists and their favourite middle class mates swan about in helicopters we, the people, pay for so they can bring us programs like, "The Flying -- bloody expensive-- Gardener" Or, news shots of someones roof! They send their "girls" down to Ascot to drink champagne and wear expensive clothes so we can all be thrilled to be paying for it. They pound us with their feminist hate propaganda and ask the men they insult to enjoy forking out the cash every year so they can do it to them! Then, every bloody two years they demand an increase in the licence fee so they can do to us again next year!

You journalists are so busy selling shit about this footballer, that pop star, this scandal, or that blatant lie on behalf of Tony and his shark-like mates, that you do not see the real pain happening right under your smug, over paid middle class noses. The same noses are pressed into the buttocks of politicians, businessmen, any women who does anything even remotely out of the ordinary -- like run fast or sail a boat somewhere (What a hero? No, sorry! A man has been there and done that already...She is just following on behind...now that it is proved it can be done safely!) -- or your head is filled with brainwashing from sad little lefties.

Think about that.

You are calling vermin like Blunkett, Harman, Livingstone, Greer and Skinner your heroes! What does that say about you and where your head is at? You are mates with the biggest bunch of political child abusers ever known. Your lefty mates are always screaming about child abuse while they are doing the same thing!

TO OUR KIDS! NOT YOUR WELL OFF, MIDDLE CLASS KIDS.

OUR KIDS!

I have been in TV studios and watched the lies being formulated. I have been asked to tell the same lies by our so called free press. FREE? You people would not recognise freedom if it bounced around your damn offices for a week shouting, "I'm Freedom! You are puppets of each other. Each journalist pumping their lies into each other and then feeding them to the people. Worse, you are proud of it! Liars, hanging around with lying politicians, all busy lying to the people and thinking that the people don't know!

In the meantime, out there in the real world that you people left a long time ago, the children are in terrible pain. Their fathers have been driven out by the propaganda scum like you have pumped out every day. You have forced mothers out of their homes into work because you wanted to support the sickest ideology ever to hit our shores and you have feted twisted minds like Germain Greer and her friends.

Children have been dumped onto strangers as their mothers and fathers have worked themselves into the floor chasing dreams that were not even theirs! Dreams that belonged, not to the people, but to assholes like Gordon Brown! Politicians, demanding that people work harder and harder, for longer and longer and for less and less, so they can have a big idea and get their egos massaged by other power crazed lunatics because they, "got the Olympics for Britain." No they didn't! Those suited scumbags don't give a damn about sport. The Olympics are not about Britain at all. What they want is too look good at the next bloody summit as they drink champaign at their tax payers expense. The same poor bloody tax payers who are going to be forced to pay for the politicians ego trip.

More than 90% of the people of this country will never get into the stadiums they pay for. They cannot afford to pay people like Richard bloody Branson (another twat that spends his days grinning like Tony Blair at any camera pointed at him) £300 for a train ticket to come to London on an over croweded cattle truck and see a bunch of junkies run around a track. For most of these hard working people, if they want to watch fast moving drug takers they just have to wait for the police to raid the local crack den.

I could write reams and reams about this stuff. How you were warned over and over again that all of this was going to happen. How you were warned that men all over the world are growing in fury about what the politicians and the press are doing to their kids and families. How the constant hatred aimed at men in your sick "news"-papers was creating the violence against women you all whine about. How, by turning your back on reality and refusing to look at female violence, children are being abused by mothers in record numbers. As you all hummed, "Things can only get better" like a bunch of idiot robots, abused men were being ignored. Savage bitches were stabbing them, throwing boiling water over them, falsley accusing them of everything from child abuse and domestic violence, to rape. Constantly goading them AND THEY STILL ARE while YOU, at the urging of Tony and his radical feminist and militant homosexual mates, filled every program and paper with pictures of ONLY female abuse victims. You have driven male victims underground with your hate and then claimed they do not exist, irrespective of how many scientific studies we have showed you, proving there are millions of them!

YOU MUST BE SO PROUD OF YOURSELVES. YOU SPINELESS MORONS!

The British people, in the main, know what a bunch of hopeless sleazeballs politicians are. They see through the bullshit and the deceit. They know how the system is rigged so that the police NEVER get punished for their corruption and murders and the politicians behave like little Caesars; lining their own pockets and shagging each others secretaries and other peoples wives. Half the journalists are doing cocaine at rates that make Kieth Richards look like an amateur, while slamming this weeks new victim for doing the same. This hypocrisy is not lost on the people because the people are, and always have been, much smarter than the average lawyer/politician/journalist ever understands. John and Jane may not be great writers, public speakers, or be able to pronounce words like plum-mouthed BBC cretins, but they are not dumb either, despite politicians and TV companies best efforts to make them that way!

What they are is patient.

Until that patience runs out....that is!

Never mind though ay? You can always make yourself look holy at next years "Children In Need" scam. Then you can pat each other on the back, feel good and go back to wrecking those same children's lives until next year!

God help you. No one else can!

Posted by Graham on Saturday, 17 February 2007 03:27:30

Ah, it's always good to read an intelligent and well reasoned viewpoint.

Perhaps someone will post one in this thread?

(PS: I didn't vote for them!)

Posted by Jerome on Monday, 19 February 2007 10:26:53

This is all good positive stuff, recognising how much more we all need to do here in Britain to take care of each other as well as ourselves. Why not follow it up with a brief, clear statement on how Conservatives would give more support to the stable families you've often pointed out as the essential building blocks of society? Even a few hundred pounds more a year would make a difference to many, especially at Christmas as with the cold weather payments for pensioners. That said, you're on the right path and keep on going with it.

Posted by StevenL on Monday, 19 February 2007 15:52:38

I stayed up and watched Russel Crowe in 'Gladiator' last night, in light of this particular report I found it surprisingly topical. Stripped of his rank as General of the Armies of the North, dethroned as the chosen custodian of the great Roman Empire, Maximus Decimus Meridius stands face to face with his mortal enemy, the man who murdered his family, the Emperor Commodus. The fifty-thousand strong crowd that adorn the walls of the Collesium chant 'Maximus' as he lifts his helmet to reveal his identity to Commodus. The Emperor, a man granted the power of life and death over every man in Rome, has his hands bound by the affections of the people towards their new hero Maximus. As Commodus's sister puts it to him later, the people 'are Rome'.

I don't believe that Britian would have appeared at the bottom of the UNICEF list in 1986. Although there is no comparable data in front of me to prove my suspicions, the world is a completely different place. Eastern Europe was under the grip of communism, Japan and West Germany were experiencing a thriving economic boom. The Yen, now a high risk, potentially volatile source of cheap capital was one of the worlds strongest currencies. The Maastricht Treaty, the common market and the Euro were not even off the drawing board. On April 26th 1986 the Chenobyl nuclear power station exploded in the Ukraine. On October 11th Ronald Reagan and Michael Gorbachev began talks in Iceland regarding the scaling down of nuclear warheads from Europe; they failed. Over here Thatcher deregulated the London Stock Exchange in the 'Big Bang', a major factor leading to the success of the City and today's public outcry about traders' multi-million pound bonuses. These were uncertain days of the cold war, who would have thought that in twenty-one years time Czechoslovakia would be rated a better place to raise your children than the United Kingdom? What went wrong?

In 1992 nearly 80% of the electorate voted and returned John Major to power. I was just gone thirteen, I remember the result being announced on the news vividly. My father was never a fan of the Thatcher or Major governments and was shouting 'Who on Earth is still voting for them?' In fact up here in South-East Northumberland that's pretty much what everyone was shouting, but at least they were interested, at least they cast their vote and had their say in the nation's future. The nation was sick to the back teeth of the Major government by 1997 and New Labour were elected with a landslide majority, but turnout had fallen to just over 70%, some people had lost interest in politics somewhere along the line. In 2001 turnout was down to below 60%, this trend can only mean more and more people were either losing faith in politicans or losing interest in politics.

More people now own their own homes than ever before, more people own cars, people have more gadgets, schools have more money, medicine has advanced like every other field of science. Where then is the UK being left behind the rest of the developed world? Young people seem to be more passionate than ever about global politcal issues such as climate change and third world poverty. The globalised media and the internet give us access to a vast array of up to date information we never had before, and this is perhaps the first sticking point; people are becoming more confused and more bewildered about the world they live in. The politcal process is also becoming more and more bewildering, think-tanks, international quangos and professional lobbies dominate the political agenda, the media communicates a confusing combination of marketing speak and statistics to an ever more detached electorate in the form of Chinese whispers.

In the midst of our ever more confused society the ruling classes, or more to the point the Chancellor of the Exchequor, has started a curious campaign to define 'Britishness'. Various 'hooray' words have been banded about such as 'fairness' and 'tolerance'. My own humble view on this is that the one thing that defines us more than any other, next to our love of discussing the weather, is how good we are at complaining. The chattering classes and the opinion leaders have got this down to a fine art. The more sensationalist your complaint is the more it will be publicised. Whether you're complaint is a complete load of tosh or not does not seem to figure any more, as long as it grabs attention people will listen and discuss it. Proposed local authority enforcement tactics of the smoking ban is compared to the East German Stazi. Even ethnic minority groups, not known for their sensationalist British-style complaining are starting to get the hang of it. The Muslim leader David Cameron visited the other week compared police treatment of Muslims to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, it worked too, coverage of his comment extended all over the media. I would hazard a guess the gentleman concerned was a happy man the next day seeing the mass-media pay homage to his very British style of sensationalist complaint. He cracked it.

Of course not everyone is as good as this gentleman clearly is at articulating his gripes, not everyone has the self-confidence to be as sensationalist, or back up their point in a heated debate with a professional politican. This shouldn't mean their opinions are any less important in a democracy however. The rise in politcal correctness, and the tendancies of the politcal and media classes to shout peoples' opinions down with 'boo' words such as 'discrimination', 'racist', 'sexist' or 'homophobic', can only serve to ensure that more and more people are deciding to keep their opinions to themselves. The culture and politcal climate I remember as a young boy in South-East Northumberland is remarkably different to the culture in London in 2007. It is only now that Sir Trevor Phillips has raised the 'professional' opinion that 'multi-culturism has not worked' that people are seriously discussing the alternatives without the fear of being branded a racist by the politcal classes. In such a confusing, fast-paced, opinion-leader-led political climate is it any wonder people shy away from the politcal process? After all we were not the poorest country on the UNICEF list, people have more gadgets, more leisure activites, more non-politcal media and more mobility than they did in 1986 to keep them occupied. Why should they care about politics anyway? You can't be branded with 'boo' words for talking about your favourite popular music as you can having a serious discussion about the effects of rap music on urban youth culture, so why bother?

The reason we should all bother is because like Commodus's sister says we 'are Rome'. If we all speak out about what we really think is making Britain the worst place in the developed world to raise our children, and just as importantly make sure they know we all intend to vote too, our rulers must listen or face popular revolt in the next election. Quite how the previous two governments have managed to take a pretty damn good nation, in New Labours case with sound economic fundamentals. A great nation that only needed a bit of tinkering around the edges, and then flush it all down the toilet is beyond me. In an ideal world there would be a Maximus Decimus Meridius to stand face to face with Blair with all of Rome behind him. Until the politcans engage the non-voting public, and the non-voting public stand up and declare 'we are Rome' I can't see the situation for our children improving.

 

Comment edited by StevenL on Monday, 19 February 2007 16:00:55

Posted by David2 on Friday, 23 February 2007 17:31:43

At the age of 65 I suppose I should think that the country's going to the dogs.
But I don't - I think it rocks!

Posted by DaveGould on Friday, 23 February 2007 19:19:15

Unicef are dependent on reporting hardship of children for ca$h. They are not scientists or even social scientists. People took this report and for some reason assumed it was true.

It isn't. It's a fabrication.

For a start, none of the factors they chose to quantify a child's life have been proven to have any real impact on that life, apart from one. Most of the factors have been proved to have *no* effect on a child's life (read Freakonomics for more info).

The only factors shown to affect children is who their parents are and who their peer group is. Read that again.

Unicef are probably decent people. They probably all care about children, possibly to the exclusion of anyone else - but that's a minor flaw. The fault mostly lies with the media who promote a fabrication as fact and gullible people who believe it.