This week sees the third Seven Days of Action event to raise awareness of the people with learning disabilities who are trapped in psychiatric units, usually so-called Assessment and Treatment Units, sometimes for lack of more suitable provision and sometimes because the units’ management refuses to accept that release is possible. Yesterday and today, the BBC featured the issue (though not the campaign, by name) on their Breakfast programme; yesterday the story of one man and one young boy being held in units a long way from home; today they featured the case of Stephanie Bincliffe, a young woman with autism who died in a unit run by the Huntercombe group after seven years living in a windowless cell; for 18 months of that, she ate and toileted in that room and was ‘washed’ only with wet wipes. This appalling excuse for ‘care’ cost the public purse roughly £4.5m, or £1,761 per day. (The profiteering of these companies — Priory Group being the other major party involved — is found in more general adolescent mental health care, and the same problems exist there: extended stays, being forced a long way from home, punitive and degrading treatment especially of girls, lack of understanding on the part of professionals, leading to people being ill over very long periods, requiring repeat admissions, and some serious self-harm and even suicides.)
Possibly Related Posts:
- Jail for poor taste, and May and ‘autism’
- Before you trust the Tories on mental health …
- Big hospital or small unit, bad care is bad care
- Regarding Brandon Reid
- A waste of a life
Early last Sunday morning in a northern Virginia town, a young lady was kidnapped off the street during or after the taraweeh prayer (the night-time prayers held during Ramadan) having gone to get food to eat before beginning her daily fast. Nabra Hassanen, aged 17, was later found dead and police are awaiting results of tests as to whether she was raped before being murdered. The killer, an illegal Salvadorean immigrant named Darwin Martinez Torres, who had been involved in a confrontation with the group of friends Nabra was walking with, one of whom had allegedly thrown a drink at his car. The youths, ten boys and five girls, ran from their attacker; Nabra tripped over her abaya, was struck by Martinez with a baseball bat and taken off in his car. In the days since, some accusations have appeared on social media that the boys in the group displayed cowardice by running away and failing to protect Nabra. They are misplaced.
Somebody has already been imprisoned for offences relating to the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, and it’s not someone who signed off on the dodgy cladding; no, it’s a local who had been helping fire-fighters and who then saw a dead body on the ground, likely someone who had jumped out of the burning building, and 
So, after the intial flurry of sympathy and devastation for the people affected by the Grenfell Tower fire last Wednesday, by Friday evening the Tory press had started to show their true colours: as early as Thursday morning the Daily Mail had printed a front page, “Three Lethal Questions”, the first being whether environmental regulations were to blame for the flammable cladding being applied to the tower; last night and this morning the Mail and Telegraph were branding the protesters at Kensington Town Hall as thugs, anarchists, a ‘mob’ and the like — true, there were some SWP there and a few men with faces covered, but the majority were friends and relatives of those trapped in the tower or people made homeless who were angry at the total lack of any official response and lack of information as to where their injured relatives and friends were. The Telegraph 
This shouldn’t need to be said, but …
So, the election results are in (
This will be the last blog post I make before the election starts tomorrow (Thursday) morning. The front pages of the two biggest-selling newspapers are full of propaganda against the Labour leadership, branding them friends of ‘jihadis’ and enemies of the state. It would also have been the 23rd birthday of Thomas Rawnsley, a young man from Bradford who died a miserable death in February 2015. He had been forced to live in a care home against his and his family’s wishes and had unexplained carpet burns on his body and died of heart failure. His inquest is yet to be held.
Last Saturday night there was a terrorist attack in London, and as often happens in these situations, Facebook activated its “safety check” or “I’m safe” feature, by which people identified as living in London or who have recently checked in at locations in London are invited to mark themselves as safe so their friends know. I and several of my friends and relatives did so, even though some of us were nowhere near London Bridge or Borough Market at the time. I saw some people criticising the feature and the trend for people to do this, such as 
Following the van/knife attacks on and near London Bridge last night in which seven people were killed (plus the three attackers who were shot dead by the police) which have been declared a terrorist attack by the police although the origin and motives of the attackers have yet to be revealed, I’ve seen tweets proclaiming that someone at the mosque must have known the terrorists’ intentions and are hiding something. I also saw tweets calling for an end to “no go areas” which have been a favourite right-wing media trope for several years. The first of these is a misconception, perhaps appealing because of frustration but no less wrong for that, and the second is an outright lie.
I didn’t see Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May last night which social media was agog over, but I did hear his interview with Emma Barnett on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour this morning. As one might expect, the programme focuses on issues of particular concern to women, and making child-care available so that women can work, particularly when they live in areas where the cost of living easily outstrips a single wage, is one of them. Barnett asked him how much his policy of non-means-tested childcare for all 2 and 4-year-olds (not 3-year-olds?) would cost, given his and his party’s repeated insistence that their manifesto is fully costed, and he didn’t know. He claimed that it would be funded mostly out of corporation taxes, but after much umming and ahh-ing, Barnett had to furnish him with the figure herself, sourced from his own shadow education secretary. When Barnett reminded him that this sort of thing reinforced the perception that “we can’t trust [Labour] with our money”, which she said went back to the time of Gordon Brown, he did not defend this point either.
In the aftermath of last Monday’s terrorist attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, the British feminist writer Karen Ingala-Smith wrote a blog entry claiming that it is “essential that we view the attack as an attack on women”, not only in the light of the fact that 17 of the 22 victims were female, but 
The other day I came across a story which a lot of people were sharing on my social media feeds since the appalling terrorist attack in Manchester on Monday night. The story, published on the pro-Corbyn ‘news’/’analysis’ site The Canary, claimed that Manchester was “set to become the second city to ban the Sun” after Liverpool, where a number of newsagents refuse to sell the paper after they published falsehoods about survivors of the Hillsborough stadium disaster. I don’t normally read links to the Canary because it’s a site notorious for not letting the facts get in the way of a good rant, and suspected when I read the headline that was was really happening was that a campaign had been launched to that end, and I was right. The story has since been withdrawn after the Sun told the Canary that the original front page had gone to press before the bombings (Google cached version 
Last Sunday Mariella Frostrup answered a letter from a father whose son wanted to drop out of school and become a rock star. 
Last week Ian Brady, a serial murderer of children from the 1960s, died in a “special hospital” (a high-security hospital which takes criminals who are mentally ill) aged 79. He had been convicted of three murders of children in 1966; he admitted to two more in 1985. His victims were of both sexes and between 10 and 17. He had been transferred from prison to the hospital in the 1980s after having been diagnosed as a psychopath; his accomplice, Myra Hindley, who helped lure and torture their victims although Brady did the actual killings, served out her time (she died in 2003) in prisons. According to Mark Easton on the BBC website, “Brady’s mug shot has become visual shorthand for psychopathic evil”; Martin Kettle in the Guardian the next day noted his and Hindley’s importance in the 
Earlier today I heard Owen Jones, the Labour-supporting Guardian columnist and author of Chavs and The Establishment, on Radio 4’s Today programme defending Jeremy Corbyn’s plans to “re-nationalise” the railways if he became prime minister. He explained that the action would not be costly as it would simply consist of waiting until each franchise came to its end and then not renew it; he also explained that the East Coast railway service had good levels of customer satisfaction when it was in public ownership.
