I spent Wednesday on a training course, surrounded by social workers. As some of you may know I have been seconded from my job, with a charity professing itself to be the voice of learning disability, to work with the LD team of a London Borough.
The conversation turned, naturally, to public spending cuts but, to the disgust of the youngest attendee, there was broad agreement that Something Needed To Be Done. The Young Socialist produced her week-old iPhone and read out a series of media predictions, how many jobs cut, how many lives ruined, how many ensuing deaths. Eyes rolled, shoulders shrugged, the head of commissioning muttered something about nothing actually having been announced yet.
"Oh really? How many of US sitting here RIGHT NOW are going to lose OUR jobs? A quarter? A HALF?!"
The commissioning head pointed out that she was the only person in the room who was in danger of being cut. The Young Socialist snorted. "We need to fight NOW, not ONE SINGLE CUT can be JUSTIFIED! They'll take us back to the DARK AGES!"
Sardonic sniggers sounded from ever corner of the room. You see, some of us actually work with the most vulnerable people in society, instead of merely Feeling Their Pain. And we've been in the Dark Ages for at least a decade and a half.
I'd been in the Labour Party for about eight years (voted Beckett in '94, it seemed like the right thing to do, but it turned out to be the first in a series of meaningless gestures) when the Valuing People White Paper was published. We'd been waiting years for it, Labour boasted it would lead to fulfilling lives for some of the most vulnerable people in society, rights, independence, choice, inclusion. But how much did they actually value people?
£0.00
The entire project was 'revenue neutral'. No new funding, costs to be met through closing outmoded services. This made Labour's tuition fees look like a paper cut. I tore up my party card and sent it to Number Ten. No reply, but none was expected.
It turned out that Labour needed the money for the self-serving NHS boost. Blair and Brown had already boasted they would double the Grauniad's jobs section, and all of a sudden there were plenty of white-collar jobs for intermediary managers and red tape specialists. A new left-leaning middle class comprised of public sector workers who would always vote Labour in the future to protect their self-interest. This was gerrymandering on a scale that Dame Shirley Porter could only dream of.
In the meantime LD and Elderly care was cut again and again and again. The staff team at the Challenging Behaviour unit where I had my first job is half the size it was in 1997. Staff pay rises have been below inflation for ten consecutive years. Social Services are no better off, indeed the staffing situation is so bad that for many people the only way to get services reviewed is by way of a Safeguarding alert, in other words they have to be abused before anybody thinks they might be in danger.
Like the sexual assault of a woman with Downs in the High Street of a South London Borough, in the week before Christmas. Hundreds of shoppers ignored a group of teenagers as they wrestled the woman to the ground, groped her whilst taunting her for her size, and then ran of with the few quid she had in her purse. Despite being caught on CCTV the CPS wouldn't proceed as the woman's testimony would be torn apart by the dimmest of defence counsel. The youths got sexual awareness counselling, which gave everyone a rosy feeling of faith and completeness....
We all told the young Socialist our tales of woe, neglect, abuse, impoverishment, but she wouldn't listen. It didn't fit her picture. Labour Good, Tory Bad, that's all she needed to know. She was in a mood with us for most of the morning and much of the afternoon, and even went out to her nice Audi to eat her Waitrose sandwich alone during the lunch break. By the time we got to Afternoon Coffee we were hearing how the spending review was taking shape, and then I got a text from my old boss.
"Social care's been announced," I told the room, "two billion..."
"Two billion cuts!" cried the Young Socialist triumphantly "That's much worse than what you were talking about!"
"Increase," said the commissioning head, "two billion increase for social care".
So we started scribbling down what it would mean. Childrens services were first as always , mental health would probably get a slice, as would the elderly. Not that we begrudged that, if dementia services don't get some extra funding soon we may as well reopen the old Long Stay hospitals as battery farms.
But LD would be near the bottom of the pile, as ever, simply because people with learning disabilities don't vote, people with kids do.
The Young Socialist was quiet as a mouse, seething with anger at the devious Tories for increasing spending. We asked her how it would affect her department, but she didn't reply, choosing to go back up to the training room alone.
I could contain myself no longer, and asked "Who IS that dreadful woman?"
"Oh, ignore her. She does the monthly glossy magazine we send out to all the ratepayers."
She, like all of the other thousands who suddenly developed a social conscience when Clegg first buddied with Cameron, have all the moral authority of a public mourner reading a tabloid at Diana's funeral. And people like Dave Prentis, whose union has been absolutely fucking nowhere for all the years that vulnerable people have been suffering unnoticed on the fringes, are building a dirty great bandwagon out of them to drive themselves back to the power they believe is their birthright so they can continue fucking things up in the name of progress
I'm fucking sick of it, where have you been? Yes the cuts are awful, the social housing situation alone will be disastrous , but where have you been? You didn't speak out when the worst off were being robbed, but now the lollipop ladies are under threat you're on the march? To quote Mr Milliband, "Come off it. Let's have a grown-up debate about this." Let's talk about how much YOU want to be taxed, let's put your money where other peoples' mouths are. Stop blaming everyone else, the country's a mess so where have YOU been? And what can YOU do to put it right again?
It's nice you've started caring, we need all the help we can get, but do me a favour will you? Don't start acting like you're Keir bloody Hardie simply because you've suddenly realised that bad things are happening and it's wrong.
Where have you been all these years?
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