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Josh
Copyright © 2006-2013, Bishop Hill All rights reserved.
Reader Comments (39)
Brilliant Josh!...I'm off to join UKIP now. (That'll teach my 19 year old adopted son.)
Stunning work, not for the first time either.
Brilliant!
LOL!
It seems Thacker is another Common Purpose apparatchik:
http://order-order.com/2012/11/24/progressive-culture-war-caused-rotheram-ukip-child-catcher/#comments
Nice one Josh. Love the Cat cage.
Did you mean "Rotherhamed", Josh, or was the spelling intentional to suggest being "rammed"?
A silent 'H' as in 'bhastards', maybe?
Good work Josh
The director of childrens whatever thinga ma gig was interviewed on BBC news tonight. Absolutely unrepentent. Thought it was the right thing to do for the children. Where have I heard that said by another left wing spokesperson.?
http://rotherhampolitics.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/joyce-thackers-priority-find-the-whistle-blower/
Michael, yes, exactly right, I thought it might be funnier ;-)
Has anyone asked Gillian Duffy what she thinks about it all?
We have come to take your children - you comment on the Bishop Hill Blog!!!!!
This is all parts of a pattern - I understand that it is a disciplinary offence at the Met Office to utter anything other than a warmist stance. I don't know whether Richard Betts can confirm or deny that?
I understood that pointing out that your models and your theories were not working out was something called "Science" - apparently not.
http://rotherhampolitics.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/joyce-thackers-priority-find-the-whistle-blower/
The comments are interesting, especially about her previous work!
It is worth noting that the odious Ms. Thacker was only following the policy originally stated by the leader of the "Conservative" Party when he referred to UKIP as "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly".
I know those two; they double up as rent and debt collectors, known locally as the “Septic Knuckle Twins”
I wonder if a social worker can be sacked for joining UKIP.
Re: Catweazle,
So you are equating the disparaging comments, by the leader of one political party about the members of another, with entering somebody's home and removing children under their care due to their political affiliations?
Political parties are in competition with each other, they will always be offering up disparaging remarks about the opposition. This does not make it official government policy.
Anthony Burgess is looking like a prophet about now.
Disgusting!!!!
I joined UKIP a while ago.
Most of this is set out in"1984".
As DeHilist has said, a reading of "A Clockwork Orange" will help.
while u feel outraged, here's more fuel. unfortunately a regular troll (one or more persons who use the name brookes has hijacked the comments) but am sure u can ignore him/them:
JoanneNova: BREAKING: Skeptics equated to pedophiles — Robyn Williams ABC. Time to protest
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/11/breaking-skeptics-are-like-paedophiles-drug-robyn-williams-abc-time-to-protest/#comment-1187971
Catweazle; Thacker is allegedly another Common Purpose drone, like CP Cameron promoted for having the lack of intelligence not to resist the Scientology-lite programming of CP.
These people are not leaders but control by paper work and cunning. Ar least the freemasons have decent minds, but CP requires you to accept the 'consensus' and support the windmills and multiculturalism so the EU can control a hollow shell of a depressed province led by quislings.
Bishop your book Hide the decline has been Hacked at the Amazon end
I download it with Paypal the Epub system
Thought the PDF was a bit to small
Opened it up it was a load of Climate Change Propaganda S..t.
I got this OCR program that converts text to Audio (brilliant for porno stories)
Some say Dyslexia its just lazyness really.
Hope they hack they try and hack my credit card do the B---stards for online fraud.
Dont worry about the £7.30.I will just order the Paperback.
Better delete this one dont give them the satisfaction .
The Cheka is reinvented as the KGB, the Abwehr becomes the Stasi. In the UK what has happened in the adoption business is that simple minded and ignorant racist attitudes have survived intact and become called by the name of multi culturalism and are proclaimed by local government officials who evidently have no idea of the implications of what they are saying.
The underlying idea is that there is something we can call racial biology, and that it is destiny. Race is supposed to be identifiable in the most obvious case through skin colour. Then by extension, we have a concept of race which extends to ethnic origins, and that too is destiny. Every country, and perhaps some religious groups within a country, even some regions, is supposed to have a distinct identity which is destiny.
In the name of respecting this identity, we clearly have to segregate children. We must ensure that children are brought up by people of the same race, ethnicity or perhaps in some cases religion. Clearly it is important not to have black or white skinned children in households of different skin colour. They will after all be of different races, which means different cultures, and this is wrong.
The underlying attitude is no different from Apartheid era South Africa or the old American South. The underlying attitude is one that says there is something wrong with people of these so called different races closely associating. Skin colour is sufficiently determinative of identity that only people of the same skin colour can possibly give a child what it needs. You see the implication? Skin colour, not our common humanity, determines more than anything else what we need.
Press a little and you will see it. What exactly is it that this brown or black child needs that white parents cannot or will not give it? It will not be brought up with its own culture? What exactly is that, then?
And we will end up with an embarassed recital of the old stereotypes as the speaker gets more and more uneasy, vaguely realising they are being led to a place they do not want to go.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238075/Social-workers-tried-colour-match-beautiful-baby-like-pot-Dulux-paint-Foster-parents-say-happiness-tempered-memory-bitter-battle-Sasha.html
Sorry Bish not Amazon its the E-Junkie Download they, ve done
Still working fine as far as I can see.
Well said Michel.
What they do with children from black/white marriages who come in all sorts of different shades beggars the imagination - or indeed with children from mixed religious or international marriages.
The notion that 'race' or culture or religion or nationality is destiny is profoundly disturbing.
Eternal Optimist - According to the linked interview she said they wouldn't ask a social worker. We know who is one of us you know.
This is Thought crime:
http://tomwinnifrith.com/articles/1522/thoughtcrime-in-rotherham-social-services-2012-1984-is-finally-here-the-ukip-foster-parents
The worst thing about this is that in the minds of the ignorant and racist local government officials, there is such a thing as black culture. Because skin colour is so important to them that it blocks out everything else, they can't see that there are genuinely different cultures of different African groups - there is no such thing as 'black culture". There's Yoruba, Xhosa, Zulu... If that were even important.
But as far as they are concerned, all blacks are just, well, black. What else is there? Classic projection
As someone who has a Hungarian wife and bilingual kids brought up in a such a household, I am quite sensitive to these situations.
Culture is never static. Even Arab culture has changed.
This is racism, yet if you said that to Rotheram council they would never comprehend.
I have been subjective to racism, as has my eldest son. This is no different.
Treat people as you find them, not as you "see" them...
UKIP's Facebook says their Rotherham campaign office had 50 walk-ins this morning wanting to join up.
Bit late I know - but just to say - brilliant, Josh....!
Sorry to demur (again), but I think this is all a bit up the creek. Personally I am perfectly prepared to accept that in this particular case some social workers may have made a bad call, for bad reasons. But the fact of the matter is that we are not privy to all the details of the decision-making process, so those of you who are getting upset are simply fanning your own vanity. The tabloid version of the tale may turn out to be right: but as yet there's not quite enough information to know for sure.
Although many of you seem to be delighted to bash social workers as and when newspapers supplying limited quantities of information (often contradicting their own earlier criticisms of previous failures in child protection) tell you to, there's a problem here. When the social workers get child protection right, you don't hear about it: success means normality, and 'child safe with fosterers / adoptive parents' is not a news story. In most child protection cases, the social workers do get it right, and we end up with happy kids and happy adults -- or as happy as a regular experience of normality allows. Your collective assumptions about what's wrong with this particular situation are therefore wilfully deluded, because they are based on a total failure to engage with the totality of the processes about which you're complaining. It's a bit like complaining about climate change because it happens to be a hot afternoon. Again, I'm not saying a grotesque wrongdoing hasn't been committed: I'm talking about the general tone of your conclusions.
Large numbers of adoptions fail. In most (if not all) cases this is the direct result of the adults concerned not having the right mindset to deal with the responsibility of fostering / adoption. Good fosterers are not necessarily good adoptive parents. The roles are different, with different demands. The schemes for selecting fosterers and adoptive parents are designed to weed out as many of those who won't make it as possible. The failure rate shows that this doesn't work -- it can't -- but the social workers and psychologists have a lot of experience, and try to do the best possible job they can. The specialists I met when I did my own potential adopter's course were absolutely fantastic: the state of the art in child psychology, and the general understanding of the long-term results of adoption in different circumstances is now far better than it used to be. (Which isn't to say, once more, that terrible mistakes aren't made, as a result of stupidity or good intentions gone awry).
One of the things that is now recognised is that since most children going to foster-homes and adoption are old enough to have a sense of their own identity, this identity cannot simply be overwritten. You don't change kids' names, you don't get to remake them as something that they're not, you don't get to deny their past: because when you do, things are more likely to go wrong. In most cases, children of all ages benefit from the maintenance of some degree of contact with their former lives. Additionally, great lengths are gone to, to make sure that where possible they are placed with families where they won't be too conspicuously different and where their 'real' background won't be continually commented upon or inquired about by people they encounter in everyday life. This is not simply about race: the matching process is carefully managed, to make sure that there's as good a fit as possible between the child and the adults, and that all the time that the child is growing up they'll be with people who are happy to help them understand who they are. In this respect, adoptive parents have to work harder than biological parents. It never stops. It's partly about making a bond that will work in the long run, and trying not to subject it to too many strains above those that are inevitable, but it's also about recognising that the child has another history too, that won't just go away.
It's pretty clear that cross-cultural adoption can work (as we know from people who go to China to find kids), but social services in this country are (theoretically) trying to go for /optimal/ solutions, and enough is now known about this to say that, in general, kids who understand who they are, and have always done so, are more likely to wind up happy years after they were taken away from their biological parents.
Fosterers might not always spend a protracted period with the kids in their care -- many of them are managing emergency situations rather than long-term ones. Adoptive parents have to look after the long-term, and that works best when they have come to terms with and are comfortable with the original cultural background of their kids.
Jonathan:
I've learned a lot from reading this. But what do you make of the fact that the three siblings were placed with their (UKIP supporting) foster parents for eight weeks, then taken away (and split up, according to some reports)? Is this normal? I realise that it may initially have been an emergency so it's a genuine question. Certainly the ex-foster parents don't sound as if they were warned that it could be such a short stint. I fully agree that we don't know what other factors there may have been that could have caused the change after eight weeks. Nor should we know, in the general case. But that could also mean that a decision taken for quite the wrong reason is opaque as the professionals hide behind confidentiality. All it seems to me we can do now is to pray for the inquiry Gove has set up, to get to the bottom of things and to report in the wisest way publicly. Thanks again for speaking from hard-won and valuable experience.
Well, this is the heart of the issue, but not perhaps in the way you think. I emphasise, if the couple concern were good fosterers and appropriate adoptive parents, then it is a disaster that the kids were moved away from them.
Foster care is in most cases only supposed to be temporary, and to last as short a time as possible. In some circumstances adoption is not a viable solution, and long-term fostering therefore becomes necessary. But for most kids who are permanently removed from their biological parents, a stable formal adoption is the desired target. This is different from fostering. Once fosterers are vetted, they can expect to receive children in need at the drop of a hat. Children don’t always stay with their emergency fosterers. So, the simple answer to your question is that it is /not/ unusual for kids to enter and leave the hands of any one set of fosters quite swiftly, and to pass on to other situations as necessary. This is precisely the problem with the system. The goal is simplicity and stability, but stability is not always possible: kids may end up moving several times between fosterers, first to get them out of danger, then to make them safe in a new location, while it is found out whether the parents can sort themselves out, whether an alternative solution is available within the extended biological family, or if adoption will be necessary. But fosterers are in short supply, and there are many children needing emergency help. If it takes a long time for suitable adoptive parents to be found, things can begin to get difficult, and space has to be kept open for new emergencies. The problem here, I think, is the lack of volunteer fosterers.
Meanwhile prospective adoptive parents have to be fully vetted and passed in what is quite rightly an arduous and long process, that has to be confirmed formally by a judge (unbinding and remaking kinship being a rather serious bit of law). Once they’ve been passed by a board including senior and case workers from child protection, adoption, plus child psychologists, a representative adoptive parent and also somebody who has had one of their own children adopted, they are then matched with child or children who need to be adopted.
I have nothing but respect for fosterers, who get elect to provide safe temporary homes for kids in dire need, who will most often arrive suddenly, traumatised, in the middle of the night, at 20 minutes notice – invariably the products of neglect or abuse, but who also love their parents, and do not want to be taken away from them. Fosterers are amazing: but fostering is in a way the problem in this whole system. In the ideal world, children would pass straight from their original home to a permanent adoptive family. This is something that experienced fosterers like the Rotheram couple will no doubt have found frustrating. The uncertainty, and the lack of stability is to be tremendously damaging.
We don’t have all the facts, but what's odd in what /has/ come to light is that the fosterers speak as if in their own minds they had already been vetted and passed as adoptive parents. Fosterers don’t usually talk this way. They are scrupulouly careful about the fact that they are /not/ parents. Adoption is a process which takes longer than 8 weeks to complete. I may be wrong, but I’ve heard no indication that these fosterers had already been ‘passed’ as adoptive parents, let alone adoptive parents for /these/ children. And it seems very strange that a fosterer in these circumstances should be actively encouraging the kids to refer to them as mummy and daddy. Now I don't know exactly what was going on here, but I wonder whether this is where the problem lay. The initial removal of the children to the fosterer’s home would have been dealt with swiftly by a child protection team. It may be that the decision about removing the kids from the fosterers was something that came up once the issue of adoption arose: an adoption team might have looked at the same situation, and the attitude of fosterers very differently indeed. And rightly so.
Brilliantly helpful, thanks. Your final paragraph totally convinces me. Not that you know - but that there are other signs that all was not as it should have been. I wonder how much of this Nigel Farage understood before he went public with the UKIP-only angle. He may of course know things of substance that neither of us do. And - in passing - how nice to talk about something much more important than global warming.