Sharon Shoesmith - A systemic failure?

The death of Peter Connelly probably wasn't the fault of a single individual and the recent successful appeal upholds Sharon Shoesmith's contention that she was treated unfairly.  In the context of this finding we can all expect Ed Balls to come in for a fair amount of stick as a result of the way in which he handled the affair, which was undoubtedly flawed. Most people will argue that Shoesmith's disciplinary was used as a way of scapegoating her and making her responsible for the death of Peter Connelly, when in the end it was not the failure of an individual but the failure of a system. This was acknowledged in the Judgement of the Appeal Court and in the Laming Report that followed Peter's death.

But systems are not separate from the people who sustain them and ultimately Peter Connelly died because of the cruel actions of three individuals and the failure of Haringey Children's Services Department, that had a  corporate responsibility to protect him. Sharon Shoesmith was the manager whose department was tasked with protecting Peter Connelly, Sharon Shoesmith was unquestionably one of the reasons that the system failed. However, the failure of that system is not the sole responsibility of any Director of Children's Services all of whom tread a fine line between best value and the unwanted attention of the tabloids.

The failure to protect children and young people begins with the ambiguity of the role and function of government. Most people operate under the delusion that the vulnerable within our society are protected by a comprehensive social care infrastructure, that will be there for you should you yourself ever need it.But as any carer would be able to tell you, that infrastructure is neither comprehensive nor is it always available. Yet the illusion of the existence of this comprehensive social care infrastructure is something that politicians of all persuasions are guilty of projecting. They have a vested interest in trying to convince us that their party can provide comprehensive social care without it leading to a increased taxes.

In order to get away with this deception politicians at all levels require the co-operation and collusion of managers within the Civil Service. But rather than protecting the professional standards and working practices of frontline practitioners, these managers come up with increasingly complex ways of increasing workloads and saving money. Ultimately the social worker's ability to spend time with the people they are working with is undermined and their ability to develop an insightful and genuine picture into a family's dynamic goes with it. Early intervention and time with the child lie at the heart of protecting children. If practitioners do not spend time with families even the best will fail to identify the signs of an abusive relationship, especially where parents have become expert in representing themselves in the best possible light.

It is in this sense that senior managers within the civil service have failed the vulnerable children of our nation, by failing to protect the social worker's relationship with the child, because it is this relationship that lies at the heart of effective child protection. However, the con doesn't stop with the politicians and their civil servants, as voters we are more than willing to accept the illusion you can have a comprehensive system of social care and child protection without having to pay for the social workers who are needed to deliver it.

Ultimately Sharon Shoesmith was an integral part of the system that failed Peter Connolly; but so are the politicians who peddle the delusion of comprehensive social care you don't have to pay for and us, the voters who pretend to believe it.

On behalf of Barack Obama - a thank you to Gordon Brown

In his speech today in Westminster Hall, Barack Obama gave a superb example of the inferred but ommitted. There was a part of his speech when he was describing the times in history when the United States and the United Kingdom had worked together for the benefit of mankind. At one point in the speech, you just know that he wanted to mention the role that the UK had played in stabilising the world's financial system in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse. It was a rare unacknowledged moment in history when the knowledge and expertise of a UK politician came to the rescue of a US President and the wider world. But, out of respect for the current encumbent and the political niceties of the day, he said nothing to Gordon Brown about the importance of his actions and his leadership in those days. When the world financial system might well have collapsed in a spiral of financial chaos.

So on behalf of Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and all of the other leaders of the worlds market led economies, who owe a huge debt of gratitude to Gordon Brown, I'd like to say thank you for being the right man in the right place at the right time. 

David Cameron and the Politics of Spite

Its symptomatic of government that when they have difficult decisions to make and hard policies to sell, they invariably do their best to convince you that its somebody else's fault. We've all heard the Tory chant about the situation that they inherited, the massive amounts of debt that they suddenly had to deal with when they came into office. We've all heard the Lib-Dem attempts to justify their change in position on the cuts with cries of the situation is much worse than we thought. Well that's politics, you can either agree with it or not and you can make your political judgements on that basis.

But sometimes governments stray into a different kind of politics, one that is not based on fair debate and discussion. Over recent weeks a trend in the Conservative Party's communication strategy has become apparent that is indicative of a different kind of political strategy, one that is based, not on the rough and tumble of political disagreement, but rather on the political ideology of spite.

The ground work for the current strategy was laid down by Cameron's speech on immigration, in which he presented us with the notion, that the reason the long term unemployed are unemployed is because immigrants come in and do the work that should be done by British workers. He was of course not the first to do this and we only need to think back to Gordon Brown's British Jobs for British Workers Campaign to see it in an earlier guise. But Gordon Brown's commitment to this kind of politics has always been half hearted and whilst he raised the issue of how immigration may affect competition for jobs, he failed to show the finesse of Cameron in directly linking immigration to welfare dependency.

So in Cameron's mind getting the long term unemployed back into work, can only be achieved by reducing the number of immigrants who are able to come into the country; less people coming in, less people competing for jobs, more unemployed people working. A simple enough rationale for people who like their social theory simple. What is perhaps less straightforward is the way in which these reductionist approaches to complex social phenomena have been applied across a range of social phenomena to develop an attractively simplistic strategy .  

The next element of the conservative approach to minority groups has been the use of stereotyping. Most recently in their portrayal of disabled people. Potentially cutting services to disabled people could have been a difficult issue for the conservatives. But in order to justify cutting benefits and support to some of the most vulnerable within our society, the government has simply reduced the community of disabled people to two categories.  Those who are genuinely disabled or those who can be described as alcoholics and drug addicts. Whilst the former are deemed to be deserving of state support, the latter are descibed as malingering and undeserving. Again the complex social world of disability and addiction have been reduced to an overly simplistic representation of good disabled people and bad disabled people. As a result of this approach Ministers can confidently argue that what they are doing will receive public support.

These simplistic conceptions of minority groups represents a powerful ideological tool for Cameron's Tory right and the press that supports him. Each is targetted for cuts and any resistance is divided and represented as undeserving.  It is simple and effective and it is this strategy that lies behind the Conservatives good showing in the recent elections. Whilst most people have sought to explain that success as an outcome of the Lib Dem demise, what has received less attention is the relatively poor showing of UKIP and the BNP. The brutal and frightening reality is that the Conservative success owes much to the way in which they were able to appropriate the language of  the BNP without people realising that this is what they had done.

David Cameron's Conservative Party are champions of a new political ideology  -The Politics of Spite-





.

Identity in political strategy- the future of the Liberal Democrats

Identity is everything in politics.The Liberal Democrats were, up until a year ago, a progressive party of the centre left. They were perceived as a party of principle, that could be relied upon to adopt policies and positions based upon the values that are central to the society that we live in. This was exemplified the other day when in the light of the bin Laden execution, Paddy Ashdown provided an outstanding defence of the importance of due process in dealing with terrorists, in the face of the moral cowardice on the issue shown by the Labour and Conservative Party's. Paddy's defence of justice will have surprised no-one, it was an act that sits comfortably with our ideas about what it is to be a liberal. This principled condemnation of the bin Laden execution was not in the Lib Dem Manifesto, yet as an act it is easily identifiable as liberal , it has a political identity or connotation.

Another type of action that has a political identity is compromise. Compromise is a form of political action that is integral to Nick Clegg's vision of a new kind of politics. It was integral to his success in the television debates and it was his apparent willingness to compromise that set him apart from the apparent tribal absolutism of Brown and Cameron. Yet as we are seeing compromise can be a dangerous thing, for politicians in general and for Nick Clegg and Liberal Democracy in particular. The line between compromise and a perception of political betrayal is an extremely fine one, especially where that compromise involves policies and commitments that are integral to an organisation's political identity. No where is this more powerfully illustrated than in the issue of student fees.

Prior to the election, the Liberal Democrats had successfully positioned themselves as a genuine party of young people and students. The now infamous pledge "to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative." which had been widely adopted across the party had been integral to the Party's success in this area. However, it was a powerful commitment not only because it tapped into a significant political constituency, but because it did so in a way that re-enforced other elements of the Liberal Democratic identity, such as social mobility, equality of opportunity and the role that access to education can play in promoting these. The decision to renege on that pledge, was a profound strategic mistake. In doing so, the Lib Dems were effectively attacking their newest and in the longer term, their most important constituency.  They were seen to be betraying a profound commitment, and setting aside the principles of equality, opportunity and access to education, that are integral to the Lib Dem political identity and their conceptions of social justice.

The justification has been the need to compromise for the social good and to deal with the deficit: all well and good, but its a bit like expecting the Labour Party to impose wage cuts with trade union support, or asking the Conservatives to put an 80% tax on big business. They wouldn't do it because they know that they would be losing a cornerstone of their political identity and constituency. In imposing the massive rises in student fees, the Liberal Democrat leadership allowed themselves to compromise on an issue that should have been written in stone. The price for that compromise has not only been the loss of a constituency but also a loss of public faith in their ability to defend the key elements of their political identity.

A party's political identity, is more important than the success or even the existence of a coalition.         

   
  

Hillary Clinton-is this why women should be in charge?

I've just listened to Hillary Clinton telling a Rome press conference that she couldn't remember what they were all looking at when this photograph was taken. Well I think that is a shame. But rather than accuse Hillary of being very forgetful or worse , lets work out what this picture does tell us.

Well, in the early statements from the White House we were told that they were watching the raid in real time and then in a later statement they were watching it from a distance. Obviously there will have been a reason for this misunderstanding but I'm going to proceed with this analysis on the basis that whatever they are looking at is in sufficient detail as to be able to hold everybody's focus and attention, apart from General Brad Webb's who appear to be engaged in some technical aspect of the situation.

We can also be clear that whatever it is they are looking at is in sufficient detail so as to be able to bring about differing emotional responses from the people who are looking at it. Most of the men who are looking at the screen, are masking and controlling their emotional response to whatever it was that they are looking at.  President Obama is carefully controlling his facial expression and emotional response to what it is that he is seeing, in a similar way that he controlled his emotional response to  the question in the 60 minute interview about having seen the picture of bin Laden's body. He might well hate what he is looking at, but he is disassociating his instinctive emotional response from the representation of his self that he projects to the world: The president is being presidential.

Some of the other men in the room would appear to be less successful at suppressing their emotional response, with one or two of them finding it difficult to stop themselves from smiling at whatever it is that they are looking at. In itself that doesn't mean anything, but these barely suppressed smiles have to be juxtaposed with Hillary Clinton's strong expression of concern, which verges on sorrow. Hillary's expression is the least contrived and controlled in the room, it is the most caring and the most compassionate. Now we all know that Hillary Clinton is as tough as they come, we know that she can manage her emotional response with the best of them, but I think that deep down Hillary Clinton is disturbed and moved by her sense of shared humanity and that whatever it is that she is seeing has moved her.

But what is less re-assuring are the responses of the others in the room, whatever it is that is arousing compassion in Hillary Clinton arouses a barely suppressed smile in some, or a form of emotional disassociation in others. Of course we cannot know exactly what it was that they were watching at this point in time, because I really don't think they will ever tell us. What we do know is that in the course of this raid, bin Laden was shot twice, his son and his wife and another a woman, all unarmed, were shot trying to protect him.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of what happened to bin Laden; the sacrifice of his wife, his child and the other woman would have been an extraordinarily difficult thing to watch. The moral certainties with which a decent human being might have viewed the demise of bin Laden, would not have sustained them in watching the end of those who were not thought guilty of terrorist crimes. Now of course according to later statements they weren't watching the raid in real time, but regardless of what it was they were watching, it aroused compassion in a very tough politician- a very tough politician who cares.       
 

Justice, bin Laden and the Arab Spring

In one way or another Osama bin Laden killed or is in someway responsible for the deaths of thousands of people and because of that widely held conviction, a few days ago President Obama ordered the arrest or killing of Osama bin Laden; and at various levels most of us think that the ordering of his arrest or death, and the subsequent execution of that order was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Well, most of us that is, who do not subscribe to Bin Laden's world view. But what about those who agree with a little of what bin Laden stood for ? Would they be so certain that the killing and disposal of bin Ladin was an act of reasonableness and an expression of justice?

I suspect not, there is a community of people in the world who are not terrorists, and who may well have had abhored what took place on 9/1,1 but who nevertheless, look at the actions of the West in its response to Islamic Terror and would struggle to see our actions as justice. They might see actions that are inevitable; in the same way that everybody knows that if you kick the shins of the biggest kid in the playground, one day, inevitably he will get you and pay you back in kind. Its not justice, but you brought it upon yourself, so you had it coming. Then there will be others who agree with the fundamental principles of Bin Laden's struggle and yet are committed to those principles as men and women of peace; perhaps they might see his death as Gods justice rather than that of men.

But the death of Osama bin Laden, should not be confused with justice; justice is defined in law and in the processes of law. Without those, there is no justice and what the Western media needs to remember, is that what they are celebrating is power and it is revenge, and whilst it seems right to you and I in the West, it will look less so to others.

Does it matter? Do we care if parts of the Muslim world think that the West wields it power, without process and justification? When people from the Muslim world look at our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and see them as an abuse of power, does it matter to us? Does it matter if we ignore the thousands of people who died as a result of our search for revenge, in the heady moments of our collective celebration of the death of Osama bin Laden.

Well it will, if the movement inspired by Mohamed Bouazzi turns out to be a false dawn; or worse, if it fails because we cared more about revenge than we did about hope.

Osama Bin Ladin - The death of a symbol?

I guess that if I'd had a relative involved in 9/11 I'd be feeling a little different now. I wouldn't have that sense of unease at the triumphalism and I might not be wondering what happens next. But there is something that has become clear today and that is: that this was all about revenge.  Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, torture, the rise of the intelligence community: Its all been about revenge for an act, allegedly and very probably instigated but not planned by Osama Bin Ladin the man who became the symbol of Islamic Terror.

And in the course of that revenge, and in the heat of its rage, the USA and its allies have brought about the deaths of a great number of people; people who were not involved in the atrocity of 9/11; people who have never carried a Kalashnikov and who probably would have preferred to have lived in the West, rather than been bombed by it. This is not a day for anything other than quiet reflection for all the victims of 9/11, those who died on the day and the ones who came after and whose blood was shed in the name of its revenge.

And as for what happens next - I'm really not sure that you can ever kill a symbol.