SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society | Childhood betrayed

SocietyGuardian.co.uk Society Childhood betrayed: "Universal childcare, a project even more overdue than Mrs Hodge's resignation, is the big idea, but the detail remains unclear. The Chancellor, the prime mover in trying to stamp out child poverty by 2020, is likely to want to target money at the worst-off, while Blairites are said to favour more paid maternity leave and tax breaks for parents employing nannies.
The largesse, however it is shared out, masks the tiny significance still accorded to rights and needs. Despite UN censure, children lack protections adults regard as sacrosanct. Smacking is, disgracefully, still legal (quite rightly in Mrs Hodge's view), 10-year-olds are tried in adult courts and asylum-seekers' children are treated shockingly. The focus, after Victoria Climbie, is on reducing risk, but new laws, as well as old ones, are designed to shepherd children into the cold world of the forgotten.
Mrs Hodge's reign as the first Children's Minister has been disastrous. As this paper argued months ago, she should go. But if she is the wrong person, then the job, with its sparse powers, is also the wrong job. If children are to benefit from the spotlight suddenly turned on them, they need a better champion than any minor political figure, buffeted by self-interest and in thrall to others.
Young people must have an independent commissioner, as recommended in the Green Paper, plus a Cabinet Minister who can drive a series of reforms, from children's centres to a reshaped youth justice system to a human- rights revolution.
Otherwise, an even wider gulf will open between the spoiled and the deprived. For many Christmases to come, creative directors will dream up catchy advertising campaigns featuring child torture. And the culpable will rest in peace as more children die like like Joseph Scholes, their passing marked only by the epitaph of caring, joined-up governance: he was someone else's error.
mary.riddell@observer.co.uk"

Strong stuff here from Mary Riddell and the GUARDIAN. I can add an inside story from Islington in the 1970's. My first wife was a social worker in Islington then. She worked in a small patch as part of a good small team of dedicated competent social workers. Then along came Margaret Hodge with her New Labour Ideology. It was not enough to have small social work teams. Housing and social care had to be integrated. The social work teams were broken up, and the good staff left. The new integrated teams presided over a lot of abused children in care, whose plight was utterly ignored by Margaret Hodge.
She recently compounded her sins of the time by condemning one of those children, now an adult adviser to John Prescott, as very disturbed. She was forced to make a public apology. But Did Blair sack her as minister for children. No. She is one of his things. She stays and decides to spend our money on databases instead of quality child care services. As I have written in my last post, it is not the syatems that are faulty, it is the quality and competence of the people who are employed in them, and the lack of resources to make them work properly. Go on Margaret Hodge, lets have a universal database to track the development of people like us who don't want or need it, while the poor slip through the net as they always do.
Human Rights! lets smack it out of them.