Dampened spirits

Last Saturday, I helped man the Parish Council stall at the Village Fete (called the ‘Horticultural Show’ in our village). Both the day before and the day after were warm and sunny, but on Saturday there was a cold wind and a hint of rain. Our stall comprised a collapsible gazebo with a banner tied to it. The banner acted as a mainsail, and the gazebo was soon blown over. Large tent pegs and lines were then used to hold it in place. A gazebo, unlike a tent, has no side panels and so gave us little protection against the weather. We sat at our table, hunched against the wind, trying to stop our paperwork blowing across the field. The gazebo, bought for the occasion, began to tear and buckle. One metal rod snapped after a particularly fierce gust.

Elsewhere on the field, there were stalls organised by the Women’s Institute (cakes), the Horticultural Society (plants), the Geological Society (rocks), the local history society (old photographs), as well as horse-riding, community games, old vehicles, a car boot sale, a dog handling show, music, a barbecue, second-hand books, hand-made jewellery, and a little tourist train. Inside the village hall, there was tea and sandwiches. The whole event was a sign of the remarkable ability of people in English villages to organise themselves, and their determination to carry on in adverse weather. Nevertheless, we all agreed that attendance was lower than last year, and that the predominant mood was one of endurance rather than enjoyment.

It was therefore irritating to read in the local paper that “Despite gloomy weather on Saturday, spirits were not dampened in Martley, near Worcester, when villagers turned out in their hordes to enjoy this year’s village show”. The ‘spirits not dampened’ cliché was used over and over again in the dreadful BBC commentary on the Royal Jubilee procession along the Thames last year. It was an insult to our intelligence then and it remains so now. Of course our ‘spirits’ were ‘dampened’, but we carried on stoically and made the best we could of the experience. In my case, this included several interesting discussions with the people who visited our gazebo, and eating a really good cake from the Women’s Institute.

Persecuting the irritating victim

My career as a social worker began in Birmingham Social Services Department, just after the department had been formed in the early 1970s. I was then an ‘unqualified social worker’, and eventually left after only a year to train for my qualification. But that one year gave me a bookshelf of memories of how some of the more bizarre members of society behave, of the distress and suffering caused by misfortune, disability and mental illness, and of how organisations of well-meaning people can add to this suffering.

The most skilled social workers in the Area 8 team of Birmingham Social Services Department had been inherited from the former Children’s Department of the local authority. They were involved in two sorts of work: fostering and adoption; and child protection. The social workers took great care in assessing the suitability of prospective foster parents and adoptive parents, and placing children with the most appropriate family. Adoption in those days usually meant placing newborn babies with married couples who wanted children but were unable to have them. Where did the babies come from? As far as I could work out, a constant supply of babies for adoption were produced by unmarried teenage girls. Even in the early 1970s, there was a general assumption that teenage girls would be unable to support illegitimate children. They were therefore encouraged to spend time in a ‘mother and baby home’, from which they emerged having given birth but without their baby. Television programmes like ‘Long Lost Families’ show the long-term distress suffered by many of these women, now in their sixties.

Older children in the care of the local authority were usually placed with foster parents, in children’s homes, or, if they had committed offences, in residential ‘approved schools’. Many Roman Catholic children went to the nearby Father Hudson’s children’s home in Coleshill, a large orphanage-type building, where they were sexually and physically abused by a team of priests and nuns. The social workers in my team regarded the home as strict, but would have been outraged to learn of the abuse inflicted on the children in its care. The department at that time was in the process of moving residential care for children into smaller homes and making greater use of fostercare. Father Hudson’s home eventually closed in 1988 and the building was destroyed by an arsonist in June 2013.

Services for disabled people in the Area 8 team were mainly provided by occupational therapists and unqualified social workers. They faced the usual problem of front-line staff in public services - insufficient funds to provide the services to which people are supposed to be entitled. The most important of these services were the aids and adaptations for people with physical disabilities. These were rationed by waiting-list, modified for some clients who were regarded as having priority need. In a few cases,  modification could work in the opposite direction. One client I remember was of working age but had suffered an industrial injury which had damaged his back. He was intelligent and assertive, and put forward a series of requests for adaptations that were more comprehensive and expensive than the department was used to paying for. This caused great resentment, particularly for my senior social worker, who began to block his requests and even argued that he was demonstrating an obsessional behaviour that endangered the welfare of his child.

The social work team, for all its faults, did try hard to match their response to their perception of their client’s needs. They were ‘person-centred’ in the grotesque phrase now used in public services. But this was not true of all public agencies. One of the worst was the artificial limb and appliance centre (ALAC), which was at that time part of central government. I was allocated a case of an elderly couple in which the husband needed to use a wheelchair, in which his wife pushed him to the shops. She was finding this increasingly difficult, and so I applied to the ALAC to supply one of their new powered wheelchairs designed to make pushing easier. However, this turned out to be faulty and could only move at running pace. The ALAC were unwilling to modify the wheelchair, or even admit that it was faulty. At the time I left the social services department, they had approached my senior social worker to determine how to get the wife categorised as mentally-incapable of operating the wheelchair.

These two clients were examples of ‘irritating victims’, or people who, wilfully or unwittingly, fail to conform to the expected behaviour of the clients of a government or local government department and thereby become subject to retaliation. I do not know how their story ended, but some irritating victims of government departments can endure years of persecution. One example is Omar Mahmoud Othman, a Palestinian who was granted asylum with his family by the Home Office in 1994 on the grounds of religious persecution. The Home Office may have regarded him as a potential line of communication to extreme jidhadist groups, but this changed after the events of 11 September 2001. Governments in the USA, the UK and elsewhere then fell into a great fear, stripping away the legal protections of citizens and identifying all Muslims as potential terrorists. On the basis of hearsay, the British government decided Omar was a ‘terrorist mastermind’. There was no evidence against him that would survive a criminal prosecution, and so in 2002 the Home Office imprisoned him without trial and began proceedings to have him deported. However, Omar gained the support of various human rights lawyers who exploited the incompetence of the Home Office, and the original deportation was dragged through endless courts before it finally succeeded in 2013.

Throughout this period, no evidence was ever presented in court about Omar’s alleged involvement in terrorism. This is probably because his real offence was to have deeply irritated the Home Office and thereby became the subject of prolonged persecution. Another factor, however, was that Omar looked the part of a terrorist, as envisaged by the media pantomime. He had lost a hand and instead had a rather menacing hook. His wife wore the conventional head to toe black clothes of the ultra-orthodox Muslim woman. Omar is of course usually known now as ‘Abu Qatada’. He has been demonised. Time will tell who the real demons are.

See also The curse of the generic

How green was my village

England is the most crowded country on the mainland of Europe, with an average of 395 people/square kilometre. Yet there are still places in England where you can look around and see only hills, woods and fields, and where you can travel down narrow country lanes to small villages clustered round an ancient church. I live in one such village in West Worcestershire, where the flood plain of the River Severn meets the long ridge of wooded hills which reach North from the Malverns. Our village is not picture-perfect: there is no village green or duckpond, the village pub is closed, and we have a small industrial estate, a primary school and a high school. But the village is in a verdant setting of hills, woods and fields that is dear to all who live here.

So much of rural England survives because laws were passed in the 1940s to prevent destructive development. National parks, green belts, conservation areas and local planning authorities all date from this period. Development has of course taken place, but country villages have usually been preserved rather than replaced by speculative housing. All this is changing, and developers can now essentially build what they like where they like. In my village, the district council has approved an estate of 51 new houses on good quality land that has been farmed for over a thousand years. This was strongly opposed in the village, which would have preferred smaller infill developments to meet local housing need. I spoke on behalf of the Parish Council in the public session of the district council meeting to oppose the development. But it was nevertheless approved, largely because the district council has no alternative.

There is no alternative because the Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) published in 2012 specifies ‘a presumption in favour of sustainable development’, and requires each district council to identify sites for housing in its local plan sufficient to meet the ‘housing need’ of its population for the next five years. But all the local plans that existed before the NPPF have now been superseded and none of their successors have yet been approved by the Secretary of State. District councils which have refused to give planning permission for unsuitable developments have found that planning inspectors have almost always overturned their decision, and that the building has gone ahead. In such cases, the district council is penalised financially by having to meet the costs of the applicant and by losing access to the funds usually paid by applicants to meet the additional expenditure (roads, schools, village halls etc) incurred by the local authority as a result of the new development. In such a climate, district councils can do little but try and negotiate the best deal they can with the developer and then approve the application.

We therefore have a parody of local democracy followed by a parody of a judicial process, which all works to enrich the corporations that build houses and supermarkets. An essential role for governments is to rationalise all this with hooray words like ‘sustainable’. The development in my village was deemed ‘sustainable’ because it will be built in a village with a reasonable range of local services. Never mind the loss of farming land to build 51 oil-fired houses, or the increase in the number of people who will need to commute by car to Worcester and more distant cities. ‘Sustainable’ has thus joined words like ‘modernisation’, ‘liberation’, and ‘choice’ which serve to cloak the darker designs of our politicians and their masters.

See also: Confessions of a parish councillor
Going local