THE STATE BENEFITS

I bumped into a friend in Sainsbury’s this morning who I haven’t seen for a month or two, and he informed me he’d been banned from driving for six months on account of receiving repeated thumbs-downs from those electronic smiley faces monitoring traffic speed; as a roadie-for-hire with his own state-of-the-art wheels, this imposition on his living was something of an inconvenience, to say the least. But, hey, I replied (in an attempt to put a positive slant on the scenario), you’ll miss out on all that crap that constitutes the winter motorist’s lot – struggling to start the engine in sub-zero temperatures and having to scrape frost off your windscreen; then you can return to the road in the spring! I don’t know what prompted me to adopt a positive slant, though perhaps it was just knee-jerk instinctive optimism manifested as lame consolation for a pal confronted by the unlucky loss of his living.

As a largely conscientious driver, in terms of not drinking before sitting behind the wheel or indulging in ‘jazz cigarettes’ whilst ferrying ageing musicians from one gig to another, my friend seemed unfairly targeted by a system seemingly installed to provide local councillors with an additional income for a gravy train that already supports their lifestyle choice in spades. I don’t regard him as a danger to other motorists, let alone pedestrians, but he’s unfortunate to be driving in an era in which the traditional officiousness of the Great British Jobsworth has been given a hi-tech makeover that punishes with punitive pettiness and doesn’t distinguish between the truly terrible driver and the one who occasionally exceeds limits designed to appease the dismal motorcade of the Sunday family saloon en route to the latest horrific theme (or retail) park.

As a kind of add-on to this anecdote of the way we live now, I received an update today as to the progress of legal proceedings on the part of the State to deprive the mother of a ten-year-old child I choose to call ‘X’ of her full parental rights. Long-term readers will be familiar with a sorry saga I’ve been documenting periodically for the best part of a year, and I’ve no doubt links to previous posts on the subject will appear at the foot of this one; but X is a learning-disabled child whose mother is a close friend of mine and whose time in the care of the local authorities has been marked by a sequence of inept cock-ups that hardly support their chances of ‘sharing’ control of the child.

In order to strengthen a case they could never win on actual evidence, the local authorities have stooped so far below the belt that they’re almost at ground level. They’ve chosen to blacken the character of the mother in ways that have no bearing on the care and consideration of the child, nitpicking and clutching at irrelevant straws they imagine reflect badly on her. For example, X’s mother has been described as ‘strange’ by a nurse supposedly overseeing a recent medical examination of X that the authorities she entrusted with her day-to-day care buggered-up yet again.

Another unreliable witness to X’s mother’s exasperation with the system – an employee at the care unit where X resides – has added his untrustworthy voice to the systematic condemnation of (and contempt for) this particular parent; despite physically preventing X’s mother from kissing her daughter goodbye when dropping her off at the residential care unit – an aggressive gesture that led to police involvement – this dickhead has been roped-in to uphold the authorities’ dodgy dossier against X’s mother, thus increasing the strain the whole process is undoubtedly placing upon a woman whose sole concern is for the wellbeing of a child too difficult for one person to permanently look after.

She handed over her daughter to authorities allegedly qualified to take care of children whose mental incapacity is so incompatible with society that only the State can control them; but repeatedly highlighting the State’s uselessness where most submit without question has left the mother up against a State intent on exacting revenge for her outrageous impertinence.

The court case arising from this dispute is scheduled to take place in a couple of weeks; the State has resorted to desperate measures to discredit X’s mother as a means of robbing her of full parental rights, though we shouldn’t really be surprised by authorities without a moral leg to stand on stooping to such despicable tactics in order to save face. Their record is so appalling that the exposure of ineptitude would bring the whole facade crashing down; every injury X has received has come whenever she’s been in the care of the State – every black-eye, bruise and bite – whilst her time in the care of her mother has been injury-free. This doesn’t look good on paper, so the State has cobbled together a case that desperately seeks to justify its attempts to wrestle away the mother’s full parental rights. If the State succeeds, the mother would have to go back to court every time she disagreed with a decision by the other party. It stinks, just as every fat bossy woman whose pension scheme is in peril should the State lose stinks.

The family courts are a closed shop, by the way, so don’t expect our great democracy to highlight the outcome of this farcical trial or to give it any publicity outside of this blog. But I shall report it because I resent the State’s interference in such matters and because I am sick to death of the State passing the buck and blaming everything on good people that it hopes lack the energy or nerve to challenge it. Speeding fines or parental rights – if we let these f**kers win we may as well wrap ourselves in the white flag for life. And I know X’s mother is right. Watch this space. Or watch this instead…

© The Editor

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mr-Yesterday-Johnny-Monroe/dp/154995718X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510941083&sr=1-1

YOUNG, FREE AND MENTAL

Two reports published within 24 hours of one another have yet again highlighted that, for all the heightened public awareness of mental illness in recent years, it remains socially stigmatising and seriously underfunded. The first report, ‘Thriving at Work’, commissioned by Our Glorious Leader no less, was a review of the way in which the workplace responds to those members of the workforce afflicted by various mental health symptoms. One sufferer of chronic depression, interviewed by the BBC in the wake of the report’s publication, was advised to look elsewhere for employment by her boss when she admitted her condition and was made to feel increasingly uncomfortable once it became common knowledge in the office; she left the job not long after, as do around 300,000 a year for similar reasons, costing employers upwards of £42bn.

The findings of the experts who compiled the report on behalf of the PM confirmed beliefs that mental illness has yet to fully shed its taboo status. At a time when the cry for an end to all discrimination based on race, religion and sexuality is at its loudest, it’s ironic that those whose needs are deemed most worthy of attention are those whose otherness is blatantly obvious in either the colour of their skin or the clothes they’re wearing – whether a lady in a burqa or a feller in a dress. Their ‘diversity’ is a virtual sandwich board of personal advertising, something that makes it easier for the majority to discern the difficulties of the minority.

By contrast, mental health symptoms being invisible to the naked eye always present its sufferers with a problem as to how it relates to those around them, unlike any physical illness. If the symptoms aren’t visible, it’s as though others are unconvinced there’s any sort of problem because they can’t see it like they can an arm in a sling or a leg in a cast, like they need to have it simplified in the most basic manner as proof the sufferer isn’t acting up. Mental illness is more challenging to the non-sufferer and can often spawn a sceptical attitude towards the condition as a consequence, almost forcing the sufferer to convince the doubters as if they were faking insanity to get out of the army. I’ve been confronted by it myself. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you; you’ve got two arms and two legs – what’s the problem? Depression is just another word for laziness.’

This attitude is in place from an early age. The second report into mental health to have appeared this week concentrated on the youth experience and how poorly served young sufferers are by the system. This review discovered almost 40% of services exclusive to children and adolescents in England were in desperate need of improvement. ‘The World at One’ covered the report by making a Freedom of Information request on the subject and discovered some children were having to wait up to 22 months before seeing a specialist mental health professional. I must admit these revelations didn’t strike me as particularly revelatory, however; anyone who has followed my regular posts on the severely mentally-handicapped child I’ve christened X probably won’t be surprised to learn X herself has endured gaps of a similar nature between such appointments.

The report was compiled by the Care Quality Commission, whereas earlier this year, NHS England published its own suggestions for improvement; ‘Five Year Forward View for Mental Health’. Claire Murdoch, head of mental health for NHS England claimed there has been an increase of 15% of spending on mental health services for the young over the past twelve months. ‘Without a doubt, after years of drought,’ she says, ‘the NHS’ mental health funding taps have now been turned on.’ As ever with the NHS, though, one wonders where the money goes; or, to maintain Ms Murdoch’s watery analogy, which plughole it’s destined to disappear down.

‘The World at One’ spoke to 22-year-old Alice Gibbs, who was diagnosed with anorexia at 12 and, after a six-month wait to see a specialist, received four years of treatment in her home city of Leicester, despite its limitations. There was an eating disorder unit in London she now reckons had the facilities to accelerate her recovery, but as a physically and mentally fragile 16-year-old, being away from the support of her family probably wouldn’t have helped either. Had somewhere of that unit’s calibre been closer to home, she surmises she wouldn’t have lost a decade to such a debilitating condition. Her experience seems to back up the ‘postcode lottery’ theory when it comes to healthcare.

Alice Gibbs is still receiving treatment, saying she has ‘managed’ her condition rather than cured it, something that anyone who has experienced mental illness will recognise; it’s always a case of management rather than cure, because there isn’t a cure. Alice Gibbs’ treatment could well be an obstacle to any career ambitions she harbours, though ‘Thriving at Work’ makes 40 recommendations to encourage employers to help their employees with mental health issues stay in their jobs. But it would seem it depends on who you work for. The insurer Aviva received special praise in the report, yet they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. On the whole, both of this week’s reports into mental illness don’t paint a very rosy picture of this country’s care for and treatment of those unfortunate enough to fall under its devastating shadow.

And whilst it makes a refreshing change to commend Theresa May for something – ‘It is only by making this an everyday concern for everyone,’ said the PM, ‘that we can change the way we see mental illness’ – we cannot neglect the callous disregard for sufferers of mental illness that her Government and its predecessor has presided over via its continuous use of Atos to decide whether or not someone is ‘faking it’ for benefits. The toxic legacy of the IDS era is still with us in the shape of Universal Credit, after all; and Mrs May won’t budge on that one. Giving with one hand and taking away with the other yet again.

© The Editor

THE WEIGHT OF THE STATE

If I were to summon up a David and Goliath analogy, not only would it point us in the direction of Cliché Crescent in record time, but it would also pamper the ego of the giant in question, making it out to be an admirable Superman, when in reality it’s Goofy dressed as a traffic warden – an inept Little Hitler revelling in the power to ruin lives. It’s the sheer Leviathan-like size of the system that makes it so overwhelming and intimidating to the individual rather than the dense dummies it employs, and its appetite for destruction needs no introduction.

Long-term readers will recall the sad saga of a child I called X, a child who is (to use a discredited, non-touchy/feely term) severely mentally handicapped. Having devoted a decade of her life to raising a child with needs so special that perhaps only a lion-tamer would require a similar level of training to cope with the child’s regularly violent behaviour, her mother handed her over to the care of the local authority almost a year ago. This wasn’t as simple as it sounds, for the local authority (who can only boast a solitary specialist care unit in the entire county it covers) wasn’t exactly willing and eager to help. It took various desperate measures for it to finally accept X, though this was done via what is known as a Section 20 care order; the local authority keeps X under its roof, but that arrangement doesn’t remove parental rights from her mother whilst it acts as surrogate parent – although the woman who oversees the care unit is referred to as a ‘corporate parent’, if you can believe that.

With the heavy daily demands of X no longer dominating her mother’s schedule, her mother slowly began to piece together a life for herself after ten years out of the social loop. X’s antisocial nature left her mother’s ordinary interaction with other people severely limited, but now her mother could receive visitors at home without fear of a screaming naked child running around and lashing out with her fists or defecating on the floor; she could also return to the workplace. She kept in touch with X through thrice-weekly visits to the care unit and would then take her out for several hours before dropping her off again. Contact was therefore maintained and her mother kept a close watch on the care X was receiving.

Unfortunately, the competence of this care rarely rose above a barely adequate level and regularly slid into outright negligence. Self-harming on X’s part was once witnessed by her mother when turning up early to collect her from the unit one day; unaware her mother was peering through the window, the fat staff were content to sit and sip their cuppas as X repeatedly punched herself in the head. Self-inflicted bites and bruises were, on one occasion, compounded by carpet burns on the child’s back that could only have been inflicted by a member of staff dragging her along the floor; there were also several other occasions in which a fellow resident/inmate was able to hit X hard when said child was supposed to have at least one member of staff shadowing him at all times.

A catalogue of such incidents, when coupled with the failure of the staff to provide X with the required amount of outdoor excursions and activities, persuaded X’s mother to take her back home in anger, so dissatisfied was she with the service being provided. Successive meetings with patronising Diane Abbott types boasting imaginary job titles had achieved nothing and X’s mother had resorted to the only option open to her. Alas, X was even less suited to the domestic environment a year after being removed from it than she had been before, and a week or so of relative calmness was suddenly superseded by an outburst of physical assaults on her mother that left her black and blue. Essentially in an abusive relationship, X’s battered mother could also no longer recruit the kind of paid assistance that was easier when X had been a smaller, cuter child, and she was left to her own devices; the local authority also didn’t respond to requests for the reinstatement of X’s former care package that had enabled her to remain at home before.

Everyone has their breaking point, however, and if X’s mother couldn’t cope after ten years’ experience, nobody could. She reluctantly had to hand X back into the careless care of a system that had repeatedly failed her. The social workers and their superiors higher up the chain of command ticked a few boxes, issued a few lectures, and smugly settled their overweight arses on the moral high-ground. Platitudes straight from the social care manual were delivered bereft of common sense and with a frightening absence of intelligence; we all have our moments when firing off correspondence, but the litany of spelling mistakes in official letters to X’s mother and confusing the respective names of child and mother suggest IQ tests rank fairly low on the list of the system’s priorities when it comes to employees.

The system will treat parents with contempt regardless, but it still prefers dealing with those either too exhausted by looking after a difficult child or too trusting in the system’s facade of authority to question it. However, why play ball when it will trample all over you, anyway? May as well speak your mind and confront the system’s failings by saying them out loud. The system reacts by essentially sticking its fingers in its ears and babbling incoherently whilst the parent tells it where it is going wrong; then when the parent has finished, the system responds by holding a Star Chamber conference behind closed doors to strip the parents of their rights over their child.

X’s mother hasn’t made herself very popular with the shits she had no alternative but to entrust her child to; even the frontline troops have refused to engage with her at X’s care unit; one physically prevented her from entering it a couple of weeks ago when she was dropping X off after a few hours away. Presented with an uncomfortable truth that contradicts and shatters the sham of social care, this Goliath simply breaks its David by inflicting its ineptitude upon him so that David is eventually worn down not by one big fight, but a succession of endless little battles that are never won.

Each chapter of this saga is more wearisome than its predecessor; everything X’s mother now turns her attention to seems to be a consequence of the system’s negligence. The system is shortly taking X’s mother to court in round one of a legal soap opera that is destined to drag on as long as ‘The Archers’. X’s mother wanted to relocate to another county with better facilities and place X there; the local authority wants to keep X captive in its ‘care’ and is building a smear case against the mother despite the fact that all of X’s injuries have occurred on its watch. Their behaviour has pushed X’s mother to the edge as much as X ever had; but X has an excuse. She can’t help it.

To put it bluntly, the State is not the friend of those with disabilities; the case today in which a male nurse who’d worked at the notorious Winterbourne View care home was cleared of punching a resident of another care home in the face (breaking his jaw) and allowed to continue in the job speaks volumes. And volumes could indeed be penned on this topic, though I shall spare you it. Most of us have the luxury to be spared it.

© The Editor

THE SECRET SERVICE

I’ve used the term ‘Star Chamber’ on more than one occasion as a derivative description for a clandestine collective of decision-makers operating behind closed doors – most recently with regards to the new censorious regime on YouTube. However, when it comes to decisions being made that are a good deal more serious than having one’s uploaded video slapped with a ‘not advertiser-friendly’ label, one need look no further for a genuine Star Chamber than the smug and sinister network of box-ticking, back-slapping, self-righteous do-gooders operating under the umbrella banner of social services.

Long-term readers of this blog may recall a couple of posts I penned last year (https://winegumtelegram.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/a-social-disservice/ and https://winegumtelegram.wordpress.com/2016/11/29/consensual-healing/) on the subject of a severely mentally handicapped child whose mother is a friend of mine. Her child, a ten-year-old I referred to as X, was placed in a temporary care unit for children of similar conditions last November because her single mother could no longer cope with the day-to-day demands of looking after such a challenging child alone. The authorities were reluctant to take on this responsibility (and that’s putting it mildly), forcing the desperate mother to adopt desperate measures, such as refusing to collect the child from school the day after she’d been fobbed off on the phone when begging for assistance, thus leaving the authorities with no choice but to re-home X there and then.

Since this traumatic incident at the back-end of last year, the child has been living in a temporary care unit that currently only has two other resident children; the mother has established a pattern of visiting three times a week and taking the child back to her home for a couple of hours on each occasion. These occasions usually involve allowing X to indulge in the simple pleasures that make her happy, ones that don’t come within the narrow, rigid remit as endorsed by the powers-that-be overseeing the care unit – basically enabling X to enjoy foodstuffs frowned upon by them, and exercising a degree of realism absent from the fatuous positivity practiced by the ludicrously long list of employees on the social service gravy-train trained to believe X’s condition is one that can be ‘rehabilitated’.

This training imbues its recipients with a superiority complex and emphasises parents are an irritant if they express views that are contrary to those deemed appropriate by state employees – even though the parents may have spent many years 24/7 with the child and therefore know what makes it tick. Parents are viewed as something of an encumbrance to the system because some of them can see the system is getting it wrong re their children’s best interests and are prepared to puncture the positivity balloon by pointing this out. Social services aren’t keen on those not in their exalted position of faux-authority telling them the system they’re trained to obey with unswerving subservience sucks.

When X returned to a spate of self-harming – mainly biting her arms and hitting herself on the head – these were new behaviours that began when she entered the care environment, and her mother instantly knew what the problem was. X does this when she’s bored or hungry; her capability for expressing her frustration in any way other than self-harming is virtually zilch. But no one in authority wanted to discuss or even admit that this was happening. It wasn’t until the mother presented photographic evidence of appalling bruises and bite-marks that the self-harming was actually acknowledged.

Initially, when the staff at the care unit placed food on her plate such as noodles, spaghetti or anything she couldn’t hold and chomp on like Henry VIII with a chicken-leg, she refused to partake in the meal and lost a good deal of weight as a consequence; this was due to what are called ‘sensory processing issues’, and until it was pointed out by the mother, the staff wouldn’t provide X with a replacement meal, refusing to veer from a menu that caters for a mere three children. There have been other incidents where the staff will take X swimming at a time when she would normally eat, a decision flying in the face of common sense. Very much a creature of repetitious habit as befitting the most extreme outer limits of the autistic scale, X reacts to any alteration in the schedule by reverting to her worst traits, even if (as her mother constantly points out to employees of the system) these traits can be avoided.

The entire county in which X resides has the one solitary temporary care unit for children in her condition; a fourth child who had attacked X on several occasions was recently relocated to another care unit, but this time down in Shropshire – a considerable distance from home. In a way, the process of relocation is akin to when convicts are removed from one prison to another, often hundreds of miles from where the con’s family live, thus necessitating an increase and expense in travel come visiting day. And, just as the families of prisoners have no say in where the authorities choose to dispatch their loved ones to, social services will place children wherever the hell they like if they have ultimate charge of the child; parents aren’t consulted because parents aren’t important.

Yesterday, X’s mother was belatedly informed by X’s social worker (incidentally, the nineteenth X has had in her ten short years) that the social services’ Star Chamber had held a secret meeting the day before in which they’d decided they would effectively gain power of attorney over X, absolving her parents of all rights and claims to her. The parents were not informed and no review was held that would’ve given a platform to the parents’ concerns and enabled them to express a view on future plans for X when a permanent home for her needs to be found eventually.

If this goes ahead via the intended court order, the social services can place X anywhere in the country and the parents will have no say whatsoever in the matter; X’s mother has established a routine with X that benefits X and brings a modicum of pleasure into a life that has a paucity of it; if X is relocated hundreds of miles away, all that will cease. Is this really being done in X’s best interests or is it another penny-pinching exercise conducted by overpaid, arrogant authorities whose PR machine sells the uninformed public a different reality to the one parents such as X’s mother have been battered around the head by?

Post-Savile, it would appear police and social services have swapped places. The boys in blue’s politicisation over the past five or six years, underlined by borderline-spoof Twitter accounts from obscure officers declaring their PC credentials in prioritising ‘Hate Crime’ and the rights of minorities, has seen them adopt the right-on tactics once associated with the social worker; at the same time, social services have been transformed into a veritable secret police, granted powers to swoop unchallenged on parents they deem unfit and ill-informed as though overcompensating for the numerous well-publicised failures of social services to prevent actual abuse of children. For most parents in X’s mother’s position, the social services add to the burden the child represents, something that completely contradicts their purpose.

For the last decade, X’s mother has been exposed to a side of the welfare state that mercifully few of us have to contend with, and it has understandably left her so cynical towards the state that she simply doesn’t trust the state to do what’s best for her daughter. Therefore, the only choice she can see is to take X back into her home – narrowing the scope of her day-to-day life yet again as she reverts to the role of carer and gaoler for a child whose brain will remain that of a three-month-old baby, but whose body is physically maturing as normal. Next birthday, X will be eleven. And her mother will be exhausted. Again.

© The Editor

OUT OF SIGHT

Anyone who has seen either the original 1977 BBC version of Alan Clarke’s ‘Scum’ or its even more graphic cinematic interpretation from a couple of years later will certainly be aware of just how brutal a system the old Borstal could be. Yes, the film was a work of fiction, though few doubt it was a pretty accurate dramatisation of conditions in such institutions at the time the initial play was penned by Roy Minton. With the first ‘Play for Today’ incarnation deemed too violent to be transmitted, director Clarke took the same route as Dennis Potter when his own ‘Brimstone and Treacle’ had been banned from BBC screens a year earlier: he restaged it as a movie. By the time it was released the Borstal system was more or less defunct, replaced by detention and youth custody centres. The name Borstal continued to linger as colloquial shorthand for such locations, however.

Since the Criminal Justice Act 1982, the ‘short, sharp shock’ eye-for-an-eye approach to punishing young offenders not yet old enough for proper prison has had to compete with demands for a more humane attitude based around constructive rehabilitation and an increasing awareness of the social environments that have bred criminality. It’s something of a conundrum, balancing the need to punish and make residents aware they’ve done wrong, without resorting to the excessively harsh disciplinary regime of the old Borstal model. If the system tips too far in one direction, exaggerated comparisons of Young Offenders Institutions with luxury hotels are regularly aired in right-wing tabloids as an example that whichever party happens to be running the country is too ‘soft’ on crime.

What does society do with children who don’t adhere to the rules and regulations dictated by that society or simply don’t fit into it? Those who end up being sent to a Young Offenders Institution as a last resort are presupposed to have reached an age where they can distinguish between right and wrong; those suffering from severe mental disabilities are similarly exiled from the frontline of day-to-day living, placed in care units that are both intended to attend to their special needs and to spare society from their uninhibited behaviour. The latter children are deemed to be blameless; they know not what they do. The former were traditionally regarded as wicked, not even able to boast the excuse of lunacy; therefore, they had to have the badness drilled out of them by Borstal.

A greater acknowledgement of the conditions that give rise to criminality amongst the young – social depravation as well as abuse of a physical, sexual, and psychological nature – have permeated thinking when it comes to what to do with such children in the last few decades. Attempting to break the cycle of offending before it becomes a habit is a tough task if the children released back into society then return to the same environments that bred them; moreover, the importance of not modelling the establishments on gaols – and therefore them not merely being ‘prep-school prisons’ – means it’s a difficult path to traverse. There is also the fact that some of the children have committed extremely serious crimes and are unarguably a danger to both the children around them and to the outside world.

Today the High Court ruled that a 16-year-old inmate of Feltham Young Offenders Institution in south-west London had his human rights breached by being kept in solitary confinement for upwards of 22 hours a day. Denied interaction with other residents and the access to education to which he is legally entitled, the boy – who apparently suffers from serious mental health problems – was detained at Feltham last December and is due for release this month; the cause of his detainment has not been revealed. In response to the ruling, the Ministry of Justice has declared that ‘proportionate and justified segregation’ is necessary in some extreme cases, though Feltham itself has been previously criticised for its treatment of residents; HM Inspectorate of Prisons recently claimed 40% of boys were locked in their cells throughout the school day whilst 30% had only a couple of hours a day in which they were let out of them.

Unless one is an ex-inmate, only those who have either family members (or the family members of friends) encased in such institutions can have any inside knowledge of the way in which they operate. They remain something of a secret society within society. If a Young Offenders Institution or a care unit containing mentally-handicapped children is to receive a prearranged visit from inspectors, the elements that cause concern for parents are discreetly swept under the carpet for the duration. It’s not too dissimilar to when my mother was a school dinner-lady; she once told me when inspectors were due the headmaster would ensure the most troublesome pupils were given a day-off in order not to give the inspectors the impression the school was a hotbed of antisocial anarchy. Had the inspectors simply turned up without warning, the airbrushed impression of the school they received would have been replaced by a far truer picture of the establishment.

Having a friend whose mentally-handicapped child is resident in a care unit, I’ve received several stories of the realities of such an institution, ones that rarely (if ever) leak out to the wider world and ones that certainly don’t fit the image anyone without an emotional investment in them might have of how they function. Avoidable accidents are commonplace, usually due to members of staff whose excess pounds prevent them from being as nimble on their feet as they should be when looking after children with an abundance of energy. When food budgets are often spent on meals the said members of staff can enjoy at the expense of the more problematic residents, who may not be willing (or able) to consume them, one has to question who is actually benefitting from the vast amounts of money diverted into these institutions.

Some of the stories that have emerged from the likes of Feltham bear an uncomfortable resemblance to scenes from ‘Scum’, whereas some of the stories I’ve been told of those institutions reserved for the mentally-handicapped often recall the equally nightmarish fictional portrayal of the old asylums in another disturbing play from the turn of the 80s, ‘Walter’. This whole subject is one of the most challenging society has to deal with, and one cannot but sometimes come away from it concluding that society isn’t dealing with it very well at all.

© The Editor

CONSENSUAL HEALING

The profile pictures of columnists in what used to be called the broadsheets are often an accurate pointer to the sanctimonious smugness of the scribe and his or her musings before the reader has even read them. The image of the Grauniad’s socialist-in-residence Owen Jones that appears on the paper’s webpage announcing the sacking of the crafty cockney Eric Bristow from his Sky Sports pundit job matches his pompous declaration that ‘Eric Bristow’s toxic tweets matter. These attitudes silence victims’ – a statement lifted from the piece I couldn’t bring myself to even look at. Like so many in his position who pose as an inquisitor of the consensus, Jones summarily fails to question any of the historical child abuse narrative and accepts it wholly as fact. The irrelevant viewpoint of an ex-darts player is a convenient red herring that gives Jones the green light to release the moral high-horse from his stable instead of addressing the actual issue.

The gruff opinion Eric Bristow tweeted in response to the spate of ex-footballer confessions over the past week or so is precisely what anyone with half-a-brain would expect a man of Bristow’s background and age to tweet; it wasn’t exactly ‘sensitive’, but if I want ‘sensitive’, I put Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ on the turntable, not 2 Live Crew. It is the unvarnished blokeiness of Bristow that has always been at the core of his appeal to those that like him, just as it is with Nigel Farage or Jeremy Clarkson. Maybe he should keep his opinions to his boozing buddies, but isn’t Twitter supposed to be a democratic forum where everybody is entitled to their say, a cyber Speaker’s Corner for the masses? That’s the theory, anyway.

When George Osborne copyrighted the phrase ‘We’re all in this together’ (one he should rightly be tarred with forever), the context in which he intended it to mean anything has been utterly transcended by everything else it can be applied to in this repressive, censorious society populated by timid, obedient schoolchildren masquerading as adults, terrified of being out of step with the rest of the class. Whether online, on campus, in media of both the print and broadcast variety and (especially) in public services, the fear of ostracism and exclusion from the crowd breeds the belief that if we all agree to pre-conditions in how we speak, think and respond then we’ll finally achieve the inclusive Utopia that Coca-Cola once portrayed when it tried to teach the world to sing.

Producing the next generation of consumers that will keep the economy on an even keel is a patriotic duty that opting out of risks vilification from the hypocritical harpies of Mumsnet, whose own concept of unity is rooted in an untruth because no mother dare admit her children have robbed her of her independence and taken away her identity. As someone whose morning routine is soundtracked by Radio 4, this is something I have never heard aired on ‘Woman’s Hour’, and I doubt I ever will. If Eric Bristow can lose his living because he tweeted something ‘offensive’, can you imagine the kind of punishment awaiting a prominent female in the public eye if she admitted she wished she’d never had the children that have become effective parasites draining her of all sense of who she is? Yes, we’re all in this together, none more so than that hotbed of competitive self-deception, motherhood.

Many of you may have read last week’s post, ‘A Social Disservice’, and this is a kind of sequel to that one, even if it might appear I’ve taken a roundabout route to it. But I think so much of the bureaucratic brickwork that the mother of the child I diplomatically referred to as X has come up against in an effort to retrieve a life for herself is mirrored in the wider world. It’s just more pronounced in the arena of social services and the detachment of management level, where patting one’s self on the back and earning Brownie points at dinner parties for proclaiming ‘I work with disabled children’ to an anticipated round of applause is the extent of actual involvement, as far removed from the reality of being cooped-up with a child suffering from extreme autism as WWI generals were from the trenches.

X was collected from four days in the care of the State last Friday and once back in the bosom of the family home reverted to feral type, reminding her mother why she’d deposited her in that care the previous weekend. X’s deterioration over just the last six months has rendered even the limited tricks that could once be used to momentarily occupy her completely redundant. In care, an entire team are employed to reduce X’s appetite for destruction, but the social services expect her mother to do the work of four or five people around the clock, 24/7, subjecting herself to continual assaults of biting, scratching and screaming for all of X’s waking hours. The individual members of staff attending to her in care have been subject to the same treatment, yet have to make excuses for it in order to accentuate the non-existent positivity that their box-ticking training requires.

X’s mother was informed a panel would review her situation at an unspecified future date, a Star Chamber hearing at which she would not be allowed to present her case nor provide the video evidence of X’s behaviour. Instead, an inexperienced social worker who has never even met X in the flesh would be there on her behalf, to submit a report compiled from an interview with X’s mother that (unsurprisingly) wouldn’t suggest any members of that panel take X into their homes for 24 hours to see for themselves precisely what X’s mother has to deal with. This virtual Soviet trial would then decide the future of someone not entitled to attend, with the umpteenth social worker to have dealt with X’s case during her short life being the mother’s proxy representative. This is the kind of farce that forces parents such as X’s mother into taking dramatic action.

The authorities are not accustomed to parents challenging their authority and questioning their wisdom because the parents are usually so mentally and physically browbeaten by the experience of looking after their problem children that they have no energy to fight back. X’s mother knows if she doesn’t take this stand then her life is effectively over. On Sunday, she rang the same emergency number she’d rung the previous weekend and after the phone was answered by a human being, the moment she explained the situation she was immediately transferred to an answer-machine. So staggeringly ineffective are the social services, someone in a similar position even advised X’s mother to dial 999 instead. She didn’t, but she dispatched an email to all parties with a vested interest in her continuing to endure a nightmarish excuse for a life and made it clear she wouldn’t be collecting X from school again on Monday. She stuck to her word and refuses to collect her at the end of the week.

The pressures on X’s mother following her actions, not only from the facsimile togetherness of the mother’s union, but from a system that expects her to fulfil a duty no sane person could stomach for as long as she already has before heading for the nearest bridge, is a consequence of a mindset that demands subservience to a consensus nobody signed-up for. And yet the consensus is there – in the social services, the DWP, the NHS, the police force, the media, online, f***ing everywhere. Oppose it at one’s peril, but for God’s sake oppose it. If you don’t, we’re finished; and the future will be a boot stamping on a human face, forever – although O’Brien neglected to mention it will be a smiley one. After all, we wouldn’t want to frighten the children.

© The Editor

A SOCIAL DISSERVICE

Keeping wild animals as pets is never advisable, though it has been a regular affectation of the wealthy and eccentric; Dickens had a pet raven, Byron had a pet fox, Josephine Baker had a pet leopard, and there was the famous story of Christian, the lion cub purchased from Harrods (!) in the late 1960s by John Rendall and Anthony Burke, who kept the big cat at their home in London for more than a year until the difficulties of the arrangement became insurmountable. Christian was eventually reintroduced to the wild by George and Joy Adamson, the right environment for a creature unsuited to the enclosed spaces of the urban jungle. The feral characteristics of a wild animal whose natural instincts are in conflict with those of their human owners and the living conditions humans favour make such unnatural captivity ill-advised.

Children are supposed to be the antithesis of wild animals in the home, though the place of the most badly-behaved in it is sometimes indistinguishable from wild animals; children are essentially indulged pets for the first few years of their existence – at least until they start school. Many children are now able to get away with a good deal more than their parents could when they were the same age, for the unfashionable implementation of discipline and respect as administered during the childhoods of most reading this post has diminished with each successive generation. The deification of children by the media and its celebrity whores has elevated the mother figure back up to the level of the medieval Virgin Mary and the children themselves to the saintly cherub embodied by Baby Jesus. Any contradiction to the consensus condemns mothers who can’t keep up with the standards set by the Breastapo, whilst the child itself can rule the roost in open denial of its angelic status.

But what if the child is ten-years-old with the mental age of a nine-month-old baby? We all know how useless and essentially boring babies are – wailing, nappy-filling tyrants who can’t even stand on their own two feet – yet imagine what they could do with their limited intelligence were we to transplant their underdeveloped brains into the body of a fully-grown child. Every random thought that entered their head when confronted by the unfamiliar and the new would be something they could physically react to rather than stare and cry at. Chaos would ensue. And that’s precisely what happens with the mercifully-rare extreme autism some unfortunate children are afflicted by at birth – the ten-year-old with the nine-month-old mental age mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. This particular child exists and we shall call her X.

X has profound learning difficulties that are incurable. She has no social skills and her ability to interact with others is severely limited. Her incompatibility with other children means her relationship with her siblings (from whom she is segregated) is minimal. She will never be able to lead a normal life. She cannot speak and can only express herself verbally through the most basic vocal noises. If the day’s routine veers from the pattern X dictates, usually by accident than design, an incendiary tantrum erupts. At such moments, X lashes out at herself and her mother with a fearsome strength that will increase as she grows – biting, scratching, punching and kicking. It is extremely difficult to reason with X or to explain a situation to her. She lacks the mental capacity to process such information and cannot understand why her mother won’t simply drive her around in the car, going nowhere for hours on end.

X puts many non-foodstuffs into her mouth, and is doubly incontinent. She views bodily waste as no different from any other substance. Her sleep does not adhere to any regular pattern. She can wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning and expect the day to progress as though it were 8 or 9. X has to be watched every moment of her waking day, placing an exhaustive burden upon her mother; her behaviour and the need to monitor her at all times makes a normal life for her single parent mother impossible and X’s mother has no extended family to call on for support.

Even a relaxing necessity such as eating a meal, watching TV or reading a book uninterrupted, something the rest of us take for granted, is impossible to undertake in X’s presence. X attends a special needs school during term time, with her needs attended to by a team. When the holidays come, however, X’s mother copes alone with occasional support staff. Bereft of her term team, school holidays are a challenge for X and her mother. Changes to X’s routine induce anxiety and upset, increasing incidents of both self-harm and harm inflicted upon those around her. X’s oblivious antisocial behaviour limits the time she can spend outdoors and amongst the public, narrowing her world considerably. Her quality of life is as poor as any able-bodied person could possibly experience.

But, of course, we have our wonderful Welfare State and its social service offshoot to aid and assist mothers of children such as X, don’t we? That unimpeachable gift to the nation that only wicked Tories and right-wing advocates of private healthcare dare to criticise is there to help, no? Think again. Oh, if your idea of a way of helping the mothers of children like X is to throw money at them because it’s cheaper to do that than to entrust the lifetime care of X to the State, fair enough. Overburdened by unnecessary referrals in the fallout from both Savile and Baby P, run along the lines of box-ticking bureaucracy with timid, naive staff trained in rigidly upbeat false positivity that negates common-sense realism, and weighed down by the layers of management that provide its beneficiaries with a comfortable career of paid holiday, pension-guaranteed detachment from the frontline parental war zone, the whole rotten system is the Circumlocution Office turned up to eleven.

This weekend, confronted by a relentless physical assault from a child whose rage is vocally manifested as the kind of screaming that makes a car alarm sound like Beethoven’s Ninth, the sleep-deprived, battered and bruised mother of X removed her earplugs and called the social services to take the wild animal masquerading as her daughter away into permanent care. Nobody rings such a number unless they have reached absolute breaking point, yet the response of the social services confronted by their worst nightmare was to try to dissuade X’s mother; when that failed, she then received a lecture in which the threat of ‘child abandonment’ accusations was implicit. Let the ivory tower-dwelling management Olympians take X into their home for 48 hours and see how they cope. It won’t happen. X’s mother has been astute enough to video X’s rages as evidence, and glass houses are susceptible to stones, after all.

I have been a long-distance recipient of X’s worsening behaviour over the last twelve months, and the fact that she has to sleep within an effective cage in order to prevent her from running away emphasises how unhappy she is with her living arrangements. The physically and mentally drained mother of X has undertaken her maternal duties above and beyond the call of duty, living a life few could possibly picture unless in the same situation. She has done everything humanly possible to appease X’s unimaginable condition, but she has finally arrived at the point of no return. If the social services cannot be there for children such as X, what is the bloody point? And, better still, how the hell can we retain outdated pride in it? If X was an adult in a relationship and had treated her spouse as X had treated her mother, the police would have been involved and there would no doubt have been a high-profile court-case. But a child? No, children don’t do that. They’re angels. And their mothers fail the audition at their peril.

© The Editor