More on Perverts

Dear Mrs A¬¬¬¬____,

You ask if she has any disabilities I know of. If I did know of any I would not be able to tell you under disability law and you are not able to ask her. In telling you she has no disabilities I may have committed an offence under discrimination law, and certainly against the spirit of the law, because I have unfairly discriminated in her favour against those with disabilities.

Either way your disclaimer suggests I write “No responsibility… can be accepted for any…inaccuracies … or damage that may result …”. This means I can and may be writing accurately or inaccurately without responsibility. Moreover you have stipulated the information given is confidential. Thus I expect you to talk to no one of what I write. If you have a similar disclaimer exonerating you from responsibility or accuracy and damage caused, you can go ahead. If your disclaimer is confidential, then so much the better; you don’t even need to inform me that your claim to confidentiality is not expected to be honoured.

You ask “Has the candidate been subject to any concerns, where the concern … was unfounded … If so, give details.” I won’t be obliged under law to do this, it is bad law. Moreover such concerns may have been covered by a similar confidentiality clause, similarly provisoed that they need not be accurate, so I would not have been able to give you the details you oblige me to give and may have made them up without the need to accept responsibility for the damage it would cause . But I tell you I have no cause for concern because I, as a decent human being, recommend K____; not because the law demands I tell you – and not – at the same time.

Yours sincerely,

Bill Brookman

Perverts

Dear Mrs A___,

I am sorry I have not found time to reply to the questionnaire about the lovely K____, who, if you have met her, you will know is a wonderful person and excellent for the post.

However the point of the questionnaire is to take a roundabout way of asking do I think she is a paedophile and a pervert. Interestingly those words appear nowhere on the forms but are the only salient points the government has said you must discover. (For the record I am quite sure she is neither; if I thought otherwise I would have let you know without the need of a government law.)

You will be aware that you, I and K____ may be criminally liable if we get any of the form filling wrong. Thus it has a ridiculous disclaimer making it not worth the paper it is written on.

So now you have a dilemma and so does K____ and so do I because she does not deserve this.

I am sorry for this most unsatisfactory state of affairs. It will get better when laws, which largely miss the point (in that the great majority of paedophile cases occur within the family, or people known to the family - by males) hastily made and poorly thought through, to please a prurient press and public demanding instant no-risk fixes; which are enforced by the threat of criminalising those left with bureaucratic tasks which in no way should come within criminal jurisdiction for non-compliance, are found to be unworkable and are repealed.

Yours sincerely,

Bill Brookman

Greek Fable - the financial collapse

If you drove through Southern Europe recently – over the past 15 years – you would have seen, in Greece, Portugal, etc., massive modern roads and infrastructure being built. All this in sleepy southern European Latin type countries who do things differently to Northern Europe.

It was a Stalinism by the back door, (but benign so we didn’t notice. So, not strictly Stalinism, but certainly his “command economy”). It was paid for by Northern Europe by commissars – oops, commissioners. And no one was going to say no – why should they? As all this cash and busyness was poured in, who cares that their sleepy way of laissez-faire is swept away? Why not ride the wave? And who could object? The German technicians will design it, we get to build it, the burgeoning bureaucracies in our own countries mean Poles, Greeks and Portuguese can get cushy jobs.

The problem was that, like in Russia, they didn’t really mean it. Only the North Europeans have all that work ethic stuff to fix and maintain the complexities they themselves create. The southern Europeans were bemusedly in it for the ride.

Well now the pack of cards has tumbled. The retirement they gave themselves at 45 has come to grief.

But it won’t come to grief in quite that cleaning out of the Stygian stable sort of way. The financiers screamed “don’t bail out Greece!” but they did – just as the west bails out the third world in unending, diluting, bloating aid, with all that accompanying disaster – which is another subject.

Should the Tories limit SureStart?

To Andy Reed (MP)’s Facebook

Should the Tories limit SureStart?

SureStart may be a victim of its own success. In the same way that grammar schools were originally for poor boys and, because of their success became bourgeois, so SureStart is desired by many – including those in Andy’s Facebook stream – for whom it was not intended. For SureStart to be justifiably well-funded it must stick to its original brief: To stimulate brain development of those children who are statistically most likely to be the low-achieving, low-functioning and, yes, criminal, members of the next generation.

By stimulating them and supplanting the poor parenting skills that their parents are not giving them – and this should be the case if SureStart is recruiting correctly – these children have a better chance in society and society will get more in return.

In a comprehensive dream stimulated by Tony Blair, for which he is not given credit, these SureStart children are then picked up by schooling, Extended Schools and other initiatives (though Extended Schools was prompted by the Victoria Columbié scandal, not quite part of the original plan). From there they are passed on to Connexions (which hit problems from the start because of hostility from already established agencies).

Organisations like mine www.Billbrookman.co.uk placed ourselves ready to take up structured (predominantly circus) provision with these young people 3 years ago. We could not persuade the powers-that-be to give us this mandate inspite of our clarity of purpose and comprehension of the programme. Perhaps our failure showed that already then the vision was becoming blurred.

Had SureStart/Extended Schools/Connexions et al been allowed to run for 20 years for whom it was intended then we might have been able to see if we had managed to create a country where a whole generation of society destined for the dust-bin would have pulled through.

I cannot give my support to SureStart if it is not true to its purpose. If it is, then I support it.