Not Fit For Purpose?

‘Investigators found the council had a “deep-rooted” culture of cover-ups and silencing whistleblowers’

– Louise Casey, the director-general for troubled families

The bad news is that Rotherham Council, having been made subject to several reports, is no longer considered fit for purpose. The good news is that Eric Pickles has declared that there will be elections in 2016….so the town can have a fresh start. That’s right, after sixteen years of ignored child abuse and neglected children, the town gets to discard those council members responsible and start again.

In effect, Mr Pickles makes it sound as if the town is being given a reboot with all the glitches and redundant packages erased. Which sounds great if you discount all the victims, who will be in their twenties and thirties by now, and may possibly be raising their own children. Damaged children who never got the protection, care, or emotional support they should have, struggling to raise their own children successfully.We don’t do that to physically disabled adults, if they have children they at least get a helper funded by the council to enable them to cope with life, and their child or children on a weekly basis.

Adults emotionally disabled, by a council who chose to ignore their sexual exploitation get zilch. Whilst they were children concerns about them were dealt with by ‘professionals’ who appeared to show all the emotional empathy of an Auschwitz prison guard observing his charges enter the gas chamber.The Home Secretary, Theresa May, blamed the failure of the authorities in Rotherham on “institutionalised political correctness“. 

But many of the men involved in sexually abusing and exploiting these girls were well known to the police. A local Rotherham youth group got just that suspicious and reported their suspicions to the police. Free of charge the police were given information which they could then have investigated but they chose not to. How much safer the streets of Rotherham would have been if the police had collaborated with social services, in tackling what had become a corrosive problem, within the community they had been paid to serve.

Never mind Mr Pickles has effectively said, the old cabinet has resigned, and the new cabinet which the public will elect will be so much better. Inspite of austerity and the adverse impact that has had on social services and policing we are supposed to believe that. Think about it, the Jimmy Saville debacle, the revelations about Elm Guest House and Dolphin Square. The exposure of Cyril Smith, Dave Lee Travis, Max Clifford and Peter Hame, the CSA Inquiry and now this. The pattern overall is the same, trusted, ostensibly respectable pillars of the community exploiting and destroying the most vulnerable and for the most part getting away with it. And in all of these cases the powers that be letting them get away with it. Am I the only lowly member of the general public to wonder precisely who the great and the good are standing up to be counted for, because it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s us.

There’s respect & then there’s RESPECT

‘We have a relationship with Saudi Arabia, partly over things like trying to achieve peace in the Middle East, but crucially over fighting terrorism … I can tell you one time since I’ve been prime minister a piece of information that we have been given by that country has saved potentially hundreds of lives here in Britain….’

David Cameron (The Much Revered)

This said by a Prime Minister who has MI5, MI6 and GCHQ at his command, not to mention the British police force. Think of it, all those experts in terrorism, all those well-trained police officers, and yet the safety of our great nation was wholly dependent on a few wisps of information volunteered by a Middle Eastern despot, amazing! Actually, dare I utter the phrase Middle Eastern despot? Raif Badawi was imprisoned for doing alot less.

Lest we forget-now this particular Middle Eastern despot has died-this is the King Abdullah whose family-government? Have provided funding to terrorist groups like Al-Qaedah ( infamous for blowing up the Twin Towers, remember them?), the Taliban (the reason we wound up in Afghanistan), and indirectly ISIS. Thanking such a  man and his family, is akin to lavishing praise on a Mafia boss who forewarns you of one shooting, even though you are aware that he has in his time arranged dozens of killings. It just ain’t right, but this is just me, a grass roots human being talking. Take a good look at what some of the great and good have had to say,

‘I knew him well and admired him greatly. Despite the turmoil of events in the region around him, he remained a stable and sound ally, was a patient and skilful moderniser of his country leading it step by step into the future.’

-Tony Blair (GQ Philanthropist of the Year)

‘[He was] a strong advocate of women’

-Christine Lagarde (Head of the IMF)

‘He was so proud of the Kingdom’s journey, a brave partner in fighting violent extremism who proved just as important as a proponent of peace.’

-John Kerry (U.S Secretary of State)

Reading all those complimentary quotes made me feel as if I were a sane person temporarily inhabiting a none too sane universe, that is until I came across this little gem,

‘Iran’s Guardian Council Chairman, on Friday, Jannati congratulated Muslims over the death of Saudi king Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz.“We should express condolences to the Israelis and Americans and congratulation to Muslims,” Jannati said during his Friday sermon in Tehran, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.’

The ‘Twin Towers’ death toll? 2,996 people, including the 19 hijackers and 2,977 victims. The victims included 246 on the four planes -from which there were no survivors, 2,606 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon. The death toll in Iraq? Over the past six months (under ISIS) well over 5,000 civilians (unarmed, but lets not go there). I have to say that when it comes to offering condolences, given these figures I’m on the side of Jannati. Now, here is a picture of our glorious British flag flying over Whitehall, at half mast for King Abdullah.

Which just goes to show that if you’re wealthy and great, you don’t have to be good.

There Goes That Same Old Tired Refrain…

‘Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, will go on trial in Lille on Monday accused of pimping, in a case that threatens to expose the double life of the politician once tipped to be the next president of France.

The court is expected to hear how, while in Washington holding the most senior economic job in the world, Strauss-Kahn had group sex with prostitutes brought to him in Europe and the US, organised by French businessmen friends who wanted to curry favour with the man they thought would one day lead the country.’

– The Guardian (2 February 2015)

Yes folks (disinterested yawn), the former chief honcho of the Inter-Monetary Fund, is to be put on trial for allegedly being a pimp. Please remember that I’ve said ‘allegedly’ for one could hardly describe his former day job as a high grade variant of ‘pimping’. Not unless you examine the IMF  & its Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) through the lens of some of its ‘prone’ victims. In Zambia, the imposition of SAPs lead to a significant drop in girls’ enrolment in schools and a spike in “survival or subsistence sex” as a way for young women to continue their educations, one wonders if perhaps Mr Strauss-Kahn was dropped off there briefly in 2011,on his way to the Sofitel Hotel in New York. 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) IMF loans paved the way for the privatization of the country’s mines by transnational corporations and local elites, which forcibly displaced thousands of Congolese people in a context where women and girls experience obscenely high levels of sexual slavery and rape in the eastern provinces.This would hardly have been considered a significant concern to a man who, we are told, was known by his own political ‘gang’ (the Socialist Party) to be a notable womaniser, fond of ‘imposing’ his attentions on younger, less powerful, less influential women.

One might even have defined these women as a little emotionally high strung, if not unhinged (should the occasion have called for it). Yes, one might even have inferred that such women, desperate in the extreme, might be prone to lying and thus require a little personal ‘Structural Adjustment Policy’ that might induce them to remain silent (see Nafissatou Diallo, former New York hotel maid for further details). No matter, for when it comes to this former IMF head the world has grown wiser. Here now stands a man on trial for ‘aggravated pimping’ in Brussels, Paris & Washington, in France.

As for the IMF itself, with the electoral victory of Syriza, Greece’s winning smile and supine subservience have all but evaporated. Greece’s new government have politely declined to renegotiate with the EU-IMF ‘troika’. They have refused to continue to follow policies that enabled the EU-IMF to cripple them as a nation, they want their decency and dignity back from an organisation whose moral compass is such, that they once recruited a prolific, forceful, womaniser, to be their head.

As was the case with Jimmy Saville, Peter Hame, Cyril Smith, and countless other profligate ‘degenerates’ we are forced to repeat the same old, tired old, done to death refrain. Associates knew about their proclivities, associates who considered themselves to be honourable men, why therefore were these abusers of the vulnerable not prosecuted sooner if at all?