Most evenings two or three gutsy women board a minibus for a tour of the town’s red light areas. They take a supply of sandwiches and hot drinks and drive around the local hot spots – streets frequented by prostitutes, the town centre, parks and the seedier bed & breakfast establishments. They are looking for trouble – or at least the potential for it.
“If we see a 13 year old girl with a can of beer on the streets or in a park at 10.30 at night we stop the minibus,” says Wendy Shepherd, the leader of the teams of specialist workers at the child sexual exploitation unit of children’s charity Barnardo’s in the north-east of England.
Four nights a week a vehicle tours the town in search of children vulnerable to sexual exploitation – and sometimes confronting the pimps who exploit them. They can be faced with harrowing situations like the aftermath of sexual assaults. Some nights they might work until 3am.
In most of Britain’s towns and cities there are such areas – and such children – even if most of the public prefers not to notice. The problem is far greater – and more pernicious – than most of us might imagine.
Wendy Shepherd’s team routinely encounters children under 16 drunkenly tottering the streets, or sees girls of 14 sitting on a wall in a known prostitutes’ pick-up spot, or encounters desperate young women of 16 and over living in seedy bed & breakfast houses – which can become a nest of drug-dealing and sex-for-hire. She asked me not to disclose the name of the town where we met for fear of identifying and stigmatising the girls involved.
“Many of these are run by unscrupulous landlords only interested in collecting the rent direct from housing benefit,” says Wendy, a bluff no-nonsense local woman with 15 years experience working with vulnerable children and adult prostitutes. “They can be terrible places with dirty stained mattresses, filthy fridges, cookers that don’t work and, even, with excrement and blood from previous tenants streaked on the walls.
Follow“We were the neighbours from Hell”
There is a discarded plastic milk cartoon in the garden and an old bike wheel by the front door of Tracey Wilson’s house on a tough-looking Tyneside council estate. But it looks no worse than many of her neighbours’, which are strewn with empty lager cans or have unwanted pieces of furniture standing on their small snow-covered patches of lawn.
There is little to mark it out as the home of a family, which Tracey now freely admits, was once branded the Neighbours from Hell.
Many council estates have such a family, or indeed more than one, whose children terrorise the neighbourhood. The Wilsons – with five sons between the aged of 21 and 10, and with no father at home – had such a reputation. The eldest son and his mates hung around the house, drinking and causing problems in the street. The middle boy stole from supermarkets and from school, when he wasn’t truanting. The others had records of poor school attendance and aggressive behaviour. “We were the family from hell,” Tracey says.
But that was 18 months ago and there have been big changes – thanks largely to Barnardo’s, one of the three charities being supported by donations from readers in this year’s Independent Christmas Appeal.
Are there no workhouses in the Big Society? Scrooge asked his partner Clegg
Christmas Eve
Clegg was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the political pundits, the opinion pollsters and a good number of his own backbenchers. Cameron signed it. And David Cameron’s name was good for anything he chose to put his hand to.
Old Clegg was as dead as a door-nail.
Cameron knew he was dead? Of course he did. Cameron and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Cameron was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Cameron was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event…
Cameron never painted out Old Clegg’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Cameron and Clegg. Sometimes people new to the business called Cameron ‘Cameron’, and sometimes ‘Clegg’, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.
What happens next in Charles Dickens’ original Christmas Carol is that a group of public-spirited philanthropists call on Ebenezer Scrooge and ask if he will make a contribution to their fund to make “some slight provision” for the poor and destitute. Scrooge is peremptory in his dismissal of them. Are there no prisons, he asks, or workhouses, or treadmills or Poor Law? Scrooge helps to support those establishments, he says, and they cost enough. “I can’t afford to make idle people merry,” he concludes.
What is interesting about this list is that Scrooge has no use for voluntary or charitable responses. His solutions to poverty are all part of the apparatus of the state. Not much room for the Big Society here. David Cameron’s rhetoric, of course, is quite to the contrary. But in the context of cuts in public spending to the order of 27 per cent over the next four years – with the heftiest totalling 10 per cent in the first year alone – it is instructive to wonder whether that rhetoric can have any meaning. Can the voluntary sector survive, let alone take up the slack, in an era of draconian cuts in public spending?
I am history’s lady. Those are words that the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, imagines from the lips of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as she takes the child she refers to as “my December baby” south to the safety of refugee Egypt, far from Herod’s maddened vengeance. They are from a lapidary suite of secular hymns known as the Manchester Carols.
The songs, and the narrative which links them, retell the Christmas story in a way which self-consciously echoes the time-honoured phrases of the Christian tradition but which sets them in a context in which we might, just might, be hearing the ancient story for the first time. Past and present exist side by side.
Advent singularly juxtaposes an awareness of the end of our world – the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell – with a sense of looking forward to a here-and-now that can be different. It underscores an ambiguity in our awareness of time. With the arrival of Christmas we recall the past, prepare the present and anticipate the future. Now, perhaps more than at any other point in the church calendar, we become alive to the interaction between the events of history, the repeated rhythm of the seasons and the transcendence that arcs us on towards eternity. When Mary says she is history’s lady she perceives the relationship between the prison of the past, the striving of the present and the shaping of the future.
A gigantic Big Fat Robin two meters-wide, cleverly constructed from wire and tissue paper, sits looking a little lopsided and forlorn in a courtyard just outside Luton town centre. Last week, looking a good deal perkier – and powered by a bicycle – it led the Winter Wonderland parade in a town, which like most other places in Britain, is doing its best to be cheery in a winter which is bleak not just in terms of icy roads but also in economic outlook on the eve of Christmas 2010.
Only don’t say Christmas, at least not in the presence of the man behind the giant robin redbreast.
“People think there’s exclusivity in the idea of Christmas and we want our winter festival to be more than that,” says Paul Anderson. “We host people coming together, rooting models of engagement to attract new generations,” he adds with deft ear for jargon which befits a man used to making applications for funds from the Arts Council, European social fund, and soon-to-be-abolished regional development associations
Paul Anderson is the chief executive officer of the UK Centre for Carnival Arts which is based in Luton – the town that is home to the largest one-day carnival in Europe.
But that is not what most people think about when Luton is mentioned these days.
The town is synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism, according to the received wisdom of the British media. The Stockholm suicide bomber was radicalized here, Muslims from Luton have died fighting with the Taliban, a member of the fertiliser bomb plot gang was a Lutonian. Muslim extremists here jeered at returning British soldiers with banners calling them “butchers of Basra”. It was at Luton railway station that the 7/7 bombers left their car and boarded a train to London to kill 52 people on the capital’s transport system in 2005.
On the other side of the coin Luton is where the far-right anti-Muslim English Defence League was founded. It was to Luton that the extremist US pastor Terry Jones, who wanted to burn the Qur’an but never quite got round to it, invited himself to address an anti-Sharia rally in February – until he was told that even the EDL thought he was too far off the loony-tunes scale for them.
But much of this is media construct, or reality filtered through a pre-set media agenda at the very least. What of the reality? I set out to discover whether Christmas 2010 in Luton is a season of misery, division and ill-will – or whether it is not that much different from that of any medium-sized British town.
We are all capitalists now – or else
For a young man some things never change. A pension? I haven’t even thought about it, said my 26-year-old nephew the other day. But this was not just the perennial carelessness of a golden youth unable to countenance the idea that growing old might one day happen to him. There just doesn’t seem much point, he opined, it probably wouldn’t be worth anything when I needed it. His Mum had just disclosed that she had recently heard that the income she could expect, from one small pension pot from one stage of her career, would just about pay the weekly newspaper bill.
In any case it is not just the young who are giving up the idea of saving for the future. Last week no less a bastion of middle-class, middle-aged, middle-England than the Daily Telegraph prominently told its readers that it is now a “waste of time” for them to put their cash into a savings account. Britain’s 38 million savers, it opined, would be better to invest their money in the stock market.
The logic of that is revealing – and not just for the section of the population which has cash in the bank or building society. The latest official figures how that the cost of living increased yet again in November – to such an extent that it is now virtually impossible to earn a real rate of return in any conventional bank or building society savings account. Even government bonds now yield less than the rate of inflation.
Any money you have tucked away in a bank is therefore losing value day by day. If you have £1,000 in an instant-access account, at the current rate of inflation – which jumped to 4.7 per cent last month – your money will be worth around £208 less in five years. For people who have built a pool of capital over their lifetime and want to live off the income, the bank is the wrong place to leave it.
The free-speech defence won’t wash
Philosophically the easiest option is to take a stand for freedom of speech when it comes to the case of Pastor Terry Jones. He is the man who almost burned the Qur’an at his ironically named Dove World Outreach Center (congregation 50 souls) in Gainesville, Florida, on the anniversary of 9/11. Perhaps if I were a secularist I might speak up for his right to come to Britain on the grounds that protecting free speech means nothing if we do not protect the rights of those with whom we heartily disagree.
But I think that as his co-religionist – however tenuous that linkage may be – I have a different responsibility.
At the height of the international outcry as his Qur’an-burning day approached it was popularly said that the international media should not be giving this zealot’s flames the oxygen of publicity. To add to the irony, or perhaps the hypocrisy, this position was widely proclaimed by the very media which insisted on putting the weirdly- moustachioed minister on their front pages and at the top of their news bulletins. This was having your Qur’an and burning it – in the time-honoured media way of condemning something at such length, and in such detail, that readers are allowed the vicarious pleasure of indulging in the very thing they smugly condemn. The British press has done this with sex stories for decades.
But now the Home Secretary, Teresa May, has the opportunity to break this vexatious circle by announcing that is would not be conducive to public order to allow Pastor Jones into the UK.
Cuts are being devolved, not power
The rhetoric has sounded attractive. Decision-making is to be passed down from central government to local people. Mechanisms will be created to allow the voices of ordinary citizens to be heard. But the publication yesterday of the coalition government’s Localism Bill raises more questions than it affords answers. And it may be that affords is the key word here.
There are a number of potentially useful measures here. There is merit in the idea of giving community organisations the right to buy libraries, village halls, pubs and shops – and the time to raise the money to do that. And it would be good if local people had greater say in the running of care homes, children’s centres and bus services.
But the rest of the bill suggests that all this is so much window dressing. About 70 per cent of the budget of local councils comes from central government – and that is to be cut by an average 27 per cent over the next four years with the biggest cuts coming first. The claim that this can be achieved without hitting frontline services is either wishful thinking or political deceit. What is really being devolved to local councils is the opprobrium of making detailed cuts in public services. It is hard to disagree with the leader of Liverpool council who said that the bill would create a lot of new levers for local people but that nothing would happen when they pull them.
There are some deep incoherences at the heart of the plan. Government wants power devolved and yet it wants planning, education or even chief executives – shared between local authorities. Even if that does not create super-councils, as critics fear, it certainly takes decisions further from, rather than closer to, the ordinary citizen. The fabled Big Society seems to be putting some of its bigness in the wrong places.
Those cuts that have already taken place have shown that charities and community groups – which David Cameron wants to take over some functions from local councils – are losing much of their funding, since they overwhelmingly rely on council grants which are proving among the first thing to be axed. Volunteers may work for nothing but the support systems they need cost money. When that is being cut no amount of political hyperbole will cover the truth.
Twenty-six of the 33 rescued Chilean miners turned up at Old Trafford yesterday in red Manchester United shirts ahead of last night’s match between United and Arsenal. Meanwhile down the road another Latin American, Carlos Tevez, who defected from United to their rivals Man City, was trying with his usual indefatigable energy to dig his way out of his contract with the Manchester’s blue team.
Twitter was alive with gags about the miners too defecting down the road if they weren’t too all offered £300,000 a week**. But the mood at old Trafford was far less cynical. One of United’s directors, Sir Bobby Charlton, whose father was a Northumberland miner, told the Chileans: “Congratulations on the luck you had, you were in a position that none of us would have liked, everyone around the world is very proud of you.”
Quite how pride can derives from luck is a splendid piece of footballing logic, but everyone knew what Sir Bobby meant as he tried to put into words something about the warmth of human solidarity. J. R. R. Tolkien once described history as one “long defeat” with “some samples or glimpses of final victory.” Yesterday at Old Trafford we were afforded such a glimpse.
** The Chilean miners have released a statement thanking Manchester United for inviting them to Old Trafford, the spokesman also added that he thanked Manchester City for the offer of visiting the Eastlands trophy room but has sadly declined saying that it was too soon for most of the miners to be visitng another small, empty desolate place.
The assault on the royal car carrying Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall last week showed that the old politics is alive and kicking – and daubing paint and smashing windows, as ever before. But, threatening though it was, there seemed something faintly anachronistic about the preposterous student cries of “off with their heads”. The assault on corporate websites – in retaliation for the global establishment’s attempts to shut down WikiLeaks – was, by contrast, something singularly modern.
In the old days leaks came in plain brown envelopes containing a few hastily photocopied pages. But a paradigm shifted last month when the WikiLeaks website began publishing 251,287 secret US military and State Department cables. This was more than just the largest set of confidential documents ever to be leaked into the public domain. It did more than embarrass on a bigger scale. It threatened the basis of international diplomacy, which relies on the possibility of frank private exchanges of views, and threatened to compromise the security of nations.
At the heart of this changed game is the internet. For a decade or more the worldwide web has been creating new ways of doing politics. It began in 1999 with the posting on the internet of a 151-page draft of the Multinational Agreement on Investment. That scuppered what was to have been the most far-reaching international agreement of the 20th century – to remove all regulations on the global movement of money – which Western civil servants were negotiating behind the backs of most politicians. The web passed another milestone in 2006 when, in the United States, Congressional candidates with support from the netroots – political jargon for the grassroots on the internet – were found to do better than candidates who lacked such support. Then in 2008 Barack Obama became the first US president to use the internet to raise large amounts of cash and organise an army of volunteers.
The internet has not only revolutionised the process of politics. It has changed the way we get our news. Experts blog, offering a critical counterpoint to the traditional media. Ordinary citizens find a platform for views excluded from the mainstream political agenda. Politics has become more participatory. And recent days have shown that protestors do not need to stand on a picket line any more; they can use technology to fight back.
But to fight what? Defenders of WikiLeaks say that US government attempts to remove its domain name system and close down its income sources it are assaults on freedom of speech. A group of “hacktivists” worldwide have offered their services in cyber-assaults on companies who have done Washington’s bidding.
It’s bad news for homeowners, was the standard response to yesterday’s revelation that house prices have fallen for the third month in a row. But not everything may be as it seems. read more…
Why China may have lost with its Nobel Peace Prize boycott
China’s heavy-handed reaction to the award of the Nobel peace Prize to a peaceful pro-democracy campaigner may have reaped some short-term rewards. After all some 19 nations have now capitulated to pressure from Beijing to boycott tomorrow’s ceremony where the place of the recipient, Liu Xiaobo, will be taken by an empty chair. But the Chinese government’s outrage may backfire in the long term.
Right now things are much more difficult for human rights advocates in China. Amnesty International is getting reports from reliable sources of hundreds of people affected by the clampdown Beijing has put in place since news of Mr Liu’s award was announced.
“We know of 274 people who have been arrested, placed under house, refused permission to travel or who are unable to go about their daily work, said Amnesty’s China specialist Harriet Garland. “And there may be many more.”
The restrictions in place are even more stringent than those which were imposed during the Beijing Olympics.
Having said that the Nobel announcement has greatly raised morale among Chinese pro-democracy campaigners. “Awarding the prize to Liu Xiaobo has had quite an electrifying effective on the human rights community,” said Sophie Richardson, a China analyst with the lobby group Human Rights Watch, who is in Olso for today’s ceremony. “It’s so long since anyone has so evocatively and so firmly expressed opposition to the Chinese government’s hostility to human rights. And that’s been an enormous boost.
“It supports and vindicates not just human rights activists and organisations but everyone in China who is trying to make the government more responsive and accountable,” she added. “It says to all those people in China that their ideas are valid and will be supported by the outside world.”
Beijing further undermined its own position yesterday with the launch of a rival peace prize, the Confucius Prize, which appeared to descend into farce when a spokesman for the putative recipient, the former Taiwanese vice-president Lien Chan, claimed he had never heard of the prize and had no intention of collecting it.
Moreover the list of those governments supporting the Chinese boycott – Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Pakistan, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco – constitute an axis of weevils whose record on human rights is not exactly luminescent. “We weren’t exactly anticipating a change in the attitude of the Cuban and Vietnamese governments on human rights violations,” Sophie Richardson added tartly.
So thin is real support for Beijing’s blustering outrage that Chinese diplomats have been resorting to blackmailing the staff of Oslo’s Chinese restaurants to turn out for anti-Nobel protests today.
China’s high-octane reaction has pretty much underscored the very case that Liu Xiaobo was making in Charter 08, the document calling for gradual political reforms, which he co-authored in 2008, and which got him an 11-year jail sentence for subversion.
“The focus this week has all been on reaction diplomatically but the real challenge for the Chinese government is domestic,” said Tom Porteous, director of the London office of Human Rights Watch. “The Nobel Prize going to Liu Xiaobo has made people in China ask who he is and why he is in prison. When they find out it is just for peaceful campaigning for democracy that puts pressure on the Chinese government and gives support to those inside it who are pressing for reform”
Harriet Garland at Amnesty agrees. “The fact that they clamped down on him so quickly after Charter 08 was authored [he was arrested even before it was published] is testament to the fact that the authorities fear him as an influential figure within China. Now they have cast themselves in the role of villains instead of taking it gracefully and using it as an opportunity to release him.”
What Liu Xiaobo makes of it all we can only guess. But when the veteran of the 1989 pro-reform protest in Tiananmen Square was, for the fourth time, sentenced to prison in 2008 he said that he had been absolutely confident that he would be jailed – and added: “I don’t fear it. I see it as a necessary step in a journey.”
Today, though he is confined in the small windowless cell he shares with five other men in Jinzhou Prison, he will take another massive step on his country’s long march to freedom.
