Monday, August 1, 2011

At least Lord Coe is up to speed | Victoria Coren

Sebastian Coe does not like the idea of gymnasts going to raves. He doesn't want them getting E'd off their faces in fields. He doesn't want synchronised swimmers slipping off their nose clips to wang a line of charlie. He doesn't want to see archers on speed.

With all this concern, it sounds like the London Olympics are going to be quite the party.

Michael Stow, head of science and medicine at UK Anti-Doping (the agency responsible for drug testing in British sport) has suggested relaxing the rules on recreational drugs in time for 2012. Good news for the nightclubs of Hackney, if not the street cleaners.

Athletes currently receive an automatic two-year ban if they are found using prohibited stimulants. Mr Stow thinks this penalty is a little draconian when the stimulants are not always intended for cheating.

"More often," he says, "it's a case of them being used in a social setting." That's a charming use of language. A "social setting"? One pictures an array of athletes taking tea on the lawns of a stately home, their muscles rippling under lace gowns and boaters.

"May I offer you a cucumber sandwich?"

"Very kind. Might I pass you the crack pipe?"

"Thank you, I won't. But I wouldn't say no to a spot of LSD and perhaps another slice of that wonderful Dundee cake."

Michael Stow argues that "social" drugs should not necessarily result in the same ban as the cheating type. Retired Olympian Steve Cram says he might be right.

Enter Lord Coe.

"There is no ambiguity," he roared. "You want to be part of this project then don't take drugs. Full stop. There is no place for drugs. You can't mix the message up. It is the morality of the knacker's yard."

Thrilling! I love his certainty, I love his rhetoric; I love his strong, clear, emphatic statement of principle. There is something incredibly seductive, in these nervous, non-committal and focus-groupy times, about a person who knows his own mind and is not afraid to say so.

Most of us feel confused, indecisive and slightly fraudulent as we scurry around pretending to be grown-ups. Lost, flawed and desperate for guidance (or is that just me?), we're suckers for someone who appears to know what's what.

We love the crisp, Tannoyed voice of an airline pilot, the busy sternness of a hospital doctor, the ethical clarity of a vicar or the technical know-how of a visiting builder – all of whom probably feel equally confused and fraudulent underneath, but God bless them for pretending otherwise. Someone in this mess has got to be mother. That's why, however strong the arguments for electoral reform, the British will never go for it because the one thing we don't want is an uncertain coalition. Lucky we haven't… oh.

Reading Michael Stow's arguments, I drifted in my usual fog of moral relativism (Sportsmen should be role models, shouldn't they? Or is that an unjust burden? Drugs ruin lives and bodies, don't they? Or is that hysterical? I'm allowed an opinion, aren't I? Or am I too drug-ignorant to be qualified? Should I wait until I stop waking up in the night in tears for everything I might be screwing up in my own life, holding on to heartfelt faith but doubting my own hopeful actions and inactions, staring my errors and fears and faults and massive life-gambles in the face, praying daily that this bumpy and winding path leads home, before I start judging other people?) until Seb Coe's fearless absolutism burned through like a shaft of sunlight.

For Lord Coe, it's simple. Bend the rules for Olympic athletes? That way, he knows, lies the coke-snorting, drunk-driving, tart-shagging, spit-roasting, injunction-shopping lifestyle of the footballer. No dice. That's one problem solved. Hurray!

Then I turned the page and read that activists are putting posters up all over east London which say "Shariah Controlled Zone: no alcohol, no gambling, no music or concerts, no form of prostitution, no drugs or smoking". I assume these are not intended solely for the incoming athletes.

And I thought: no drugs, I like that. No smoking: bit harsh, I wish they'd just kept it to restaurants. No alcohol: wouldn't be a big problem for me, might feel a bit sorry for those who love a pint, I'd be delighted to compromise on "No drunkenness". No prostitution: unrealistic, better to legalise and tax it for the workers' protection. No gambling: that would be bearable as long as people understood the moral and practical differences between poker, sports betting and casino gaming, which they don't. No music or concerts: don't be so bloody stupid.

And I realised: 1) politically, we all know exactly what we believe, even we limp-liberal relativists who like to see all sides; we cheer strong opining only when it's the expression of what we secretly or unconsciously think already, stated more bravely than we'd dare ourselves.

2) Governments operate exactly like we do, their certainties a boringly predictable product of their environment and experience. Being increasingly made up of career politicians straight out of university, they are rather particular: they do drink, they don't smoke, they fear drugs, they like music, they're deeply conflicted about prostitutes and they don't know the first thing about gambling.

So, I tell myself and anyone with a similar weakness: beware the yearning for clear leadership, for as long as Parliament is so stubbornly homogeneous. It's comforting at home. But until a wider range of social types is in that house, be grateful for every vagueness, every uncertainty and every law they don't make.

Having said that, Sebastian Coe is still right. Obviously the drug rules for athletes should not be softened up. I mean, like, duh.

www.victoriacoren.com


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A letter to … Dad, who needs to start living again

I want to say sorry. Only in these last few awful months have we realised that Mum was ill and life should not have been this way. We were young when she started the indoctrination. My sister and I found it fun; a girly gossip about your family. We bonded through our dislike of your relatives; Mum always keen to tell us some new treat of information that would be layered on our already warped picture of our aunt, your only sibling, and her children.

We lived far away and had no real experience of them. Mum was keen to paint their lives: every detail and decision used by her to show us how wrong they were, that their values were not ours. We started seeing them as a group, never allowed to know them as individuals.

When we were growing up, it was easier for you not to see it. You went along with Mum's plans in exchange for a painless life, not noticing how little contact you had with your family. The times we did see our cousins, our minds were primed only to see the differences, my sister and I picking up each new morsel of shocking behaviour and bringing it back to her like a gift.

Mum wanted you to sever your family ties; not to see your own sister, your nephews. We closed ranks. If only you knew how much hate your wife had and how she was passing that hate on to us.

When your sister died too young, Mum got what she wanted. No more visits. Our cousins almost adults, no more strained family reunions. It was then that she started on you. It was the small things at first; a night out when you had a little too much to drink, an awayday where you bought the wrong tickets at the train station. All compiled in Mum's head, then passed on to my sister and me as clear evidence of your uselessness. She started not going out with you, blaming you for causing her to live like a hermit.

When you retired and started to do all the things you wanted to, she stepped up the campaign. Your cookery lessons were giggled over. Imagine a 65-year-old wanting to learn how to cook! You rekindled a passion for Spanish, but she would not let you carry on, convincing you that it was stupid and pointless. I saw you trying so hard to make her happy, only to be hurt and confused by her constant criticism and icy condemnation.

Mum's breakdown at Christmas caused us to start painfully talking to each other. You were unused to, and unsure of, opening up to your grown-up daughters, initially hesitant to lay blame, reticent about telling us of how sometimes you had feared getting up in the morning in case you did something wrong. A book placed on the wrong shelf, a pan left to bubble over for a second would spell the end of your day, cursed by Mum's disapproval.

And now we know that Mum's mind is ill, and her treatment has begun, we need also to reinstate your life. It took us all so long to see that she had an illness. Dad, I need to you find your love of life again, to play music and sing out loud, to discover new passions and enjoy long forgotten ones, or even just to let the pan boil over. Lots of love, Anna


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Public sector workers need 'discipline and fear', says Oliver Letwin

Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin says he is determined to 'instil' fear among public sector workers to push productivity. Photograph: David Levene

Oliver Letwin, the coalition's policy minister, has revealed the government's determination to instil "fear" among those working in the public sector, who he claimed had failed for the past 20 years to improve their productivity.

Letwin, architect of the coalition's plans to reform public services, told a meeting at the offices of a leading consultancy firm that the public sector had atrophied over the past two decades.

In controversial comments angering teachers, nurses and doctors, he warned that it was only through "some real discipline and some fear" of job losses that excellence would be achieved in the public sector.

Letwin added that some of those running schools and hospitals would not survive the process and that it was an "inevitable and intended" consequence of government policy.

"You can't have room for innovation and the pressure for excellence without having some real discipline and some fear on the part of the providers that things may go wrong if they don't live up to the aims that society as a whole is demanding of them," he said.

"If you have diversity of provision and personal choice and power, some providers will be better and some worse. Inevitably, some will not, whether it's because they can't attract the patient or the pupil, for example, or because they can't get results and hence can't get paid. Some will not survive. It is an inevitable and intended consequence of what we are talking about."

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCSU), reacted angrily to Letwin's comments, describing them as "nonsense".

He added: "Public sector workers are already working in fear – fear of cuts to their job, pension, living standards and of privatisation. Far from improving productivity, the cuts are creating chaos in vital public services."

Letwin was speaking at the launch of a liberal thinktank's report at the London headquarters of KPMG, one of the biggest recipients of government cash, which won the first contract for NHS commissioning following the decision to scrap primary care trusts and further open the health service to private companies.

Letwin's recent white paper on public sector reform had been dismissed as watered down earlier this month amid speculation that the Liberal Democrats had vetoed radical change. But Letwin said on Wednesday that he believed he was prosecuting "the most ambitious set of public service reforms that any government in modern Britain has undertaken", adding that productivity had improved across the economy except in the public sector in the past 20 years.

A spokesman for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said he did not know where Letwin had sourced his figures. However, an ONS analysis that works back to 1997, shows that productivity in public services fell on average by 0.3% a year between 1997 and 2008 because the level of inputs, such as staff and equipment, increased faster than the output, such as operations performed and numbers of pupils taught.

Harriet Harman, Labour's deputy leader, said last night that she did not recognise Letwin's portrayal of the public sector. "Death rates in hospitals have been falling, satisfaction levels have been rising," she said. "What hasn't changed is the Tories' antipathy to public services. And the idea that the way to improve public services is to put fear into those who provide them is absolutely grotesque."

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: "It is widely acknowledged that there is a problem with productivity in public services. The government's policy is to improve it and provide the best value for the taxpayer."


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Knife crime on rise as youth services cut

Knife crime Knife crime in London has increased by almost 10% in the past year as local authorities cut youth services. Photograph: Katie Collins/PA

UK cities should brace themselves for a summer of gang and knife violence as the impact of cuts to youth services takes hold, experts are warning.

Youth violence is already increasing in London. Figures given to the Guardian reveal that serious youth violence increased by 4% year on year across the capital, with a 9.6% hike in knife crime.

There are fears that deep reductions in youth service budgets, particularly to programmes that divert inner-city youths away from gangs and knife crime, could have a devastating impact on crime levels.

Professor John Pitts, who advises several London local authorities on gangs and violent crime, warned that inner cities were likely to experience increased crime as the holidays begin.

"If you cut summer activities for young people as night follows day you will see an increase in crime," he said. "My anxiety is that those gang members who were in school will now be on the streets. Coupled with cuts to the services they use and fewer youth workers who can mediate, those streets will be a lot more dangerous and I would expect the level of crime and violence to rise."

Gang violence, including peer violence against girls and young women, is increasing, he said. "It is getting worse, it is becoming more embedded and more serious – this is not the time to be pulling the plug."

Eight teenagers have died in London already this year, including Negus McLean, 15, who was chased by seven youths on bicycles before being stabbed. Earlier this month Yemurai Kanyangarara, 16, died after being stabbed in the neck – two 15-years-old youths and a 14-year-old boy have since been arrested.

According to Scotland Yard the number of recorded knife-crime injuries in London went up from 941 to 1,070 in the three months between February and April this year compared with the previous three months; victims in the 13-24 age group injured during knife crime increased by more than 30% between 2008-09 and 2010-11.

Youth services, particularly those that prevent gang violence, have been savaged by local authorities because of government-imposed cuts. More than ?100m was removed from local authority services for young people up to March this year, according to the Confederation of Heads of Young People's Services, which surveyed 41 of their members. Budget cuts imposed at the start of the financial year averaged 28%, but some local authorities were cutting 70%, 80% or even 100% of youth services, it said. Almost 3,000 full-time staff who work with youths have been lost.

Universal services such as youth clubs have been hit hardest: 96% of the 41 heads of youth services who responded said club activities would be either reduced or stopped altogether by April next year.

MPs on the education select committee warned parliament last month that "disproportionate budget reductions" could have "dramatic and long-lasting" consequences. Graham Stuart, the select committee's chairman, said the current situation was "damaging" and an increase in crime was "inevitable". He said: "Tim Loughton [the children's minister] has said that cuts to children's services are disproportionate and we agree."

Youth services have been cut in every area of the country. According to the union Unison, Norfolk, Suffolk, Buckinghamshire and Manchester part of a "growing number of local authorities planning to get rid of the youth service altogether". Birmingham is likely to reduce youth services by 50% over the next three years; Haringey and Hull local authorities have cut 75% of its their youth services; Warwickshire is facing an 80% cut; the prime minister's Witney constituency, in Oxfordshire, has closed 20 out of 27 youth centres – there is not a youth service in the country that remains untouched.

At the same time London Councils – a lobbying organisation that promotes the interests of the 32 London boroughs, the City of London, the Metropolitan Police Authority and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority – has warned about the consequences of slashing funding to youth-offending teams by as much as 30% in some boroughs.

And the Youth Justice Board is to be scrapped, leading MPs to warn that the move could prove costly if crime rates rise.

The government hopes the voluntary sector will play a bigger role in tackling the youth violence, announcing ?18m of funding earlier this year to help charities tackle knife, gun and gang crime after Brooke Kinsella, the actress turned knife crime campaigner whose brother Ben was killed in 2008, released a report.

Some charities argue this is not new money, and with 70% of voluntary organisation funding coming from already squeezed local authorities, according to the union Unison, some in the sector fear charities will be unable to provide a comprehensive system.

Smaller charities, while doing positive work, can be unco-ordinated and much effective inter-agency work will be lost, warned Mick Hurley, an adviser to Greater Manchester police on serious youth violence, who was awarded an OBE last year for services to young people.


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Problem solved

My seven-year-old daughter weighs 32kg (five stone). She is not fat, but is tubby and can be greedy. She is my build – overweight, but not grossly so. I don't want to give her a phobia about being overweight but, on the other hand, I don't want her to eat herself into a miserable, fat adulthood with all the related illness that obesity brings. I tell her she needs to eat healthily and should not overeat. I do not ban sweets and crisps, but I do monitor them. Friends say I am far too worried about it and will give her a complex if I tell her not to eat too much. She exercises – dancing three times a week and walks and swims.

What am I to do? If I let her eat what she likes, she will be fat; if I tell her not to eat too much, I will give her a complex.

F, via email

If you go to http://tinyurl.com/3kt8af4 you can input your daughter's age, height and weight to find out her BMI, which will tell you if she is overweight. You will then have a much better idea of whether you have cause to worry.

Then, you can act on this by yourself, or ask your GP for a referral to a nutritionist. I think it is great that you want to your child to be healthy, not overweight, while remaining mindful of not giving her a complex. It is a difficult line to tread but try to make talking about food factual, not emotive.

I spoke to three specialists about your letter. Carlos Gonzalez, a paediatrician, Helen Crawley, reader in nutrition policy at City University, London, and Toni Steer, a public health dietician who works for the Medical Research Council.

All agreed that it is important not to have unhealthy snacks in the house, so the temptation to eat them is not there. Gonzalez and Steer suggested keeping a food diary for a few days, to see what your daughter is eating and when. Steer recommended you note any difficult times of day and plan strategies accordingly. So if your daughter comes in feeling really hungry after school, have some healthy snacks ready. Steer also recommended not being too strict or too permissive, but "authoritative": give your daughter a controlled choice. So, for example: would she like an apple or a banana?

You may also need to look at what, and how, you eat. There is no point telling your daughter to eat healthily if you don't. Do you all sit down to eat together? Do you buy lots of prepared foods (which can contain hidden sugar and fat); do you eat watching TV so that you're not mindful of what you are eating? What size are your portions?

I think it is unrealistic to cut out all sweets and crisps, but try to make healthier choices (high-cocoa rather than milk chocolate, for example). Or go for smaller portions – buy one small bag of crisps not a big family bag.

It is also a good idea to get your daughter involved in all aspects of food: learn about good nutrition together so it is not about "good" or "bad" food; let her choose new fruits and vegetables while shopping, or grow some together. She is also at an age where she can help with cooking. Don't make mealtimes stressful – enjoy the experience. Once your kitchen is full of healthier food, I hope you'll be more relaxed. Make sure she isn't taking in excess calories from fruit juices (fine in moderation) or soft drinks that have little nutritional value.

I note that she is exercising, but don't forget about everyday activities, too: use stairs instead of lifts, walk or cycle to school if possible.

Other than in extreme circumstances, it is never a good idea for a child to lose weight. You simply want them to catch up with their weight so their BMI is in a healthier range. Finally, remember to compliment your daughter, too. I appreciate that you are coming at this from a health point of view, but you don't want your child to think her worth is in her weight, or lack of it.

Two helpful websites are www.nhs.uk/change4life and cwt.org.uk.

Contact Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence


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Cameron accused of breaking pledge on NHS

nhs spending cameron In their manifesto, the Tories promised to increase health spending every year. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty

David Cameron was accused of breaking his biggest pledge at the general election – a guarantee that health spending will increase every year in real terms – after Treasury figures showed a fall in spending in the coalition's first year in government.

Labour accused the government of burying figures in a Treasury document which show that spending on the NHS was cut in real terms to ?101.9bn in the coalition's first year in office from ?102.7bn in Labour's last year in government.

John Healey, the shadow health secretary, said: "David Cameron has broken his NHS pledge. He put up posters pledging to cut the deficit, not the NHS, but we see now that the Tory-led government has already cut spending on the NHS in its first year.

"On top of this cut, Cameron's reckless NHS reorganisation is set to cost ?2bn, money which could be better spent treating patients. And there are more cuts forecast in future years. This proves again what people have seen before: that you can't trust the Tories with the NHS."

Labour criticised the government after figures in the Treasury's Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) for this month showed a cut in NHS spending in real terms from ?102.7bn in 2009-10 to ?101.9bn in 2010-11. The Tories opened their NHS section in their general election manifesto with the words: "We will back the NHS. We will increase health spending every year."

In a question and answer session on 14 June the prime minister said: "I want to make this clear, you know we are not cutting spending on the NHS, we are increasing spending on the NHS. This government took a very big decision, given that the NHS is one of the biggest budgets there is in the country, we took a decision to increase by more than inflation in each year NHS spending."

The Institute for Fiscal Studies gave a cautious endorsement of the Labour interpretation of the figures. It said that "NHS (Health)" spending had increased in cash terms but had fallen, or at the very least been frozen, in real terms.

Rowena Crawford, of the IFS, said: "In reality whether the NHS gets plus 0.0% or minus 0.0% growth in a year makes very little real difference. While one 'breaks the pledge' and the other doesn't, the NHS still essentially faces a real freeze in its budget which it will find very constraining given increases in demand for healthcare and the large real increases in spending it has enjoyed for the past decade or so."

George Osborne hit back last night. He said that the year identified by Healey as the coalition's first year in office – 2010-11 – was in fact the final year of Labour's 2007 spending review.

The chancellor said that he had decided to stick to the Labour plan because he came to office just over a month into the 2010-11 financial year. In his first spending review, outlined in November last year, Osborne said that health spending would increase every year from April 2011.

Osborne said: "This is a massive own goal from Labour – attacking their own NHS spending plans. Under Labour spending plans, NHS spending fell, under this government's spending plans it is projected to rise – people can draw their own conclusions about who they trust on the NHS."

Labour hopes that the apparent breach of the Tories' election pledge will put further pressure on the government, which was forced to pause its NHS changes in the spring. But the IFS said it was not surprised by the fall.

Crawford said: "That NHS spending may be lower than it was last year in real terms I'm not sure is particularly surprising. I think the Treasury have previously indicated that they were expecting an NHS underspend in 2010-11."


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Public sector workers 'frogmarched' into strike action over pensions

public sector strikes Unions say public sector workers are being forced into further strike action after the details of pension contribution increases were announced. Photograph: Sang Tan/AP

Leaders of teachers, nurses, civil servants, firefighters and other public sector workers claimed they were being "frogmarched" into co-ordinated strike action after the Treasury took the surprise step of setting out in detail how much individuals will have to pay in contributions to their pension schemes from next April.

The overall cost of ?1.2bn is broadly as expected, but senior union sources said "we had no warning of this co-ordinated announcement for each scheme, or that it would be leaked to the Telegraph and the Sun laced with the usual rhetoric about 'gold-plated pensions'."

Union leaders said they were convinced some ministers, including Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and health secretary Andrew Lansley, remain committed to a negotiated settlement before the new regime is introduced next April, but they questioned whether Treasury ministers were only interested in cash savings.

There was frustration at a recent Liberal Democrat away day for MPs that the party, including Treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander, had found themselves cast in the role of bearer of bad news to the public.

Brian Strutton, national secretary for public services at the GMB union, and one of the negotiators in recent talks, said Alexander had "spiked" the discussions for the second time in two months. "Is the government trying to negotiate or frogmarch us into a dispute?"

He added: "In the past, if somebody had asked me, it was 50/50 whether we solved this through negotiation or not. That balance has now significantly changed and it is 60/40 against us being able to reach a negotiated outcome, which makes the prospect of industrial action in the autumn much more likely."

Alexander said the proposals protected low-paid workers, and ensured a better balance between what taxpayers and workers contributed. Around 750,000 workers should pay nothing extra and another one million should pay no more than 1.5% extra. Talks on specific schemes, such as those in local government and the NHS, will lead to more proposals by the end of October on how further savings of ?2.3bn in 2013/14 and ?2.8bn in 2014/15 can be made.

Under the proposed changes to be introduced next year, nurses and classroom teachers earning ?25,700 will pay an extra ?10 a month for their pension, an NHS consultant on ?130,000 will pay an extra ?152 a month, while civil servants will see their contributions rise by between ?20 and ?140 a month.

Teachers in the most typical pay band – ?32,000 to ?39,999 a year – will see their contributions rise from 6.4% to 7.6%.

"It has nothing to do with the affordability or sustainability of teachers' pensions, it is a tax on teachers to pay for the mistakes of others," said Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers.

Higher up the income scale, teachers earning ?50,000 would be expected to pay an additional ?696 a year, civil servants ?684 and those working in the NHS would be set for a ?768 hike.

Highest earners would face increases of up to ?284 a month – ?3,400 a year more.

In the ?100,000 bracket, civil servants would pay an extra ?2,100 annually, doctors almost ?2,000 and teachers ?1,752.

In the main firefighter pension scheme members would face rises from 11% to 14%, and to 17% for fire officers. The pension age will also rise to 60. The Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack said preliminary arrangements for a strike ballot were being prepared. He said: "This pensions robbery is a crude smash-and-grab raid on firefighter pension rights to help pay for the budget deficit. It is nothing to do with long-term sustainability or affordability."

The greatest savings for the taxpayer will come from the NHS scheme (?530m), followed by the teachers' scheme (?300m) and the civil service (?180m).

Unison leader Dave Prentis accused Alexander of "crude and naive tactics", urging ministers to "stop treating these talks like some kind of playground game".

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: "The unions have absolutely known that this process was going on. The idea that anyone is taken by surprise by this is nonsense."

He said strikes would be "very disappointing" because the government was committed to ensuring that public sector pensions were "among the very best available", adding: "There's still a lot to talk about for the future long-term design of the scheme but there will continue to be, unlike most pension schemes, defined benefit with a guaranteed pension level so no investment risk and they'll be good pensions."


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Buying a sisal bag can make a real difference to Africa's starving millions | John Sentamu

A mother carries sisal A mother carries sisal on her head along with her baby. Growing a cash crop makes a real difference to communities in Africa. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

We have all seen reports of tens of thousands of Somalis in desperate search of food and water. Somalia's foreign minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, has warned that more than 3.5 million people may starve to death and the UN estimates that more than 1.5 million Somalis are internally displaced by hunger – most of them in Mogadishu, but also in neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia.

Images of children starving, of militant regimes and of refugee camps seem an all too familiar and deeply frustrating reoccurrence. Yet again, dozens of experienced local aid organisations are forced to confront "compassion fatigue" as many ask whether Africa is just a bottomless pit into which endless aid is poured, with little to show for it in the end.I have long argued that we need not only to tackle global poverty through charity, but also through practical measures that enable people to help themselves. Is it actually possible to see real progress towards sustainability and a better life for the world's most vulnerable people?

The problems of east Africa are complex, and require a far greater degree of co-ordination than has so far been possible. The political will of national governments, the support of the international community, the engagement of non-governmental organisations, private sector investment and grassroots initiatives are all critical to the success of development.

All too often the international community, or more specifically, the former colonial powers, get blamed for interference, and for the destabilisation and disincentivisation of local initiative in these regions. And yet when children are dying, and food and water need to be provided fast, it is often the international community that is best equipped for a rapid response.

In Britain, we can be encouraged by the swift response from the Department for International Development, and it is my hope that governments of other nations respond as generously – especially countries of the African Union. They cannot vicariously leave it to Kenya and Ethiopia.

But this is not the only response, and not, ultimately, what is needed to secure a better future for the region. In eastern Kenya, the people in most desperate need are often those outside the refugee camps. They see the refugees inside benefiting from World Food Programme handouts, while they struggle to feed themselves and keep their goats and cattle alive. Despite the horrors of life in the camps, there is real security there – the promise of food, water and some medical care.We should not forget there is a real need to ensure that those living on the edge, who year after year must eke out an existence in those dry and barren landscapes, are not forgotten. It is also crucial that people get support locally so that they don't have to make such perilous journeys to find aid.

To those who want to give up on east Africa, I want to say that progress is indeed being made, and much more progress is within reach. It is amazing how much of a long-term difference a small amount of money makes to these local self-help groups. Small, relatively low-cost initiatives can radically alter the future for local communities. Advances depend largely upon local initiative, as churches, co-operatives, NGOs and other institutions equip local people to organise and address the intense challenges.

For example, the Anglican diocese of Mbeere is planning to install water run-off tanks on tin-roofed churches and schools throughout the diocese. Local farmers dig trenches and lay pipes to bring water to their communities. North of Mount Kenya, in the more arid areas, communities must be helped to construct dams and dykes where there are dry river beds, to catch and retain the flash floods when they come. In the very dry areas boreholes and wells provide water for the livestock of nomadic farmers, while churches foster more stable residential communities around their centres where the young and the very old find security and learn some basic horticulture. Along with this goes the challenge of changing the food habits of generations as pastoralists make the shift from cattle to goats, which are better able to withstand drought, and farmers exchange maize for millet or sorghum, more suited to semi-arid conditions.

And yet for the time being there is a continued need for food aid. Currently I hear schoolchildren in these semi-arid areas are faced with being sent home two weeks before the end of term as the schools have no more maize. Maize has more than trebled in price in recent months, and there is simply not enough to go around. Parents don't want their children out of school because they have no food at home either. As the price of maize rises, so the price of meat falls, as the condition of goats and cattle deteriorates with the extreme drought. It is no use trying to sell your goat to buy maize. The economics of survival are tough. We have a responsibility to help.

There are imaginative solutions coming from within Kenya, often piloted by women's co-operative groups. Recognising that more effort must go into ensuring that people in semi-arid areas can use their land for the best, these women's groups have planted sisal to make bags and other items. This is a cash crop which can help to raise their capacity to organise their own lives and plan for the education of their children.

If only we could ban all plastic bags and replace plastic with sisal in as many contexts as possible. Already many are trading their way out of poverty and hunger – there is scope for far more to do so. I would like to see UK supermarkets buying more sisal products from Africa. Sisal grows in very dry conditions and has great potential to raise local income. This would be better for the environment, and better for everyone. I challenge our designers and buyers – for the sake of the hungry, think sisal! Such a small change in behaviour could make a massive difference.

The one unspoken question is what happens if the rains do not fall this October, and if they fail next year too? Climate change is presenting the Horn of Africa with some stark choices. People are dying unnecessarily of hunger and preventable diseases – that is a scandal. But the fact that some choose to ignore the contributing underlying problems is an even greater scandal. It is amazing how much difference local people can make to sustainable development if trusted to put their ideas into practice. Let us be part of a global community in supporting the people of east Africa as they take a series of small steps to raise themselves out of poverty.

The archbishop of York visited Kenya in the post-election crisis in 2008, where hundreds of people were killed and 300,000 people forced from their homes to refugee camps. His chief of staff, the Rev Malcolm Macnaughton, has recently returned from visiting Kenya in July with the Peter Cowley Africa Trust and the Friends of the Diocese of Mbeere. Last Thursday, the archbishop of Canterbury launched an urgent appeal for donations to emergency relief activities in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.


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Bias against obesity 'cost me fight for gastric band'

A doctor checks a patient's weight Tom Condliff says the NHS stigmatises obese people more than smokers. Photograph: Dorling Kindersley/Getty

A 22-stone diabetic who could have just months to live after his health authority refused to pay for him to be fitted with a gastric band has attacked British society for stigmatising obese people more than smokers or heavy drinkers.

Tom Condliff, a 62-year-old former police officer who lives in Talke, Staffordshire, became the first man in Britain to take legal action against his primary care trust under the Human Rights Act.

Condliff argued that North Staffordshire PCT had an obligation to take into account article eight of the act – the right to a private and family life – when making decisions about whether to fund the ?5,500 operation, which has been shown to be more than 80% successful in treating diabetes. The government's Office of Health Economics says the operation pays for itself in a year.

However, three law lords sitting in the Royal Courts of Justice last week rejected the argument. The supreme court also declined to hear an appeal.

"I feel very disappointed by the verdict of both the PCT and the courts," Condliff said in his first interview with a newspaper since the judgment was handed down. "The operation represents very good value for money for the NHS and will save at least ?20,000 a year, given that there is a very good chance it would cure my diabetes."

Condliff became obese because of the drugs he has taken to treat his diabetes, rather than through overeating, according to his lawyers. "It makes me feel very angry," he said. "Until five years ago, I was a fit and healthy man. I have always been about 15 stones and I am 6ft 2in. It wasn't until I started suffering from diabetes that I put on all this weight. I don't overeat; I only have about 500 calories a day.

"In any event, it shouldn't matter. PCTs regularly treat people who have hurt themselves doing dangerous sports, falling over when drunk or after they have smoked all their life. It is ridiculous that obesity is stigmatised in a way that other illnesses aren't."

Condliff's case has shone a light on regional variations in the provision of NHS treatment. Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence stipulate that if a person has a body mass index of 40 or more and has sleep apnoea or type 2 diabetes, they should qualify for the operation on the NHS. Condliff's BMI is 43, but North Staffordshire PCT says it is too low to qualify under its own guidelines.

"It makes me feel very angry and upset," Condliff said. "I live less than a mile from Stoke-on-Trent PCT, which follows the Nice guidelines. If I lived there, I would have had this lifesaving operation years ago. I understand there is a postcode lottery, but I think all PCTs should follow the Nice guidelines. What is the point in having Nice if PCTs don't have to pay any attention to it?"

Medical experts who assessed Condliff in April said he had a year to live if he did not have the operation.

"His quality of life is going downhill rapidly," said Oliver Wright, his solicitor. "He's trapped inside his home and in a lot of pain. He can't sleep and can't take painkillers because his kidney function is so bad. A pain consultant said he should be on morphine."

"I have been holding out hope that somehow I would be able to have the operation that will save my life," Condliff said. "I have been battling with the PCT for years and all of the stress has had a big impact on my health and family life. I am very upset that the courts have rejected my case. I also feel very let down by the NHS. I have paid tax all my life, worked hard in service of my country, in the navy and the police, and now the NHS won't pay ?5,500 to save my life."

Condliff acknowledged that his case would have had important consequences for other people seeking treatment on the NHS if he had been successful. "This case was first and foremost a battle to save my life, but my wife and I were also hopeful that other people might benefit from social factors being taken into account when the NHS considers who to treat," he said.

Paying for private treatment is not possible because only an NHS teaching hospital has the skilled staff to carry out the operation, given his worsening condition. "I don't have the money and I cannot work because I am too ill," Condliff said. "I have tried to borrow the money, but it was simply impossible."

Wright held out the prospect of an appeal to the European court of human rights, but acknowledged that time was against them. "We are very disappointed. He's going to die unless he somehow gets the treatment," he said. "There is no longer uncertainty. The law is very clear. Social factors don't have to be taken into account."


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Somali refugees brave fighting in Mogadishu in hope of UN food aid

Food queue in Mogadishu suburb Despite continued fighting in Mogadishu, thousands of refugees from Somali's drought-hit south are arriving in the capital. Above, refugees queue for food in a camp in the suburbs. Photograph: Mustafa Abdi/AFP/Getty Images

Hit by the worst drought in 60 years, tens of thousands of people are leaving the rural areas of central and southern Somalia for the war-ravaged capital, Mogadishu, where last week the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) started an airlift operation to deliver to 20 feeding centres.

Despite continuing fighting, with troops of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and African Union-led forces battling the Islamic militants of al-Shabaab, more and more people are coming into the city, hoping to find relief from a drought that is affecting 11 million in Somalia alone.

The WFP said it has been able to provide 85,000 meals a day in Mogadishu but with mortar shells frequently hitting civilian areas the TFG military offensive that started last week is likely to hamper the delivery of food.

The UN declared a famine in two southern regions of Somalia on 20 July, but Abdirahman Omar Osman, the Somali government's spokesman, said the emergency is even more serious. Every day about 3,000 people arrive in Ifo, Dagahaley and Hagadera, the three camps at Dadaab in Kenya, which now have more than 380,000 refugees, 100,000 of whom arrived this year.

Barack Obama has said the emergency in east Africa has not had the attention it deserved in the US. Speaking during a meeting with the presidents of Benin, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Niger on Friday, Obama asked Africa to play a bigger role in assisting the people affected by the drought.

The UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs has predicted that famine will spread to all of southern Somalia, parts of which are controlled by al-Shabaab, which banned foreign aid in 2009.

After talks with relief organisations, al-Shabaab has allowed some food to be delivered in the past weeks but so far no regular supplies have reached the areas controlled by the Islamist militants, who are linked to al-Qaida.

Djibouti, eastern Ethiopia and northern Kenya have been badly hit as well. The scale of the crisis has even prompted long-time refugees in Dadaab to join the relief efforts. Mosques and Islamic associations in the camps are collecting food and clothes to give to the newcomers.

"We have also asked the population to give priority to the new refugees at the water points," says Mahmoud Jama Guled, who chairs a section of Ifo camp. He said that in his area one water tank is now serving more than 6,500 families.


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Glasgow's Big Issue sellers document their lives

Underneath a bridge over the River Clyde, Daniel, a vendor for the Big Issue, takes pictures of places he used to sleep. He is one of six vendors from the street paper who took part in a week-long photography workshop. Photograph: Matteo Cardin/Photographers for Hope

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A chilling and cruel tale of two cities | Kevin McKenna

In Escape From New York, John Carpenter's malevolent and under-rated 1981 classic, Manhattan has become a walled penitentiary where America's most violent criminals are deposited and then forgotten. What social structure that exists is administered with extreme prejudice by the Duke, the meanest, baddest, smartest "mutha" in the joint. When the president's plane crashes inside the city limits, Kurt Russell, a Purple Heart hero gone bad, is given 24 hours to rescue his unappreciative leader.

Many who have been enthralled by Carpenter's dystopian vision of law and order in a dim future have observed all sorts of social and apocalyptic messages in the film. Sometimes, though, it's best simply to sit back and enjoy 99 minutes of stygian menace, grotesque humour and the coolest soundtrack in Hollywood history.

Then another set of statistics is released indicating that the north-east of Glasgow has been cast adrift from civilisation and I think of Carpenter's vision. Polite society seems carefully to be walking backwards away from this area of Glasgow in the manner of one who has just encountered an unleashed rottweiler. Last week, we learned that more than a third of people in this benighted area do not have a single school qualification between them – the lowest rating in the UK. Indeed, every one of Glasgow's constituencies was placed below the British average while every Edinburgh constituency appeared in the top third for academic attainment.

Part of the SNP's great four-year confidence trick on the Scottish public is the way it has perfected the art of the vapid and supercilious responses even in the face of a genuinely catastrophic social revelation such as this. "The Scottish government is committed to raising attainment and ambition across the board." Translated, this simply means: "Who cares?"

In each of those countries affected by the Arab Spring, we are told that the people are fed up with corruption, low wages, scarcity of goods and the violence of the security forces. Yet in Syria, Libya, Lebanon and Algeria, adults will live 10 years longer than in parts of Glasgow.

The SNP, though, is simply the latest Scottish and British administration which has disengaged from the problems of this neighbourhood. In the last 30 years, Glasgow's East End has reached a point where it now always records the worst score in every social indicator of poverty and deprivation. Worklessness, life expectancy, cancer, heart disease, knife crime, educational attainment, drug abuse, single-parent families, people claiming benefits – Glasgow's East End is dying a very slow and painful death.

Meanwhile in Edinburgh, there is an edifying vignette of stories that will help us all mind the poverty gap. A couple of publicly funded heritage groups are squabbling over a multimillion redevelopment of one patch: Charlotte Square. It seems that some mews cottages are in the line of fire and this has shaken the Barbouratti to the very depths of their foundation garments. Round the corner, an artist is putting the finishing touches to a 10-year project to depict biblical scenes out of matches and wastepaper. The council has contributed ?120k to this. And down the road (Edinburgh is a very small city), the royal family is preparing to annex the Canongate for a private wedding ceremony of someone who is about 10th in line to the throne. This is expected to cost us around ?500k.

The Edinburgh international festival will begin in earnest next week and will soak up another ?6m of public funds while generating incalculable economic benefits for one of the richest cities in Europe. Scotland's three national galleries, every one of them in Edinburgh, will attract the gaze of many of the festival tourists.

I stand in no one's shadow when it comes to my admiration and love for our capital city and, indeed, I am already organising a couple of wee peregrinations to the Shortbread City for the purposes of getting cultured during the festival. Rarely in the civilised world will you find a community epitomising blight, deprivation and death living so close to one that represents privilege, wealth and beauty. It must be a core responsibility of government to seek ways of bridging this chasm between Scotland's haves and have-nots.

Here, though, is what has been engaging the SNP government while this obscenity on its doorstep has gradually been revealed: a 40-point plan that will jail poor people for singing off-colour songs; fighting the Crown Estates for more revenue and expressing outrage that the Electoral Commission may be put in charge of the independence referendum.

In the weeks ahead, we will encounter more public sector strikes following the announcement of a plan to make workers pay more and work longer for their pensions. We will also be told how the economy of Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, has been gelded by the existence of such a large public sector and its "index-linked" pensions, as if no one is entitled to such a thing these days. We have such a large public sector because many people in Scotland, and especially in Glasgow, are in need of state intervention. They are poor, infirm and live in bad places. The circumstances of poverty and deprivation in many neighbourhoods going back 150 years are congenital. Most of those killed in our two world wars were poor and working class and Glasgow had more of these than most as they had flooded in to satisfy the demands of the ship, steel and coal industries. For decades, they had endured slave wages, crowded slums and no paid holidays.

Their privations funded the lifestyles of the merchant class and built the military hardware that defeated a kaiser and a fuhrer. Generations of poor people who live beyond Glasgow Cross have been viewed as expendable by our governments; it has been no great mischief when they have fallen. There were never any war reparations or rebuilding programmes to make amends for the years of sacrifice of these people and the generations of torture they endured at the hands of those whose fortunes they built.

We have been building a wall around the north-east of Glasgow and soon it will be so tall that we will be spared sight of their squalid little lives. If this government held a poverty summit and ceased its worthless sectarian posturing, and if the plight of our urban poor was made an urgent priority, then it will be entitled to have its independent Scotland.


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Rogue landlords flourish as would-be buyers forced to rent

Slum landlords of the type that enjoyed a boom in the 1980s are again doing brisk business because of major changes sweeping the property market, say housing experts.

Millions of people are being priced out of buying a property as mortgage availability becomes scarce and they struggle to raise a deposit. Latest figures suggest mortgage lending is now a third of what it was at the height of the boom in 2007.

A dearth of social housing, which is under acute pressure as local authority budgets are cut, is also contributing to a lack of affordable accommodation. An increasing number of people have no option but to rent, creating intense competition in the private rental market.

There are now 3.4 million households living in the private rented sector in England, a 40% rise over the past five years and the biggest increase on record, according to new analysis by Shelter. The trend has alarmed the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) whose officers are charged with ensuring the nation's housing stock meets adequate standards.

"People who are in relatively secure jobs but can't afford to buy are moving into the rented sector," said Stephen Battersby, president of the CIEH. "People who have traditionally used the private sector will drop further down the ladder into the hands of the more exploitative, neglectful landlords, if not those who are downright criminal."

The government claims three quarters of private tenants report they are happy with their accommodation, but experts point out that this leaves some 800,000 who have concerns, many with the way they are treated by their landlords.

In the past year, Shelter says it has seen complaints about landlords increase by 23%. Almost nine out of 10 environmental health officers say they have encountered landlords harassing or illegally evicting tenants from their homes. And almost all environmental health officers say they have encountered landlords who persistently ignore their responsibilities, with half believing they do this to make as much money as possible

"A chronic shortage of social housing and more people priced out of the housing market means that renting is fast becoming the only option for thousands of people in this country," said Campbell Robb, the chief executive of Shelter. "Yet our figures show a worrying increase in the number of people seeking help regarding problems with their landlord. It would appear that rogue landlords could be cashing in on this growing market."

Housing charities warn there is very little policing of landlords and the condition of their properties. In 2009, the English Housing Survey identified 1.5m homes in the private rented sector as "non-decent". Of these, 970,000 failed the Decent Home Standard. This has led the CIEH to call for a national register of landlords. "It's a public health issue that affects us all," said Battersby. "The NHS is spending ?800m a year because of poor housing, factor in social costs and it's ?1.5bn."

Environmental health officers working for Local Housing Authorities (LHAs) are responsible for monitoring standards in private properties rented out to benefit claimants. But, according to new evidence obtained by the CIEH under the Freedom of Information Act, four fifths of LHAs have never carried out a prosecution of a landlord.

Cutbacks have prompted fears that this situation is unlikely to improve given the amount of time and manpower a prosecution involves. But experts fear the need to tackle the issue of rogue landlords in the private sector will become more urgent in the coming months. The localism bill currently before parliament allows local authorities to discharge their duties to homeless people by using private rented accommodation, rather than social housing, without the applicant's agreement. Changes to the amount of housing benefit paid to claimants will also have an impact.

"With cuts to housing benefit and changes to the homelessness safety net, we are concerned there will be an influx of people pushed to the bottom end of the private rented sector which will lead to an imbalance between supply and demand for properties," Robb said. "This could see some rogue landlords exploiting the lack of accommodation, with the most vulnerable tenants left with little choice of who to rent from."


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'Kidflation' leaves children counting the cost of rising prices

chocolate bars Sweets, chocolates and soft drinks prices have risen over the last three years, while some families have reduced pocket money. Photograph: Valentin Flauraud

Children have been among the biggest losers in the economic recession because of a huge rise in the cost of items they buy and a reduction in pocket money.

The rate of inflation on goods bought by children, "kidflation", has risen 68% more than retail price inflation over the past three years. While the retail prices index (RPI) has increased 8.5%, kidflation has gone up 14.3%, according to research by Santander and the educational charity Personal Finance Education Group (pfeg).

Children's typical purchases include sweets and chocolates, which have seen a 24% price hike, soft drinks up by 16.2% and the price of children's clothing has risen by 17.4%. Nearly half of children listed sweets, snacks and drinks as the most common things they bought, while one in three named going out with friends or family as a regular use of their money. One in four spent money regularly on games for games consoles such as PlayStations, Nintendo and Wii, which are up by 27%. Telephone costs, which include mobile phones and text messages, have increased by 10.4%.

Nici Audhlam-Gardner, director of banking at Santander, said: "Inflation is generally considered to be something that only affects adults, but it's evident from our research that children have been impacted too while inflation has been creeping up over the past few years.

"Children are seeing the costs of their everyday purchases rising at a very worrying rate, and parents are also being affected by the costs of children's items apparently increasing by more than the standard adult measure of inflation."

To make matters worse, almost half the parents questioned have either reduced or stopped the pocket money they give to their children, or have started making them earn it through work in their home. One in 10 have reduced their children's pocket money, and 2% have stopped it completely. A further 13% have reduced the pocket money they give and now make them work for it, while 21% are making their children earn the money but have not reduced it.

Out of the 500 children who were surveyed, the average amount of pocket money among 10- to 16-year-olds is ?5.50 a week, amounting to ?286 a year. Children aged 10 receive the least amount of pocket money at ?163 a year, while 15-year-olds receive nearly ?400 a year. In 2007, the average pocket money was ?8.01 per week.

Despite this, the research found that nearly 42% of 10-year-olds regularly put their money into a piggy bank or a savings account at a bank, building society or Post Office, but this figure halves to 23% by the time children reach the age of 16.

Gary Millner, director of operations at pfeg, said: "The report emphasises the extra inflationary burden faced by our children in managing their finances and whether we like it or not our children are exposed to more financial decision making now at an earlier age than their parents."

However, recent research by consumer organisation Which? Money has shown that children's attempts to save may be pointless, with many children earning tiny amounts of interest on their savings accounts. Half of banks paid 1% AER or less, with an average rate at 1.01%. The lowest interest was with First Trust Bank's Junior Saver account, which paid just 0.05%- 50p for every ?1,000 saved.


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Sunday, July 31, 2011

'I felt numb – we'd lost our little boy'

Linda Sterry with son Gregor Linda Sterry with her son Gregor, who died shortly after his second birthday.

One of my most treasured memories of my son Gregor is the image of his cheeky face on his second birthday as he pinched icing off his birthday cake. It was 4 March 2009, and we celebrated with a tea party with his four-year-old brother, Ben, and two of their friends. It was the perfect day. Little did we know that less than two weeks later he would go down for his afternoon nap and never wake up.

On the morning of 15 March, Gregor had been out playing in the park. At lunchtime, my husband, Mark, put him to bed for his nap, but when he went to check on him later he wasn't breathing. Mark tried desperately to resuscitate him, while I phoned the emergency services, with Ben clinging on to me asking what was happening.

The paramedics and hospital staff did everything they could, but it soon became clear that Gregor wasn't going to make it. I felt utterly numb – it was like a surreal nightmare. When we were told we had lost our little boy it was as if the world had come crashing down around us. We drove home in a complete daze.

Arriving back, I was stunned to see a police officer guarding the house. We were told it was a crime scene, and that we would need to answer some questions. He didn't know if we would even be allowed back in that night. Just two hours ago, we had been told our child had died, and now this. The officer was clearly inexperienced and didn't know how to speak to us. On top of all this, the police had to take away Gregor's sheets as evidence. It was horrendous.

Soon, two CID officers arrived to question us and all I could think was: I want these men out of my house, so answer their questions and they'll leave. The automatic reaction when a police officer starts questioning you is to feel inexplicably guilty. I was thinking, do they think I've harmed my child? They went through a list of questions about illnesses, what had happened that day, who had been where, and things like that.

Eventually they finished and left, and we had the heartbreaking task of telling Ben what had happened. He was devastated. We told him that the doctors couldn't make Gregor breathe again and he had died. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

After that I was on autopilot. We had a fantastic funeral director who gave me a list of things to do every day, and there were things that I wanted to make sure happened – the situation was distressing enough, so it was very important to me that Gregor's life was celebrated.

For the funeral, I encouraged people to wear their brightest item of clothing and the coffin was covered in daffodils. I had made it clear to friends and family that Ben needed his peers there, and I definitely think having lots of children there helped. But in the days after the funeral, the house felt empty and silent. I desperately missed the sound of a toddler running around.

In some ways Ben's grief and straightforwardness really helped me and I would answer his questions as honestly as I could. A lot were along the lines of: "What do you think happens with such and such?" and I'd say: "I don't know. What do you think?" Two seconds later, he would be asking what was for tea. Children's grief has been described to me as "puddle jumping" and I think that is an amazing analogy. One minute they have their foot in a puddle, then they are straight out again and they won't return to it.

I hadn't lost anyone close before so grief was very new to me. I think helping Ben got me through it. I encouraged him to talk about his brother. He knows what grief feels like, he knows that feeling in his tummy. He says: "I really miss my brother." I'm probably his best counsellor right now. If I thought he needed other support I'd be the first person to seek it, but he is very open. He misses his brother terribly – they shared a room.

I keep loads of photos of Gregor in the house. Images are hard sometimes because they show you what you had, yet they show you what you have lost. But Ben will always be a big brother. Six months after Gregor's death, the first school project he had to do was All About My Family. How tough is that? Especially when children are quite factual and will say: "You don't have a brother."

There have been occasions when I haven't hidden my tears from him. I don't think I could. If he is sobbing in front of me, sometimes I want to cry with him, but the pain and sorrow is a measure of love and showing emotion is a healthy thing. I'd be a lot more worried if he was keeping it all in.

Shortly after Gregor's death, a police officer put a leaflet for the Scottish Cot Death Trust (SCDT) through the door. Cot death hadn't even crossed my mind, so that was a shock. At an initial postmortem, the verdict was "unascertained, pending further investigation". We then had a four-month wait for the cause of death, which was found to be an overwhelming virus. Even though he hadn't had any symptoms, we discovered the virus had infected all Gregor's organs. The paediatrician explained that it was very rare for this to happen in a healthy child and that was hard to deal with.

The police were involved throughout. In Scotland, where we live, the procurator fiscal heads up the investigation, acting like the Crown Prosecution Service in England. They take information from the police and all the other reports and pathology and communicate with the family. Our experience with the procurator fiscal was pretty shabby. The communication was not well co-ordinated and led to a lot of confusion.

But the referral to the SCDT was crucial. I called and spoke to the community services nurse. For the first few months I hadn't cried very much, but I found myself comforting a lot of people who were crying, so it helped to be able to talk things through with her.

The whole thing has been tough for my parents, too. Something like this challenges relationships with your family because, suddenly, the child is experiencing something the parents have not. That has been really difficult, but with the help of counselling I have managed to keep things on track.

In fact, counselling has helped me in a lot of ways. The anxiety I felt back then was overwhelming. I've always been quite self-confident, but my self-esteem was so low that I felt physically sick at the thought of going to work.

I got myself back to work but didn't enjoy being there. Then last November I was made redundant. It was a shock, but I think I probably would have left at some point because I felt I wanted to do something worthwhile.

After I was made redundant, I saw an advert for Vodafone's World of Difference scheme, in which people "donate" themselves to a charity. I was accepted on to the scheme, working with the SCDT running a survey for bereaved families about their experiences. It was almost somehow making good of my pain. It gave me a massive boost. I gained a lot from talking to other parents who had lost children. I had a sense of aloneness that is really hard to explain to people. I was surrounded by friends but I still felt alone in my head. So talking to others who had been through it helped.

Every year brings new challenges and more lie ahead. My approach is to face up to them because, even if Gregor's death couldn't have been prevented, the more people know about how they can reduce the risks of cot death, the better.

A key finding of my survey was inconsistency of care. The biggest problem was that a lot of professionals didn't listen to families. Most acknowledged why the police had to be involved, but sometimes they felt it was done insensitively. For me, it was a really tough thing to cope with on top of everything else. If our son had died in a hospital or hospice, we would have been surrounded with support – instead, we were made to feel guilty. There are huge opportunities for training. I would hope that the local bobby who turned up on my door could be given an insight into being as kind as the law allows.

But it is hard for anyone to know what to say. I gave up protecting other people's feelings a long time ago. If people ask: "Do you have children?" I answer honestly. If I did otherwise, I feel I would be betraying Gregor's memory.

Visit scottishcotdeathtrust.org or fsid.org.uk. Linda's blog is at worldofdifference.vodafone.co.uk/blogs/linda-sterry


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Pauline Black: Going back to my roots

pauline black Pauline Black. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Pauline Black's earliest memory is of throwing up her breakfast in response to the news that she was adopted. It was 1958, in Romford, Essex, and Pauline was four. Until then, she had been in "blithe ignorance" about her origins, despite the fact that she was the only non-white person in her family. She knew her skin colour was different from that of the rest of her family, and that this seemed often to be worthy of negative comments, but she hadn't understood why. "It was something that never came up, I had no notion of it," she says.

Aware that her little girl was about to start school, where questions were bound to be asked, Pauline's mother, Ivy, told her daughter that her "real" mother was a Dagenham schoolgirl and her "real" father was "from a place called Nigeria".

Throughout her childhood, Pauline felt like a "cuckoo, in somebody else's nest," she writes, in her new memoir, Black by Design. It wasn't until 20 years later, when she was lead singer of the 2-Tone band, the Selecter, that she felt she finally belonged somewhere: "Any band is like a surrogate family," she says.

In the 1950s and 60s, Essex was not an easy place to be an adopted mixed-race girl. "It was totally unreconstructed," says Pauline. Her memoir is full of shocking stories, such as her mum telling her she looked "like a bloody golliwog" when she decided to grow an afro. Were Pauline's family racist? "I'm not going to say they were racist – they weren't racist. The word hadn't been invented then. They were xenophobic, absolutely, but that wasn't just confined to black people, that was anybody," she says.

In her 40s, Pauline's mother had developed Bell's palsy, a facial paralysis that made her reluctant to leave the house. The family doctor suggested the 1950s cure-all for depressed women – a baby. As Ivy had had a hysterectomy (after her fourth son), adoption seemed the answer. "The story I was given was that she had difficulty leaving the house and the doctor said, 'What you need is a baby,'" says Pauline. She was fostered and then adopted when she was 18 months old.

Pauline describes her mother as uptight and fearful of the world, but also "home-loving, a woman who loved babies".

How did such a fearful woman come to adopt a black child in the 50s? "I don't think colour really came into it. I don't think they'd actually thought that question through. I think there were only boys around that day and she wanted a girl," says Pauline. Her parents were so unprepared for the arrival of a newborn baby that they didn't have anywhere for her to sleep: "They didn't have anything. They didn't have a cot – I spent the first few weeks of my life in a drawer. This was the family joke," she says.

Pauline's relationship with her mother had become strained by the time she was 11, but she felt more affinity with her father, Arthur, a mechanic, whom she describes as "working-class and proud". "He was a very loving and very open man. I can never consciously remember him saying anything about a black person that was derogatory, but I can remember my brothers and uncles, saying things," she says.

Looking back, Pauline believes her father was a depressive. He used to take to his bed for a week at a time and she would be sent upstairs to cajole him out of his bedroom. How was her parents' relationship? "Pretty weird. I guess they loved each other in their own peculiar little way, but it wasn't all beer and skittles," she says.

Many of Pauline's memories will be familiar to anyone who has grown up adopted, mixed race or black in a white family: the sense of isolation, the alienation, the sheer loneliness of looking and feeling so different from your family, compounded by the guilt of having these feelings and the frustration of not having the vocabulary to express it at the time.

In her book, Pauline likens adoption to a full blood transfusion: "It may save your life in the short term, but if it's not the perfect match, rejection issues may appear," she writes. What would have made things easier? "To have known another black family. To have known other black kids. I needed to know there were black people who had jobs, were living normal lives," she says.

Her mother taught her to fear black people, particularly men: "I suppose all mothers make you scared of men, but black men were definitely bogey men, they got you pregnant, they didn't care, they'd run off and leave you, and if that happened – 'If you revert to type' she was trying to say – then we wash our hands of you."

Does she wish she'd been adopted by a black family? "That would have been better because I'd have had role models. But it isn't who brings you up – a black or mixed-race family could have adopted me and been absolutely dreadful, just like a white family could have been dreadful, but it's the lack of role models," says Pauline.

As she grew older, her relationship with Ivy became uncomfortable: "By the time I was 11, things had changed irreparably and that was because I was more conscious of who I was," says Pauline.

Education created another chasm: "My parents had both left school pretty much by the time they were 12, so I was just allowed to get on with it. By that time I was a very secretive child. I mistrusted adults. I went inside myself."

Even today, wearing a beautiful black silk shirt and looking at least a decade younger than her 58 years, Pauline seems shy and reserved, rather than the exhibitionist one might expect of a stage performer who was arguably the most influential women on the male-dominated 2-Tone music scene.

By the late 60s, early 70s, the American Black Power movement had given Pauline the vocabulary she needed to express herself, often with mixed results. She combed out her hair, wore an afro to school and painted "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" on a poster in her bedroom. This new found pride in her identity infuriated her mother, who was convinced no good would come of it: "She wanted me to be Shirley Bassey – I wanted to be Marsha Hunt."

In 1971, Pauline left Romford for Lancaster Polytechnic (now Coventry University), to study science before training as a radiographer in Coventry. It was around this time that she met her husband, Terry, an engineer – they have been together 38 years, quite an achievement for someone who says she has "little concept of family".

By 1976, Pauline was singing in local pubs, earning ?10 a gig. Then one day in May 1979, she went to a rehearsal with a group of friends and left as the lead singer with the Selecter. A few months later, the band had their first hit, On My Radio. Within seven weeks of being a fully formed band, the Selecter were supporting the likes of Madness and the Specials and Pauline was being hailed as the Queen of Ska.

It was around this time that she changed her surname from Vickers. The name Black came to her after a session with the band – she was naming the elephant in the room, she says: "I thought, that is just absolutely amazing! My family, for the first time, will have to say it," she says.

"[The term] coloured was still used in those times. Black was still an underground thing, and to actually name yourself Black, as far as my family was concerned, was quite a big bone of contention. I don't think I've ever been fully forgiven. If I'd changed my name to Smith, that wouldn't have been quite so bad," she says.

If changing her surname to Black was radical for the time, so too was her androgynous "rude-girl" uniform of a sharp black and/or white suit with a grey fedora.

Though never quite as successful as Madness and the Specials, the Selecter had their own loyal following and a string of UK hits after On My Radio, including Too Much Pressure and Three Minute Hero. What made them different from other bands on the 2-tone scene was not only the fact that they had a black female singer, but there was only one white member, out of a line up of seven. "Madness were all white, there were only two black people in the Specials. And then there was us," says Pauline.

It was a time of racial tension in Britain and it was not uncommon for rightwing skinheads and National Front supporters to launch into sieg heil chants during 2-Tone gigs. Wasn't Pauline disheartened when the music she loved was appropriated by "bonehead skins," as she calls them? "It was never appropriated, they were just there. In Top Rank clubs and Tiffany's, and all those kinds of places, you would have 2,000 people in there and 40, possibly 50 people who sieg-heiled at you that particular night," says Pauline.

How did she deal with it? "I rather naively thought they could be shown the error of their ways. That didn't happen, but we tried. We'd ask the audience: 'Do you want these people in here?' Sometimes that would shame them into shutting up," says Pauline.

When the Selecter broke up in 1982, (they have since reformed and have a new single out this week) Pauline built a successful career as an actor. But in their Top of the Pops heyday, when she was regularly on television and featured in the press, Pauline began to wonder if her birth mother might see her and get in touch.

Out of loyalty to Ivy, Pauline didn't try to trace her birth mother until she was 42, eight years after Ivy's death – her father had died in 1976.

"I knew I couldn't do it while she was alive. It would have been too upsetting for her," she says.

Once she had decided to trace her birth mother, Pauline became "a whirling dervish" of activity. Within a couple of weeks she had found an address and telephone number. This was fast work given that her birth mother, Eileen, was a "?10 Pom", one of the wave of Britons encouraged to emigrate to Australia in the mid-60s – she had left when Pauline was 13 and knew nothing of her daughter's success.

Pauline wrote to Eileen right away and within a week her telephone rang at 5am. When she answered, a woman with a strong Australian accent said: "Darling, it's Mummy."

Eileen told her that her father had been an engineering student who had come to London from Nigeria to study. His name was Gordon Adenle. Pauline hit the phone book and rang every entry under that name. The following day, she found herself in the London flat of Gordon's second wife. She was shown pictures of her father, who, it transpired, was a Yoruba prince. She felt an instant physical connection with him: "It was the strangest thing, walking into the room and there was my father, staring at me, I wasn't prepared for that, at all, or the whole story about him," she says.

Sadly, he had died a year earlier, so he still remains a mystery: "Almost like a fantasy figure," she says.

She has yet to visit Nigeria, although she has met a half sister: "I've tried to talk to people, I've written letters about my father, their impressions of him, but you don't get anywhere ... A cousin went there and photographed my father's grave. That was cathartic because that's a bit like a full stop."

There was, however, a proper reunion with her birth mother. A few weeks after first speaking to Eileen, Pauline stepped off a plane in Sydney to meet her and, as she writes, was "enveloped in 42 years of love".

After the initial euphoria of their reunion, came the hard work of building a relationship. "When you've done with all the introductions – this is my life story, this is your life story, where do you go from there?" she asks.

Reunion is a little bit like a love affair, she says: "For the first two weeks, it's absolutely wonderful. They're the most adorable thing in the world, your heart flutters, you've got so much to learn about each other." Then things become more prosaic: "You've just got to get on with it," says Pauline. (She maintains a good relationship with her four older adoptive brothers, but they have shown little interest in the connections she has made with her birth family.)

Eileen, who writes once a week, told Pauline that she used to stand at the end of her street in Romford and watch her go to school.

What kind of advice would she give anyone who is considering tracing their birth family? "Don't just think about the object of your desire – your birth mother – think about everything that's going to come with it, and think about that quite hard. Be prepared for it. She's going to come with a whole heap of other people and they are going to have a whole heap of other agendas. Be prepared for that, but don't let it stop you," says Pauline.

She thinks not enough is done to support adopted children: "They've addressed the needs of everybody else, but not the child."

She also believes adopted children should have follow-ups with social services and, where possible, contact with birth parents. If it's not possible? "They should have photographs, some sort of family history, who you came out of. You should grow up knowing that – be able to assimilate that – so that by the time you are 18 you're not feeling as though you are bereft or you don't belong to – or never belonged to – something."

Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir, by Pauline Black, is published by Serpent's Tail, ?12.99. To order a copy for ?10.39, including free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846


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Sorry, Jane Horrocks, but it's you who's being common | Barbara Ellen

Jane Horrocks doesn't do things by halves. Some people bite the hand that feeds them, she rips off the whole arm at the shoulder. Or so it seemed with her comment about Tesco being "full of chavs". Not forgetting the "pensioners holding everyone up" and "screeching kids". Wow, such contempt, even though their commercials bought Horrocks the home she dubbed "Tesco Towers" and, as she said herself, gave her the financial security not to have to do "crap" work.

I wasn't surprised. I interviewed Horrocks years ago, presuming she'd be nice, but she was awful. With every question, she eyed me like a cobra weaving up out of a basket. I asked at one point whether she'd ever fancied doing my beloved Corrie, and she was really snotty about it. "Why would I do Coronation Street?" (Erm, because it's a British institution, because it's well written and acted, because the likes of Sir Ian McKellen don't seem to think it's beneath them.)

Shortly after we'd spoken, I got word not to write up the interview, because of lack of space. What a relief. It was as if Horrocks had been given myriad blessings (talent, intelligence, quirky beauty, that engaging Lancashire accent), and instead chose to turn her back on her own working-class background, and become a dreary snob. Talk about going over to the luvvie dark side. On a wider level, how depressing that this is what "doing well" means to some people – the opportunity not to look back in anger, so much as to look around and sneer.

There has always been mockery for people, who bang on about their working-class origins, their impeccable council house credentials – guilty! And I get it, I understand why this kind of thing (competitive retro-poverty?) can seem hilariously overdone, in that Monty Python "We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank" kind of way. The question is, do you "get" us? Do you register that it's not all about chippy chest-beating and mindless class war, great sport though that undoubtedly is?

Rather it's an intricate jumble of memory, insight, respect, affection, identification, and even survivor's guilt. Never mind that some of us feel as if we're only a couple of paychecks from ending up back there anyway. There's the sense of not wanting to forget where you "came from" (maan), because this feels like betraying the people who are still there.

This is why the casual contempt directed at the "masses" never fails to make you flinch. I always thought "common" was the truly offensive C-word, but it was a dark day when "chav" showed up – simply because it was a new way to make sneering sound respectable. These days, Horrocks might think twice about using the word "common", but it's fine to speak of "chavs" marauding around Tesco.

Thing is, I remember Horrocks talking about "Tesco Towers" in our interview, how the commercials freed her to be more choosy with work. Then, as now, there seems nothing wrong with that – I'm sure many actors do commercials for the same reasons. It wasn't Horrocks's view, it was the charmlessness, which I know wasn't a one-off.

It's easy to lampoon those who are misty-eyed for the working class. But I'd still take their good hearts any day, over those who seem to think their success is a free pass to opine on the horror and hilarity of the "lower orders" they once belonged to. Note to Jane Horrocks: the only people who are truly common, are those who stoop so low as to call others common – or chavs, or whatever the hate-lingo is these days. If you don't know that by now, Ms Horrocks, you're as thick as Bubbles, your character in Absolutely Fabulous.

The latest list of the most popular baby names is out. A fascinating barometer of changing times, it's usually studied with shrieking anxiety by parents, hopeful that their children's names aren't positioned too high (too ordinary?) or too low (they're freaks!).

You can tell how "hot" your child's name is by whether it appears on novelty key rings or drinks bottles. Adults also like to check how their own names are doing, but I have no sympathy for the once dominant, now fallen, Susans and Pauls. They have had their moment.

Barbara (and variants thereon) never made it on to popular names' lists, drinks bottles or even those ceramic plaques for the bedroom door.

Barbara was considered tragic and passe when I was born and remained so through many different eras.

There seems no male equivalent to its enduring low-level unpopularity (Barry? Derek? Ken?). Consequently, I love my name, simply because someone has to. It's got two Bs, two Rs and three As; it means "foreign or stranger"; what's not to like?

Obviously I would appreciate a mention of Barbara in the next list, even if it is just a pity party.

Baroness Scotland, chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission for England and Wales, and its child protection chief have said that churchgoers should take Roman Catholic priests to football matches, or invite them to have a glass of wine, as this would stop them feeling "lonely, isolated and unsupported emotionally" and turning into paedophiles. Hmm.

This past year, abuse allegations have doubled against the Catholic church, which Baroness Scotland rightly cites as a positive sign that victims are less afraid to come forward. However, is she seriously suggesting that, if people were more sociable towards priests, the molesters wouldn't be sexually attracted to children any more? That the occasional fun night at the bingo with worshippers would be enough to unravel the complex psychosexual tangle of the average pederast? As in: "Invite me around for Christmas drinks or the kid gets it"?

It's arguable whether loneliness is a reliable indicator of paedophilia. While one could accept the direct link between loneliness and general depression, child abuse seems rather too specialised. Paedophiles often choose professions that give them access to children, also the kind of status that makes them slow to spot and hard to catch. While some may be loners, other paedophiles are gregarious and charming, duping adults as well as children. All this sounds less "isolated" and "unsupported" than chillingly well-organised.

Whether such levels of sickness, calculation and cunning could be neutralised with an invitation to watch a footie match or share a glass of sancerre seems unlikely. Baroness Scotland makes a valid point about the isolation of Catholic priests, but twinning it with paedophile tendencies seems random to say the least. Conviviality is a wonderful thing, but, the last time I looked it wasn't a cure for paedophilia.


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Why I'm calling a pensioners' strike | Brian Schofield

The coalition's war on pensions continues. The latest assault is on the provision for the retirement of public sector employees – who are going to have to pay more to get (probably) less, and later. And not because their pensions funds are financially unsustainable (they're not) but because the pensions on offer just seem too decent, too respectful, in a country where such sentiments are now a luxury. No one else gets a well-managed, reliable employee pension scheme any more, so why should doctors or teachers?

And the war goes wider. There's talk of vicious cuts to the tax relief on private pensions contributions (vigorously denied, for now, but we shall see) and while the plans for the flat weekly state pension of ?140 look enlightened, how long will we have to live before we get the first cheque? Sixty-six (the retirement age in 2020) is just the start of a relentless creep upwards. Frank Field MP, with his depressing willingness to think the unthinkable, has mooted a state retirement age, very soon, of 74.

Can the war be stopped? Not, surely, by the threatened public sector strikes. As a country, we've travelled so far from the idea that a secure retirement is a citizen's right, that no number of angry nurses on Whitehall will shift the argument. Only one group can remind us why we all chip in to pay each other's pensions. Retirees themselves.

I'm calling a pensioners' strike.

"Hang on, but pensioners don't work, do they?" And that's the nub of the problem. Because that pervasive attitude, that retirees don't "work" or "add value", and are a "burden" on the productive population – that idea needs squashing, flat. In an act of solidarity with their juniors – and a demand for a bit of bleedin' respect – Britain's retirees should all, just for one day, do what everyone assumes they do – sit around watching Cash in the Attic, maybe play a spot of golf, have a nap … and do absolutely nothing else. And the country would grind to a standstill.

Let's have the strike in the school holidays, shall we? Because seniors are the largest childcare sector in the UK – providing more hours of care than nurseries, nannies or playgroups, allowing hundreds of thousands of parents to go to work. The value of retirees' grand-childcare is estimated at ?2.6bn a year. On pensioners' strike day, the economy would stall so heavily, George Osborne could use it as an excuse for his next growth figures. Then you have the 1.5 million people over the age of 60 in the UK who currently "work" as carers for ailing spouses, siblings and children. And these days, a significant proportion of retirees are actually still managing, sourcing or providing the care for their own parents.

Finally, a mere 4.9 million people over the age of 65 are currently regularly volunteering or participating in their local civic life. On strike day the country's museums, galleries, stately homes, community bus services, meals on wheels services, literacy programmes, adult education services and so much more would have to be shut down, denied the grey army that keeps them alive. As my grandmother perfectly puts it: "David Cameron goes on about the 'big society' because he doesn't know any old people. We've built it already."

Ironically, old age advocacy charities are desperately trying to promote increased public spending on pensions in developing countries, arguing that pensions are an investment in people at the heart of their families and communities, whose wellbeing thus promotes wider wellbeing. I recently met Lucy Wambui, a 70-year-old raising 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren in the slums of Nairobi, and funding all their education through her chip stall and the small pension the charity Help Age International was paying her. Was she a burden on society? Was she hell.

And that's how we should start viewing pensions – not as an outlay, an entry in the national liabilities column, but as an investment in people who haven't stopped making a massive contribution to our lives. And maybe then, after the great grey strike of 2011, we can start a genuinely collaborative conversation about how the generations need to support and depend upon one another, in a humane and caring future.


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Coalition cuts are making life tough for mothers

Siobhan Courtney and son Alban Gyles Siobhan Courtney had to give up her job as a television journalist because the numbers do not add up after the birth of her son Alban.

The notion that maternity leave should be abolished is easy to dismiss as a ludicrous piece of "blue sky" thinking by one of the prime minister's inner circle of trusted advisers. Steve Hilton, David Cameron's director of strategy, is known for thinking the unthinkable. Portrayed as a maverick who wanders around No 10 in his socks, he is said to have nine mad ideas for every good one. A spoof website, The Steve Hilton Policy Generator, throws up suggestions such as "Return to VHS to abolish online piracy … just to see what happens" or "Make children sweep chimneys to make things more fun".

No need to worry, then. "He comes out with this stuff all the time," one senior Whitehall source said after news of the idea emerged last week. "He is madder than any of the caricatures around."

But what then of the government's cuts to childcare provision, Sure Start services and working tax credits? And what are women to make of recent research from the Fawcett Society, the gender equality group, which found those hardest hit by the triple whammy of cuts to jobs, benefits and services were single mothers?

Despite all the talk of family-friendly policies, and Cameron and Nick Clegg insisting on taking paternity leave and doing the school run, perhaps Hilton's remarks are just further proof of the Conservatives' blind spot when it comes to motherhood.

"There are serious signs across the government not just of a carelessness about women's lives but of an ideological approach which risks turning the clock back," said Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary and minister for women. "It is hard to imagine anyone who has any idea about working mothers or their importance to the British economy proposing the abolition of maternity leave – unless, of course, they think mothers shouldn't work at all."

Cooper's intervention could be passed off as party politicking, but even within the coalition there is some evidence that Hilton's plan was following a direction of travel not entirely alien to the government. This month, the minister for equalities, Lynne Featherstone, a Liberal Democrat, publicly warned government departments and local authorities that they will be in breach of equality laws if they do not examine the potential for cuts to fall disproportionately on women. Last year the Fawcett Society said that of the ?8.1bn in savings (from cuts to jobs, benefits and services) announced in the emergency budget of June 2010, ?5.7bn, or 72%, was being borne by women, compared with 28% by men.

Featherstone rejects the "blind spot" thesis, but when asked to justify the fact that women were being hit hardest by public sector job cuts, she said: "You can't make an omelette without cracking eggs." Critics say there have been too many omelettes. Many families have seen their income fall thanks to changes to working tax credits and a lowering of the threshold for receiving them. The proportion of childcare costs that a parent can claim back from the government has already been reduced and the Observer revealed earlier this year that ministers are considering almost halving the childcare allowance for some parents. It would reduce the amount a family with two children can claim from ?210 to about ?120 a week.

There has been a ?20m (28%) cut to Playbuilder funding, a Labour government programme to build more playgrounds. A 22% cut to funding for childcare provision and Sure Start, with the removal of ringfencing, has resulted in many councils withdrawing, scaling back or charging extra for services such as holiday childcare and leisure activities. Justine Roberts, co-founder of the website Mumsnet, said: "It seems rather ironic that the coalition government agreement included a promise to make our society more family-friendly. We've yet to see much evidence of this. Parents are struggling with some of the highest childcare costs in Europe, static wages and the prospect of reduced child benefit and tax credits for many."

Siobhan Courtney, 28, who has a four-month-old son, Alban, has given up the job she loved as a television journalist because the numbers do not add up. She and her partner live in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and both work in London. "We are on the threshold and aren't entitled to any tax credits," she said. "If I send my son to nursery, I'll be going to work just to cover his nursery fees and my commuting fares. That's bonkers. Many new mothers I've met say the same. I'm going to freelance, but the trouble with ad hoc work is that you have to pay for childcare whether or not any work comes in. I don't want to come across as some sort of middle-class, bleating woman but it does seem unfair. It's a really tricky time."

Luciana Berger, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, said the squeeze on women and families was a constant topic of discussion in her constituency surgeries: "From cutting funding for childcare and working tax credits to closing Sure Start centres and changing the state pension – affecting women aged 56 and 57 particularly hard – this Tory-led government has systematically pursued policies that disproportionately affect women. I've been inundated with representations from female constituents."

A year on from the coalition's first budget, research from the Fawcett Society and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that single mothers are the most affected and, after all the changes, can expect to lose 8.5% of their net annual income by 2015. Anna Bird, acting chief executive of the society, said: "Childcare is getting more expensive, incomes are falling and the tax credits that add to low income are being reduced. Single mothers are facing difficult decisions about whether they can afford to go out to work. These women want to be role models for their daughters too. It's the role models we'll lose that will have the biggest impact."

One lone parent who is finding life a financial struggle is Victoria Hopkins, a human resources manager from West Yorkshire. "I would really like to see the government offering more assistance in the way of tax relief to single working mothers like myself," she said. "I get no financial assistance from my daughter's father because his business went into administration. My annual salary is ?28,000, which I appreciate is OK, but by no means is it a huge wage. I have to cover my outgoings and on the weeks that my daughter is on school holidays I have to pay ?130 a week for childcare. This equates to nearly ?2,500 a year, and the contribution from the government via tax credits is ?345 a year – pitiful.

"I am contributing to society by working, I am contributing to the economy through my taxes, I'm being a good role model for my five-year-old daughter. Where is the incentive for me to work? I'd be better of being a stay-at-home mum living off benefits. It's ridiculous."

Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of the website Netmums, calls women in this situation "ledgers". "It sums up what a huge proportion of the working mothers who talk to us feel," she said. "They are on this ledge where they are just coping but if one thing changes – for example, when they get a tax credit review and are told they are going to be ?40 worse off, or they have to take unpaid time off because a child is sick, or there's a snow day – it tips them off the ledge. We have women with jobs telling us they are worse off than if they didn't work but they are hanging on because in a year's time one child will start school and their childcare costs will fall."

Sharon Hodgson, the Labour MP for Washington and Sunderland West, said she believed the government was targeting women with children because they were the demographic least likely to vote. "The worst things they did last year, people have forgotten about. Getting rid of the child trust fund, the baby bond, the health in pregnancy grant, added to all the things they have done recently, is all targeted at women and families."

Tory MPs reject the notion that the government's way out of economic problems is to make women suffer more, and the latest intake of the parliamentary party insist that they are different from their predecessors. Certainly, they claim, there is no ideological motivation. "I would say this is more woman- and family-friendly than previous governments," said Damian Hinds, the MP for East Hampshire. "It is probably an evolution over time, but also [the result of] having a man in Downing Street with a young family and Nick Clegg with a young family too. Of course, there have been cuts but I genuinely think there is a real will to address problems such as multigenerational worklessness and dysfunctional households. The design of the new benefits system is an enormously ambitious project and there are obstacles we need to overcome but there is nothing ideological about this, not at all."

Shortly after the coalition took power, Hilton spoke at a staff meeting in Downing Street. Described by one of those who attended as inspirational, Hilton stressed he was interested in three things: "Transparency, big society and family."

The Fawcett Society said last week it was hugely encouraged by the Modern Workplace consultation, which is looking at extending the right to request flexible working and changing parental leave so fathers can take a greater role in their child's first year. But perhaps the government should look to France for truly family-friendly policies. Mothers there are helped by free pre-schools, family allowances, tax deductions and four months of maternity leave on full pay. Or would this be too much for even the wackiest of blue-sky thinkers?

¦ A ?20m cut (28% of the total) from Playbuilder funding, which allows local authorities to build more playgrounds. No longer ringfenced.

¦ A grant that helped women eat a healthier diet during pregnancy has been abolished.

has been rolled in with other programmes, cutting the funding by 22.8% this year and removing the ringfence. Many councils have had to withdraw, scale back or charge extra for services such as holiday childcare and leisure activities.

¦ The childcare element of the working tax credit has been cut from 80% to 70%, meaning an average loss of ?436 a year for 470,000 families.

cut all non-statutory provision such as libraries and youth services, which provide

crucial services for working mothers.


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