People outside the UK may not have seen the unfolding stories about the Jersey Hammer Children’s Home of Horror. You probably don’t want to know about it, if you are a sentient being, but I’m going to bring it to your attention anyway.

Over decades, any number of staff committed horrific abuse of children they were supposed to be caring for. At least one child’s body has been found. Who can even guess how many more supposed “runaways’ ” bodies will turn up.

Every day, a more disturbing detail is released. The dungeons in which the kids were kept for really heavy abuse are being unbricked. Repellent items, such as shackles, that speak volumes by their very nature, have been found in them.

Over the years, many children went to seek help from the police and had all been ignored. One man was interviewed on television sobbing about what had happened to him there decades ago.

There are 40 suspects. 40, ffs.

These &&&&&&s – the English language doesn’t have words strong enough for me to use – got away with it because their victims were disposable. Nobody missed them. They could disappear and no one cared.

They were already damaged kids and everyone finds damaged kids too hard to deal with. The &&&&&s were presumably perceived to be doing a public service, by coralling lots of kids that people were afraid of (in the weird way that kids are now seen by many people as so intrinsically dangerous that it’s acceptable to use subsonic weapons to keep them at bay.)

People who’ve been through the child “care” systems almost always seem to bear horrific mental scars. Luckily (if you can say that) most are just scarred by being dumped in an environment in which the people who look after you are only doing it for the pay. But a disturbingly large proportion are scarred by physical and sexual abuse.

My point here is how do you stop this sort of thing happening? Some lessons that seem blatantly obvious.

(1) Stop putting “care homes” for vulnerable people in the middle of nowhere. The worst events seem to be in institutions that are miles away from the rest of society.

(2) Reward staff who speak against any practices. The newest, most inexperienced member of staff may be the only one with any residual humanity.

(3) No one paid attention to the kids who tried to speak up, in the Jersey case. So, lets start actually listening.

(4) Make the job of looking after kids more attractive – pay, conditions, status. Only recruit people who can convince a good selection of children and child advocates that they are trustworthy. Over a reasonable time. Keep them on probation for a couple of years.

(5) Teach kids that they have rights. Teach them to stand up for themselves and to tell lots of people when they are harmed by anyone. Include self-advocacy in the national curriculum.

Children need anonymous forums where they can tell the truth. I don’t just mean the Internet or phonelines. I mean providing real-life, physically present, advocates for “looked after” children, with no other role but to listen to what they say, find out what they need and take it seriously. Make them available in schools, community centres and, above all, in bloody “care” homes.

Let’s learn to recognise how children express rage and reward them for expressing justified rage in words.

The media keeps stressing that this particular care home was closed 20 years ago, as if the years between the 1940s and mid -1980s were in some long-forgotten medieval era, in which such behaviour was possible. No such luck.

If anything, things are getting progressively worse for kids in the 21st century. As UNESCO observed, British children are the most miserable in Europe. Compared to Dutch kids, who can discuss things with their parents and aren’t pressured at school (but who somehow manage to grow up speaking half a dozen languages and being able to argue rationally…) British kids are miserable.

Just take the standard baseline level of misery of so many children and multiply that by a factor of 100 and you might just approach the misery level of a “looked after” child. I can’t even match this guesstimate with any realistic figure for the extra level of misery that a kid that ends up as prey for these monsters feels.

And yes, I know this is a humourless diatribe. I apologise but have no excuses. If our society can’t even begin to protect its most vulnerable members, we really should just give up all pretence of being human.

What a tosser Peter Hitchens is. I’ve just read his 16th February column in the Mail on Sunday First, he spits bile at Shami Chakrabati, Dwain Chambers and Rowan Williams. (About Rowan Williams – he says

“while the chief of the Church of England speaks up for Muslims, it is increasingly difficult for English Christians to follow their consciences in face of politically correct laws undermining marriage and punishing those who express doubts about homosexuality. Who will speak for them? “)

(Splutter. Precisely which “politically correct laws undermining marriage” are these, then? What punishments are inflicted on “those who express doubts on homosexuality”? You’ve guessed it. They don’t exist. He made them up. Even if these things weren’t invented out of whole cloth, what on earth would stop Christians “following their consciences”, if that feat – so difficult to achieve for most of us, whatever our beliefs or lack thereof – can be so easily achieved by marrying and not being gay? So, what on earth is he demanding of the Archbishop of Canterbury?)

But the real gem is the bit where he tries to make readers draw a subliminal connection between Barrack Obama and the Third Reich. (Yes, you read that correctly. He really does.).

I’ve recently read blogs in which Barrack Obama is called a communist. The justification for this assertion is, at one and the same time, so offensive and so ludicrously argued, that – as usual given the naivety that has followed me all my life – I assumed it’s a spoof. No, it isn’t.

Similarly I thought that his opponents presenting Obama, to a pretty well Islamophobic USA, as “really” a muslim, because his surname rhymed with Osama, was a childish joke. However, pictures of Obama in traditional dresson a visit to Kenya, are now used as more “evidence” that he’s a secret Muslim.

All this starts to strain even my determined optimism about human intelligence. There’s a whole edifice being built that is intended to work at a visual and instinctive level for political ends.

Politics is dirty. New-model politics seems to be developing a whole new face of “dirty” in the Information Age. Subliminal smears. Subliminal smears that play on people’s terrors by manipulating imagery and juxtapositions of unrelated items, to build up unexamined mental pictures.

Hmm, not unlike the (more amateurish) propaganda that was used to support the European dictatorships, in the mid-20th century. But, ironically and, almost incredibly, although Peter Hitchens’ column is presenting a subliminally racist worldview (out of 4 targets of his ire, only one is “white” and he doesn’t get a picture. Equal opportunities invective, my bum), he has decided to use that exact “mid-20th century dictatorships” imagery to portray Obama as a Nazi. I kid you not.

I quote from the demented one himself:

Obama worship has echoes of the Third Reich

This Barack Obama frenzy is getting out of hand. A Left-wing friend has emailed me a YouTube Obama propaganda video that reminds him – in technique – of Leni Riefenstahl’s Hitler-worshipping film Triumph Of The Will.
I see what he means. To an insistent beat, impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women endlessly repeat the slogan “Yes, we can”, in a disturbingly mindless way.
The thing contains no thought, no argument – just Obama worship.
Compared with this cult-like stuff, Hillary Clinton’s clumping old-fashioned Leftism is almost reassuring.

Hmm. Where to begin? It’s like a semiotic treasure trove. I’ll stick with the glaringly obvious.

An “insistent beat” (music, I think that means), “impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women “? You mean, like in almost all adverts? For everything from Coca-Cola to CPUs?

No, he doesn’t mean that. He means like Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films. For Hitler… Well, I’ve not seen Triumph of the Will but her Olympia had ranks of impossibly beautiful people, beautifully shot. That was indeed a powerful aesthetic, in the service of a vile cause. However, it’s not normally the first image that springs to my mind when I see beautiful people in adverts. But then, I don’t write for the Mail – still notorious for its admiration of home-grown UK fascists in the 1930s, and with an anti-Nazi record that even its admirers – if they exist – could hardly see as stellar.

By definition, the one thing that wouldn’t have appeared in a Nazi propaganda film was “impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women “… Even Mail readers can’t be so dumb that they don’t know that the defining characteristic of the Third reich was the ideology of “race”, used to gather support for a power-hungry group by playing on people’s prejudices.
So what’s your point then, Peter Hitchens? Despite its being labouring the obvious, I’m still going to spell it out. It is a deliberate attempt to create subliminal associations in the (laughingly named) “mind” of the average Mail reader.

Hitchens piles up negative verbal images of non-white people, throws in a couple of pictures, just in case the subliminal effect isn’t working properly and the Mail readers are too dumb to make the negative associations on the text alone. Shami Chakrabati’s valid concern that directing uncomfortable sound devices at children contravenes human rights is presented as “whining”.

When Archbishop of Canterbury is presented as being pro-Muslim, pro-gay and anti-marriage, I begin to suspect that Hitchens has a tick-box of Mail reader triggers and he’s going to make sure that every possible Mail hate-figure (gays, Islam, black people, civil libertarians, rowdy youth, socialists) gets a name check.

Then wham, after the Mail reader’s mental hornet’s nest of fear and rage has been suitably stirred up, Barrack Obama’s name gets dropped into the mix.

You are wasted in the UK, Hitchens. Using all the dirty tricks in the propagandist’s Big Book of Dirty Tricks. But, even Mail readers don’t have a vote in the US elections. You Yanks really don’t appreciate how lucky you are, sometimes.

Releasing contentious information on Friday afternoon used to be UK government’s way of minimising its impact. A Sunday release seems to be taking the practice of making news items insignificant to a whole new level. How keen must these Treasury workers be, if they are working on a Sunday?

The BBC has just reported that the failed Northern Rock Building Society is to be nationalised. After spending a fortune on it, the UK government was not best pleased that the Office of National Statistics (ONS) decided to class Northern Rock as part of the public sector. Hence its debts added close to £100bn to the National Debt.

(Fascinating sub-plot. ONS employees, facing their jobs disappearing if they won’t move to Wales and with a new obligation to prove scientific independence, just decided to tell the truth. Woot.)

….as the Office for National Statistics has made clear by insisting that its liabilities, to the tune of £90bn, should be classified as government borrowing (from the Observer, 10 Feb, 2008.

As a side-effect, a harsh spotlight fell on the plans to plug the holes in pass this billion-leaking cash sieve and pass it on to Virgin so they could make profits.

By the way, the UK’s population is round about 61 million. So, thats well over a thousand pounds for every person in the UK. If we just count the working population, this is about 29 million. If I haven’t got the wrong number of zeroes here, I make that £3,103 for every working person in the UK. That’s a year’s tax for the huge numbers of low-paid workers who make up the bulk of the population. Don’t make me look up how many countries in the world there are where the average annual income is much less than that. (That’s what Wikipedia is for)

The British public seems to love Richard Branson, seeing this ex-Etonian as a true man of the people, because he wears loud sweaters and gets in hot-air balloons. Even so, there is a limit even to the British people’s love of ballooning billionaires. Hence there is some opposition to shoring up a company for his benefit at quite this level.

Or maybe Branson isn’t prepared to take any risk at all with Northern Rock and needs the government to make Northern Rock profitable before Virgin get their hands on it.

From yesterday;s Guardian:

Taking the bank into public ownership – which could mean sacking thousands of staff and making taxpayers in effect bear the risk of ‘owning’ £100bn in mortgages – would trigger a storm of protest…..

I can see that letting a bank go bankrupt would be pretty economically devastating and the government had little choice but to rescue it. Even so, how come no one has been arrested? And what about the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be there precisely to make sure that people like me – i.e with no capital and a poor track record for looking after even their own money – don’t suddenly find themselves looking after billions of pounds of other people’s money?

And assuming, that the government now has to do all the dirty work to bring the bank back to life, why on earth must they hand it back to the private sector as soon as it ever becomes profitable again?

(Sorry if you thought this was going to be about the beautiful wrestler-turned actor in rubbishy movies, the Rock. You probably noticed by now that it isn’t.)

Today’s drugs panic relates to Dwain Chambers, who has once again showed he can run 60m faster than anyone else in Britain, after a two-year ban for use of a banned substance.

The big names in British athletics (yes, that is a very llocalised meaning of the words “big names”) are engaged in an unseemly scramble to distance themselves from him. Plus today’s BBC website says that a promotion group won’t have him at events.

How fair is this? His real crime seems to have been to have said that it was impossible to win the Olympics without some chemical assistance.

He was banned for two years. This time is over. It’s not as if athletes have twenty year careers, so that they can just be out of their sport for a few years and lose no ground.

In my limited understanding of the term, he was never “cheating” anyway. He outran everyone who he raced against. “Cheating” would involve tripping up his rivals or bribing the timekeeper.

It’s tough to distinguish between a fair and an unfair advantage. I can guarantee that no amount of chemical enhancement would put me in the Olympic class for swimming. (For a start, I can’t really swim.) Why are some things that give an athlete sporting advantages “cheating” while other things aren’t? Good genetics for running – unfair, but we don’t all have them. Aerodynamically enhanced sportswear? Expert coaching? Good diet? These all provide sporting advantages that aren’t equally available to everyone.

For most sports, access to the opportunity to do them at all rests on having an unfair advantage: your own eventing horse, a tennis racket, snow, an athletics club that you can afford to go to, an Olympic-size pool, time to train, a national commitment to providing facilities and so on.

So, clearly, the whole issue rests on where you draw the line. The athletics associations drew their line to exclude whatever pharmaceutical letter combination Dwain Chambers was caught taking. Fair enough. He was competing under their rules. They applied a penalty. Also fair enough. He accepted the penalty and kept to the testing rules while he was banned from competing.

So why is the man now being blamed for everything from being a bad influence on future sportspeople to keeping a good non-cheat out of the England squad by selfishly winning enough races to get into it? (Arguments on BBC Breakfast.)

One commentator claimed that he had modified his physique by taking the banned substance 3 years ago, so would have inherent unfair advantages for the rest of his career. I don’t know what magical substance Dwain is supposed to have taken, but, if such a product exists, surely doctors all over the world would be clamouring to get it it to treat the physically weak.

The BBC says that the Gitmo trials will be fair.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has promised a fair trial for Guantanamo prisoners accused of organising the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Firstly, these are military tribunals, not courts, but they intend to seek the death penalty. Does that sound like a convincingly fair trial to anyone outside the Bush administration?

Surely, by definition, you can’t have a fair trial where the evidence is extracted under torture.

If the investigators were so inept that they had to keep people in isolation for years, interrupted by periods of regularly overtly torturing them, to make a case, I suspect they may not have the strongest case in the world.

This is clearly the perspective of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“Possibly putting someone to death based on evidence obtained through water-boarding, or after prolonged periods of sleep deprivation while being forced into painful stress positions, is not the answer,” said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch. (from the BBC website)

Is the Bush administration completely stupid?

Is there any way on earth that this show trial will diminish the threat of terrorism, given that noone outside of the US and few people inside must see this as any form of due process?

Even the British royal family doesn’t believe what the US says about the war in Iraq, ffs. Much as it grieves me to quote a Royal in an approving manner,
Prince Andrew got it pretty well spot on last week, although he was seriously slated in the media, for daring to express a political opinion.

(Ironically, Princess Diana is still worshipped by the media, precisely for daring to express herself. I guess that is more to do with the touchy-feely “poor sensitive me” stuff that she came out with. In the present day, you are much more respected if you discuss your bulimia on Oprah than if you give any serious thought to the world…)

Andrew said there were

“occasions when people in the UK would wish that those in responsible positions in the US might listen and learn from our experiences”.

Basically, the prince, himself a decorated Falklands war veteran, was implying that the colonial mistakes of the British could prove instructive to the USA. Specifically, not acting in ways that spur lifelong hatred and will to fight, I assume.

He also said, although more politely, that we in the UK don’t believe what we hear from Washington, post-Iraq:

the Iraq war had induced a “healthy scepticism” towards America.(from trhe Guardian, 5 Feb 2008)

I grant that our own government seems hellbent on not learning any lessons from history, so it’s not as if our hereditary figureheads have any influence here, either. But, surely years of holding on to their land and fending over republican revolutions have taught them a thing or two about the virtues of flexibility and of not making unnecessary enemies.