nourishing obscurity

My first reaction whenever I read a story a bit left field is to check out the author and if he/she/they are hidden behind a smokescreen of capitalization and glaring colour, not least in the employment of adjectives, one wonders.

On the other hand, we’re never going to get new revelations from the other type – the cynic, might I say the bourgeois cynic whose world consists of day to day affairs, the nitty gritty of everyday life if you like and who finds uttering the words “conspiracy theory” in response to any tale “outside the box”, to employ the new bureauspeak, the best way to deal with an inconvenient idea.

Don’t get me wrong, most of my friends are in this latter group and are forever saying, “Well I disagree with much of what you say but occasionally …” at which point I ask, “Which particular facts do you think were wrong?” at which point they can’t answer that but they just “feel” it’s not right.  I do see where they’re coming from because that was my reaction before I delved into it.

This is why when Churchill, Quigley, Rockefeller, Wilson, Jenner, Strong, Svali, Ruskin, Milner, McFadden, House, Dulles, Chester Ward and a host of lesser names all say the same thing – that there is an agenda for global socialism and a thrust for blocs of countries rather than individual nations, then from 2003 to 2008, I’m seen as left field for saying it but from 2009 onwards, I’m once again mainstream.

Along the way, a lot of material has been sifted through and in amongst the sheer bilge and wild speculation are some nuggets of truth or at least things which raise the eyebrows a little.

Checking it out

So when I was sent a link to a John Ward article, my reaction was scepticism – no detail at the top, bright colours and a small reference to Not Born Yesterday and John Ward down below.  Turns out he’s a Guardian rumourmonger.

Well, OK, so he’s a known known and thus I checked him out.  One forum had people speculating that he was not really much more than someone who likes to ferret out info, seemingly apolitical but just enjoying a good story – a traditional journo, in other words.  Guido is this type too and in fairness to him, he does actually find things out and he does actually turn our to be right more often than not.

That’s why he has the readership he has.

Albion Alliance

This has been a long preamble and that’s because I received a message yesterday suggesting that we should be more transparent about who we are at Albion Alliance and about which emails we allow to register.

I’d agree with that and looked last night at the emails which had become signatories so far.  There were some august names in there, many more who blog about the sphere, readers from outside and yes, there were about 15% which you could say were constructions, let’s make up a hypothetical name – geewhiz@warmmail.com, for example.

This is something we’re going to have to discuss today.  With about 15% of names in this category, it’s still not an issue but both that and our own bona fides is a lingering question.  I think we can overcome that by running the history of how the Alliance came about and linking to those who had the idea to do it.  In my own case, you know who I am here but we will get on to this.

State mentoring and intervention

This is what the post today is really about and it’s taken me donkeys’ years to get to the point.  There is evidence that the state is increasing its role in taking over the functions of families and having children in care.  Naturally, this has always been done but there seems to be an increase in this of late.

Some time back, I ran a post on the Western Wellness Association, a “schools based” mentoring programme.  For those with antennae attuned to picking up such phrases as “Wellness’ and in schools, flags immediately go up.  It seems they’re also associated with Best Friends and Big Brother mentoring services as well.

The GAO has reported on them and here is a promo by a man describing himself as a “serial entrepeneur”.  Infed raises some questions about the speread of these programmes across the U.S., targetting “youth at risk” and how both parents and schools are handing over counselling to these funded bodies from outside.

There’s no doubt that in a number of cases, e.g. the Zion Ranch sex farm, operating under the guise of a church, authorities needed to step in. And yet, with the increasing drop-out rates from school, the widening gap between youth and authority, resulting in the ASBO policy over here and the expansion of mentoring services to cope with what parents are failing to do, it’s not just the efficacy of such programmes which is being called into question but the whole worrying trend of the state stepping in or funded voluntary organizations doing the same.

Questa raised the question of the state stepping into the medical process within a family context, e.g. someone refusing medical treatment and being allowed to die:

The state should not be involved at all, unless it has evidence of a conflict of interest between the family and patient, disagreement among family, incapacity of the family decisionmaker, or a family decision that is not among acceptable medical alternatives. The state should have no further role. The Missouri solution, to replace family members with state actors who know nothing about the person’s wishes and values, exemplifies the most offensive kind of state interference in our private lives. It cannot be tolerated.

Again and again, it all seems legit, doesn’t it and the state, often through councils and local other local authorities, sees its undoubted role in protecting the “at risk” expanded into something more, until they are stepping in where there is no clear case of “at risk” or where there is a case but the reaction is almost draconian.

Zealous State

Such a case is Ward’s story [remember Ward from earlier in the post?] of the Plymouth Child Removal Case.   Basically, an at risk family [and it seems that the woman's claim to the title "family" was a little tenuous, given her history] was targetted for removal of the children.

Three police cars and five police officers were required to remove five small children from a mother’s home in her absence. In my neck of the woods, you’d be lucky to get that kind of turnout for a murder.

That’s what raised eyebrows, along with subsequent action, rather than the initial risk assessment.  A neighbour, Barbara Giradot, explained:

Just five minutes after Ms Mcmanus left her home, three police cars which had been hidden at the end of the street cruised up to her house and entered. When Bernadette returned (she says, some fifty minutes later) she was abruptly informed that the children were to be taken from her on the grounds of abandonment.

To make that charge stick, the police and social services would have to show a clear intention by the mother not to return. They can’t do that because it isn’t true, but the kids are now in care anyway….following a 7th October hearing in Plymouth, at which no judge was present.

There are a number of issues.  Plymouth has been had up for “unsafe provision” and failure to meet targets and now, in the light of the Baby P Haringey case, there is an overcompensation the other way.  It’s also a money spinner:

An nby reporter rang the offices of The Fostering Foundation in Tavistock the week before last. There, a Tracy Norman told her that the going rate to foster a child is now £490 a week. The agency was, she said, “urgently looking for foster parents to take in females 2-16 years and boys 3-17″. These, she averred, had been neglected and/or abused. And like she said, they needed foster parents ‘urgently’.

All this is not unfamiliar to Brits living in 2009.  Driving neighbours’ children to school, proposals to run CRB checks on everyone, irrespective of involvement with children and the new climate of fear instilled in parents which sees council play areas less frequented and children unable to pursue the type of life previous generations enjoyed is an increasing phenomenon.

There is, of course, the real risk and then there is the imagined risk, along with the “one rule fits all”, tick-box bureaucratic society we’re now living in.  Parental discretion troubles the state, hence the explosion in mentoring services and youth provision.  There is another, more political, way to view all this and that is the inexorable state creep into all aspects of our lives, when the focus shifts from genuine cases of neglect and abuse into potential cases in families further up the ladder.

This, in turn, brings up the question of neighbours and others dobbing in families they see as worthy of state intervention – that is how it happened in the USSR and became a system.

Buzzwords, Weaselwords and foul play in everything

If I were to write posts mentioning solidarity with fellow workers, imperialism and the proletariat, there’d be little question from where I’m coming.  If I were to write of family values, common sense and free enterprise, you’d know who was writing that.

If I were to speak of wellness, making children whole, tolerance and a friend in need in conjunction with provision of the highest quality programmes and “Our name and logo are synonymous with quality program delivery and best practice worldwide” [I won't name the provider], then I’m afraid that all the sensors are at the alert in this merging of the jargon from separate disciplines into one integrated whole.

The overused word evil is not out of place here.  I’m not suggesting paedophile networks rubbing their hands in glee at the kiddies they’re going to officially remove form their parents today [that's another topic] but more about the banality of evil, in the way it all seems so natural and logical, so matter of fact.

Pitchforking Jews into ovens or herding them into Zyclon B rooms was daily routine for the bored guards at Auschwitz – a state programme for the elimination of vermin, that was all.  Except that it was far more than that in reality.

By a combination of orders from above, a climate of KPIs and other quotas, fears for job security at an uncertain time of job rationing, the matter-of-fact memo from head office and the peer pressure and fears for personal safety, human beings can be made to do the most unpalatable things and to rationalize them away.

More than that, there is this esoteric thing where each person takes pride in his area and likes to exclude others and raise what he/she’s doing to the status of a science or art.  An example is the photographer in Groundhog Day, at the bar, explaining to Andy MacDowell how most people think photography is point and shoot. “Oh no, he chuckles – it’s far, far more than that,” and he proceeds to bore her.

What I’ve finally come to is that when bureaucratic, compartmentalized and specialized work practices come into play, they become exclusive in nature, for example in our inability to tell social services what is right or wrong – that can only come from the NVQs, the experts.

This creates a portal for the state and this is one of the chief criticisms of the EU way coming to us – that the only reality, the only truth, is what is handed down from above.  As the older generations who stand in the way of this process, due to their ability to still think for themselves, die away one by one or are put out to pasture, so the New Child, the 20 year old who has never known any of the old values, comes to the fore – compliant, wishing to please and credulously taking on board the groupthink handed down from above.

He or she has grown up in a world of poor job prospects and the need for compliance and makeover, in the hopes of holding down a position in the new society.  These new cits are of limited or specialized education [the days of the liberal arts having long gone] and are used to being nannied.  Bureaubabble issues from their mouths, in the kindest of voices and there are even techniques for dealing with the independent yahoos like ourselves.

We have no place in the new society and will be kept both at bay and with enough shelter and food to support us until the last of the questioning voices are silenced by pure attrition. The new dystopia is not the Blade Runner or similar films but a world of carefully clipped grass on road verges, central parking areas, central medical clinics in cold, clinical, officially heartwarming [questionnaire recommended] decor, Stepford Wife receptionists and others in the sprawling bureaucracy or semi-governmental Public/Private Partnership initiatives and outside that?

Outside are the fringe dwellers, the freethinkers who emerge from the murk for their food rations and slip back into the shadows once more of  a world ruled by bandits and full of eccentric Tuttles, a world that proper people have long since given up on.  It is a cautionary tale for any would be freethinker who doesn’t embrace the principle of “when I say jump, you ask how high”.

How far away do you think we are from that?

Filed under: Society & human issues