Kennedy was a PR masterclass

Jonathan Freedland is right to single out hope as a major reason that the Kennedy myth endures (JFK 50 years on: Idealism of a story that ended before its time, 22 November). The Kennedy story also remains a masterclass in public relations. The creation of the Camelot image, the careful use of film and photography, the image of vitality. The problem is that the PR has largely taken over from any semblance of reality in the popular perception of Kennedy. The family man was actually a serial adulterer, the man of vigour and vitality kept going with drugs.On achievements, the truth of what might of have happened in Vietnam will never be known. What the Kennedy administration did do was create a blueprint to promote the support of some bloody dictators across Latin American and beyond, favoured only according to their usefulness to the overall goal of US global hegemony. The enduring fascination with Kennedy does relate to a desire for something better. It does though also amount to idolatry, a desire to filter out the truth and live in the past.

- Guardian letters - 27/11/2013

Who cares for our carers?

Vulnerable people need someone acting as an advocate in their corner - whether it's someone in care without family, or the carer on a zero hour contract

 

It has been four months since Mum died. Recently I bumped into one of her former carers.

Sue* looked exhausted. Working for the care company had clearly taken its toll.

On a zero hour contract, she told of the difficulties of being at the total whim of the managers regarding hours. So she could get a day packed with back to back calls or get a couple of hours of work in the morning then a gap of four hours before again getting stacked up calls into the evening.
She told how often she wanted to stay longer to get the job done but there was the pressure to get in an out as quickly as possible.

The final care company that we had for Mum were on the whole pretty good, they provided the care and had a decent oversight process. But they still employed their workers on zero hour contracts that no doubt burned many of them out, as seemed to be the case with Sue.

There has been much talk recently about the length of calls, with a fixation on 15 minute calls as not being sufficient for care needs. This can of course be the case but there are other times when the call could be less. If it is literally a toilet call, where the carers are coming at a specific time to see if the person wants the toilet and they don’t then the call can be less than 15 minutes.

Generally, the experience with Mum with care in the home worked out fairly well, though the burden increased all the time as she became more helpless. Had she come out of hospital rather than dying there, the next stop would have been a care home.

Our family had experience of care homes for the last 3.5 years of my Dad’s life. He had dementia, which got steadily worse over the last five years of his life.

Dad spent just over a month in his first care home, then he went onto two others spending around 18 months in each. He moved home as the need for more specialised care for the dementia condition increased.

These homes were generally good, though again the concern had to be how the staff were treated and the desire to obtain maximum return from the clients. One example with Dad concerned a proliferation of haircuts.

In one memorable exchange, I suggested Dad had less hair than he’d ever had and yet was having more haircuts than ever. I could see what was happening, the home were receiving the £700 a week plus for care but obviously sought out other income streams. Haircuts, nails and other things fitted these extras. They were of course justified on the basis of the dignity of the person. A valid argument, but also one that can be used to increase the bill.

There are a number of lessons to be drawn about care both at home and in nursing homes. The first is the need for the vulnerable person to have someone acting as an advocate in their corner. An individual who will stand up with the care company, home or hospital.
I largely did this for my Mum and Dad but it was always worrying when seeing an elderly person with seemingly no friends or family. Who would fight their corner?

The other area is the whole treatment of care workers. These people do vital skilled work that should be valued by society. They should be treated as such, not as some sort of modern day slave on zero hours contracts. It is not right that carers should be on the minimum wage and casual contracts. They should be salaried, with decent wages and other conditions of employment like holidays and sick pay. This change in the employment relationship would change the whole care sector overnight.

The present approach of bringing in people training them up, exploiting them to burn out point and then no doubt getting rid of them is no way to run care in the UK today. Staff need to be treated properly and the whole sector needs regulation. Then maybe there could be a move toward a care sector that is fit for purpose in terms of dealing with our elderly population in the 21st century.
*Name has been changed
see - Independent - Voices
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/who-cares-for-our-carers-8962833.html
 

Northern Ireland collusion - Lethal allies

Killers on the lose, police collusion and it all happened here

A new book launched recently details a police force totally out of control, implicated in many civilian deaths and colluding with death squads to target a minority.

The surprise for many, who may not have heard of these revelations, is that it all happened in Britain. The virtual silence concerning the publication of “Lethal Allies” maybe says something about the state of denial that still exists on these islands regarding much of what happened in the statelet of the north of Ireland in the names of the British people.

Lethal Allies details120 deaths that occurred in an area known as “the triangle of death” in the north of Ireland between 1972 and 1978. Only one of the people killed had any links with republican paramilitary organisations.

The Triangle of Death” extended from Tyrone and Armagh in the north down to Dundalk, Monaghan and on occasion Dublin.

There are details of people in pubs or going about their business, gunned down in cold blood or blown up. The lack of any effective follow up to these crimes led a number of people in the early stages to question whether there was collusion going on between the loyalist killers, the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

Among those to speak out early on were local priests Father Denis Faul and Father Raymond Murray who wrote a booklet on the ongoing slaughter called “the Triangle of Death.”

Authored by journalist Anne Cadwallader, Lethal Allies was a joint effort involving the Pat Finucane Centre and Alan Brecknell, whose father was murdered at Donnelly’s bar in 1975.

A lot of the evidence contained in this comprehensive book was obtained from the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) set up by former Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland Sir Hugh Orde.

The HET were supposed to investigate individual cases and then put together an overarching report but this never materialised. The lack of an overall report was one of the reasons for the book being produced.

It seems that those in London and those guiding the war in the north of Ireland knew from the early stages that there was collusion going on between the security forces and the police

The records show that some 1800 guns stolen from the Ulster Defence Regiment (a division of the British army), finished up in paramilitary hands. The British government knew that 15% of the UDR were in Loyalist groups, so served as soldiers and paramilitaries at the same time.

In one case two GAA football supporters had gone over the border to watch a match. On the way back Colm McCartney and Sean Farmer were pulled over by a fake UDR checkpoint and shot dead. An RUC patrol had earlier been stopped by the checkpoint, yet knowing that there was nothing official due to be happening in that area did nothing about it.

The charmed life of Loyalist paramilitary Robin Jackson is a recurrent theme of the book. Involved in murder after murder, Jackson continually evades justice. In the early stages he was identified by the wife of Patrick Campbell, who he murdered, but the evidence was not considered strong enough by prosecutors to proceed. “He all but confessed in a police car but this was still not regarded as strong enough to proceed,” said Cadwallader, who recalled how Jackson had been caught with a list of names believed to be targets. He went on to kill many more people, prior to dying of cancer himself in 1998.

Jackson crops up time and time again.”There is incontrovertible evidence that Robin Jackson was an RUC agent,” said Cadwallader.

What becomes clear is that the police did very little to investigate and apprehend those responsible. The result was that many more people were killed by several individuals like Jackson, who went on to become multiple murderers.

One of the central messages of ‘Lethal Allies’ is that if the security forces had been doing their job, acting within the law and to uphold the law, much of this killing could have been avoided and the whole conflict ended earlier.

One view offered was there were those in the security services who - in line with past colonial struggles - wanted to precipitate a situation whereby they could be allowed an even freer rein to operate.

Indeed, the crucial part of the whole collusion story missing from this book is who was pulling the strings from London and how it all ties back to the highest echelons of government and the security state.

Drawing on the work of the HET and others, Cadwallader puts together a comprehensive account of those involved, stretching up into the higher regions of the RUC but it is difficult to believe that killing and disorder on such a scale was not being authorised from a far higher level. That is a story that still remains to be told.

It is a view shared by Sinn Fein MP for Mid Ulster, Francie Molloy who believes the British government has far more information it can put into the public arena on collusion and the role of state forces in these activities.

In one chapter, there is detail of the destructive effect all of these deaths have had on the families left behind. So there is Maureen McGleenan, the mother of Gerard, who never really recovered from the death of her son. He died as he stepped onto the street, as a bomb went off at the Step Inn in Keady. Maureen visited her son’s grave every day for 30 years. Many suffered trauma, receiving little help to cope. The work of the HET though has helped many, beginning some sort of healing process as a result of having the truth at least partially officially recognised.

The author revealed that some of the families of those murdered are pursuing civil actions. Some are suing the Chief Constable of the PSNI because they want disclosure and an apology. “Some sort of truth commission is needed for individual families who’ve been treated with such cruelty by the state,” said Cadwallader, who suggested that Northern Ireland just will not be able to move on until these issues are dealt with.

“I’ve said I don’t see the point of getting an 80 year old man in the dock for the murder of my father,” said Brecknell, who told of the importance of the families’ stories being told.

Former Northern Ireland Police ombudsman Baroness  Nuala O’Loan has suggested an Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to life)  Compliant Investigation Unit should be set up with full police investigatory powers and no time limit.

There clearly needs to be something done to bring out the truth of what happened over three decades in the north of Ireland.

The HET made a start but the grudging way things have been handled, suggest that this is the minimum that those with much to hide thought they could get away with. As time passes, so the task of dealing with the crimes of the past fades. Alan Brecknell makes a good point, about dragging up 80 year olds to face the courts but the truth of what happened and why does need to be told.

Time is running out. Many of those involved have already died off. Some of the evidence has been destroyed and more may well be as time goes by. And there are many on these islands that hope to see this period simply shepherded off into the historic archives.

This though will not help the victims or their families who survive. A failure to acknowledge just what did go on during these years in the north of Ireland from the Cabinet table to the assassin on the ground will only mean that it could all happen again.

Indeed, there is already a legacy of the Troubles in the years since with the so called war on terror. In this case, despite that lack of bombs and bullets on the streets, repressive anti-terror laws have been brought in going beyond much of what existed during the years of the conflict in the north.

A legacy of this period in the north of Ireland has been the conversion of the rule of law into an easily manipulable set of rules used by those in power to persecute minorities. It is a dangerous slope that ends in the police state, which is what it would seem the north of Ireland descended into for much of the last century.  

* Lethal Allies is published by Mercier Press, price £12.99

"Sylvia Pankhurst – suffragette, socialist and scourge of empire"

This excellent book from Katherine Connelly examines the life of political activist Sylvia Pankhurst from her early days in the suffragette movement to fighting colonialism and fascism in the 1930s and 40s.

One of the particular strengths of this book is that the author appears grounded in the struggle of progressive movements. As a result, she manages to bring home just how parallel many of the battles fought by Sylvia Pankhurst are to the world today.

An early feature of the book is the split between Sylvia and her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel Pankhurst over the way in which women’s suffrage is to be attained. 

All three women are part of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), however, Emmeline and Christabel wanted an elitist approach that saw middle class and upper class women in the vanguard. They were to act on behalf of other women, the working classes not being up to the task.

In the longer term this saw Christabel and Emmeline support the war and back the Conservative Party. Indeed, Emmeline was set to stand for the Conservative Party when she died in 1928.

In contrast Sylvia favoured working class organisation in the labour movement. So women’s suffrage was but part of the wider struggle for working class rights.

So Sylvia founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes that proved more effective, mobilising working class women, working with new unionism and securing the first meeting with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in 1914.

Sylvia was not the one stop shop that her sister and mother represented, seeing the need for struggle from the grass roots up. The book includes detail of her numerous imprisonments and a vivid description in her own words of how her jaws were forced apart when being forcibly fed while on hunger strike in prison.

Sylvia was anti-war, seeing the suffering that the conflict brought on working class people generally and women in particular.

She was early to point out through the newspaper, the Dreadnought, how the war merely benefited the wealthy in society.

Sylvia grew quickly disillusioned with the Labour Party which she saw as a reformist rather than revolutionary body. This disillusion reached a height at the outbreak of World War I, with Labour MPs so whole heartedly supporting the war.

Sylvia was an early supporter of the Russian Revolution, believing that the soviets based in the working class movement were the way to bring about real change. They were setting up an alternative government not seeking to tamper round the edges with an already moribund Parliamentary system. She fell out with Lenin over the method of approach to bringing about socialism in Britain. 

The Russian leader seeing a role for the likes of the Labour Party and Parliamentary action as part of the road to bringing socialism to the masses. Ironically, Sylvia then took an isolationist approach, similar to that adopted by her sister and mother in the WSPU toward other movements, refusing to have anything to do with organisations that were not committed to a wholesale type revolutionary approach. This led to her not supporting the Poplar rates strike in 1921 that saw Labour councillors like George Lansbury going to prison.

The author though while highlighting the inconsistencies of some moves by Sylvia, further points to her far sightedness in seeing the fascist threat long before most people. 

So while many in the British ruling class seemed to welcome the ascent of Mussolini to power in Italy in 1922, Sylvia warns of the upcoming dangers of appeasing fascism. 

She was proved right.

The final phase of Sylvia Pankhurst’s life focuses on her anti-colonial struggle, particularly in relation to Ethiopia. She had a strong tie to the country, arguing against the 1920s invasion which Britain allowed Mussolini to undertake. Sylvia spent her final few years in Ethiopia up to her death in 1960.

This is an excellent overview of the life of Sylvia Pankhurst which manages to unlock many of the problems of working class struggle for the first half of the 20^th century. The author’s understanding of struggle in a working class context makes the book that much more accessible and relevant to what is happening in our society today. An excellent read.  

* Published by Pluto Press, £13

see: Morning Star - 25/11/2013

Other victims of crime

Prisons Week and Prisoners’ Sunday focus attention on those given custodial sentences. This year, the aim is also to highlight the plight of the children of those in custody – children whose welfare is often neglected by the courts

When Desmond dropped off his young son at primary school one morning he had no idea that he would be behind bars before the day was out. He was confident he would be released on bail when he appeared in court that morning on a charge of theft and so would be able to pick up his son from school.

In the event, he was remanded in custody and did not tell the police, court or prison staff that he was the boy’s sole carer. The child’s mother was already in prison for an earlier unrelated offence. By the time Desmond found himself in prison, it was 3 p.m. His son was due to leave school at 3.30 p.m. and would be expecting to see his father at the gate. Desmond had become increasingly agitated and prison staff were attempting to calm him down.

Church prisons charity Pact contacted the school and informed the staff of the situation, and managed to contact Desmond’s sister who agreed to look after the boy for a couple of days while something longer term was arranged.

Eventually, the local authority’s children’s social care team got involved, providing support for the child and the family to avoid the need for the boy to be taken into care.

The case of Desmond’s son is just one of many in which children become the innocent victims of crime when their parents are imprisoned. All too often a parent is sentenced with no provision being made for the children left behind.

In another case, Annie, a grandmother, told of the shock she experienced when her daughter was sent to prison four years ago, leaving her two children with nowhere to go. Annie has been looking after her granddaughters ever since. “No one believed she’d be sentenced. We thought she’d come home to the children so there was nothing prepared. We had to go home and tell the children that mum was not coming back,” said Annie. “There were tears and there still are tears, four years later. I don’t think they will ever recover.”

Annie says no one mentioned the two girls in court and describes them as “victims of a system that doesn’t care”, adding: “It’s not just the courts, there’s social services – there is no one there to help. I phoned social services and they said they’d provide £50. If I hadn’t taken the role they would have been taken into care.”

Cassie told of a similar experience when she ended up looking after her sister’s three children after she was imprisoned, saying: “There was no support on the criminal side. I don’t think the court was aware of the children. When we asked for support, we never got it. The children’s services failed to provide anything.”

Cassie explained that her sister’s case had been very high profile and that media interest in the family was intense. “At one point, we had to move 200 miles to get away from the media. We were sworn at and spat at on the street. The kids were bullied in school. We couldn’t deal with it on a daily basis.
We preferred to go somewhere where we were not known and could make a fresh start,” she said, adding that she also had to care for her own two children and that these, too, were “caught in the crossfire”.

In 2012, the parents of 160,000 children were sent to prison. More than 60 per cent of women prisoners are mothers and nearly half (45 per cent) had children living with them at the time of imprisonment.

A quarter of men in young offenders’ institutions are already or about to become fathers.

Pact came across the problem when running its First Night in Custody programme at Holloway Prison. “We found that when the mother was in prison, it was the grandparents, sisters and friends rather than partners caring for the children,” said Pact chief executive Andy Keen-Downs, who added that half the women who had children did not make this known. Of those who did, 34 per cent of their children were being cared for by grandparents, 27 per cent by the father and 10 per cent by social services.

Alan Lowe, a magistrate in Wigan and Leigh, Greater Manchester, has been campaigning on this issue for nine years, after the Archbishop of Liverpool, Patrick Kelly, asked him to look into it for him.

Archbishop Kelly had noticed the children without parents at the school gates when making pastoral visits around the diocese.

Mr Lowe told me that the concern he expresses in court about the children of those facing custodial sentences is not always appreciated. “On one occasion I recall being told ‘You’re not a social worker, it’s your job to sentence’,” he said, adding that recently a head teacher was left with a child at 10 p.m., trying to find out where the mother was. “Things have got to change. Health, education and local government have got to come together and cooperate,” said Mr Lowe, who believes providing the necessary support will spare children trauma that would otherwise blight their lives.

He has raised the issue with his local MP, Andy Burnham, the shadow Health Secretary, who has worked with the campaigning group Families Left Behind, which is a coalition that includes Pact, Caritas Social Action Network, the NSPCC, Barnardo’s and Grandparents Plus. Families Left Behind is seeking an all-party approach to impose a duty on the courts to ensure that any children are taken into account at the time of sentencing.

It is hoping to do this via an amendment to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill. The amendment would put a duty on a court passing a custodial sentence to ask what the arrangements are for the care of any children of the offender and/or any vulnerable adult who is dependent on the offender while the offender is in custody. If the court determines that these arrangements are unsatisfactory, it “must make a referral to the relevant local authority social-care team”.

Campaigners also want to see an amendment to the Bail Act 1976 to ensure that similar considerations are taken into account when bail is denied to a defendant who is responsible for a child or vulnerable adult. “For too long, these vulnerable children and adults have not been protected sufficiently by the law. They are rarely identified by statutory agencies before they reach crisis point and are suffering from poor outcomes, which could have been avoided. Supporting the amendment to create a statutory duty on courts to identify whether individuals remanded or sentenced to prison have children or vulnerable adults dependent on them will help to ensure that this situation is addressed,” said Keen-Downs, who quotes a number of disturbing instances when provision has not been made in the past. These include children being left with individuals who misuse alcohol and drugs, and children left with friends who pass them on to other friends.

The proposed amendment to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill has been introduced in the House of Lords where the bill began its committee stage this week. It remains to be seen whether the all-party support being sought by the Families Left Behind coalition materialises. Failure to do so will see the children of prisoners continuing to be punished for the crimes of their parents. It is an approach that is storing up problems for the individuals themselves and society as a whole in the long term

published: Tablet - 16/11/2013

Experiencing care

It’s four months now since Mum died, so there has been some time to reflect, particularly about her care. The thought occurred recently upon meeting one of Mum's former carers.

Sue (not her real name) told how she had really liked Mum, her sense of humour and concern for the carers. Sue was disappointed not to learn about Mum’s death at the time from the care company. She said she would have liked to come to the funeral.

Sue looked exhausted. Working for the care company for the past couple of years had clearly taken its toll. On a zero hour contract, she told of the difficulties of being at the total whim of the managers in the office regarding hours. So she could get a day packed with back to back calls or be given a couple of hours of work in the morning then a gap of four hours before again getting stacked up calls into the evening. She told how often she wanted to stay longer to get the job done properly but there was the pressure to get in an out as quickly as possible.

I know the keeness of the care companies to pack in as many calls as they can. In one conversation, a manager said how they liked to get people with cars because they could get around that much quicker. Otherwise the individual had to walk from call to call or cadge a lift.

The final care company that we had for Mum were on the whole pretty good, they provided the care and had a decent oversight process. But they still employed their workers on zero hour contracts that no doubt burned many of them out, as seemed to be the case with Sue. A previous company had also done a reasonable job for Mum for a few years. They had initially done just a morning call, which eventually extended up to three calls a day.

Training there though was a concern. One carer admitted she’d been a PA a couple of weeks before and had been out a few times with experienced carers before being let out on her own. It was very much learning on the job.

In the end with this company it became a case of the workload and complexity of the care being too much.

The time keeping methods also seemed haphazard. Most recognised care companies have a system whereby the carers ring back to the office upon arrival in the client’s house. They then ring again upon completion of the call. This means there is an accurate record of the time spent. The call has to come from the client’s phone thereby signifying they were in attendance and not sitting in the local park with a mobile.

There has been much talk recently about the length of calls, with a fixation on 15 minute calls as not being sufficient for care needs. This can ofcourse be the case but there are other times when the call could be less than 15 minutes. If it is literally a toilet call, where the carers are coming at a specific time to see if the person wants the toilet and they don’t then the call can be less than 15 minutes. Indeed, if you are paying for the call, you want the visit to last as little time as possible in those circumstances.

It was over lapsed timings and the growing care burden that our family finally parted with the first care company. They had some excellent dedicated staff but the needs were growing, with hoists later required etc.

One thing though that this operation did have real concern for was the bottom line. There were disputes over payments and the final notice period. It is one of the more disconcerting elements of the world of the private care industry trying to judge whether there is genuine compassion being shown toward your loved one or whether it is all really about getting paid at the end of the day.

Generally, Mum’s experience with care in the home worked out fairly well, though the burden increased all the time as she became more helpless. Had she come out of hospital rather than dying there, the next stop would have been a care home.

Our family had experience of care homes too. The last 3.5 years of Dad’s life were spent in care homes. He had dementia, which got steadily worse over the last five years of his life. In the end it was impossible for Mum to cope as the main carer at home.

Dad spent just over a month in his first care home, then he went onto two others spending around 18 months in each. He moved home as the need for more specialised care for the dementia condition increased. These homes were generally good, though again the concern had to be how the staff were treated and the desire to obtain maximum return from the clients.

One example of maximum return concerned hair cuts. Dad had little hair but seemed at one point to be having haircuts every couple of weeks. In one memorable exchange, I suggested Dad had less hair than he’d ever had and yet was having more haircuts than ever. I could see what was happening, the home were receiving the £700 a week plus for care but obviously sought out other income streams. Haircuts, nails and other things fitted these extras. They were ofcourse justified on the basis of the dignity of the person. A valid argument, but also one that can be easily deployed to increase revenue.

There are a number of lessons to be drawn from our families experiences of care both at home and in nursing homes. The first is the need for the vulnerable person to have someone acting as an advocate in their corner. Someone to stand up for that person with the care company, home, social services and hospital. I largely did this for my Mum and Dad but it was always worrying when seeing an elderly person with seemingly no friends or family in the hospital ward. Who would fight their corner? At home who would question the carers coming in or ask the home about the apparent drowsiness every time you came into see them.

The other area is the whole treatment of care workers. These people do vital skilled work that should be valued by society. They should be treated as such, not as some sort of modern day slave on zero hours contracts. It is not right that carers should be on the minimum wage and casual contracts. They should be salaried, with decent living wages and other conditions of employment like holidays and sick pay. This change in the employment relationship would change the whole care sector overnight.

The present approach of bringing in people training them up, exploiting them to burn out point and then no doubt getting rid of them is no way to run care in the UK today. Staff need to be treated properly and the whole sector needs regulation. Then maybe there could be a move toward a care sector that is fit for purpose in terms of dealing with our elderly population in the 21st century.