A major test for Obama

As if the incoming President had nothing else to do - like getting America back to work,trying to resolve the financial mess etc - he has one massive foreign policy challenge ahead of him and it's called Palestine.

The issue that George Bush chose to put on the back-burner is something which Obama desperately needs to bring to the front of America's foreign policy agenda. Why? Because America has the power and influence to broker some kind of an urgently needed deal to get Israeli - Palestinian negotiations back on track.

The situation which escalated this week has hideous possibilities. Given the hatred that exists between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel, it was always a massive uphill climb to hope for a lasting peace, but when Hamas won the elections in Gaza in 2006 that situation took an even more sinister turn. The Israelis are having to deal with two Palestinian governments which don't trust each other and both hate Israel.



While Israel is prepared to deal with the Palestinian Authority in the west bank it will not deal with Hamas in Gaza, regarding the organisation as terrorist and not to be recognised. Fair enough, some may say, given that Hamas has declared that Israel has no right to exist - but perhaps Israel should look back to the late 1940s when its own freedom organisations were regarded by the British in exactly the same light.

There is a lot to be said about wording. Hamas has said it does not recognise Israel's right to exist. That could be a long way from a vow to destroy the Israeli state. However reluctant Israel may be to deal with these Gaza 'terrorists' maybe they have to swallow their own vomit and get round the table.



Certainly what has happened this week cannot be allowed to continue. Hamas has continued to provoke the Israelis, firing 80 rockets a day into the country and randomly killing its citizens. No nation on earth is going to put up with that. But Hamas knows that when Israel strikes back it does so with a vengeance. Hamas is surely inviting Israel to commit to a ground war which, even if it 'wins' (whatever winning means in this context) the international condemnation will be so great that Hamas will have won a diplomatic victory.

This is where, I believe, the new American government can play a strong leading diplomatic role. Obama has a lot of good will and credibility going for him at the moment and maybe he can rescue America from some of the opprobrium surrounding the Bush legacy by making this issue of the Palestine -Israeli conflict a primary one. America must try its best to persuade Israel to sit down with both Hamas and the Palestine Authority and it must, I believe, commit diplomatic resources to spurring on such a coming together and more to be a key player in hammering out the basis of a new independent Palestinian state.

It's not going to be easy, far from it. It is going to be a major diplomatic headache, maybe for some years to come. But I believe America is best placed to exert pressure and influence on both parties and to come through with the kind of diplomacy which used to be an American by-word.

During the invasion of Iraq, one cynical US military chief said 'We don't DO nation building'. Well I believe that's exactly what America has to try and do as a top priority, with European help. If not and these fierce adversaries are just left to go the way Gaza has gone this week, the middle east will soon be another bloody inferno and it will be too late to do anything about it.

The Pope's depressing mediaeval message

I've been away over Christmas hence the lack of updates to the blog and I would certainly have commented on this issue before. There must be millions of progressive Catholics all around the world shaking their heads in sorrow at the Pope's choice of Christmas message.

Pope Benedict's Christmas message, which said that saving humanity from homosexuality was at least the equal of saving the world from the effects of climate change, was shameful and a throw-back to attitudes at least 100 years out of date.



Comments of this sort from the head of the world's biggest Christian faith can do nothing but stir up hatred and discord when the secular forces in the western world have sought to overcome these traditional attitudes which blighted our society for too long.

Does the Pope think a person chooses his or her sexuality? Surely that is something as ordained by God (if He exists) as one's ability to be a Shakespeare or an Einstein?

It is one thing to suggest what membership of a particular Christian church believe...that is the Pope's right as head of that church and the right of others to either endorse that view or disagree with it, but the Pope went much further than that. He suggested that the human race was in peril from homosexuals..and that is akin to witch-hunting - at which the Catholic Church has proved notoriously enthusiastic over the centuries.

Anyone would think homosexuality was a new 'fad' rather than an orientation which has existed since human beings existed and it is so depressingly mediaeval that the Pope should use his Christmas message - supposedly bringing peace and love to ALL mankind - to create division and the possibility of encouraging 'gay-bashing' as a result.

It is not merely depressing but grossly hypocritical coming from a church which not only opposes the genuine love between two people of the same sex, but is so keen to avoid tarnishing the reputation of its clergy that when homosexual abuse of young children has been committed by the Church's own representatives, it has gone to great lengths to cover it up and protect the guilty regardless of the misery inflicted on those unfortunate children.

The best they could get from a squalid tragedy

The jury at the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by police marksmen at Stockwell tube station three years ago, in the mistaken belief that he was a suicide bomber, have returned an Open verdict on his death.




Whatever gloss the police might try to put on this, it is a devastating indictment of their behaviour, particularly after the tragic incident, where officers have clearly lied in their teeth to protect themselves. The coroner ruled out a verdict of Unlawful Killing as an option, otherwise I reckon the jury may well have returned such a verdict. There was certainly no grounds for the outcome desired by the police, that of Lawful Killing, not only because they got the wrong man but because the procedures were flawed and several officers covered up the truth.

The result is the best the De Menezes family could have got, though the family must feel anger as well as grief that some police officers are getting off the hook. The De Menezes family lawyer suggested that perjury charges could be brought against officers who claimed to have shouted a warning which none of the tube train passengers heard, but that option has been ruled out of order.

What is SO distressing about the case is not the tragic death itself - though of course to the family of the dead man it is everything. It was understandable in those anxiety fraught hours and days after the July 7th bombings that police officers would take extreme measures to stop a repeat and that there was the possibility of a mistake being made.

What has angered me throughout is that the police seem to have been unable to put their hands up and say 'we made an honest mistake which has cost a man his life and we are more sorry than you can imagine'

Instead a smoke screen was thrown up, a tissue of lies about De Menezes vaulting the barrier to escape the law, suggestions that he was an illegal immigrant (as if that made killing him justified in any case) We now know too that the firearms police believed they were operating under Kratos, a strategy the British special firearms unit adopted, secretly, from training they absorbed at the hands of the Israeli security forces. Basically this says, if you are virtually certain you have the right man, don't shout a warning because they will blow the device. Instead open fire to the head and kill them. (The bullets they use, incidentally, are fragment on impact bullets which virtually destroy the victim's brain and do not go through the body, thus are safer in a crowded place).

Now I can understand why they believed this to be such a situation, (wrongly directed though it was and I am yet to fathom how the operational control seems to have skated out from under this mess...except of course for the ritual 'falling on his sword' of Sir Iain Blair. The officers who were directly responsible are still in post) What I cannot understand is why, once the error was realised, the police had to concoct all sorts of stories about shouting warnings and De Menezes reaching for something suddenly. All of this, as testified by eye-witnesses, is rubbish.

We seem to have a situation where specially trained police units are told to operate in a way which is outside the code of practice laid down for armed confrontation. However they are not to ever ADMIT that such a covert policy is in existence and to go through the theatre of claiming that they had taken such and such an action in accordance with the rule-book.



One of the two men shown above, C2, who shot De Menezes broke down in the witness box and said it was a burden he would have to carry for the rest of his life. And I believe him. But he HAS his life and that of his family. The De Menezes family have lost an innocent son to a horrible operational mistake.

I don't suggest for a minute that the police officers are any happier than anyone else that an innocent man died. I believe that they set out to do their duty in protecting the public from bombers..and that is a brave and honourable thing to do. What is neither brave nor honourable, is, once a mistake has been realised, to do everything possible to obstruct the course of justice by claiming all sorts of actions on their part which didn't happen...and all sorts of actions by the dead man -also which didn't happen - which impugn him and his family.

When are the police going to realise that the public would have far more respect for them if they told the straight, honest truth that they tried to do the right thing and failed. We are all human, we can all understand that. What the public cannot stomach, from our guardians of law and order, is a tissue of lies every time a serious mistake is made, designed to cover arses. That HAS to stop.

Human rights and how to circumnavigate them

This Wednesday, December 10th, is Human Rights Day. It is the acknowledgment of two things. The fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came into being 60 years ago this week affirming basic human rights to every man, woman and child on earth. The second acknowledgment is that the Declaration is cynically trampled on day by day, hour by hour all over the world.



Last Saturday, Amnesty International, of which I am an active member, held a human rights card signing for prisoners of conscience all around the world, at St Martins Church in Birmingham's Bull Ring Centre and, as always, attracted a lot of people into the church annexe to sign the cards. Maybe they will forget all about it later but it pricks a conscience every year and maybe some of those people will do more than walk by and sign cards. Maybe some will become involved.

Later that evening another Birmingham Amnesty group sponsored a music and poetry evening at Birmingham's Library Theatre for a group of people called 'Writers without borders' - a group of talented people from all over the world who have settled here, many of whom are victims of oppression in their original homelands. The talent was considerable but the sincerity of purpose was even more impressive and I left feeling uplifted.

Even walking nearly 5 miles to my home on icy pavements, thanks to the city being gridlocked by late night shoppers and not a bus in sight, failed to dampen my good spirits.

What did - and what should dampen yours if you are British - is to look at the commitment to human rights by our two main political parties. Although the Conservative Party -as one would expect - is the most shamelessly hostile to being 'hostage' to all the provisions of the human rights declaration, the Labour government is not much better, with its attitude of 'we're all in favour of human rights provided they don't inconvenience us too much'

The Tories have blatantly threatened to repeal the Human Rights Act if - God forbid - they get into power at the next election. The Labour Party - which passed the Human Rights Act in 1988 - has since pathetically, shamefully backed off it and has derogated from the European Convention on Human Rights, claiming -as do all pathetic governments when doing squalid deeds like this - 'national emergency' and 'threats to national security'. Well apart from the fact that such threats have been invited by the hideous, foul decision to back Bush and make war on Iraq, there is no excuse for any government to tear up a basic fundamental right of any human being, regardless of the extra effort to pursue the truth. Yes people who were party to acts of aggression against the UK have to be arrested and tried. But they MUST be given full legal representation and they MUST be treated with humanity, regardless of what they are suspected of. You do not prove your human rights credentials by sinking into the same tactics as the people you accuse. Sometimes it is hard work and a government faces criticism for a 'soft approach'. But such criticism HAS to be overcome.

A person's human rights are not negotiable by governments on the basis of necessary expediency. And where those rights are trampled on, governments should be held to account either in the appropriate European or International Courts of justice. And that holds true for the Americans in particular whose shameful refusal to recognise or endorse an International Criminal Court has been another stain on the Bush administration. Their reluctance, of course, following the invasion of Iraq is understandable and self preserving - but shameful, nonetheless.

Barack Obama has claimed that he will 're-visit' the issue of American participation without actually promising 100% support for the Court but I am hopeful, in the light of his other commitments, that he will add this to his list of moves to turn America around to being the moral force it ought to be. The world will be a better place when all the major powers realise that they have an obligation to practice what they preach.

Human rights is not something you can sweep under the carpet if it doesn't happen to suit your agenda. If December 10th does nothing else it should remind us all of that.

Why the system fails children at risk

I don't usually 'lift' articles from newspapers but I'm afraid of losing this one from yesterday's Times Law Review by Martha Cover a member of the Family Law Bar Association and, in my opinion, one of the clearest most dispassionate analyses of why child protection sometimes fails, and why, in the opinion of the writer, changes in legislation regarding child protection are likely to produce more 'Baby P' s unless something is done to change the culture within government and social services.




"Ed Balls moved swiftly to remove Sharon Shoesmith from her post, and states that every local council must learn the lessons of Baby P’s death. But in many ways, Shoesmith was the perfect children’s director for the new-look Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Since 2004 two of the goals set by the department have been to reduce the number of children subject to formal or legal protection by the courts. The numbers of children in care and on the child protection register had to come down. And they did.

Last December, four months after Baby P’s death, an Ofsted report praised Shoesmith’s regime for this dangerous achievement. To any childcare lawyer or judge it does not seem credible that in December 2006, social workers could hand the nine-month-old to a young friend of his mother’s, when a paediatrician and police had decided that his head injury and bruising were suspicious. They allowed him to drift home after a few weeks because the police were unable to identify the perpetrator and charge anyone with a crime.

Baby P should have been the subject of a legal planning meeting between social workers and a local authority solicitor. An application for an interim care order should have been made to the family proceedings court. A judge or magistrates would then have been asked to decide if he should go home or not, including Baby P’s court-appointed guardian. But not only was Baby P not offered the protection of the court and a guardian, the social workers did not seek legal advice until July 2007. How could this have happened?

In 2004 Every Child Matters, a very important Green Paper, was published. The aim was to provide for all children by joining up services provided by education, health and social services. The focus was to be on early prevention and intervention. These services have failed to materialise.

The one clear effect has been to raise the threshold of risk to frightening levels before social workers will take legal action. The Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) have ignored repeatedly the serious impact this policy has had on children at risk.

These were the national findings of the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) from 2004-07: “Access to family support for many families in need is severely restricted. Families in considerable distress on the threshold of family breakdown and serious harm are not getting the sustained support they need. Some services operate inappropriately high thresholds in responding to child protection concerns and taking action to protect children . . .” This warning went unheeded. In April last year responsibility for inspecting children’s social services was taken away from CSCI and handed over to Ofsted, diluting expertise and marginalising the role of in-depth inspection in child protection.

In the summer of 2007 a procedure for care proceedings, called the Public Law Outline or PLO, was piloted. It was designed by senior family judges with the intention of reducing delay in court proceedings by ensuring that social workers had assessed the family thoroughly before going to court.

However, it placed burdens on local authority social workers and lawyers for which they were completely unprepared. Social services departments had neither the people nor the resources to carry out the in-depth pre-action assessments required. They took fewer and fewer cases to court.

Last March the MoJ published findings of government research into care proceedings brought in 24 different courts in 2004. The conclusions were unequivocal: “There is no evidence that local authorities bring care proceedings without good reason . . . The expectations of local authority practice in preparation for care proceedings under the PLO far exceed what was undertaken or could have been undertaken before action to protect the child in most of the sample cases.”

On the first page of the summary of the research, led by Professor Judith Masson, there is an MoJ disclaimer: “The views expressed in this research summary are those of the author, not necessarily those for the Ministry of Justice (nor do they reflect government policy).” On April 1, with no attempt to evaluate its impact on child protection, the MoJ and the Department for Children, Schools and Families launched the PLO nationwide.

In May the ministry increased the court issue fee for care proceedings from £150 to £4,000. Five issue fees could pay for a family support worker for a year. Ten could pay for a senior inner city social worker. Ministers and the Association of Directors of Children’s Social Services repeated their bland assurances that this would not affect the protection of children, because local authorities still had a statutory duty to issue care proceedings. There was a
further immediate drop in care proceedings.

The Government does not like care proceedings. Nor do local authority managers. The reason is cost, both to the legal aid fund and to authorities, who are ordered to carry out comprehensive assessments that have been needed for years but never done.

Each care case is a mini-inquiry into the welfare of the child, his development and needs, his family circumstances, the ability of his family to care for him, and the amount of support and assistance they have been offered or would accept. Judges are often critical of local authorities’ failure to intervene sooner and more effectively, even where the family has been known to them for years. In case after case, one reads of the alarm being raised by health visitors, schools and neighbours. After short-term intervention, there is the constant refrain “case closed”.

Children will come on to the child protection register, and then, when things improve slightly, come off. Support and monitoring is withdrawn. This is the trigger for another crisis, within days or weeks. But local authorities are now set targets to reduce the number of children on the register for more than two years, and to avoid children being put back on the register once they have come off. This source of protection for children is also actively discouraged. The ministry research has established that more than 90 per cent of families in care proceedings are already known to social services, and more than 45 per cent for five years or more, before proceedings are taken.

Care proceedings can also have an impact on parents who may have been lulled into a false sense of security by years of ad hoc and intermittent intervention. When they find themselves in a courtroom they know they are in serious trouble. They get automatic access to legal advice and robust advice from an experienced lawyer can change their understanding of the concerns. Finally, many parents will listen to a judge when they will not listen to anyone else.

Children’s social work is about managing risk. It is a complex and skilled task, requiring close observation, the ability to talk to people, time spent with the child and his parents in their home. It is extraordinary what a difference a good social worker can make. Good social workers will use the court process to share the responsibility with the judge and get help and resources for the child. But these social workers often achieve what they do in spite of, and not because of, their managers. Their judgments are often overruled by managers chasing targets who have never met the child or his family. They are under pressure to complete paper work assessments, churning out low-grade checklist documents. Time spent talking to the parents and observing the child is devalued.

Children need to be protected from harm, and parents need to be protected from the improper interference and the unjust exercise of power by public authorities. The judges, guardians and lawyers help to ensure that the child is protected, against further abuse, against social workers unable to see the danger in the plausible but deceitful mother, and also against the promotion of government targets over the interests of the individual child."





Martha Cover - the author

A man who fell to the occasion

Michael Martin is a man I ought, in theory, to endorse as Speaker of the House of Commons. He has the kind of background of which Socialist legends are made. His father was a merchant seaman and his mother a school cleaner. He was a trade unionist from his teens who joined the Labour Party in 1966 when he was 21. He became a Labour MP for Glasgow Springburn in 1979 and served as a Parliamentary Private Secretary from 1980 - 1983. He served on various Parliamentary committees for the next 17 years, doing all the right things, and finally was chosen to succeed Betty Boothroyd as Speaker in 2000. The appointment was controversial as it had been convention to alternate the leading political parties in the Speakers role but Martin succeeded his fellow Labour MP.



The result has, in my opinion, been a grievous mistake. Martin's performance as speaker has constantly courted controversy, not least on the question of his claiming expenses.He was much criticised last year for using tax payers money to pay for lawyers to block negative press stories about him. He has refused to allow his wife to be security vetted and has also tried to block the publication of MPs expense sheets - presumably because they may well reflect on his own claims. He was investigated after his wife went on shopping trips and incurred £4000 in taxi fares which Martin subsequently claimed. He also charged the refurbishment of his home to expenses at a cost of £1.7 MILLION - the sort of figures most of us could only dream of.

Then, last week, came the arrest of Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman during which police searched Green's office in the House of Commons. Questions were asked about who had given the police permission to conduct such a search, the ultimate responsibility being Martin's. He came to the Commons on Wednesday with a speech designed to clarify the issue.

In my opinion the speech was hapless. Martin came across like some stumbling, insecure Uriah Heep putting most of the responsibility on the Serjeant-at-arms, Jill Pay. I have no doubt that Martin probably did find out too late to do much about it but being a public figure is all about taking responsibility. Martin's red-faced shuffling performance, punctuated with cries of 'Order' before he was even interrupted, came across like a 'nothing to do with me, guv' rebuttal.

It was not a performance guaranteed to inspire confidence and although it is convention to publicly support the Speaker, MPs can hardly fail to have been discomfited by the clear avoidance of responsibility shown by the senior figure in the Commons.

I believe Mick Martin should stand down as Speaker. This performance must, for many MPs have finally sapped whatever confidence was left in a man whose record in the role - both in the chamber and in his dealings outside it - has been sadly disappointing.

Do we need to think differently about child welfare?

So the predicted 'night of the long knives' following the report into the Baby P case has taken place. Ed Balls, the Secretary for Children, has done what was expected and suspended or sacked a number of senior child welfare staff in Haringey.



I have spoken to a number of social workers on line over the last 24 hours and there isn't one who thinks this is anything more than window-dressing. The problems still remain of a government which wants to see statistics which look good, furnished by a social services executive in every major council which ticks all the right boxes, and case workers on the ground who feel their bosses are too far removed from the action and don't understand their concerns.

It would seem that we need to change a number of things within the machinery if there is to be any perceptible change in the success rate within child protection. The obvious one of these - and I'm sorry if its TOO obvious - is that it wasn't Sharon Shoesmith, Cecilia Hitchen, Maria Ward or any of the other people who were sacked or suspended yesterday, who knocked Baby P about until the poor little mite was almost unrecognisable - it was the guardians with whom he lived. There may have been failings in Haringey and I am sure they are repeated in child protection services across the country, simply because these people have a thankless task and are battling under legal constraints and red tape which make their job often difficult and sometimes impossible.



And that, I believe, is the first and most fundamental change we need to consider - the culture that says a child is always better off with its parents. There seems to be some romantic delusion about parents and children bonding when facts would tell you that while giving birth to a child is a biological fact, loving it afterwards is far from a given.

Seems to me that we need to be a bit tougher in this area, no matter how many heartfelt cries and tears from 'distraught' parents when their children are taken away. Most people,I believe, no matter what the stresses and strains of daily lives which prompt anger and frustration would NEVER in a million years take those frustrations out on a baby. It is a mind set. If you are capable of beating up a child once, then frankly, do you ever deserve to be trusted with children again?

The second step has to be legal. I understand that the costs of obtaining a child protection order have increased over 20 times in the last 12 months, prompting councils to be more cautious about even taking such a step. Surely this is wrong and needs urgent review. Nobody wants a situation where social services act like the Gestapo. But at the moment they clearly do not have the balance of the law on their side. And that needs to change..and change fast!