Tag Archives: disappear

Painting over a child’s mural shows just a part of the Tories’ cruelty to children

Robert Jenrick: thanks to his actions – and those of his colleagues, someone should refer the Tory government to the NSPCC.

This should never have happened:

After saying there’s no money for anything, the Conservatives hired workers and sent them to a refugee detention centre for children – to paint over murals showing a smiling Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and other characters, because they didn’t want the kids there to feel comforted.

The minister responsible was Robert Jenrick, who overspent on his first campaign to be an MP, charged the public £100,000 for a third home he rarely used, and has given tens of millions of pounds worth of help to Tory donors.

The decision has been roundly condemned:

But when she was challenged on it, the Tory Financial Secretary to the Treasury – Victoria Atkins – actually had the front to tell Sophy Ridge her government wants to look after children “well”.

Here’s an example of how well the Tories look after children:

That’s right. Tories look after children in their care so well that they send them alone to hotels from which they know others have been taken. And what is the purpose of taking them? People trafficking? Dare I suggest sex trafficking?

Tories know what happens to these kids when the send them to places like that – but they send them anyway.

Would you call that looking after children well? Or would you call it something else?


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Child trafficking victims are disappearing from UK care – and the attitude seems to be ‘so what?’

In one year, nearly 30 per cent of all UK child trafficking victims disappeared from foster and care homes [Image: Veryan Dale/Alamy Stock Photo].

In one year, nearly 30 per cent of all UK child trafficking victims disappeared from foster and care homes [Image: Veryan Dale/Alamy Stock Photo].

Is nobody else worried that our local authorities seem completely unperturbed about this shocking failure in their duty of care?

Would they have mentioned the fact that a confirmed 760 young people have gone missing from their care at some time, if they had not been forced to do so by a Freedom of Information request?

Would they have told anybody that 207 of these children have never been found and are presumed to be back in the hands of their exploiters?

And these figures aren’t even accurate!

Less than a quarter (45) of the 217 local authorities from whom information was requested have bothered to reply.

This is a bitter indictment of a care system that, quite clearly, doesn’t.

Child trafficking victims and unaccompanied children are going missing from local authority care at an “alarming” rate according to a new report, which reveals that in one year, nearly 30% of all UK child trafficking victims and 13% of unaccompanied children disappeared from care services.

New research by child trafficking NGO Ecpat UK and the charity Missing People has found that 167 of the 590 children suspected or identified as child trafficking victims in the year from September 2014 to 2015 vanished from foster and care homes across the country.

An additional 593 of the 4,744 unaccompanied children placed under the protection of local authorities also went missing at least once in the same time period. Of the 760 trafficked or unaccompanied children who disappeared from care, 207 have never been found.

The new data, drawn largely from freedom of information requests to 217 local authorities across the UK, shows that Thurrock, Hillingdon, Croydon, Kent County Council and Surrey had the highest numbers of trafficked and unaccompanied children who were unaccounted for. One local authority reported that 22 child trafficking victims had gone missing in the recorded time period.

Despite the high numbers, Ecpat says that the real scale of the UK’s missing child trafficking victims is still not accurately reflected in the data.

Source: Child trafficking victims disappearing from UK care at ‘alarming’ rate | Global development | The Guardian

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UKIP has lost its website – to a record company!

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UKIP’s official website has disappeared from the Internet, with the UKIP.org web address linking to a domain hosting page.

Speculation is rife that the party, currently third in UK popularity polls, simply forgot to renew its domain name.

Adding insult to injury, the current page features an advert asking: “Are you comfortable in your retirement?”

Some were soon suggesting the domain name had already been re-registered by someone else, meaning UKIP can’t get it back.

150106ukipnewwebsite2

Vox Political can reveal that this is true:

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How professional. And UKIP wants to govern the country.

UPDATE: From Alcopop Records, c.1.30pm – “Sorry guys – the internet has let us down. This morning we legitimately purchased the UKIP website for £200 (confirmation here). However, Go Daddy seem to have given it back to them (no sign of a refund yet). Genuinely gutted. We’ll be back Farage…”

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Why has Osborne let us down over offshore tax evasion, again?

141102taxavoidancememe

Remember back in school, when you were taught that we have laws in place to ensure justice for everybody?

Isn’t it a shame you weren’t taught the facts?

It seems every clearer that laws are written by whoever is rich enough to buy the politicians who enact them – especially in a Conservative, or Conservative-led, government.

So – for example – if you are one of the elite super-rich who, between them, have an alleged £20+ trillion stowed in offshore tax haven bank accounts, you could happily bung a few thousand – or indeed a few hundred thousand – to the Tories to stop their Chancellor from increasing the powers of HM Revenue & Customs to track them down and make them pay their fair share.

That could explain the discrepancy between what Tory Chancellor George Osborne said in April and what he’s saying now.

Back in April, he told us he was consulting on a new criminal offence carrying a possible prison sentence that will ensnare people with undeclared foreign income – even if they did not intend to evade taxes.

Osborne said: “We are changing the balance of the law so the burden of proof falls on those who are hiding their money offshore and we don’t have to prove that they intended to do so.”

“It is totally unacceptable for people not to pay the tax that is due and the message will be clear now with this new criminal offence that if you’re evading tax offshore, there is no safe haven and we will find you.”

What is he saying about it now?

Absolutely nothing.

Instead, the plan to make offshore tax evasion a criminal offence has been quietly dropped from a draft Financial Bill that was published last week.

According to Citywire, Ray McCann, partner at Pinsent Masons, told the Financial Times: “I think that the proposal is now likely to quietly disappear. There is no substance to it [italics mine].”

Perhaps we should be checking for more substantial donations to the Conservative Party, between April and today’s date, instead.

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400,000 ESA Claims Disappear due to DWP trickery

ESA on the rise: Figures from NIESR's Jonathan Portes show the number of people receiving ESA is increasing - but there are none for those in the 'mandatory reconsideration' queue and it seems 400,000 claims awaiting assessment have gone unrecorded.

ESA on the rise: Figures from NIESR’s Jonathan Portes show the number of people receiving ESA is increasing – but there are none for those in the ‘mandatory reconsideration’ queue and it seems 400,000 claims awaiting assessment have gone unrecorded.

Vox Political is grateful to Same Difference for bringing this article by Work Test Whistleblower to our attention:

The old men of Caxton House might seem unworldly, but they know how to pull off a conjuring trick: they’ve made 400,000 claims vanish into thin air.

The Atos bottleneck has led to a huge number of jobless people getting stuck in welfare limbo (or “limboland” as IDS said in the House the other day). They wait…and wait…and wait for their ESA claims to be assessed.

In the meantime, how does the DWP classify them, in its official stats?

  • JSA claimants?
  • Unemployed?
  • ESA recipients?
  • Employees?

Answer: none of the above.
They aren’t recorded anywhere in the data fed to the press.

Read the rest of the article on the Work Test Whistleblower site.

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Food bank debate shows yet again the government’s argument has no substance

131219foodbanks

By now, we should all know how these Opposition Day debates go – but Wednesday’s discussion of food banks was one of the best examples I’ve heard.

The form goes like this: The relevant Labour shadow minister launches the debate, quoting the facts that support the argument (in this case, that the rise of food banks is a national disgrace and the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government’s policies have caused it), the government denies the charge – always with the same feeble excuses, backbenchers queue up to tell their own damning stories of what has happened to their constituents… and then the government wins the vote because its members have been whipped to vote against the motion, rather than because they believe it is wrong.

The food bank debate was textbook. Not only did it carry all these features, but:

  • The Secretary of State responsible, Iain Duncan Smith, declined to speak at all, but turned tail and ran after listening to only a small number of speakers.
  • Minister of State Esther McVey, who spoke in his place, delivered what Labour veteran Gerald Kaufman described as “one of the nastiest frontbench speeches I’ve heard in more than 43 years”.
  • As one story of government-created hardship followed another, Conservative MPs laughed. Clearly they are enjoying the suffering they are causing across the UK.

Each of these is a damning indictment of the depths to which the Coalition has driven British politics. But the debate is only half of this matter. Now it is our duty to publicise what happened. Many people may not know about this, or may not understand its significance.

They need to understand that food bank use has risen exponentially under David Cameron’s Conservative-led government, from 41,000 people in 2010 to half a million by April this year, one-third of whom were children. People are resorting to them because the cost of living is rising while wages have stagnated and social security benefit payments have been delayed or slashed. The government promised to publish a study on food banks in the summer of this year, but has delayed publication with no stated reason. The government department responsible – DEFRA – did not even put up a minister to speak in the debate.

Probably the most damning indictment was the vote. The Coalition government defeated a motion to bring forward measures that would reduce dependency on food banks. The obvious conclusion is that this government is happy to be pushing ordinary working and jobless people into crushing poverty – and intends to continue putting more and more people in the same situation for just as long as it possibly can.

We heard that:

  • People in Slough are fighting each other over discount fruit and vegetables in the local Tesco.
  • Food banks are visited by skilled workers who are unable to get jobs because of Coalition government policies.
  • Serious failures including administrative error in the benefit system mean one-fifth of the people visiting food banks are there because the Department for Work and Pensions has been unable to do its job properly.
  • The Bedroom Tax has hugely increased the number of people using food banks.
  • “The working poor are emerging as the Prime Minister’s legacy, as millions of people live in quiet crisis.” (Labour’s Jamie Reed).

In response, the Tories trotted out the old, old arguments, trying yet again to sell us the long-disproved claim that Labour forced the country into poverty by mismanaging the national finances. We heard, again, the turncoat Lord Freud’s claim that people were visiting food banks because the items there were free (ignoring the fact that everyone who visits a food bank is referred by a qualified organisation, and verified as being in crisis). We heard, again, the suggestion from our ignorant Education Secretary Michael Gove, that people are turning to food banks because they cannot manage their own finances (good management makes no difference if costs outweigh income; but then he clearly hasn’t been educated well enough to understand that).

Esther McVey’s speech showed clearly why she should have remained on breakfast television, where comparatively few people had to put up with her. She accused the previous Labour government of a “whirl of living beyond our means” that “had to come to a stop” without ever pausing to admit that it was Tory-voting bankers who had been living beyond their means, who caused the crash, and who are still living beyond their means today, because her corporatist (thank you, Zac Goldsmith) Conservative government has protected them.

She accused Labour of trying to keep food banks as “its little secret”, forcing Labour’s Jim Cunningham to remind us all that food banks were set up by churches to help refugees who were waiting for their asylum status to be confirmed – not as a support system for British citizens, as they have become under the Coalition’s failed regime.

She said the Coalition government was brought in to “solve the mess that Labour got us in”, which is not true – it was born from a backroom deal between two of the most unscrupulous party leaders of recent times, in order to ensure they and their friends could get their noses into the money trough (oh yes, there’s plenty of money around – but this government is keeping it away from you).

She said the Coalition had got more people into work than ever before – without commenting on the fact that the jobs are part-time, zero-hours, self-employed contracts that benefit the employers but exploit the workers and in fact propel them towards poverty.

She lied to Parliament, claiming that children are three times more likely to be in poverty if they are in a workless household. In fact, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in-work poverty has now outstripped that suffered by those in workless and retired households; children are more likely to be in poverty if their parents have jobs.

She attacked Labour for allowing five million people to be on out-of-work benefits, with two million children in workless households – but under her government the number of households suffering in-work poverty has risen to eight million (by 2008 standards), while workless or retired households in poverty have risen to total 6.3 million.

She claimed that 60,000 people were likely to use a food bank this year – but Labour’s Paul Murphy pointed out that 60,000 people will use food banks this year in Wales alone. The actual figure for the whole of the UK is 500,000.

She said the government had brought in Universal Credit to ensure that three million people become better-off. There’s just one problem with that system – it doesn’t work.

She said the Coalition’s tax cuts had given people an extra £700 per year, without recognising that the real-terms drop in wages and rise in the cost of living means people will be £1,600 a year worse-off when the next general election takes place, tax cuts included. She said stopping fuel price increases meant families were £300 better-off, which is nonsense. Families cannot become better off because something has not happened; it’s like saying I’m better off because the roof of my house hasn’t fallen in and squashed me.

Then, on top of all that, she had the nerve to tell the country, “Rewriting history doesn’t work.” If that is the case, then hers was one of the most pointless speeches in the history of Parliament.

Labour’s Jamie Reed had the best comment on the debate. He said: “The final verdict on any Government is based on how they treat the poorest in society during the hardest of times,” after pointing out that “the laughter from some of those on the Government benches … says more than words ever could.”

On a personal note, my own MP, Roger Williams, spoke about the food bank situation in Brecon and Radnorshire. It is gratifying that he is proud of the food bank set up by New Life Church, here in Llandrindod Wells – I well remember the telephone conversation I had with the organisers, in which I encouraged them to set it up. I am glad they took up the baton – and that he has appreciated their work.

Rather more worrying is the suggestion that he considers a possible new food bank in Brecon to be only the second in our constituency. There are food banks in many other towns, including Knighton, Ystradgynlais and Hay-on-Wye – with satellite facilities in smaller towns and villages. It is disturbing that the MP does not seem to know this.

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