Education not for sale!

Watching the Politics Show today saw a report about parents in Kirklees campaigning for a secondary school in their area.

A bill to create a new class of parent-led “free schools” will be announced in today’s Queen’s speech, and after that it should be all systems go for the Birkenshaw, Birstall and Gomersal Parents’ Alliance. The group hopes its 900-pupil school will be among the first approved under the new law, which will allow parents, charities, religious groups and social entrepreneurs to set up independent schools within the state sector.

Furthermore

Rachel Wolf, a former adviser to Michael Gove and founder of the New Schools Network, a group dedicated to increasing the numbers of state schools that are independent of local authorities, says the law already allows schools to own their own assets, employ their own staff and set their own admissions arrangements. What’s needed, she says, is a law to prevent local authorities from selling off their unwanted school sites to developers – so they’ll be forced to sell or lease them to groups like the Birkenshaw parents instead.

Former adviser to Michael Gove, Rachel Wolf and director of New Schools Network (funnily enough the organisation comes across as ‘independent’ it’s only when you look at the website do you see the connections between the organisation and the Tories). Obviously, this organisation is actively encouraging these parents in Kirklees to set up an independent school. One of the parents in this group was asked by the reporter whether they were in negotiations with Serco. She said they were but at the same time dodged the question. Serco who seems to have many fingers in the corporate pie, from running an oppressive racist immigration prison like Yarl’s Wood to Secure Training Centres aka prisons for kids such as Hassockfield, prisons, Flexible New Deal contract for three regions: North, Mid & South-East Wales (North Wales); Coventry, Warwickshire, Staffordshire & The Marches (West Midlands); and Greater Manchester.

And that’s the scary thing about these proposals from the Con/Dems is the fact that democratic control will be taken out of the public sector and given to charities, religious groups, big business and private sector. Transparency and accountability will be fundamentally eroded. Education will about class privilege where schools will be competing for scarce resources, and the ideology will be about conflating the interests of corporate capitalism and the individuals who will be receiving the education. Hopefully people will kick against this…….

Herons, swans and ducks

I must wander around the park more often when England are playing football in the World Cup as it was unbelievably quiet except for the shouts coming from open windows. So it was kinda pleasant to wander around with my camera and I wanted to see if I could capture an image of the two herons who have lurking around the lake in the park, hiding around the bushes in the water. I was able to but was annoyed with myself as the flash on my camera startled it. It flew off though I was able to take a quick photo but have discovered the autofocus mechanism on my Tamron AF 70-300mm is slow capture birds in flight.

Think I was able to shoot an image of a seagull in flight as they kinda glide and hoover so it’s easier to take while the heron flew off in haste. Though pleased I got the resident swans plus chick. And the usual ducks swimming around. Though have discovered through experience and by looking on photographer forums that I need a different lens if I want to capture birds in flight. Oh well…..

Psych meds soar as the recession bites….

The number of antidepressants prescribed by the NHS has almost doubled in the last decade, and rose sharply last year as the recession bit, figures reveal. The health service issued 39.1m prescriptions for drugs to tackle depression in England in 2009, compared with 20.1m in 1999 – a 95% jump. Doctors handed out 3.18m more prescriptions last year than in 2008, almost twice the annual rise seen in preceding years, according to previously unpublished statistics released by the NHS’s Business Services Authority. The increase is thought to be due in part to improved diagnosis, reduced stigma around mental ill-health and rising worries about jobs and finances triggered by the economic downturn. But tonight doctors warned that some people are being put on the drugs unnecessarily, especially those with milder symptoms of depression, partly because there is too little access to “talking therapies”, which use discussion rather than drugs to tackle problems.

Now this doesn’t surprise me in the least an increasing level of reliance on meds combined with the fact that this recession is not an equal opportunities one (impact of deep public spending cuts would lead to heavy job losses for women). Meds are cheaper than therapy. According to findings by MIND regarding mental health and recession:

• 1 in 10 had visited their GP for support
• 7% had started a course of medical treatment for depression
• 5% had seen a counsellor
• Half said staff morale was low
• 28% were working longer hours
• A third said staff were having to compete against each other.

Furthermore

Mind’s findings prompt fears for the mental health of hundreds of thousands of workers who face debilitating pressure as businesses tighten their belts. Many staff are working longer hours, competing with colleagues to keep their jobs and facing a slump in morale.

With the recession still ongoing along with expecting more pain courtesy of the Con/Dems by way of massive searing public sector cuts. This means changes in working practices and conditions, modernisation, restructuring, liberalisation, contracting-out, outsourcing and what other words used as a code for privatisation will have a massive emotional and psychological negative impact on people, which will affect their health as we have seen. Recession means depression, with a swirling mix of  a potent cocktail of anxiety, fear, alienation, pressure, stress and atomisation. No wonder people are reaching for the meds. In 2008 doctors were handing out 36m prescriptions, in 2009 we see 39.1m handed out.

We have an epidemic of depression as the kind of society we live in isolates and alienates. The sticking plaster approach of meds will only be able to look at the surface rather than examining the underlining reasons. We live in a debt-ridden insecure world where the ideology defines human beings in terms of material consumption. A dog-eat-dog society that devalues and demeans human beings. The global working class suffer the consequences of neoliberal ideology, people driven to the edge some pushed over the edge. No doubt the global ruling class see the increased misery and depepression as collateral damage as part of the recession. And things will get evidently worse……

Pain for us gain for them

While David Cameron readies us all for the immense pain ahead that we will suffer due to the massive and brutal cuts in the public sector. You now have the classic corporate capitalist whining about the need to cut taxes for the rich while everyone else faces massive cuts. Indeed the CBI are arguing that the rich should be protected while the rest of us go to the wall. It really does expose a visceral class hatred for working class people but also for the welfare state and public sector.

I wonder how the Con/Dems will react to Richard Lambert, the CBI’s director-general, proposal? But then you will witness this a number of times, corporate capitalism protecting its interests (funny really in some sick way as they create this economic mess) while we will be the ones paying.

What will happen after the next boom created by the supposed creativity and flair unleashed by the Con/Dem economic policies turns to a bust? Will working class people be told to give up the luxury of eating food?

The rich are rich not through talent but because they always ask for more: and only occasionally get told to get stuffed.

Bloody Sunday: “unlawful killings”

One of my first demos I ever attended in a late January during the mid-1980s was one to remember unarmed people shot dead by the British Parachute Regiment on the streets of Derry in the North of Ireland in 1972, it was known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

These people were massacred, they were executed and what ensued was a cover-up along with the lies and more damn lies told about that day. Yesterday, after 12 years of investigation and millions of pounds spent, Saville inquiry announced what we all ready knew….these civilians were unlawfully killed which could mean potential prosecutions of the squaddies involved. I would dearly love to see justice served after 38 years but  I bet any prosecutions against any of those squaddies involved in Bloody Sunday will collapse…!!

If you are brave enough to kill someone else you should be brave enough to stand and answer in public for what you have done and be brave enough to do the time. Otherwise you are a coward with a rifle and nothing more.

Links:

Liam’s blog

Britain’s Bloody Sunday cover-up (H/T Kevin)

“Not one of the soldiers admitted any of this happened when they gave their evidence to the inquiry. But I lay there and watched it happen. I saw it. I didn’t need their evidence”. Still Waiting For Justice

“Unspeakable acts took place on Bloody Sunday. There was no justification for a single shot I saw fired.” (former paratrooper)

Classifications and labels of mental distress

I was reading Anji’s F Word post on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) – a feminist critique. It is a very good, interesting and honest article. It also made me think of that specific label along with pondering my own experiences of personality disorder. Women are more likely to be labelled with BPD than men (More than half of women prisoners have been diagnosed with a personality disorder). BPD has been linked to experiencing trauma in childhood such as sexual abuse. Certainly I have known many women get the label if they have self-harmed. My own personal experience of personality disorder goes back to when I was 17, and my then GP labelled me with a Schizoid Personality Disorder.

I certainly felt shocked and wondered if this meant madness, also I was scared as it sounded such a frightening ‘disorder’…it sounded big, complicated and clinical. I did feel dehumanised and stigmatised as again I wondered what people would think of me now I have this massive big label attached me, ‘was I mad’? Nobody explained what it meant, nor explained that I had entered the realms of ‘pick and mix’ labelling based on ‘catch-all’ criteria. My mental health ran the gauntlet of disorder ABC within a few months. A shrink diagnosed me as having common or garden depression and anxiety and then back to schizophrenia …. mainly because the shrink had breached my confidentiality when I challenged this he upped my medication, gave a more oppressive and dehumanising label and introduced me to tranquilisers. And that’s what happened when I challenged authority (Shrink: “I admit I breached your confidentiality but who is going to believe you”?… Quite! Who would believe someone with a scary label like schizophrenia?)

Sorry I am digressing…. but back to the issue of BPD I agree when Gillian Proctor wrote, Women’s and girls’ distress can be understood as a response to our experiences in a society where power is shared unequally between men and women. Furthermore, The diagnosis of BPD is criticised for focusing attention on the individual woman, rather than on the context of her life. I know Proctor is writing about BPD in relations to self-harm and sexual abuse but then on a general analysis that is how women and girls viewed in a patriarchal capitalist order where power relationships prevail (and Proctor et al edited a specific edition of Asylum magazine in 2004 on women and Borderline Personality Disorder).. Throughout history women have been pathologised  with labels such as “hysterical” and “neurotic”… all bound up with the ingrained misogyny in various institutions, classifying, labelling and controlling women’s behaviour that is deemed transgressive.

Psychiatry rarely treats people as human beings instead we are reduced to specific criterion, behaviour,  eventual diagnoses and labels. And as psychologist Lucy Johnstone argues psychiatric diagnoses are social judgement lacking scientific objectivity. The psychiatric system is fraught with power relationships and is ingrained with institutional racism, sexism and homophobia. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in 1892, Mental illness…for women is often a form of logical resistance to a ‘kind and benevolent enemy’ they are not permitted to openly fight. In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy positive response.

Because of my experiences of having psychiatric labels foisted on me it has created an automatic response of overall rejection of any of these classifications, clinical dissection of the mind and labels, I describe and label myself on my terms and not by the terms of a dominant ideology…

The realities of rape

I just wanted to write a few things concerning the Adjournment debate in Parliament on anonymity for rape defendants. Gorilerof3b has written an excellent post on the debate.

What I still don’t understand is why the Con/Dem alliance are contemplating giving anonymity to rape defendants? Where is the need or necessity? What studies and/or research is this based on? Is there such a problem with lack of anonymity for defendants? And to be honest, Crispin Blunt, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, handled this debate in a very bullish and chauvinistic manner.

Blunt argues, Equally, defendants accused of rape and not convicted are entitled to some protection. Anybody accused of rape is likely to be subject to minute scrutiny, often raising matters detrimental to the individual’s reputation that, in any other circumstances, would be regarded as trivial or irrelevant.

And this seems to be central to the Con/Dem alliance’s proposal, the number of false allegations, and these false allegations has been blown well out of proportion by the supporters of anonymity for rape defendants. Overall, research suggests the rate of false allegations of rape are no higher than those of other crimes (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005). Compare the number of false allegations to the 75-95% of rapes that are never reported to the police (HMCPS & HMIC, 2007). This is a startling and shocking percentage, so why aren’t the Con/Dem alliance concerned about that? Reporting rape has increased but convictions for rape is decreasing.

UK conviction rates for rape (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005):

1977: 33.3%

1999: 7.7%

2002: 5.6%

2004: 5.3% - (representing 1 in 20 reported cases) (OCJR, 2006)

And the uphill struggle women face when reporting a rape continues, justice is stacked against women. The assumption that women lie exposes further institutionalised misogyny within the police and the judiciary as it has been found they overestimate the scale of false accusations of rape, along with subjective assumptions made about the victim.This results in poor communication and loss of confidence between complainants and police (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005; HMCPS & HMIC, 2007).

So why aren’t the Con/Dems concerned about this as opposed to proposing the anonymity of rape defendants?

I believe this exposes a right-wing political trajectory for the Con/Dems. . With a right-wing ideology expect to see further moral crusades. Sexual violence is wedded in the patriarchal capitalist order but with this current political trajectory expect to see more woman blaming….

EDM 105 – rape anonymity

Lobby your MP to get them to sign up to this EDM regarding rape anonymity

ANONYMITY FOR DEFENDANTS IN RAPE CASES 26.05.2010

Mactaggart, Fiona
That this House believes that the Government’s proposal to grant anonymity to defendants in rape cases sends a message to juries and rape victims that the victim is not to be believed; fears that this could inhibit the effective prosecution of serial rapists; is further concerned that this will reverse the progress made on the prosecution of rape cases noted in the independent Stern Review; is further concerned that the Government has put forward the proposal without any research, evidence or examination of these issues; and calls on the Government to withdraw its proposal.

Defend the urban fox….

Ok, I am biased. I like foxes, I live in an urban area and always seem them lurking around, looking timid and nervous, scuttling away. During night time I have made out their shape, silhouetted, scuttling away. They are beautiful and inquisitive animals with, much maligned unfairly. I even don’t mind their screeching that sometimes wakes me up…!!

And since the awful tragedy of the baby twins and the fox, there seems to be one hell of a knee jerk reaction against urban foxes. Mayor Boris Johnson has argued for a cull of foxes. Why? And how does he propose that this is carried out? Shooting the animals? Traps? All in urban areas, not very bright… well, what do you expect from someone like Johnson who would probably prefer to see foxes being harried and hunted by privileged toffs on horseback resplendent in red ready with hounds to tear them apart!

 Well, if that’s the case, and Johnson wants a war on the urban foxes then my hunt sabbing expertise from my misspent youth will come in handy! I am waiting as well for the Con/Dem alliance to blame urban foxes for the need to savagely cut the public sector….

Links:

 Good post from Jim  

Living With Urban Foxes (some facts and figures about foxes)

Fox website

John McDonnell withdrawing from Labour leader contest

Am really gutted about this….

Dear Comrade,

I am writing to let you know that I have withdrawn from the Labour Party leadership race this morning. I stood for the Labour leadership as the candidate of the Left and trade union movement so that there could be a proper debate about Labour’s future in which all the wings of the party were fully represented. It is now clear that I am unlikely to secure enough nominations and so I am withdrawing in the hope that we can at least secure a woman on the ballot paper.

We came into this campaign knowing that it would be really difficult to obtain sufficient nominations but we knew we had to try. The support we received from rank and file party members and from trade unionists was just overwhelming but we still could not overcome the barrier of gaining sufficient support from Labour MPs.

I appealed to the party leadership to lower the qualifying bar to allow all the candidates on the ballot paper. It was perfectly possible within the existing rules for this to be done. Reducing the bar to 5% would have allowed all the declared candidates to get on the ballot paper and the Party to have a full and open debate about its future direction. The party hierarchy refused and instead threw its weight behind one candidate.

I know that many Labour activists and trade unionists will be disappointed.

I want to thank you for all your hard work in lobbying and campaigning to secure sufficient nominations to get me on the ballot paper. You could not have worked harder.

I am urging everyone to continue the fight for democracy within the party so that in future elections rank and file members will be represented by the candidate of their choice.

 We must also now throw our energies into the campaign to resist the cuts that the Coalition government is launching against our community. Providing

leadership in this struggle is critically important in this coming period. We will be convening rallies and demonstrations and linking up with trade union action to resist the cuts. Let’s rise to this challenge.

 Yours in solidarity,

 John McDonnell MP