….10,000 UK kids a year abscond from care to evade sexual abuse
Which form of freedom should come first?
Abu Qatada is a fashionably high-profile Human Rights recipient, whose newly confirmed permission to stay in the UK (while in the middle east and Asia his adherents bomb people into crippledom) tests almost everyone’s liberal instincts, however gushing or homaeoapathic they might be. He is free to roam in Britain.
The Coalition continues to be a willing (and at times enthusiastic) member of a European Union so crooked it can’t get any accountancy firm anywhere to sign off its accounts, so economically disastrous that half of ClubMed’s school-leavers can’t find employment, and so profoundly fiscally mismanaged its debt cannot be managed even with near 0% interest rates. The EU is free to impose its laws on the UK.
Britain’s banking system stands accused of doubling the national debt liabilities, cheating small businesses, manipulating the Libor rates, and doing nowhere near enough to sandbag itself against the inevitable wall of derivative knock-ons heading its way. But to date Mervyn King has spent £375bn trying to give them free money in exchange for toxic isotopes, and the Treasury thinks that RBS Man Stephen Hester is a good ol’ boy. Our bankers have a licence to skim at our expense.
So there’s a nice trio with which to start the day: a murderously illiberal Islamist, an ethically bereft European Union, and a serially psychopathic financial sector: all of them not just tolerated in Britain, but told they are welcome here. We somehow can’t bear to see them go.
Contrast and compare with how Britain treats its indigenous citizens towards the lower and more vulnerable end of the scale.
This week, one million households will receive letters from HMRC about losing child benefits. (I am opposed to them on principle, but that’s not the point: the recipients’ quality of life has been eroded.)
Last March, the price of Beer rose 5p thanks to tax increases. Drinkers here in the UK already pay 40% of all European beer taxes, despite only consuming 13% of the volume. (Same caveat as above applies)
For nearly four years now, the UK’s retired have suffered near-zero interest rates (Zirp) on the investments they use as income. This has forced the normal 38% level of Wrinklie investment in stock markets to go up to 80% in some cases (which was always the idea anyway) and encouraged speculation in an obviously Central Bank-manipulated gold market.
Despite some private care homes charging as much as £250,000 a year to care for one troubled child, there has been a significant reduction in financial support for national children’s services that would actively assist in the protection of kids in care from sexual abuse. 25 children aged between 12 and 17 disappeared from care homes and foster care in Kent alone last year. Kent Council admitted that they had ‘no way of knowing’ what had happened to the children although it was suspected that these young people were victims of child trafficking.
In 2009, a secret immigration document revealed that as many as 77 Chinese children had disappeared from a care home in the London Borough of Hillingdon. No sooner had they arrived at the home than they vanished. These children, it was discovered, were farmed out across the UK, in an assortment of perverted business deals that resulted in already-vulnerable youngsters being plunged into prostitution and drug-trafficking.
On 20th June 2012, The Children’s Society and others compiled a report about the vulnerability of children in the UK care home sector. It concluded that children who run away from care homes generally do so because they are being abused and groomed for sex, while teenagers are routinely placed in rough areas far from home and in care homes known to paedophiles. Police estimate that some 10,000 children go missing from care annually, though official government data recorded only 930 last year…something of a discrepancy, that. And get this one: ‘there is a troubling tendency in the child protection system, where it is often acceptable for adults to engage in sex with children as long as it is “consensual.” The MP’s are expected to announce an urgent investigation into the system, which they say “is not fit for purpose.” One wonders what they think the purpose of child care is.
The Slog 