Sunday, June 30, 2013


More of Britain's multiculturalists



During her primary school years, Katie was considered academically gifted and dreamed of becoming a forensic scientist.

At home, her loving parents read her bedtime stories and would at times remind her to feed her giant African land snail.

But when she turned 12 her life changed forever. Sitting on some steps with a friend in Oxford, Katie was approached by two Pakistani brothers who befriended her with alcohol and cigarettes.

She was flattered by the attention they paid her, completely unaware she was being groomed for sexual exploitation until it was too late.

For almost three years she was violently and sexually abused by a gang and then sold for sex on hundreds of different occasions to a network of child abusers across Britain.

Shockingly, during her ordeal she told police and social services she was being abused, but nothing was done to help her.

As some of her abusers started long jail sentences yesterday, Katie spoke for the first time about her three-year nightmare.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘By all accounts I was a bit of a geek at school,’ she said.  ‘Then six months later I become somebody who went missing all the time, coming back days later, filthy and dirty.  'The sudden change is scary to think about, even now.’

Katie still struggles to comprehend how a girl with upstanding parents – her father is a civil engineer – could fall prey to such abuse.

‘At the start they made out like they wanted to be your friend.  Then the intensity crept up. They would put you off everybody. They would say your family was your enemy, your friends were your enemies.

‘By this point I thought my teenage friends wouldn’t like me any more. They would say if you go back to school no one is going to like you because you’re a slag.’

After several months, the Pakistani men began to ask her for sex, pretending to want a loving relationship with her.  But soon they were threatening violence if Katie refused to do what she was told.

‘It’s something I felt I had to do,’ she said. ‘Although I knew what sex was, there’s a difference between having sex as an adult and as a child. This was people taking advantage of a child.’

As her ordeal intensified, Katie was taken to rooms in guest houses and flats in the backstreets of east Oxford. ‘I was taken to parties,’ she recalled.

‘By party I mean everybody coming and having sex with me. If I said I didn’t want it, it would just happen anyway.’

Katie said: ‘They just thought they could do what they wanted with me, no matter how disgusting. It got to the point where I just went along with things.  'Mentally I shut down and just did it.’

Aged 14, and by now in a care home, she alerted her carer to the abuse but was ignored.

A month after her 15th birthday, she told police that one of her abusers, Akhtar Dogar, was forcing her to have sex with him and other men.  But instead of following up these allegations, she said officers threatened to arrest her for wasting police time.

‘My behaviour and appearance should have been sending alarm bells,’ she said.

Although Katie is now in a long-term relationship, memories of her past still haunt her.

She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder at the age of 15 and suffers from severe bouts of depression and OCD.

SOURCE






Politically correct British bureaucracy betrays foster mother

The foster mum who took in a 'vulnerable' boy of 16 - only to find he was a drunken asylum-seeking thug of 26

The aggression in the voice on the other side of my spare bedroom door was both startling and frightening — not least because it was supposed to be coming from a young boy.

I’d knocked respectfully before delivering clean washing to my foster son, Farood.  ‘Keep out,’ he snarled back in a deep, threatening baritone.

I was beginning to think this ‘poor, vulnerable, 16-year-old lad’, as he was described by social services, who had asked me to look after him, was not all he seemed.

Since his arrival 12 days earlier, Farood, an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan, had behaved disgracefully. He constantly reeked of alcohol and treated my house like a hostel rather than a home, coming and going as he pleased.

But it was his physical strength and raw aggression that I found the most frightening.

I’m a 60-year-old widow and retired school secretary, only 5ft tall, and I live on my own. This ‘boy’ on the other hand, was more than 6ft tall, stocky and had a demeanour and physical strength beyond his supposed years.

Where there should have been spots, there was stubble.

Where I’d expected a cowed and frightened child in need of love and a good meal, I found the arrogance and, quite frankly, terrifying swagger of a grown man.

Intimidated and frightened, I quickly stopped trying to enforce any house rules. I could almost see the aggression that bubbled off Farood, how could I match his brute physicality?

Even when I found condoms left casually on his bedside table and received a complaint from my neighbour about him leering at her teenage daughter over the garden fence while he smoked endless cigarettes, I felt powerless to act.

But when I tried to raise my concerns with my key worker — that Farood wasn’t the 16-year-old I’d been told he was — I was fobbed off.

‘Just hang on to him for a couple more days,’ I was told, with the assurance everything was being done to look into Farood’s background and find a more permanent placement.

Finally, after more than a week of sleepless nights wondering whether I was safe in my own bed, I begged, pleaded and insisted that Farood was rehomed — I watched him being driven away, racked with guilt and a sense of failure.

Weeks later, however, that guilt turned to anger when I discovered, to my horror, that all my suspicions about this ‘cuckoo’ in my nest were correct. I learned from my social workers that Farood was in fact 26, not 16.

Police had accessed criminal records in his home country that showed he’d previously been in trouble for theft and brawling. He was now in a detention centre while the Home Office considered his asylum application.

No one had even thought to assess all this before placing him under my roof a year ago. I still shudder when I think what could have happened. And no one has ever apologised to me for the danger I was placed in.

SOURCE






Anti-Islamic U.S. bloggers banned from entering the UK

Message to UK liberals: if you’re campaigning to bar two right-wing US bloggers from Britain, you’re no liberal

Something quite outrageous happened this week: the UK home secretary, Theresa May, banned two right-wing American bloggers from coming to Britain. Apparently their presence would not be ‘conducive to the public good’ because they do not accept what May calls our ‘shared values’. So they weren’t banned because they’d committed any crime, but because they’d committed a thoughtcrime - the thoughtcrime of thinking differently to May. This captures brilliantly the tyranny behind censorship: through stymieing clashes of opinions, it empowers an enlightened few to define what is a good value and what is an acceptable thought."

How it happened

Like, I’m sure, most of the British population, I hadn’t heard of Pamela Geller or Robert Spencer before their names appeared in the UK press at the weekend. Apparently, they are right-wing bloggers from America, who are planning to visit Britain to speak at a rally organised by the right-wing English Defence League (EDL). Cue much censorious fulminating from Britain’s misnamed liberal commentariat, who want the bloggers kept out.

Earlier this year, the UK anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate (HNH) adopted a refreshing new stance (commended by spiked): it declared that ‘No Platform’ - the practice of denying people on the far right a public platform to express themselves - was ‘outdated’. When it comes to combating far-right groups, said HNH, it’s better to do it through ‘argument’ and to ‘expose their ideas’.

Yet now, HNH has reverted to its earlier ‘No Platform’ stance: it has been at the forefront of a campaign calling on UK home secretary Theresa May to bar Geller and Spencer - who write the Atlas Shrugs and Jihad Watch blogs, and who were behind a New York subway ad campaign implying Muslims are ‘savages’ - from entering Britain. The pair are due to speak at an EDL rally in Woolwich, scene of the recent ‘jihadist’ knife attack, on Saturday.

In a petition to May, signed by 2,000 supporters in the first 24 hours alone, HNH writes a sentence that must surely be a shoo-in for Doublespeak of the Year: ‘We believe in freedom of speech and the rights of people to hold and express different views. However, in a democracy there have to be limits on people abusing these freedoms to incite hatred, and we believe that Geller and Spencer are seeking to do just that.’

In the strange minds of HNH campaigners, it seems you can believe in free speech yet lobby to ban individuals from entering your country to speak freely. You can believe in the right of people to hold and express different views, except views you personally dislike. And you can do all this in the name of democracy, presumably because the UK public itself, the demos, is so volatile and manipulable that it has to be sheltered from the poisonous views of Geller and Spencer.

The fear of the public becoming a big, ugly lynch mob seems to have led even Liberal Conspiracy blogger Sunny Hundal, who helped organise the Convention on Modern Liberty in 2009, to abandon any pretence at liberalism. He has uncritically plugged HNH’s censorious petition - at the cost of isolating his readership.

Under his HNH plug, a commenter cites a 2011 article in which Hundal defended a controversial Muslim preacher’s right to come to Britain regardless of what he planned to preach. ‘I’ve always been for having a consistent approach on this issue’, Hundal wrote in 2011. ‘Either you ban people who preach any form of hatred – from homophobia to religious segregation – or you only ban those that say things that would be illegal under our laws. I prefer the latter approach, because I believe that people should be allowed to make up their own minds on issues.’ Under this quotation, the commenter simply writes: ‘Hypocrite.’ Quite.

The only principles these censorious campaigners accept are those imposed by the EU. Anders Gravers, a leader of the group Stop the Islamisation of Europe, has also been invited to speak at the EDL rally, but he has not been named in the HNH petitions ‘because he is an EU citizen’ and therefore it seems must be allowed to travel freely throughout European Union counties. This rather gives the lie to the idea that these ‘incendiary’ speakers are genuinely a threat that must be stopped. If these various cranky bloggers and campaigners really were capable of causing moral mayhem in Britain, surely Gravers would be kept out, too? Perhaps HNH is only interested in keeping out vulgar American savages, in the same way right-wingers campaign to keep hot-headed Muslim preachers away from the UK.

May was following in the ban-happy footsteps of her New Labour predecessor Jacqui Smith, who at her height in 2008 was barring five people a month from entering Britain on the basis that their presence would not be ‘conducive to the public good’.

The EDL, of course, has no licence to play the free-speech card. It makes no bones about calling upon the state to outlaw the speech of ‘extreme’ Muslim preachers and it wants to ban poppy-burning protests. And neither can it plead an open-borders case for allowing its speakers to come to Britain: it routinely calls for the forced deportation of radical Islamists from the UK. But that is what you would expect from a nationalist organisation of the far right. Is it also now what we should expect from British liberals?

SOURCE





Abortion Rights Not Synonymous With Women's Health

When your grandmother gets some bad news, do you tell her: "Well, at least you have your abortion rights"?  Why not? Maybe it's because whatever you think of abortion, the right to have one is not synonymous with a woman's health.

But don't tell that to the liberal group Think Progress. On Twitter, it recently teased some shocking news: "Why 2013 is shaping up to be the worst year for woman's [sic] health in modern history."

When I followed to the linked story, there was nothing about a spike in cervical or breast cancer rates. Nothing about occupational safety for female workers and no mention of female life expectancy either. Instead, the story was about how the ACLU says anti-abortion laws are on the rise across the country.

Of course, this sort of thing is all over the place. Under the headline "Losing the Global Fight for Women's Health," Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, the "Female Factor" columnist for the international edition of the New York Times, writes of the allegedly horrific threat to women's health posed by restrictive abortion laws in places like Africa, Asia and Latin America. She makes no mention of the estimated 160 million women "missing" in Asia alone who were killed in gender-selective abortions.

Even the most ardent pro-life activist readily concedes that there are instances when an abortion is in the interest of the mother's health. But it is bizarre to suggest that women's health and abortion rights are interchangeable. The biggest killer of women is heart disease, followed by cancer, then stroke. I couldn't find "lack of a timely abortion" on the CDC list.

And yet, President Obama -- and nearly every other abortion-rights supporter -- blithely accuses Republicans of wanting to make women's "health care choices" for them.

"You've got a state legislature up here that sometimes acts like it knows better than women when it comes to women's own health care decisions," the president said at a rally in New Hampshire during the last campaign. "You know, my opponent's got the same approach."

How odd from the eponymous father of Obamacare, which will mandate that women (and men) pay for insurance coverage they don't need. It will cause many women (and men) to lose their existing health care plans. It will empower bureaucrats to decide what treatments for women (and men) the government will reimburse and which it won't. Under Obamacare, women who smoke or are overweight can be charged 30 percent to 50 percent more for their health insurance.

These features are defensible from a liberal or statist point of view, but not if you actually believe that women have a special and unique right to make "health care decisions" for themselves wholly unfettered by the government.

Which raises one irony to all this. By any objective measure, liberals are far more eager to use the government to make health care decisions for women, because liberals want to make health care decisions for all Americans -- slightly more than half of whom are female. It's Michelle Obama and Michael Bloomberg -- not Michele Bachmann and Mitch McConnell -- who want to tell women what they should eat and drink and how much they should exercise.

Conservatives want to leave it to women to make their own choices: about what to eat, whether to smoke, how fast they can drive, whether they can own a gun, etc. Many conservatives would also like to see women live long enough for the chance to make those decisions, rather than be snuffed out in utero.

Of course, this argument will be wholly unpersuasive to the folks shouting the loudest about "women's health decisions." Which raises an even greater irony. The basic conservative or pro-life view is that abortion is different than other health care decisions because there's a harmed party other than the mother. This fact, not sexism or traditionalism or theology, is what trumps the general conservative preference for individual freedom. You don't have an unfettered right to harm someone else.

But once you get beyond abortion, conservative public policies treat women like autonomous human beings capable of making their own choices -- about health care or anything else. It's the abortion-rights extremists who boil down the vast range of issues and choices raised by the term "women's health" to a single issue: sexual reproduction, as if women were nothing more than breeders. And yet conservatives are the ones who're called sexists.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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Friday, June 28, 2013



Another multicultural episode in Britain



A man who bludgeoned his wife to death with an ornamental elephant was yesterday jailed for life.  Devendra Singh, 33, will serve at least 16 years in prison after he was convicted of murdering his 41-year-old wife Charlotte Smith.

He repeatedly ‘smashed and shattered’ her skull after she demanded a divorce, using force described by a pathologist as ‘beyond the scale’.

After the attack Singh left the body lying on the lounge floor.  He then threw evidence – including the 4lb wooden elephant – over their garden fence into a field before fleeing the home near Leek, Staffordshire.

Stafford Crown Court heard Singh travelled to London, but put his wife’s SIM card into his phone so he could pose as her, sending reassuring text messages to her family and friends.

However her family discovered her body three days after she was killed last September.

Singh later handed himself in to police and admitted killing his wife, but denied murder on the basis that he suffered a ‘loss of control’.

During the five-day trial pathologist Olaf Biedrzycki said Miss Smith’s injuries were among the worst he had seen during his 20-year career.

He told the jury: ‘There were an awful lot of fractures to the front of the skull, and I could feel a lot of fractures to the face. The degree of force used to inflict the injuries is of an extreme nature.

‘It is one of the most severe head injury cases I have come across.’

Detective Inspector Glyn Pattinson, who led the inquiry for Staffordshire Police, said: ‘There is no doubt that Singh’s attack was brutal and sustained.’

Miss Smith, who worked as a health and safety manager, met Singh during a family holiday to Goa in 2008. They decided to get married in December 2010 and, after waiting for a visa, Singh moved from India to the UK.

When he struggled to find work, the Smith family even opened a shop in the town centre for him to run.

But prosecutors said by last summer the relationship was failing, and Singh had become prone to heavy drinking and aggression.

Miss Smith, who was known as Charlie, told work colleagues her husband had grabbed her around the neck during an argument just four months before she died.

Speaking after the sentencing, her parents, Irene Cork and Peter Smith, said: ‘No matter what length of sentence is served to him nothing will compensate for our loss.

‘Some years from now he will leave prison and be free to continue with his life. For Charlie there is nothing.  ‘Losing Charlie will continue to affect us for the rest of our lives.'

SOURCE





Black racism in Britain

A toddler has been left with a broken collar bone after he and his mother were attacked in broad daylight because the little boy appeared to be mixed race.

The two-year-old was tipped out of his pushchair and injured when a black man started hurling racist abuse and then went for his 30-year-old mother at Highams Park railway station in east London.

Police fear the suspect was attacking the unnamed woman, who is also black, because the child had lighter coloured skin and may have been mixed race.

As the mother tried to get off the train the apparent racist grabbed her by the hair, dragging her to the ground and knocking over the pushchair, badly hurting the toddler.

The woman and her son were first approached by the man at Walthamstow Central Station, east London, at around 3.03pm on Sunday June 23, and as they boarded the 2.47pm Liverpool Street to Chingford train.

Investigating officer Detective Constable Gerry Hughes said: 'When the train arrived at Highams Park station, the victim left the train with her pushchair. She was assaulted by the man, who pulled her hair, dragging her to the ground along with the pushchair. The man then made off from the scene.

'The victim was left understandably shocked but uninjured. Her son was taken to hospital where he was diagnosed with a fractured collar bone. He was later discharged from hospital.

'This was an unspeakable attack on a mother and son, and we are determined to find the man responsible. I'd urge anyone who has any information into the incident, or recognises the man pictured, to come forward and assist officers in this investigation.'

A full search of the area was conducted but the man could not be found and British Transport Police have now released CCTV images of an apparent black male they wish to speak to in connection with the incident.

A British Transport Police spokesperson said: 'We know it was a racist attack because of what the mother reported the man as saying. He was commenting on the colour of the child's skin which he was saying was slightly lighter in colour that the mother's.'

Anyone with information is asked to call 0800 40 50 40 quotin

SOURCE






The fate of a whistleblower in Britain

Julie Bailey, who helped expose the horrific neglect at Stafford Hospital which cost up to 1,400 lives, says ‘vipers’ have victimised her ever since she set up Cure the NHS.

She started the pressure group in her own cafe following the death of her mother at the hospital. But yesterday she handed over the keys to the business, having agreed a cut-price sale on eBay.

‘People have been coming into the cafe shouting that nothing happened at Stafford, that I am lying and there were no unnecessary deaths,’ she said last night.

‘I have been run out of town by small minded people, leaving my home, my livelihood and my friends because a few misinformed local political activists have fuelled a hate campaign based on lies.

'This is a classic case of shooting the messenger.’

She said the final straw was the ‘desecration of my mum’s grave’ that continued for six weeks.

The 50-year-old mother of two says her troubles began in 2009 when a Healthcare Commission report into the failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS put the future of its casualty department under threat.

She became a hate figure after local party activist Rolfe Pearce posted a video on YouTube in which a man signing a Labour petition to save the unit expresses a hope that Miss Bailey would die.

The video, which provoked a torrent of hateful emails and telephone calls, was posted by Mr Pearce in a personal capacity and was later taken down.  The 49-year-old said the comments were tongue in in cheek.

Miss Bailey’s plight became worse when another Labour party activist claimed she had said at a public meeting: ‘Let’s shut the hospital, let’s sack all the staff’.  That demand, the activist, Diana Smith, said, was ‘met by loud cheers from her band of followers’.

This year the campaign against her took a sinister turn when the grave of Miss Bailey’s mother, Bella, who was 86 when she died at the hospital after ‘being dropped’ by a nurse, was vandalised.

This was followed by a postcard saying: ‘Thank you for closing Stafford hospital, Ha, Ha, Ha, you better now spend more time watching your mother’s grave.’

Last month, emergency call handler Roy Guest, 54, was sacked by West Midlands ambulance service after comments appeared online about a wish for Miss Bailey to suffer ‘a life-threatening illness’.

Miss Bailey said residents have been boycotting her café, reducing takings to as little as £40 a day.

She is moving out of her rented home in Stafford this weekend, initially to live in a static caravan at an undisclosed location.

She sold the café for £14,000 and now plans to devote more time to turning Cure the NHS into a national charity.

Miss Bailey told last month how damage had been caused to her mother’s grave over a six-week period.

Speaking at the time, she said: ‘The momentum seems to be growing when I go out onto the streets of Stafford. People come up to me and say “It’s not true, you were lying. You brought shame on the town and nobody died”.

‘It just drains the strength from you and you’re back grieving again. But the one thing I do say is, “Have you read any investigations? Did you go to the inquiry?’’’

Last night, Mrs Smith, who was a volunteer assistant to David Kidney, the former Labour MP for Stafford, stood by her blog post and accused Miss Bailey of forgetting what she had said at the public meeting in 2009.  She said: ‘I have notes of what Julie said and witnesses who also heard her comment.’

Mrs Smith, who is involved in the Support Stafford Hospital campaign which organised a march through the town attended by 30,000 people in April, said: ‘Barely anybody will have read that blog until its contents were picked up and disseminated by Cure the NHS members and supporters.’

Cheryl Porter, one of the founders of the Support Stafford Hospital campaign, insisted: ‘We have had absolutely nothing to do with any of the problems Julie Bailey has faced.

‘We condemn the abuse Julie Bailey has received – the desecration of her mother’s grave, the abusive emails and phone calls. But these incidents are nothing to do with us.  ‘We were set up as a campaign group fighting against night-time plans to close the accident and emergency department at the hospital, two years ago.

'We are thankful for what Julie and Cure the NHS have done in exposing what went on at the hospital.  But we are now one of the top 20 hospitals in the country for safety and Julie is part of the reason why.  ‘We simply want to secure the long-term future of acute services at Stafford. We all need to work together to achieve this.’

She said it was sad that Miss Bailey had felt compelled to leave her home town.

In February Sir Robert Francis QC published his final report into Mid Staffordshire which said the trust had put corporate self-interest ahead of patients.

The public inquiry cost £13million.

SOURCE






The British woman who accused a stranger she found on Facebook of rape - and how it ruined her victim's life


False rape allegations are rife in Britain

Given everything he has been through, one wonders how Philip McDonald can even bring himself to look at Facebook. True, he’s hyper-conscious about his security settings, but then, so would you be if you’d endured what he has over the past two years.

For Philip, a polite and quietly spoken 26-year-old father-of-one, was plucked out of the blue by a total stranger who spotted his picture on the social networking site and decided to falsely accuse him of rape.

In an act of inexplicable viciousness, 31-year-old fantasist Linsey Attridge chanced upon a photograph of Philip and his then 14-year-old brother James and used it to back up a story she’d concocted. She’d done it, apparently, in order to win some sympathy with her boyfriend, when she feared his affections were waning.

It led to Philip, a wholly innocent chef, being harassed in the street and shunned at the school gates. He is still fighting, two years later, to salvage his battered reputation.

Philip, speaking for the first time to the Mail, still struggles to articulate the true horror of what happened to him.

‘It’s frightening,’ he says. ‘We have no idea why she picked on us.’

It is Philip’s partner Kelly Fraser, 27, who describes their experience.

‘It was like our lives were a deck of cards and someone just threw the whole lot up in the air and that was our lives for two years,’ she says. ‘We have only just started to pick up the pieces now.’

It was only two weeks ago that Linsey, a single mother, appeared at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, where she admitted a charge of wasting police time.  And her punishment for a callous deceit that besmirched the names of two innocent young men? A risible 200 hours of community service and a social services supervision order.

Neither she, nor the police, have apologised to Philip or James.

The story has led many to ask, quite rightfully, how this could have happened. ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ is the general summary.

Well, it appears you could — if you’re Linsey Attridge, that is.

Philip describes himself as an ordinary ‘family guy’. He has a six-year-old daughter Erin and another baby on the way, and has never been in trouble with the law.  In fact, he has even applied to join the police force twice because he ‘likes helping people’.

He manages a rueful smile as he looks at the photograph that started it all: a close-up of the two brothers, the younger boy’s arm slung companionably over Philip’s shoulder, both staring directly at the camera. Two years ago, it was his profile photograph — the first image people see when visiting his Facebook page.

‘It was taken at a party,’ he says. ‘It was a wedding thing at my mum’s neighbour’s house.’

He had no inkling — and who would — that one night in August 2011, Attridge, sitting at her laptop, barely a mile away on the outskirts of Aberdeen, would alight on that photograph, as she trawled Facebook, looking for faces to fit a story that was in its entirety a figment of her imagination.

She’d claimed two men had broken into the home she shared with her boyfriend Nick Smith while he was away playing football.

The men, she said, subjected her to a brutal attack — she even punched herself in the face and ripped her clothing to make her tale more credible.

When, a few days later, two plain clothes police officers walked into the city centre cafe where Philip worked, he assumed they wanted some breakfast.

‘Then they shouted: “Philip McDonald”, and I said: “Yeah, that’s me,” and they said: “It’s CID, we want to speak to you”,’ he recalls.

Philip, totally unaware that he was in any trouble, was unperturbed. It was only when the detectives said there was an investigation that also involved his brother and that they needed to go to the police station that he began to panic.

‘They told me stuff in the car about the allegation of rape. I was completely shocked and burst into tears.’

Unknown to Philip, his brother, a student at a residential school for teenagers with behavioural problems, had been taken in handcuffs from his mother’s home half an hour earlier.

He recalls how frightened he was during the five hours in which he was questioned, fingerprinted and swabbed for DNA.

‘My life is clear, I’ve had no dealings with the police whatsoever,’ he says. ‘I was just panicking, panicking . . .

‘It was when they mentioned that it was such-and-such a day that I calmed down. I told them I was putting my daughter to sleep at that time. I had an alibi. Kelly’s family were there and everyone vouched for me, saying: “He was putting his daughter to bed.”

‘They finally released me at about half past two in the afternoon and said: “We will get back in touch with you.”

Kelly, who was alerted to the brothers’ arrest by their mother, picks up the story.  ‘I just felt utterly sick when I heard what the allegation was. No one can know how that feels unless they have been there.

‘When something like that happens, your mind goes into overtime, you don’t know what to believe. He could have lost his job, his family.

‘It’s a good job I’ve been with Philip for so long and not just a few months. I just knew he wouldn’t have done that.’

Philip and Kelly, who met at school and started their family aged 18, wish they knew why a blonde-haired stranger they had never met — indeed they’ve still only seen her in photographs — dropped such a grenade into their lives.

It took two months for the fiction she had concocted to fall apart, during which time Linsey submitted herself to the rigours of forensic investigation — intimate physical examinations, tests for sexually transmitted diseases, the kind of scrutiny that women who have genuinely been raped endure because they want justice.

Throughout this process, Linsey sobbed, shook with fright and even made herself sick to hoodwink the female friend supporting her through her ‘ordeal’.

Out in the real world, Philip’s ordeal was much worse: ‘He got harassed in the street; even in the school grounds parents were looking him up and down,’ remembers Kelly. ‘It was just horrible. I’m sure people were looking at me thinking “What is she still doing with him?” ’

The whispering at the gates of their daughter’s school became so unbearable that they withdrew her, moving her to another school where the pupils and parents knew nothing of Philip’s arrest.

‘We could tell what people were thinking by the way they were looking at us,’ says Kelly.

‘That’s why we ended up putting her in another school. That was hard.’

‘Why would you do something like that? How many lives has she ruined? I wonder if she realises that it was a little girl’s life she ruined, too?’

They are not alone. In a different part of the city, kickboxing instructor Nick Smith, 32, gives a disbelieving shake of his head as he recalls how he was taken in by his ex-girlfriend Linsey, who spent more than a year living under his roof while he supported her and her daughter.

‘I look back and see so many things and think: “What an idiot”,’ he says.

‘The things she put me through, the things she put those guys through. They didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that. There are very few people she didn’t convince.’

Strangely, it was through Facebook that Nick first met Linsey, who grew up in Grangemouth, near Falkirk, with her mother Marion, a seamstress, and father Alexander, a window cleaner.

The family were Jehovah’s Witnesses and Nick wonders whether her strict religious upbringing shaped the woman Linsey became.

‘When she left the faith, she told me her family stopped speaking to her for a time, but that may not even be true. I’ve met them and they are all nice people.’

Linsey married financial advisor Gary Attridge in 2008 in a civil ceremony, with her sister Julie as bridesmaid. This was followed by a rainy honeymoon in Malta.

A daughter, Emily, swiftly followed. But by 2010, the marriage was on the rocks and she found Nick online, perhaps attracted by photographs of a good-looking, fit young man. She left Grangemouth and moved to be with Nick in Aberdeen.

By the summer of 2011, that relationship was also in pieces. Linsey, says Nick, had sex with a friend of his in his home, while he lay sleeping upstairs.

The couple separated after Linsey confessed, but Nick allowed Linsey and her daughter to stay in his home to give the child some stability. ‘We were two people living in a house for the sake of a young girl who needed stability. I had formed a strong bond with Emily, to the point where it was me she came to if she hurt herself. She even called me Daddy.’

It was against this backdrop that the fiction began. Linsey was desperate to save her relationship and pretended she’d been attacked, presumably to garner sympathy from Nick. Little of the saga was revealed in court, but the Mail has learned that Linsey heaped lie upon lie.

She didn’t immediately claim rape, first saying that she’d been attacked, and only embellishing her tale — to garner more sympathy perhaps — a few days later.

Next she claimed that Nick’s friends, transport manager Raymond Henderson and his wife Tanya, and their two daughters aged eight and six, who supported her through her apparent ordeal, were going to be targeted by the ‘bad men’.

There were reports, presumably generated by Linsey, that men matching the description of the ‘rapists’ had been seen near the Hendersons’ home and they were forced to move into a hotel, on police advice, for their safety for a week.

Meanwhile, it was a terrified Tanya Henderson who listened to Linsey as she sobbed. It was also Tanya who accompanied her to the subsequent medical examination.

‘They actually had to stop the medical a few times,’ says Tanya with disgust. ‘She felt faint, she went to be sick . . . the things she put herself through. We went and got a pregnancy test, tests for Hepatitis C, Aids. The woman deserves an Oscar, she was such a good actress.’

By the time the pack of lies fell apart in October 2011, all concerned had begun to suspect Linsey’s tale. But no one dared question the account of a woman who claimed she had been raped.

After all, as Tanya says: ‘Who makes that up?’

In the end, it was when Linsey again harmed herself and attempted to lay the blame at Nick’s door that the lies came crashing down. She could no longer sustain the fiction and the police were called.

Philip was back in the cafe, working, when the police came calling again.  ‘All they said was: “You’re in the clear.” No apology. Nothing.’

Philip and Kelly are not the only ones left reeling by the web of deceit Linsey Attridge wove around their lives.

Linsey’s former friends Tanya and Ray are still understandably furious at how they were taken in. ‘I was livid and just talking about it now, I feel angry at the pain she has caused, at what she has done to my family, to Nick, to two guys. So many lives have been affected,’ says Ray.

‘Those poor guys were innocent, and they will have to live with the stigma that she attached to them for the rest of their lives,’ adds Tanya.

And what, you might ask, of Linsey Attridge?  The young mother is back living in Grangemouth, 130 miles south of the scene of her deceit.  A man answered the door when the Mail visited her flat and insisted she would not be commenting.

Meanwhile, her mother Marion Black, on her way to collect Linsey’s daughter from nursery school, said: ‘There are two sides to every story and it is not true, what has been written. Linsey has been very upset, this has been a humiliation for her.’

In their modest flat back in Aberdeen, where they are doing their very best to look after their daughter and prepare for a new baby, Philip McDonald and Kelly Fraser are remarkably composed considering all they have been through.

‘I think it actually made us stronger, believe it or not,’ says Kelly.  ‘We had to be strong for Erin. We have to get on with our lives. But talking like this is something Philip needed to do, he needed to get this off his chest, so that people know he and James are innocent.’

Philip, not a man who angers easily, is resigned to the fact that the apology he would like will probably never come. 

‘People like that should be locked up and taught to respect other people and their families,’ he says.  ‘Why is she allowed to walk away? If she’s done this to me and my brother, how many other people are there that she’s made up lies about?’

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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Thursday, June 27, 2013



The love of a Daddy's Girl

The poor woman.  I feel so sorry for her.  But she is the winner in the end.  She obviously had a very close relationship with her father and feels he is still with her.  Try to tell her that fathers don't matter to daughters!



A Michigan wedding photographer has captured the heart-wrenching moment a bride who recently lost the father she adored falls to her knees next to his gravestone on her way to the altar.

Unable to have her dad walk her down the aisle at her June 7 wedding, Paige Eding, 23, requested to make a stop at the cemetery where her father Mark Winia was buried about 18 months ago after he passed away from a severe lung infection aged just 45.

Eding, dressed in her beautiful white gown, was so overcome with emotion standing by her father's grave, she crumbled to the floor - and photographer Kari Wieringa was there to capture the impassioned moment.

Wieringa shared the picture on the Facebook page of her company Zander & Breck Photography a week after the wedding, with Eding's permission, and the image has since gone viral, garnering more than 718,000 likes and being shared on websites like Reddit.

Under the photograph, Wieringa wrote: 'I had the pleasure of photographing this beautiful wedding last weekend. Before any photos were to begin she wanted to make a stop to the cemetery to visit her dad who had recently passed away.

'I'm not much of a crier for those of you who know me, but when she hit her knees, tears streamed down my face. What a beautiful thing to incorporate in her day.'

Eding's entire family was rocked when Winia, a father of four daughters, died unexpectedly in December 2011.

The chef, who coached the Zeeland East High School girls' soccer team, wasn't feeling well one Monday but he still made it to practice.

The next day, though, his illness worsened and he was rushed to Zeeland Community Hospital, then to Spectrum Health's Blodgett campus. There he died on December 14 of what was described as 'a severe pulmonary virus' - essentially a fierce lung infection.

A Facebook page dedicated to his memory paints a clear picture of the love his family, friends and soccer girls - but particularly his four daughters - felt for the man whose life was tragically cut short.

Eding and her three younger siblings, who are from a different relationship, regularly write about their grief for their father on the page.

On December 1, 2012, the 23-year-old wrote: 'Wow Dad. Today I lost it. All day (I) couldn't help thinking about you, every second. And I could not help the steady stream of tears down my cheek. I miss you so much and it hurts like it was just yesterday. Thank goodness for Kevin, and knowing exactly how to comfort and help me. We love and miss you terribly.'

While on April 10, she said in a post: 'Sometimes I have these dreams that things went differently and you are still here with us. Nothing has changed and you are so warm and so real. These dreams I could swear they are real I can almost feel he emotion of them. Then I wake up to reality. I miss you so much dad. It's days like these when I know you will be comforting me because today I'm so broken. Love you.'

Ahead of the wedding on June 7, Eding's mother Robin Leigh Bartz took to the memorial page.  'Today is the day Mark, I will proudly give our daughter away knowing Kevin is a great man, and Paige is an amazing woman, i know you will be there watching, Heather will proudly stand on your behalf,' she wrote. 'Much love, Robin.'

Wieringa's wonderful photograph encapsulates the love Eding felt for her father.  'I wanted it captured,' Eding told The Huffington Post of her trip to Winia's grave that day. 'I wanted to have that lasting memory.'

When they approached the grave, a group of family members who accompanied her hung back, leaving Eding to be alone with her dad.

'It all seemed pretty normal, she looked fine, and so we're standing there and I'm ready to take pictures, and she just fell,' Wieringa said.

Eding added: 'It was a moment of longing and wishing for him. I was so sad that he wasn't there physically ... but I was also joyous. ... Through my family, he still lives inside of each one of us.'

She said the photograph, which some online commentators have labelled 'tacky,' wasn't staged but came from the heart.  'I didn't even know she had the camera to her face,' she told the website. 'Everyone else didn't exist.'

According to Eding, her father would have approved of her new husband, Kevin, and the man has helped her cope with the loss of her dad. When it came to walking down the aisle, Eding's grandfather stepped in to take Winia's place.

Another stunning image Wieringa captured at the wedding was the newlyweds locked in a celebratory kiss.

'I've got my dad and my new husband. If she only took those two photos, I would be happy in life,' Eding said. 'Kevin and my dad, they're so alike. When's the sun's not shining they'll be your sun. It's a quality that I love to remember in my dad and that I'm so lucky to have in my husband.'

SOURCE





Why these squalid cover-ups in Britain? Because no politician dare admit the terrible truth about the NHS

By Melanie Phillips

So now, having had the inquiry into the inquiry that suppressed facts about the failure of the original inquiry, there is to be a further inquiry into the bullying of the woman who tried to blow the whistle on the uselessness — and worse — of the inquirers.

Really, the saga of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has progressed from tragedy through scandal to farce, and has now plumbed astonishing new depths of moral and political squalor.

For at the weekend, after the revelations of the cover-up over deaths from negligence at Morecambe Bay hospitals, we learned just what happened to Kay Sheldon, a non-executive director at the CQC, when she tried to bring to light failings at the regulator which were putting patients’ lives at risk.

And now we also know — just as had been suspected from the start — that the culture of bullying, intimidation and lies in the NHS reached to the very top.

When Ms Sheldon tried to air her concerns that the CQC wasn’t up to the task of uncovering bad practice in hospitals and care homes, her messages to chief executive Cynthia Bower and other board members were not answered, or were stonewalled.

In despair, Ms Sheldon decided to speak out at the public inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire Trust, where 1,200 patients had died needlessly through the incompetence and negligence of the staff.

As a result, the CQC’s chairman, Dame Jo Williams, wrote to then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley asking him to sack her.

Worse still, Ms Sheldon discovered that Dame Jo had commissioned a psychiatric report on her without her permission and that she was described — wholly falsely — as a paranoid schizophrenic.

It was, of course, the old Soviet Union which was given to silencing its critics by certifying them as insane.  The CQC seemed to be run by Stalin on steroids.

But this ruthless approach to dissent went all the way up to the Cabinet. At the weekend, it was revealed that after receiving a CQC report on Ms Sheldon’s Mid Staffs evidence, Andrew Lansley told her he was considering her dismissal.

How shocking that this supposed guardian of the public interest seemed not to have wondered whether Ms Sheldon might be correct and that patients were indeed at risk. Instead, he cavalierly assumed that the very body about which she was complaining must be in the clear.

Further revelations about this cover-up culture in the National Health Service are now coming thick and fast. A former CQC inspector, Amanda Pollard, has claimed she wrote two letters to Ms Bower expressing safety concerns — but was ignored.

Roger Davidson lost his job as the CQC’s head of media and public affairs just before the 2010 General Election after revealing that one quarter of NHS trusts had failed to meet basic hygiene standards.  He was forced to sign a gagging order when he left and was told the CQC was ‘railing against’ his action to ‘highlight issues’.

Sir David Nicholson, the outgoing chief executive of the NHS, who was in charge of Mid Staffs when the scandal began to break, is reported to have spent £2 million on severance packages including gagging orders for 50 staff — which bought their silence about mismanagement.

Now the Labour Party has been dragged into the scandal, too, with claims that the CQC came under pressure from Labour ministers to tone down any criticisms in the run-up to the 2010 election.

The former Labour Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, has denied that he leaned on the CQC to sanitise its criticisms of Morecambe Bay hospitals.

But the then health secretary and now Labour's shadow health spokesman, told the health care regulator in November 2009 that its role was to 'restore public confidence in the NHS'.

And in her own evidence on Mid Staffs, the former CQC chairman Baroness Young said that health ministers — including Mr Burnham — had put the regulator under ‘pressure’ to ‘tone down’ its criticism of hospitals around that period.

This whole disaster goes back to the Gordon Brown government, which merged three failing NHS watchdogs to create the CQC in the teeth of warnings that this was asking for trouble.

The ensuing debacle was not just the result of a botched merger: it reflects an NHS culture which is profoundly, systemically and almost certainly irredeemably rotten.

At the very root lies an appalling litany of serial incompetence, indifference and even cruelty by front-line staff. Let us not forget the dreadful events themselves in Morecambe Bay hospitals, where at least 16 babies and two mothers are estimated to have died through neglect.

And in Mid Staffs, neglect and cruelty reached such a pitch that patients drank from flower vases to relieve their thirst.

Now, 14 more hospitals are being investigated for unusually high death rates. And we know from example after sickening example that too many elderly patients are treated all too frequently with a callousness that defies belief.

While thousands of NHS staff are highly professional and dedicated, far too many have simply lost the ethic of caring.

And these failings are not being addressed; because what rules in the NHS, from top to bottom, is a culture of ruthless unaccountability in which the buck stops nowhere. 

Kay Sheldon refused to be intimidated. For her heroic stand, she deserves a medal.

But the CQC cannot now be put right because the NHS cannot be put right.

For the root of this moral and professional corruption is that the entire bureaucracy of the NHS — up through the Secretary of State to the Prime Minister himself — conspires to tell the public the big lie that the NHS remains a national treasure because no other system matches it for decency and compassion.

In fact, the opposite is true. And until that fact is honestly faced and its consequences translated into a radical rethink of healthcare delivery, the horror voiced in official circles at Morecambe Bay, Mid Staffs and the rest will be no more than crocodile tears.

SOURCE






British government parenting advice is 'corrosive and harmful', report finds

Official Government advice telling people how to bring young children up should be torn up because it is “corrosive and harmful” and can damage family life, a new academic report argues.

The so-called “positive parenting” approach which involves avoiding punishment or even criticism while constantly accentuating the positive can do more harm than good and simply “sets parents up to fail”, it concludes.

In the study, published in the journal Ethics and Education, Helen Reece, an expert in family law at the London School of Economics, argues that the official obsession with being “nice” to children all of the time is “arduous, if not impossible” and can simply destroy the spontaneity of the parent-child relationship.

She argues that in extreme cases it has led to parents involved in contact or care cases being judged against an impossible standard and then unfairly marked down by social workers and even judges with major consequences for the rest of their lives.

In particular she takes aim at the official handbooks published by the Department of Health and given to parents of newborn babies, known as “Birth to Five” which combines practical advice on matters such as feeding with more subjective pronouncements about how to speak to children.

Under the heading “Be positive about the good things”, the guide advises new parents that even if their children’s undisciplined behaviour comes to “dominate everything” they must react by talking about something “good” and encourage children to “be themselves”.

It adds: “Move on to other things that you can both enjoy or feel good about and look for other ways of coping with your feelings.”

In the paper Ms Reece explains: “Arguably more than any other child-rearing resource, it represents the accumulation of official, mainstream, advice about how to discipline children: published by a government department, production and distribution costs are funded publicly. Given the contemporary proliferation of widely divergent childcare advice – an era in which we can choose to be a ‘tiger mother’, an ‘attachment parent’ or the mother of a ‘contented little baby’, as advised by Gina Ford, I am interested in exploring advice that comes with a clear and overt official stamp.”

Examining the advice line by line she concludes: “Positive parenting is hard if not impossible work, setting parents up to fail.

“Another persuasive objection is a concern with how parenting positively may destroy the spontaneity of parent–child interactions: ‘I’m praising my child – check; I’ve got a positive tone of voice – check; I’ve adopted appropriate body language – check.’

“The nub of this point is that it is impossible to tell somebody how to be nice, because the very essence of being nice is that it cannot be forced: coerced kindness is a contradiction.”

She adds: “Its serious consequence is that any shortfall in a child’s behaviour can always be explained by the fact that the parent’s treatment of the child was not positive enough.”

Ms Reece called for the Government to remove advice on such issues from official guidelines while still giving parents important information on matters such as a safe temperature for a baby or nutrition.

“I think to be told how to relate to your child is really corrosive and harmful,” she said.

Dr Dan Poulter, the health minister, said: "We want to do everything we can to support parents in giving their child the very best start in life.

"A new child is a wonderful experience but it can be daunting, especially for first-time parents.

“It is therefore important that all those who care for children have access to the most up to date information and advice.

"The new NHS Information Service for Parents - launched just last year - provides expert, trusted advice for both mothers and fathers and it has proved extremely popular.

"Over 160,000 parents have signed up so far and the feedback we receive is excellent.”

Dr Ellie Lee, director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at Kent University: “The view has become prevalent that bringing up children is far too difficult and too important to be left to mere parents. The main beneficiaries of this have been so-called ‘parenting experts’.

“There is no evidence, however, to suggest Britain’s parents have gained anything from being told that professionals have the answers.

“This article makes some very important points about the dangers of making policies about how to raise children and I hope some politicians will listen to what she is telling them.”

SOURCE






New drive to bring in marriage tax breaks: British PM faces fresh revolt by backbench MPs to enshrine pledge in law

David Cameron is facing a fresh backbench revolt as Tory MPs launched a bid to force him to introduce tax breaks for married couples.

Former Children’s Minister Tim Loughton yesterday introduced plans to enshrine Tory pledges to recognise marriage in the tax system in law.

He said it is ‘long overdue’ that David Cameron made good his pledge to introduce marriage tax breaks and urged the Prime Minister to ‘put our money where his mouth is’.

Mr Loughton said the government needs to act because the measure will support stay-at-home mothers, who have been penalised by other coalition tax moves like child benefit cuts.

The Prime Minister has pledged that a tax break for married couples will be introduced by 2015 and the measure was written into both the last Tory election manifesto and the coalition agreement.

But Tory MPs are concerned that Mr Osborne has been dragging his feet and they want the measure put into law now to convince voters that the measure is ‘not just an afterthought’.

Dozens of Tory MPs are expected to back an amendment to the Chancellor’s Finance Bill, tabled by Mr Loughton yesterday, to force George Osborne’s hand. Mr Loughton said: ‘The Prime Minister has reiterated his huge enthusiasm for marriage.

‘It is long overdue for him to put our money where his mouth is and honour the longstanding Conservative pledge to restore a transferable married couple’s tax allowance and send out a clear message that we value marriage and family socially and financially.

‘There are many hardworking married families or in civil partnerships where one of the parents is working hard at bringing up children in the home. Yet almost uniquely amongst Western economies they receive no recognition in the tax system and many have been big losers from changes to child benefits and other allowances.

'More than 3 years on from our manifesto commitment, it appears no nearer and the patience of many hardworking home based parents is being severely stretched.

‘It is vital that we do not discriminate against those parents who often sacrifice their own careers for the good of their children.’

Under the plan introduced yesterday, transferable tax allowances would be introduced for all married couples - and those in civil partnerships - with at least one child under the age of five living at home.

The tax breaks would be introduced in 2015, giving Mr Osborne time to find the money to pay for the measure.

Under plans previously endorsed by Mr Cameron any member of an eligible couple would be allowed to transfer £750 of their tax-free personal allowance to their partner, reducing their partner’s tax bill. This would be worth £150 a year to basic-rate taxpayers.

But Mr Loughton’s amendment will let the Chancellor set the level of the allowance in future and could change the number of couples who qualify.

That move is designed to maximise the support of MPs who want the principle of married couples tax allowances enshrined in law but who don’t want to force Mr Osborne to spend money the government doesn’t have.

The amendment has the backing of Andrea Leadsom, a leading light in the 2010 intake of Tory MPs.

The campaign group Mothers at Home Matter also endorsed the plan. Spokesman Laura Perrins said: ‘This is a very welcome move to lessen the financial penalties targeted at families who care for their children themselves.

'It is first step to recognising caring duties in the tax system but more needs to be done to lessen the discrimination against them.’

It is highly unusual to seek to amend the government’s Finance Bill, which enshrines Budget tax changes in law. But a large number of MPs are expected to vote for the measure when it is considered at the report stage of the Bill.

With both Labour and the Lib Dems expected to oppose the measure it has little chance of passing.

But Mr Loughton said he expects considerable support from Tory backbenchers, something that could embarrass Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne.

He said: ‘Time is running out to make good on our very clear commitment and the Report Stage of the Finance Bill presents one of the last opportunities to put this important measure on the statute book before the next election.

‘My amendment gives the Chancellor maximum flexibility to do this and I hope he will seize this late opportunity.’

It is the second time that backbenchers have sought to force Mr Cameron to enshrine his pledges in law after the Prime Minister was recently forced to back a Private Members Bill to guarantee an in-out referendum on Europe.

A Treasury spokesman said: ‘The commitment is very clear. We will introduce some form of recognition in the tax and benefits system in this Parliament at the appropriate time.’

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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Wednesday, June 26, 2013




More multiculturalism in Britain:  Unlicensed Algerian cab driver is jailed for rape



An unlicensed taxi driver was jailed for raping a passenger in his car nearly one decade after being cleared of an almost identical attack.  Mohamed Hacene-Chaouch, 46, of Catford, south-east London, took advantage of the drunken 24-year-old woman after she spent a night out in Soho, central London.

The victim had been at a birthday party with friends and was so intoxicated that licensed black cabs had refused to take her home.

By the time the Algerian married father-of-five  picked her up on Tottenham Court Road, she was slipping in and out of consciousness.

Hacene-Chaouch, who was unlicensed and had convictions for touting, drove to her home in Hackney, east London, before the attack. He admitted picking the victim up but claimed no sexual activity could have taken place because he was only parked up for a minute. However, CCTV cameras proved he was lying.

Hacene-Chaouch was convicted of rape following a trial at the Old Bailey, before being jailed for seven years and three months today.

Jurors were not told Hacene-Chaouch had been acquitted of an almost identical attack in the Tottenham Court Road area in 2004.

Sentencing, Judge Wendy Joseph QC told him: ‘It must have been clear to you that she was helplessly and hopelessly drunk. ‘She told you she was so drunk no black cab would take her. It is clear she could hardly stand and was barely able to walk.

'You had positioned yourself where such people as her were found and you knew well that such touting was against the law. I am quite satisfied there was an element of predatory behaviour.

‘She trusted you to take her safely home. She was clearly vulnerable, obviously helpless and in your power. After that attack she suffered panic attacks and had great difficulty in sleeping.

‘She has found it impossible to form any new relationship with a man. She is a straightforward, sensible and practical young woman.

‘She holds out some hope for the future but recognises it will take a long time to get over what happened to her. You refuse to accept the wrong you have done. I have never heard the least scintilla of remorse.’

Before being led down to the cells, Hacene-Chaouch gestured to his wife in the public gallery and said: ‘I am innocent. I never touched her’.

He was convicted of touting for hire on several occasions between 2004 and July 2012. On January 27 this year he was waiting at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road.

The woman had been out for a meal to celebrate a friend’s birthday before joining others at a bar.  She became separated from her friends and was trying to get a cab home when she bumped in Hacene-Chaouch.

She said: ‘I remember having the overwhelming feeling of being alone. I remember being in the car, in the back seat, and going in and out of consciousness. It’s very blurry but I think I got sick in the car and he was upset.’

Hacene-Chaouch stopped at a garage so she could withdraw £25 for the fare before parking up near her home. He then groped her between her legs before forcing her to perform a sex act on him.

She told her flatmate the following morning and the attack was reported to the police. The driver was traced through CCTV from the garage and from the street outside the victim’s flat.

Hacene-Chaouch denied oral rape but was convicted. He was also alleged to have stolen her mobile phone and camera, but a separate theft charge was withdrawn by prosecutors during the trial.

He was banned from operating as a taxi driver for ten years and ordered to pay a £120 surcharge. Hacene-Chaouch will also have to sign on the Sex Offenders Register for life.

SOURCE





A defence of the British social class system

Unlike Alan Milburn, I like the games of class and status because they give point, style and texture to existence

There is something sordid about SM. Its advocates indulge themselves in smutty special pleading to justify their peculiar tastes. I refer not, of course, to sado-masochism, but to that other contemporary vice: social mobility. Or, at least, to fussing about it.

Alan Milburn, a Blair health secretary, is now fussing on behalf of the Government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. Two thirds of correspondents in its latest survey complained that progress in Britain depends on who, rather than what, you know. (Opinion was split, however, on whether their own background had been influential.)

Any advanced culture has class systems: methods of attributing merit to individuals. Once, that merit was determined by how much of Sussex you owned (something which had earlier been determined by how murderously you roughed-up your neighbours).

Britain’s class system was well-established by Chaucer’s day, with its nice hierarchy of yeoman, esquire and “gentilman”. This last category, still with us, was then enhanced by a mobile immigrant. This was an idea: the “gentiluomo” of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, which established an enduring conception of elegance and manners.

Socially, anyone can mobilise to become a gentleman. It’s a matter of talent and desire more than contacts or inheritance. True, education creates the opportunity. Education is capital, a priceless source of immaterial wealth. That’s the point of getting one. Redbrick powered my own record-breaking lap times in the mobility race.

The problem is different: all too often the social mobility argument is not about enhancing opportunity, but inhibiting the exceptional. Exceptionality worries the SM lobby. We have seen this before. Procrustes insisted on making everyone fit his standardised iron bed, using amputation if necessary. Then there is Kurt Vonnegut, whose 1961 short story Harrison Bergeron is set in 2081, and has a Handicapper General whose job is to put masks on beautiful people, attach weights to the athletic and make the intelligent listen to nasty sounds on headsets to impair their superior thinking.

The SM argument is founded in fear and doubt, not good materials for any foundation. Yes, our class system presents many obstacles – but the mobile negotiate them, while the stationary stare dolefully at what stands in their way. If it is true that David Cameron has never spoken to Commissioner Milburn about his role, it may not be because Eton and Stokesley Comprehensive have their cultural differences, but because PM finds AM dull.

Of course things are determined by who you know. Life is a performance, not solitary confinement. But why should this surprise us? Genius might be cultivated in solitude, but its exercise requires a public audience. The same goes for charm and wit. You cannot be charming and witty alone in a room.

As for wealth, I do not know any rich kid who would not have been better off if his banker’s card had been taken away at birth. And while the present cabinet has a lot of sumptuous Etonian bottoms, the school’s pupils have been less mobile in sport, architecture, literature, science, technology and pole-dancing. So c’mon, fusspots.

I like the games of class and status because they give point, style and texture to existence. But if we are to be socially mobile, I want a two-way street. As de Tocqueville knew, a healthy culture can be judged by whether people hope to rise or fear to fall. I want a bit of each. Perhaps more of the latter, since fear is so inspiring. “I’m sorry, Mr Milburn,” I imagine the BA hostess saying. “I know you’re Handicapper General, and you’ve had a government handout for a first-class ticket, but we don’t think you’re suitable.” Down you go. That’s the promise of real social mobility.

SOURCE





DOD Produces Special Poster for Transgender, Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay Pride

On Tuesday, June 25, the U.S. Defense Department will give special recognition to "gay, lesbian and bisexual servicemembers"--as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender civilian workers--for their "dedicated service to our country."

And this year, "Pride Month" at the Defense Department comes with a poster:

The red, white and blue poster -- designed for the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute located at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida -- includes the followiong quotation from President Barack Obama:

"For more than two centuries, we have worked to extend America's promise to all our citizens. Armed Forces have been both a mirror and a catalyst of that progress, and our troops, including gays and lesbians, have given their lives to defend the freedoms and liberties that we cherish as Americans."

OutServe-SLDN, an advocacy group for LGBT military personnel, called it "appropriate and gratifying" that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is following the precedent set in 2012 when then-Secretary Leon Panetta hosted the Pentagon's first LGBT Pride Month.

But the group isn't happy that the DOD memorandum announcing Tuesday's Pride event for gays, lesbians and bisexuals did not mention transgenders in uniform:

"While acknowledging transgender civilian DOD employees, the memorandum notably omits any mention of the contributions of transgender people in uniform -– presumably because transgender people remain barred from service by outdated and obsolete medical regulations.

“Transgender people have served this nation with pride, honor, and distinction –- and continue to do so in the hundreds, if not thousands. It’s past time to honor them for their service and sacrifice, and past time to end the discredited and obsolete practice of forcing them to serve in silence and fear,” said Army veteran and OutServe-SLDN Executive Director Allyson Robinson in a news release issued earlier this month.

LGBT Pride Month is celebrated each June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City that erupted after a police raid on a gay bar.

Tomorrow, the Defense Department will celebrate the December 22, 2010 repeal of the Pentagon's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Homosexuals have been allowed to openly serve in the U.S. military since September 20, 2011.

SOURCE





German Left Attacking critics of Islam

National parliamentarians from Die Linke, Germany's post-communist Left Party, recently presented the federal German government with a Minor Inquiry (Kleine Anfrage or KA) concerning the government's policy towards the conservative German website Politically Incorrect (PI).  This is only the latest effort by left-wing multiculturalists to quash open discussion, and criticism on Islam by designating the discourse "anti-democratic"and "right-wing extremist."

As the online rules of order for the German parliament or Bundestag explain, the KA in Section 104 allows the Bundestag's president to receive questions for the federal government about "certain delineated areas." Normally the president calls upon the government to answer the questions in writing within 14 days, although agreement with the KA authors can extend this time limit. 

As the German-language KA Wikipedia entry explains, this procedure serves as a means of parliamentary control over the government by calling upon it to give account of a given state of affairs.

Die Linke's May 13, 2013, KA (document 17/13573, available in PDF format here) notes that "Islam-hostile internet portals" like PI with its "tens of thousands of visitors daily" and parties such as the Freedom Party (Die Freiheit) and Germany's Pro movement (Pro NRW/Pro Deutschland) "warn against a supposed ‘Islamization of Europe.'"  In PI reader comments, meanwhile, Muslims "are collectively humiliated and denigrated in a racist, xenophobic, insulting, hate-filled, and at times violence-glorifying manner."

Referenced by the KA and previously reported by this author (see here and here), PI and Die Freiheit, with common members such as Michael Stürzenberger, have conducted a petition drive for a referendum to stop a proposed Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (Zentrum für Islams in Europa-München or ZIE-M). 

The KA references a story from the Munich-based German national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung discussing how Stürzenberger commonly compares the Koran with Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and Die Freiheit rallies have featured signs stating "Christ is truth, Muhammad is a lie." Previously reported by this author as well (see here and here), the KA also notes that the Bavarian Office of Constitutional Protection (Verfassungsschutz) has recently begun monitoring Bavarian chapters of PI/Die Freiheit due to "anti-constitutional" sentiments.

A previous August 18, 2011, Die Linke KA (17/6823)  had also dealt with PI/Die Freiheit in the wake of the July 22, 2011, massacre perpetrated in Norway by Anders Behring Brevik.  This earlier KA bemoaned in Germany an "increasing hostility to Islam precisely among high earners and people with high levels of education." In this context "populist and xenophobic campaigns against ‘Islam'" appeared to the "extreme right in Europe" as a "recipe for success for their propaganda" and an "entrance ticket into the political middle." Die Freiheit was one of several attempts to found "anti-Islam parties" while PI had become a "central forum of Islam haters in the German-speaking area."

Yet in citing an article from Berlin's leftwing Tageszeitung (taz), the 2011 KA noted that the federal Verfassungsschutz had not deemed PI's outlook as anti-constitutional given PI's self-professed "pro-Israeli, pro-American" character.  The article noted additionally PI's "emphatic profession of loyalty to the Grundgesetz," Germany's Basic Law or constitution.

The government's answer on September 5, 2011, (17/6910) to the various questions concerning matters such as membership and statements of PI/Die Freiheit and other groups in the 2011 KA continued this analysis. With respect to Die Freiheit, there were "not sufficient indications" to classify Die Freiheit as "rightwing extremist." The "overwhelming majority of PI entries," meanwhile, "made no use of classical rightwing extremist argumentation patterns, but rather was to be situated within the Islam-critical spectrum."

While some PI contributions had "anti-Muslim or in parts even racist content," these were "practically exclusively" in the comments section and were "even there the exception." Thus a "rightwing extremist effort (still) did not allow itself to be discerned" at PI.

Not to be deterred, Die Linke responded on October 31, 2011, with yet another KA (17/7569) about "anti-Muslim agitation" citing several sources such as newspapers warning against PI, Die Freiheit, and other groups.  In this KA, Die Linke indicated that it was not so much interested in a "secret service surveillance of the Islam- and Muslim-hostile scene" by the federal Verfassungschutz as a "societal ostracism of this body of thought just like every other form of racism and anti-Semitism."

Among other questions, Die Linke wanted to know what connections PI had to "religious groupings from the evangelical, dogmatic-Catholic, and old Catholic milieus." The government's response (17/7761) on November 17, 2011, however, reiterated the position taken in 17/6910 and noted that "individual statements" did not suffice to define an entity as "extremist" but rather demanded an "overall observation."

In 17/13573 Die Linke repeated many of its previous questions and inquired whether the federal government still maintains its previous outlook in light of recent Bavarian decisions.  This is the latest Die Linke salvo in an ongoing campaign to bring about a self-proclaimed political "ostracism" of PI/Die Freiheit and other groups. 

Yet the irony was not lost on Stürzenberger, who pointed out to PI that Die Linke, with much of its roots in East Germany's Communist Party, is itself an object of federal Verfassungsschutz surveillance.

The future of a free and open discussion of Islam in Germany seems perilous with the likes of Die Linke, a totalitarian-legacy group, continually demonstrating its propensity to use the German federal government as a tool of intimidation against Islam's critiques.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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Tuesday, June 25, 2013


The sinister reason they're robbing the Guides of God

If this country still had any spirit, tens of thousands of families would this weekend be resigning from the Girl Guides  (or ‘Girlguiding’ as it is now modishly known) and setting up a pro-British, pro-Christian breakaway.

An important youth movement, in which young minds are formed, has been taken over by radical revolutionaries, who plan to cut references to nation and God from the Guide ‘promise’ – a pledge they themselves describe as the organisation’s ‘beating heart’.

They know what they are doing. The same people long ago captured the schools and universities, which are now factories of Left-wing conformism. Now they want the youth movements as well.

But there will be no revolt. This is partly because the New Left are masters of a technique known as ‘salami-slicing’, by which they slowly change the country into somewhere else.

Each individual action is so thin a slice that only a few people will mind, and most will jeer at them for caring. ‘Moral panic!’ they will squawk.

But once enough of these slices have been taken, it is clear that a deep and lasting change has happened. By then it will be too late. People will quickly forget that Girl Guides were ever Christian or patriotic. And the pledge to honour the Queen – which has been kept for now – will go later.

As one of nature’s stroppy non-joiners, I’ve never been a Boy Scout. For me, the joys of the outdoors are overrated.

But I can’t help noticing that youth movements have been hugely important in the political struggles of our age. The Russian Communists and the German National Socialists both banned the Scouts and Guides.

And both Hitler Youth and Communist Pioneers had one thing very much in common – recruits were urged and even ordered to attack the Church. Pioneers jeered at priests in the street and even campaigned against Christmas trees.

Hitler Youths (whose meetings were held at the same time as church services) spied on priests and denounced them for the slightest criticism of the regime.

Hitler knew well what he was up to. To those many German adults who refused to follow him, he sneered: "When an opponent declares “I will not come over to your side”, I say calmly, “Your child belongs to us already ..... what are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community”.’

Or, as the brainwashed Hitler Youth sings in the film Cabaret, ‘tomorrow belongs to me’.

Parents who struggle to bring up children to love God and country know already how true this is, how their young come home from school stuffed with politically correct equality and diversity rubbish and ignorant of our history and tradition. Now the same process will affect the Guides.

Why should this happen? For those who think the Scouts and Guides are too patriotic or too religious, a Left-wing scout movement, the Woodcraft Folk, has long been available. I rather admire them for their independent-minded guts.

Long may the Woodcraft Folk flourish in our free, Christian country, but why should the Girl Guides copy them, and introduce this sickly little pledge of selfishness and squidgy loyalty to their ‘community’?

You’ll have to ask those who appointed Julia Bentley as the organisation’s chief executive. Ms Bentley is a zealous sexual liberationist, condom outreach worker, Blairite commissar and abortion apologist, so what did they expect?

But who, apart from her, actually wants this change? A few months after she was appointed, the Guides sent out a ‘Consultation’ questionnaire. Questions 7, 8 9 and 10 are all about the wording of the promise. I asked, and asked and asked ‘Girlguiding’ to give me figures on how respondents actually answered these questions. They flatly refused to tell me. Draw your own conclusions.

SOURCE





Homosexual violence blamed on conservatives

Events at Tel Aviv’s Barnoar social club for gay youth:

The barest facts are not in dispute: A masked individual entered the youth center the night of August 1, 2009 and started shooting, killing two (a 26-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl), injuring 11 others, then escaping into the night.

“Having insisted for decades that homosexuals are ‘just like everyone else,’ few gay activists in Israel or abroad seem prepared to admit that those ‘everyones’ are bound to include sinners as well as saints.”
The reaction offers a glimpse into the Tel Aviv psyche. Whereas the average foreign observer, Jew or gentile, might automatically guess that the killer was yet another Muslim terrorist, Tel Aviv’s intelligentsia immediately pointed the finger at the Jewish religious right.

After all, liberal secular Jews pointed out, hadn’t Haredi Yishai Schlissel stabbed three marchers during the 2005 Pride Parade in Jerusalem?

And what about equal-opportunity hater Jack Tytell, who, among many other things, once distributed instructions for building “your very own Molotov cocktail,” which he nicknamed the “Schlissel Special”?

Such homophobic ignorance was practically to be expected from those backward (and badly dressed) religious barbarians in Jerusalem—but Tel Aviv? The Barnoar massacre literally hit Israel’s elite where they lived.

Labour and Likud quickly issued official expressions of outrage so laden with the mandatory therapeutic jargon about “tolerance” and “homophobia” that their statements were virtually indistinguishable—a rare (and revealing) display of political unity.

Candlelight vigils popped up across the city, then around the world, culminating in a 20,000-strong rally in Tel Aviv a week after the shooting. A bipartisan array of Knesset members was conspicuously present, including President Shimon Peres himself.

And then…nothing.

That is, until last week, when—just before the annual Tel Aviv Pride Parade—police announced they’d finally arrested four people in connection with the lukewarm case.

One of those detained was Shaul Ganon, Barnoar’s high-profile and very homosexual founder.

Huh?  I struggled to piece together a sensible narrative out of vague, often contradictory English-language versions of Israeli news stories that were written under the constraints of a judge’s short-lived gag order. Eventually, a sordid soap opera emerged out of a “lost in translation” fog:

According to some gay jailhouse snitch, another gay guy—Ganon, it emerged—had molested some underage male who’d been hanging around the center. The victim told some lowlife family member, who got another lowlife to shoot up Barnoar in revenge.

Everyone arrested has since been named publicly, and they’re denying pretty much everything. Ganon first proclaimed his innocence, then admitted to “having sexual contact” with an underage boy—not the boy at the center of the revenge plot, however (who now denies Ganon ever touched him), but with a gay state’s witness whose latter-day jailhouse confession broke the case open.

And a “transgender woman” has just come forward to accuse Ganon of raping her ten years ago when she was still a he.

The only constant throughout this weird saga has been the liberal elite’s unshakable belief that the Barnoar massacre was a homophobic “hate crime,” an overt political act rather than, as now seems apparent, the culmination of a highly personal, almost feudal feud.

Never mind that two of those allegedly involved are gay men themselves, one a well-known hero in the “community.” Those facts don’t fit their well-practiced victimhood narrative, so Israel’s professional left keeps insisting those facts must be wrong.

A common refrain is that acts of revenge target specific individuals, not random strangers who happen to be in the right place at the wrong time. (Have these amateur criminologists ever heard of Sharon Tate, who was innocently subletting that Cielo Drive house from Charles Manson’s real target?)

Their desperation is palpable, and why not? If Ganon really did have sex with a minor at Barnoar, then “right wing” condemnations of a sinister, pedophiliac gay “agenda” will be impossible to dismiss any longer as mere hysteria.

Israel’s gay activists and their straight allies can’t accept that the tragedy they’d lovingly fashioned into a valuable souvenir of their own immaculate victimhood may have been just a sleazy “rape revenge” movie come to life—The Last Gay Youth Club on the Left, perhaps?

SOURCE





Marine Le Pen to face prosecution for comparing Muslims to Nazis

Her father was prosecuted without much effect so this will also be futile, I would think.  She will get a small fine and ignore it.  It will be good for her vote though

Marine Le Pen faces prosecution for comparing Muslim immigration to the Nazi occupation of France after the European Parliament's legal committee recommended that the far-Right leader be stripped of her immunity.

The full parliament is now expected to formally lift her protection from prosecution as an MEP after a vote on the recommendation on July 3, clearing the way for her to face race hate charges in a French court.

Sajjad Karim, a British Tory MEP on the parliament's legal affairs committee, voted in favour Ms Le Pen losing her parliamentary immunity.

"There is a red line between freedom of speech and inciting racial hatred," he said. "I, along with many other MEPs, today voted to drop Ms Le Pen's immunity and I am confident that the majority of the European Parliament will follow our lead in July."

French prosecutors asked the EU assembly last November to lift the French National Front leader's immunity as a lawmaker so she could be prosecuted for remarks likening Islamic prayers to the Nazi occupation.

Ms Le Pen faces charges for comments she made in a speech to National Front supporters in December 2010 when she denounced the holding of Muslim prayers in the streets of France in areas where there are no mosques.

"For those who like to talk about World War II, to talk about occupation, we could talk about, for once, the occupation of our territory. There are no armoured vehicles, no soldiers, but it is an occupation all the same and it weighs on people," she said.

She follows in the footsteps of her father Jean Marie, founder of the French National Front, who was stripped of his legal protection as an MEP to face German Holocaust denials charges in 1998, he had previously been convicted of similar charge in France.

SOURCE






"Protection" of female employees backfiring in Britain

As a mother-of-five and wealthy entrepreneur, she knows only too well how much effort it takes to juggle demanding personal and professional roles.

But Anya Hindmarch has launched a stinging attack on maternity laws – which she believes hinder rather than help women in the workplace.

‘There is a brown envelope  flashing above every woman’s  head in terms of tribunal threat,’ she declared.

The ‘tricky and suffocating’ regulations could force firms to employ men rather than women, Mrs Hindmarch, 45, told MPs. The luxury handbag and accessories company which bears her name counts celebrities such as the Duchess of Cambridge as fans.

Mrs Hindmarch, whose warning of the ‘brown envelope’ refers to the money which can be made from employment tribunals, has also been made one of the Government’s trade ambassadors.

The laws stop bosses from insisting a pregnant employee reveal her plans for maternity leave, such as if and when she will return to work.

They can ask but she is not required to answer and her company must not do anything which could be seen as pressurising her.

Mrs Hindmarch made her  comments when she appeared before the Commons Business Innovation and Skills Committee.

Asked by Labour MP Julie Elliott why she could not have these  types of conversation, she replied: ‘I find myself treading on eggshells and becoming hugely legal. It just feels really wrong.

‘It would be great if you were able to have a sensible chat. I would prefer it to go a stage further. It would work much better for women if they were asked to commit to how long they will take off.’

Even if a female employee planned to take only two months off, her firm has to hire a replacement for a year to cover the maternity leave.

‘You cannot hire someone for two months and keep rehiring,’ said Mrs Hindmarch.

Of her mostly female team of 50, a total of 13 had babies in 2011. But she added: ‘I think it [regulation] could end up working against women, unfortunately.

‘As a woman, a mother-of-five and an employer of a lot of women with children, it would end up making you make a choice between employing a man or a woman.

‘You probably might pick the easier route because the  regulation and consequential cost and eggshell treading would just be too onerous.’

She added: ‘I cannot say strongly enough that any more regulation will cripple this country. We are so over-regulated.’

Maternity rules have changed dramatically in the last decade, allowing women to take up to a year’s leave, with nine months paid, and request flexible working.

The committee’s report into women in the workplace was published yesterday. It called on the Government to highlight companies which encourage flexible working to ‘dispel the myth’ that this is ‘problematic and cannot work’.

Large firms should also publish  pay audits to highlight where large gender pay gaps exist, it added.

A Department for Business spokesman said a new system of shared parental leave was replacing ‘old-fashioned and rigid’ rules.

This allows working couples to choose how they share childcare in the first year after birth, he said.


SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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