Broadmoor: time it closed!

Broadmoor is the Gothic madhouse on the hill, a place that lurks in the imagination of the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, and just the its original name conjures up a Roger Corman b-movie chiller, Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. It was built by Joshua Jebb in 1863, located in Crowthorne. Jebb also designed Pentonville……  

 And the stereotype of Broadmoor still looms today.

 I used to visit Broadmoor regularly during the mid-late 1990s, I would get the train from Waterloo, then taxi to Broadmoor. Once there, you are searched and then escorted to either the visiting room or the ward. I used to visit women there as a volunteer for the organisation WISH (Women in Special Hospitals), I had visited women at Rampton (I was invited by their women’s group) and Ashworth. Most, I think all now, of the women have been moved out of Broadmoor (one of the campaigning demands of WISH) and generally the special hospital regime was always geared towards men overshadowing the needs of women. It was estimated that 95% of the women in the Specials had experienced rape and sexual abuse sometime in their lives, that in itself represents a high level of vulnerability and powerlessness. Similar to the prison system these places act like social dustbins for the traumatised and the distressed.

My first experience of being led through the grounds I was struck on how vast the place looked, modern architecture fused with neo-Gothic, the imposing building reminded me constantly of Goffman’s Asylums, institutionalised misery. We always get sensationalism when it comes to Broadmoor, the high-profile cases yet many people are incarcerated for low-level crimes or who have not committed any index offence, they remain in the background and lets be honest….they don’t sell news!

 Channel 4 news did an expose on Broadmoor last night and the findings didn’t surprise me. 

Words can’t describe the experiences many women encountered as residents at Broadmoor, they still chill me. The place symbolised oppression. Abuse, neglect and sexual/physical violence went unchallenged and unheard. Silenced. Powerlessness and vulnerability increased. Cover-up after cover-up. More pain more trauma. No justice. Meeting many of these women, I was confronted by the similarities I had with them, things we had in common, and the recognition of how easy it is to end up in a hell hole like Broadmoor, even as an atheist I was reminded always of the phrase, there but for the grace of God (go I).

The place continually unnerved me, I was pleased that women felt they could trust me but at the same time I was powerless to act as many felt too scared for their complaints to become formal. One woman I visited regularly, and got to know very well, committed suicide as she concluded that she would never ever get out of Broadmoor, she would never be free, only in death. I still have the sculpture she made me on my book shelf. I wonder sometimes about what type of life she would have had had she been given the support and help she desperately needed. She was failed by an uncaring brutal system along with countless other people.

 I stopped visiting the Specials’ and dropped out for a short time in the mental health user movement as I couldn’t handle the bleakness and how soul destroying it was, the feeling of powerlessness and silence crept further into my life and impinged on my own mental wellbeing, I felt angry 24/7 but trapped by it. I think if this was affecting me now I would deal with it very differently.

I felt constantly crap for letting these women down, I found it hard to cope. I did believe I was looking into the human abyss known as the Special Hospital regime. Every time I left Broadmoor I had the urge to scrub myself clean of the institutionalisation that lingered on me. The squalid system that treats people in such a degrading, abusive and inhuman way yet time and time again it goes unheard and hidden. People didn’t seem matter; they were treated like they were nothing, invisible. And what clouds the issue is the sensationalism and hype that goes with the Specials. The right-wing populism that plays to the myth of these places.

The Fallon enquiry recommended that the Specials should close (though he knew the government wouldn’t accept that so listed further recommendations) and that still stands. Broadmoor, Ashworth and Rampton are symbolic of a bygone archaic Victorian age, they are an anachronism entrenched in the 19^th century which has no place in 2009.

Time to close these high secure hellish nightmares!

Vestas occupation: riot cops strike break (what a surprise!)

From Save Vestas blog:

Workers staging a sit-in at the soon-to-close Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight are being starved out by police.

The police, many inside the factory and dressed in riot gear, have denied food to the workers who took over the factory offices last night, to protest the closure of their factory. The police, operating with highly questionable legal authority, have surrounded the offices, preventing supporters from joining the sit-in, and preventing food from being brought to the protestors.

Around 20 workers at the Vestas Plant in Newport, on the Isle of Wight, occupied the top floor of offices in their factory to protest against its closure which will result in over 500 job losses.

Acting without an injunction, on private property, the police have repeatedly tried to break into the office where the protesting workers have barricaded themselves, and have threatened the workers with arrest for aggravated trespass, despite the fact that no damage has been done to the property where the protest is taking place. Police have also forcibly removed people from private property, another action that is of very questionable legality in the absence of a formal injunction.

The office involved in the latter action was number 3606. The officer who appears to be in charge is 3115.

This heavy handed response is the latest in a long line of over-reactions to protest by various UK police forces.

John McDonnell on Channel 4 news

John McDonnell on Channel 4 news on the stark inequalities in this society. Very good he was as well especially on the issue of whether Brown is the best PM/Chancellor regarding redistribution of wealth. Er, no…. is the answer…

It is the first report of the news (around 4 mins) and John is interviewed in the studio by Jon Snow.

Earnings divide

So the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has been spending £1m on making staff redundant and then employing them again as consultants. Nice work if you can get it!

More than £11m was paid out in redundancy to staff who did not want to move from the old quangos to the new. But in the run up to October 2007, when the new commission was due to start operations, it was short of 140 staff and 15 out of 25 directors.

Seven staff from the old Commission for Racial Equality, which Trevor Phillips headed in 2003-06, were hired as consultants, despite having just accepted large redundancy cheques. Yesterday’s report said there was no evidence there was even a gap between when they left one job and moved into another, but they were not asked to pay back their severance money.

But this isn’t the only quango on the gravy train in comparison to average paid to the lowest paid worker.

Labour Peer Lord Gavron stated  this year when introducing a debate on pay in public companies: When 12 years ago, I conceived the idea of publicising the ratio between the highest and lowest remuneration in our public companies, a typical ratio in many companies would have been around 30. This meant that for example, if the lowest paid averaged £10,000 per annum, the highest paid were getting around £30,000. Perhaps naively, I thought 12 years ago that the gap was rather large. Today we find instances where the ratio is 300.

In salary terms this means, lowest paid worker on £20,000 while highest paid around £6m! Gavron also argues that the ratio, if it continues to develop in a linear fashion, could be 1,000 or maybe more.

Furthermore the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) show that between 2007 and 2008 the weekly earnings for full-time employees of the bottom decile grew by 3.5% compared with growth of 4.4%  for the top decile. Incidentally, the gender pay gap has increased to 12.8 per cent, up from 12.5% in 2007 (it’s not an equal opportunities credit crunch!).

And obviously the further you go up the greasy pole the ever widening of the gap between rich and poor, per annum. Adam Crozier (Chief Executive of Royal Mail) earns a cool £3m (an increase of 1,222.3% since 1999), Mark Thompson (BBC Director-General) £816,000 (increase of 366.5% since 1999), Mervyn King (Governor of the Bank of England) earns £289,551 (an increase of 22.5% since 1999)… Trevor Phillips, Chair of  EHRC, earns a mere £110,000 in comparison.

None of this top drawer pay seems to come with any form of public accountability. What impact are these bosses actually having? Do they treat their workforce fairly? Do they develop their organisations properly? Perhaps they do but we just cannot tell.

The above are only a taster of top ranking bosses’ earnings in the quangos and public companies but they show that our “betters” continue to walk off with our money with pretty well nothing to stop them. You can think on all these figures next time you hear right wing pundits complaining of greedy public sector workers.

What are they really worth? At a guess £64.30 each week.

 See Labour Research July 2009 (sub only unfortunately)

Jean Charles de Menezes: unveiling of mosaic tomorrow

Received this via FaceBook

Join us at Stockwell Tube tomorrow morning at 9:45am to mark the 4th ANNIVERSARY OF THE SHOOTING OF JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES

AT 10AM THE FAMILY OF JEAN CHARLES WILL UNVEIL A BEAUTIFUL NEW MEMORIAL MOSAIC that it hopes can form a permanent memorial outside Stockwell Tube.

The family will be launching their petition entitled ‘Never Forget’ calling on the Mayor of London and Transport for London to allow the mosaic to remain outside Stockwell Tube.

The family needs your support to make this a reality by signing the petition.

Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on 22nd July 2005 at Stockwell tube station during a pre-planned police anti-terror operation. Four years on from his brutal killing no-one has been held accountable for his death.

The family will be unveiling a beautiful mosaic memorial of Jean Charles which they have helped make and have requested be allowed to remain as the permanent memorial to him outside Stockwell Station. The Mosaic would replace the current memorial which has been at Stockwell Tube for the last four years and has been carefully looked after by the family and supporters.

We hope you can join us for a short while tomorrow morning to commemorate Jean’s death and support the mosaic.

Summer reading

Unfortunately, I have a tendency to start reading a number of books at the same time which can lead to overloading the brain cells, instead of reading one at a time I start a couple at the same time and end up leaving them half read…well usually…. I found my old copy of Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, which I started reading circa 1989… and the bookmark is still there at the page I left it at!

Have been trying to concentrate my reading on women and photography (mainly at the moment, Jo Spence) but end up being distracted by other things. Or I end up being engrossed by some magazine usually Vanity Fair or Closer (ok, I am addicted to women’s magazine, any of them, I read them… they are like a literary sugar rush… Can’t. Do. Without. Tried cold turkey but not very strong willed, tis true, I have failed….) And today is Tuesday…

Well….anyways…. have ordered Neal Lawson’s book All Consuming, been reviewed here. Other books that I have been perusing which give food for thought include David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, along with Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s thought-provoking The Spirit Level.

Once I have gathered my thoughts I will write a more in depth post about these books.

Miss England final

Well done to the protesters demonstrating outside the Miss England final. See Clare’s blog for a report and pix.

Utterly disgraceful that Clare and other women involved in the protest were subjected to ‘stop and search’ powers by the cops.

I was chatting to one of the women at the protest outside the GLA yesterday and she was telling me about the beauty pageants taking place in colleges, culminating in the hideous Miss Student UK (the strapline: ‘more than just a pretty face’!!…). These competitions certainly didn’t take place at the time I was at University (before I dropped out) in the early 90s. Nor in the 1980s. It kinda shows how far we are slipping back politically when it comes to women’s liberation and equality.

And now these pageants that pit woman against woman all based on the superficiality of attractiveness (yet, the organisers cry….’it’s more than just a pretty face’!…. Yeah right!!) which further commodfies and objectifies women.

Workers in occupation at Vestas

From Derek’s blog:

Save Vestas – Defend Jobs, Save the Planet – Support the Occupation

Workers at the Vestas Wind Turbine factory on the Isle of Wight have JUST NOW occupied their factory. They are fighting for 600 jobs and the future of the planet. They need help now.

PLEASE TEXT AND CALL EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

There is a large picket of support starting outside the factory. This will be crucial in giving people confidence inside. We want hundreds of people by morning.
If you are not working, come now, by car, bus or train.
If you are on the South Coast and working, come for the night and go to work exhausted and proud.

If you can’t come, call up friends and offer to pay the fare or petrol money for someone else to come down. Or part of the fare.
Don’t just call the environmental and union activists you know. Call your friends and ask them who they know. Call your brother’s friends or your children’s friends. Text everyone. Get your friends calling and texting.

WE WANT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE NOW.
SAVE THE JOBS – SAVE THE PLANET.

The workers want Gordon Brown to step in as if it was a troubled bank and save the jobs and keep making wind turbine blades. They gave the bankers trillions. They say they care about climate change. He has talked about creating 40,000 “Green Jobs”, the first step should be protecting these 600.

The workers will need solidarity – donations of money, food and other assistance. In the first instance please send messages of solidarity to savevestas@gmail.com

We will suggest other forms of solidarity soon. Do this now. Reach for your phone

NB: Website see here

Crisis in Rape Crisis: Boris gets blocked!!

Clare Solomon confronts Boris Johnson

We blocked  Boris Johnson leaving the GLA from a back exit at around 2pm onwards.

Boris blustering

 Clare Solomon and Boris Keep Your Promise (I don’t know the woman’s name who was representing them) stopped Boris from moving, everytime he moved we blocked him.  They confronted him about his election promise and he blustered and blundered like the buffoon he is when answering.

Outside the back exit of the GLA: A job well done!!!!

Boris argued that there will be 3 more Rape Crisis Centres in London (btw there is only one Rape Crisis and that’s based in Croydon) but didn’t give a timescale nor any indication where the funding will come from.

Outside the GLA

Boris Johnson made an election promise that 3 new Centres would be funded. A strategy paper was launched in April 2009 calling ‘for action to end violence against women’. The strategy is open for public consultation until 20th July 2009 (today).

"Boris keep your promise"!

Great day, vibrant and dynamic, lots of chanting, with some direct action thrown in, it certainly put a spoke in Johnson’s wheel!

 Met some lovely women involved in the campaign and good luck for the protest outside the Miss England final tonight. Further objectification and commodification of women.

See as well The F Word.

Guardian article http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/jul/21/campaigners-johnson-rape

Below is video footage Boris being blocked….

Bankers’ bonuses: ‘greed is good’ mantra back in vogue!

So Unite members are to be balloted regarding strike action over the decision by Barclays to scrap its final salary pension scheme.

Unite members are incensed at the pension proposals which would result in the total closure of the Barclays’ pension scheme. In a consultative ballot, 92 per cent of staff said they wanted to be balloted by Unite on industrial action.

The union will hold the ballot in August, with potential strike action taking place across the bank in September. The industrial unrest would significantly impact the operations of Barclays and the service the company provide to its customers.

Barclays are changing workers’ pay and conditions without consultation (sounds familiar) yet at the same time awarding tens of millions of pounds to investment bankers. And the ordinary workers get shafted when it comes to their pension rights along with job losses.

And the bankers’ bonuses will be back in vogue by the end of the year, merrily sipping bottles of Cristal champers toasting NL for bailing them out and in the process making a financial killing (ask yourself…just where did that bail-out cash go…?!)

The collapse in the economy was caused by debt which spirraled out of control (btw for a crash course in the credit crunch watch the thought provoking drama Freefall), debt generated by an out of control banking system that NL did nothing to regulate. And it will be everyone else including the public sector who will suffer for this free market piracy and greed.

Btw: good luck to the Unite members in their ballot. Solidarity to you!