Susannah was (as far as we can tell, and this is the impression given in the written articles also) trying to support Mike and Tiffany with their son Toby, who at 3 1/2 years old was still in nappies, unable to speak and aggressive in his behaviour. The social workers believed that intervention was urgent as there was only a few months left before the window for remedying these things closed. The boy was being cared for by two obviously inadequate parents who had failed to obtain a bed for him and whose house had dog’s muck on the floor. The father, who obviously had learning difficulties of some kind, was hostile to the social worker from the start, and repeatedly accused her of simply being there to take Toby away, or as he put it, to “wreck” them. There were a number of incidents in which Toby sustained bruises and his parents’ explanations did not convince.

Tiffany was pregnant with another child, and during her pregnancy was hospitalised; the couple agreed that Toby should go into foster care as they did not think he could deal with looking after the boy on his own, but he pulled out at the last minute. The social workers went to court and succeeded in getting him taken into care. After the second baby was born (and promptly removed), Tiffany threw Mike out after a fight, and although the social workers were willing to work with Tiffany to keep her and her two children together, she decides to give them up for adoption.

Some might say that Tiffany made that decision because she felt beaten down by the constant pressure, but having watched the programme, it appeared that she was enjoying the new-found freedom caused by Mike not being there — she said that she had been controlled by others all her life, and was finally able to be herself. Her depression was also being treated for the first time. It’s possible that she wanted all trace of Mike out of her life, and that included his children. The programme ended by saying her children would be adopted separately due to Toby’s special needs, that Tiffany would not see them again as children, and that Mike had made no further contact.

I read a review of the programme on the Telegraph’s website (the picture of Tiffany is more flattering than anything you see of her in the programme), and one of the commenters (who signed himself “That Guy”) asked “Come on social workers, and their apologists, tell us why the children can’t see their natural mother, who didn’t intentionally harm them, during their childhood?”. The answer is that this is beyond the social workers’ control: it is how the adoption system works and always has done, because it dates back to a time when adoption was a means of getting rid of illegitimate children by pretending that they were really someone else’s. In other countries, a type of open adoption exists where the birth parents still have some degree of access, but that is not true here. There are other options available, such as special guardianship (where children are looked after by specially cleared family members or friends), but that probably was not an option for Tiffany anyway.

What astounded me was the refusal of some commenters to accept that Mike’s (in particular) obvious learning difficulties and inability to see or discuss things rationally were a major obstacle to getting Toby’s developmental needs seen to. One of the commenters compared Toby’s surroundings to his own upbringing in a small, crowded house in the 1950s, as if basic and poor was the same thing as filthy and unsanitary (I am sure they didn’t allow people or dogs to defecate on their floor). During a contact visit, he barely spoke to his son, preferring to absorb himself in playing with the children’s toys separately from Toby (however, the presence of the social worker looking at them and taking notes cannot have helped). He looked child-like, apart from his beard, and acted the part (he also revealed that he had lost a number of children to miscarriage and stillbirth, which may reflect a genetic disorder of some kind). It’s possible that his problems were not all of his own making, but it’s also true that he was in no fit state to raise Toby, much less to attempt to remedy his pressing developmental needs.

It is not the first time I have seen someone on the internet brazenly deny the obvious failings of a parent in such a documentary. Last December, the BBC broadcast a Panorama programme about the difficulties of getting older children adopted out of care, and a recurring feature was mothers with learning difficulties or low intelligence who had made repeated bad life choices which put their children in danger. The mothers’ learning issues were sometimes plainly obvious from the way they spoke, and yet Christopher Booker, in his column on the Telegraph website, said that these issues were “scarcely evident when she was allowed half an hour’s ‘contact’ and they all rushed into her arms”. Yet they were plainly obvious to me, and no doubt to the social workers as well. I’ve written about Christopher Booker briefly here in the past, but for those not familiar with his writings, as well as complaining endlessly about children being seized from loving families and held hostage by a secretive, unaccountable family court system that always sides with the social workers, also insists that global warming is a myth and that asbestos is nowhere near as dangerous as is commonly believed. George Monbiot addressed the failings of his writings on these two aspects here and here, but does not really address the fact that Booker is obsessed with the financial cost of everything — he published a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster, which purports to expose “how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history”. It’s always the money: when social services are protecting kids (or wrongfully removing them), it’s money; when we are trying to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn, it’s money; when we strip out asbestos, it’s money. In his earlier book, Scared to Death (co-written with Richard North), he mentioned a number of the child protection scandals of the 1980s and in all but one of them, he mentioned the cost to the taxpayer. Never mind the fact that social workers avoid taking children into care, and prefer family members to care for children wherever possible, precisely because foster care (let alone institutional care, where it is even available) is expensive.

I’m often sympathetic to people who have had their children taken by social services, and I’m well aware that they make mistakes and that they are often not fixed as quickly as they should be (although often, the social workers are acting on instruction from doctors who fail to spot conditions like brittle-bone disease and assume a baby’s injuries are inflicted by their parents). However, when I see such ridiculous nonsense posted as comments on articles on this subject from people who are blind to obvious danger to children, my sympathy for them just drops like a stone. If anything, it’s rather a shame that poor Toby wasn’t found, and rescued from his miserable surroundings, much earlier.

I’ve heard suggestions that Steve must have learning difficulties of his own, otherwise he would not, and should not, have been allowed to marry or have a sexual relationship with Trish because she would be deemed a “vulnerable adult”. Having seen the interviews with him, I do not know where anyone gets this impression — he has a job in IT and seems well aware of the challenges facing the family and his own responsibility in caring for a wife who cannot work. Trish was very frightened of having her baby taken away and was shown asking the midwives if she’d be allowed to keep the baby (a girl named Elizabeth); they told her that there was no reason why she shouldn’t. She was worried about this after reading about this happening to another woman with learning difficulties in the paper (this may have been Kerry Robertson/McDougall). In the event, according to a post by Steve on the show’s Facebook page, the midwives did inform social services (as was their duty), but further inquiries revealed that they were satisfied that Trish was competent, or at least well-supported, and were not interested.

As for the question of Steve and Trish’s marriage, nobody can tell how severely mentally impaired Trish is simply by seeing her on TV. It could have been prevented at the outset had anyone who worked with them thought Trish could not make valid vows, and they would hardly have been allowed IVF (several times) if she would have been considered an inevitably unfit mother. It’s possible that she may be more intelligent than her speech (she clearly has some difficulty with speech due to her injury) indicates, and despite her problems with short-term memory (hence the pictures showing her how to prepare the baby’s bottle), she did eventually learn how to do this without them. She suffered a head injury at 13, and had doubtless learned a fair bit about the world by that time, so it is not the same as someone who had been impaired all their life. She also has some insight into her condition, as we see when she talks of the frustration of not being able to remember things, and on another occasion says she hopes her child has her husband’s brain and not hers, otherwise she would feel very sorry for them (she also remembers how the accident happened).

Those of us who’ve seen them on TV do not know much about Trish’s history other than what they have told us, so we do not know if she progressed at school or took exams at all, or what she has managed to do with her time since the accident or since her marriage. We do know that it was Trish who made the first move in their relationship and Steve admits that she is more confident than he is and does the talking when they are out. Clearly, her cognitive impairment was not judged to be so severe that anyone saw fit to prevent their marriage, and possibly it is not as severe as her behaviour (at a very emotional time for both of them) might suggest. Who are we to judge?

There really are far, far too many people sponging off the taxpayer right now with their fake or exaggerated disabilities and they’re one of the reasons we’re in the financial mess we’re in. … Every time the disability lobby squeals for more another few jobs are lost, another few basis points are lost from GDP growth. But these people don’t care; they know better than that: the government owns a magic money tree and its ability to distribute the fruits thereof is boundless.

The notion of ME being ‘fashionable’ goes back a long way — at least to 1992, when a paediatrician outside Tunbridge Wells diagnosed a sick and frightened 14-year-old girl named Lynn Gilderdale (left) with it and told her that she had a fashionable illness. As I think I’ve proven on here over and again, ME is not a “fake disability” which “makes you a bit peaky”, it’s a serious illness that can lead to very severe physical disability, ongoing sickness and severe pain. There is too much evidence of physical pathologies, including demonstrable damage to the central nervous system and other systems in the body, to entertain any theory about it being psychological either in origin or in continuation. If you develop severe ME, as about a quarter of sufferers do (like the already mentioned Miss Gilderdale), you might not be able to use your special parking space as you might well be bedridden. You might have to settle for a bedpan rather than a nice big disabled loo. You might not even be able to speak, which for the rest of us would be a good thing if it happened to him (as well as Ricky Gervais, Frankie Boyle and all the other miserable excuses for comedians who make a living mocking disabled people). Most of them would be only too happy to work (or to get an education, or to do the things the rest of us call fun). As someone I know who has severe ME said in reaction to Liddle’s rant, “if Rod Liddle really wants ME, he can have mine”.

The statistics have already been well argued over, and the fraud rate of DLA, by the government’s own statistics, is 0.5%, and the statistics referred to in Liddle’s piece (that 80% of those claiming Incapacity Benefit (78%, actually, as reported in the Mail) — or rather, Employment and Support Allowance as it is now called) are fit for work most likely refers to those found fit for work by ATOS’s test, and many of their decisions are overturned on appeal, so the real figure is probably much less than 80% or even 78%. ATOS has been known to fail people who are undergoing chemotherapy or are otherwise manifestly unfit by using a tick-box assessment, as this investigation showed. The Mail’s report at least acknowledges the criticisms of high appeal success rates and of seriously unwell people being wrongly refused; Liddle simply repeats the rounded-up 80% figure as fact.

Liddle concludes by claiming that “the people fraudulently claiming sickness benefits are doing a disservice to those who really deserve it: The people who really become disabled or ill. It has become easier to claim these benefits, partly as a consequence of the disablement (sic) charities who, out of their own self-interest, insist that an ever-greater proportion of the population is disabled”. First, over-emphasising the issue of fraud, for example by misrepresenting the number of people turned down by a government test (regardless of future appeal results) as the number of people fraudulently claiming the benefit, is an easy way to make sure that many of those who do really deserve it will not get it, because it will make disability more difficult to prove but this does not necessarily mean it is not there. Second, people tend to think that “real” disabilities are the very visible ones everyone knows about: blindness, paralysis and cerebral palsy, for example. Other conditions may not affect someone getting to the test on their own, but might result in them being unable to do pretty much anything for the rest of the week, or they might still hinder that person working (or finding employment) in a way the test might not allow for. These include employers’ prejudices, for example, particularly if the disability affects someone’s appearance or manner of speaking.

James Delingpole’s article puts the “disability lobby” among a number of causes which allow for taxpayers’ money to be siphoned off to “hard-left organisations like Friends Of The Earth and the New Economics Foundation” so that they “can campaign for more encroachment in our lives by the overweening state”. My own observation of the disability campaign is that it is non-partisan, and while its current campaign is against attacks on disability benefits by a Conservative-led government, it responded warmly when the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, supported their position (as with senior Tories in the House of Lords more recently). The campaign is about empowering disabled people to live independent lives as much as possible, not funding large charities to care for them on an institutional basis, as some of them once did. None of those I’ve worked with are charity bosses on “fat cat” salaries; they are severely disabled people who have worked very hard without remuneration, often at great risk to their own health (as the picture accompanying this paragraph demonstrates; it is of Sue Marsh, a co-author of the recent Spartacus Report, who was hospitalised with complications of her Crohn’s disease late last month).

He also quotes a figure which traces back to the Family Resources Survey, namely that 11 million people in the UK — “that’s a quarter of the adult population” — qualified as disabled. However, this figure was for the whole population and included those of pensionable age; the figure for the working age population was half that. The problem is that these figures do not estimate those who are entitled to claim benefits, let alone those who actually do — they include anyone who has anything that could be termed a disability. For example, 1.5 million people reported incontinence, which does not always occur alongside other physical disability and need not impair someone’s ability to work. (You can see the DWP’s breakdown of these statistics in this PDF, and you might notice the substantial “Other” section in “Disability prevalence disaggregated by impairment” — this would include sight impairments, for example.)

It is, in any case, not “fake disabled” people who have “crippled the economy”, but bankers and others in the financial sector who bankrupted several large banks with their irresponsible lending practices, and the rich and large corporations who find ways of getting out of paying their taxes while expecting the rest of us to pay for at least some of their healthcare and other public services. The small number of “fake disabled” are an unfortunate consequence of making sure that real disabled people are not forced into beggary, indignity and early deaths; we need some means of detecting them but not at the expense of making sure those who need the support, get it. As for ME being fashionable, I’ll believe that when I see a woman in lilac pyjamas with a nasogastric tube and dark glasses being carried on a stretcher down a catwalk in Milan. Until then, that’s just a bad joke.

Has BMT been carried out in patients with EB before?

Yes, two clinical trials of bone marrow transplants from healthy donors without EB into children with severe EB are currently ongoing in the US. Early results from the trial indicate that, in some patients, there may be some benefit derived from bone marrow transplants.

However, overall results are mixed and, sadly, there is a significant risk of death. Consequently, such trials are not planned currently in the UK.

The episode was titled “Butterflies”, and although in the first few minutes Dr Griffin presents Henryk Hanssen with a newspaper front page reading “Hope for Butterfly Child”, the significance of this reference was never explained (it refers to the fragility of the affected person’s skin, which can tear and blister very easily from friction or pressure). Hanssen and Griffin have some apprehension about the exploitative nature of the media coverage and the experimental nature of the procedure, as well as the patient’s enlarged liver, but agree to proceed with “extreme caution”. The girl with EB, named Cindy, had a sister who was a year younger, who decided she did not want to donate her bone marrow and explained that her sister’s condition had completely dominated their lives, with at one point her bicycle being taken away because her sister could not ride it. Dr Griffin later managed to persuade her to give her consent by telling her that they were very fortunate to have an exact tissue match and that, if successful, the treatment could change her sister’s life (this after her mother said she had signed the consent form and that her underage daughter’s consent was of no significance). The operation goes ahead, but we do not find out whether it was successful; we do not see Cindy after she goes to theatre, and Griffin tells her mother that the operation is not a quick fix, which might open the possibility for future appearances, but none of the family are in the next episode.

I’ve raised concerns about ridiculous storylines in this strand before — Holby’s Saturday evening sister programme Casualty ran a storyline in which a man who had been diagnosed with ME was shown beating his wife (he was later re-diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, which was a curious diagnosis in itself as you don’t just have muscular dystrophy, you have one of several dozen types of it). I objected to the ME storyline because it is more common for sufferers (who are more likely to be female) to be abused by medical professionals of both sexes, rather than a male sufferer to abuse his female partner, who was a nurse. It was a lot like having one programme on domestic violence in several years, and it featuring a violent wife rather than a violent husband. That time, my complaint was brushed off on the grounds that medical accuracy had sometimes to be sacrificed for the sake of the drama.

This storyline was very clearly inaccurate, presenting a treatment which is very much in its early stages and which British doctors have refused to offer because of its experimental, high-risk nature, as if it offered a very significant hope in curing EB now (or at least checking it, as damage that has already been done cannot be undone). Is there no limit to this organisation’s “artistic licence”? People die of complications from this disease every year, and many of those who have it (particularly if severely), especially if they have many friends with it (which they are more likely to nowadays because of social networks) will have known people who have died. There are many ways a story like this could have been told — there are other conditions which require a bone-marrow transplant (or an organ donation, even) to cure them, so why could one of them not have been used, rather than pretending that something that, right now, doesn’t work, does, and that something will radically improve a patient’s life when it is more likely to kill them?

These include Hugh Grant, who testified that he had received press phone-calls demanding a statement regarding the birth of a child conceived during a brief liaison, which deterred him from visiting the mother or his child for fear of giving the press their story. Grant also reported that, when celebrities called the police to report a mugging or burglary, they often found that a press photographer appeared before any policeman. Yesterday, the former adviser to the model Elle Macpherson reported that she had been accused by the model of leaking secrets to the press and forced into a rehab unit, when in fact the secrets were being obtained by the press directly from Macpherson’s voicemail. She is suing News International for loss of earnings.

The other night, I heard a discussion on the BBC London late-night programme, hosted by Joanne Good (with whom I have previously had this exchange), on whether people who are in the limelight of their own accord, such as actors, forfeit their right to privacy. (They also took a call from the father of Russell Brand, who accused the press of twisting things he had said to or about his son and making stories out of them.) I do not see how anyone can think people give up any right to a private life simply because they become famous — people want entertainment, and they get it from the music, films or comedy these people produce. While it is the press’s prerogative to report on crimes and corrupt behaviour, the private lives of such people, unless they have deliberately made a public show of it.

The press have also published articles attacking the morality of both Grant and Steve Coogan, who has also been outspoken in his criticism of the press’s standards since the closure of the News of the World. It is notable that the press still hold celebrities to standards of morality that normal people are simply not held to anymore when, for the most part, they never claimed to be saints or proposed themselves as moral guardians. (This is in stark contrast to politicians who preach “family values” while carrying on affairs, let alone religious leaders and the like.) The press’s ferocity against Grant and Coogan reflects a sense of entitlement — they imagine that people owe them a story and thereby a living — and consider themselves entitled to be moral arbiters, not those they expose.

However, their behaviour causes far more damage than a footballer having an affair. The parents of a schoolgirl who was stabbed to death at school in Glasgow in 1991 testified that their son had committed suicide and was found with copies of the offending articles in his hands. The articles claimed that the victim was a school bully, which they insist was untrue; the murderer was also convicted of an assault on their daughter which happened at school the day before. I read one of the articles at the time, and it did not actually give the real names of either party, but it did imply that the girl had been sentenced to an indeterminate period in prison for the equivalent of a “battered wife” killing (in fact, she was released in 2000, after serving eight and a half years). The parents have been seeking a change to the law in Scotland that dictates that a deceased person cannot be defamed (i.e. that the press can print what they like about them). Gary Flitcroft, a footballer with Blackburn Rovers who was exposed as having an affair in 2002 (after the courts removed an injunction banning the revelation), told the inquiry that the story resulted in his children being teased at school and his father, who suffered from depression, no longer going to matches because he could not tolerate the chanting about his son’s private life; he believes it may have contributed to his father’s suicide.

The tabloid and mid-market press have also done considerable damage to the interests of entire sections of the population by running distorted and, in some cases, fabricated stories about people getting special favours from the state or benefits that they really are not entitled to. Frequently, these stories are presented as favours to one particular minority (such as Muslims) when in fact they often had nothing to do with Muslims at all: a classic example is the story of the swimming pool having their windows blacked out after requests from Muslims, when in fact the pool’s ground-floor windows had reflective film applied (which is normal) after complaints from a wide section of the community, not just Muslims. More recently, they have turned to attacking benefit recipients, alleging massive fraud in order to justify scrapping allowances which are vital to the lives of many, particularly disabled people.

Of course, comment should be free and I have no problems with divergent views being expressed, whether it be about religion, the welfare state or anything else, but this does not give any organisation the right to present propaganda as news, by using screaming headlines which are not borne out by the content of the story, or by manipulating statistics (by rounding some figures up and others down, for example) or cherry-picking facts. The nature of running a newspaper is that it is expensive, and control is likely to be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, who have a vested interest in preserving their wealth and who know that their readers would rather not share their incomes with anyone, regardless of whether that be for the common good or not. Some American proprietors are known for letting local editors decide on their papers’ editorial lines, but British owners (notably Lord Beaverbrook, former owner of the Daily Express) have been fairly explicit in that their newspapers are for propaganda; that claim was made in the 1960s, but it holds true for the title (and its nearest competitor, the Daily Mail) today.

It is not just in the UK where the political process is held to ransom by powerful media owners: in Italy, the former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, owns a very large section of the country’s print and broadcast media, and while Berlusconi was in opposition from 2006 to 2008, the media that was outside his control refrained from criticising him too harshly, as they knew he could easily win another election. Tobias Jones’s assessment of the new “technocrat” administration is that it could cut through a lot of the old-boy networks and protectionism that have made Italy a very expensive and frustrating place to live, but believes that Berlusconi’s media interests will mean he remains barely a step from power:

He’ll no longer be the prime minister but, with his epic media empire still intact, he’ll always be the king-maker, able to make or break a government. He will effectively hold a veto on all major decisions. In recent years his TV channels and newspapers and magazines have hammered anyone, including Gianfranco Fini, who dared to criticise him. There’s no doubt that the same will happen to anyone who threatens his empire and, especially, his immunity. He will always be the elephant in the room.

So, breaking up his empire must be the new government’s first priority. This, of course, is unlikely in the UK where the major media owners support the present government, but the Labour government had from 1997 to 2010 to reform media ownership and regulation and blew it — if anything, they ran scared from it. If this government refuses to take the matter seriously (or the inquiry’s report is sympathetic to the media corporations), Labour should make it a priority the next time it gets into government. Freedom of speech is essential, but this does not equal a right for a small number of very wealthy men and their lackeys to a bully pulpit from which to dictate public opinion. It is not about freedom; it is about power.

Throughout today, I’ve been receiving tweets with the hashtag #MyDLA, from people telling what the benefit (Disability Living Allowance) does for them — usually paying for vital care, a wheelchair, a hoist to get them in and out of it (and bed, and toilet), electricity for their ventilator and feeding pump, incontinence pads and other costs incurred by being disabled; one woman with severe ME said it helped keep her and her widowed mother alive. The cause was the above article, claiming that the vast majority of claims for DLA are paid out on the basis of “filling in a form”, without any need for a face-to-face interview. The Mail surmises that much of it is paid out without justification, with a possible waste of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. (More: Flash Bristow @ Where’s the Benefit?, Full Fact, Latent Existence, Well Fair System (originally at Wheeling’n’able), Behind the Child.)

The figures and the central claim in the Mail’s article may or may not be true, but they have clearly missed the point of why a benefit may be given out without the government conducting a face-to-face interview. No, the point isn’t that the form is long and complicated and that some people have to make four attempts or more to actually get the benefit, and as one respondent put it: “Any reporter that thinks getting #myDLA was easy has never had to fight to prove just how useless you are. Its thoroughly humiliating”, or that the majority of those who did not have a face-to-face assessment provided “supporting evidence” or a doctor’s letter. No, it’s that the face-to-face interviews (which the Mail claims are to be mandatory when the Personal Independence Payment comes into force in 2013) are not always necessary, and would be a waste of money.

If the patient’s disability is fairly obvious, and is one which results in a fairly consistent set of needs, such as a spinal cord injury or blindness, assessors will know what the claimant needs and what he or she does not. A high-level spinal cord injury often results in the need for a ventilator and always a powered wheelchair as well as carers to assist them with everything, and so on. Even with conditions that aren’t so obvious, those who do the assessment might be familiar with it and might know what entitlement the evidence they are supplied points to, at least better than a Daily Mail journalist might. I wonder if Kirsty Walker has heard of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that can have very severely disabling and debilitating effects? I know of two women who have this, and one of them was bedridden for several years as a result. Similarly, a blogger I know once complained that the Daily Mail had alleged that people had got Incapacity Benefit because they had “blisters”, when in fact such blisters could be a symptom of her illness, epidermolysis bullosa, which causes skin breakdown and blistering from any rubbing or pressure, resulting in almost constant pain, open wounds that can get infected with potentially fatal consequences, and inability to use one’s hands or feet, among other things.

Similarly, re-assessments may not be necessary because some conditions simply do not fluctuate and others only get worse. They would cause needless stress to the recipient, who would worry that some bureaucrat would decide they did not make the grade and cut their benefit, resulting in them having to go through an appeal process, as often happens with the ATOS assessments now (and if their payments are cut in the meanwhile, they may not be able to get to any appeal). In some cases, a face-to-face interview, let alone any subsequent appeals process, may cause a deterioration in their condition (as with a condition like severe ME that can leave them very sensitive to light and sound).

Of course, I do not think for a moment that the real reason for printing such an ignorant headline was that they misunderstood why people do not need a face-to-face interview: their real agenda is to portray DLA claimants as scroungers and make it look like a large proportion of people are getting it without justification, so as to justify the government’s current policy (or anything else they might try to get through Parliament). It is ironic that they cite someone from the Taxpayers’ Alliance in support of a story that, essentially, invites the government to hire staff to do assessments that usually do not need doing. As some have pointed out, though, newspaper campaigns depicting disabled benefit claimants as scroungers, or their benefits as a soft touch for scroungers, fuels violence against them, regardless of whether claim implied by the loud headline is not supported by the story underneath it, so there are consequences to such stories beyond financial losses.

Humphries’ programme started by interviewing various people who were claiming benefits and giving some recollections about “his day” when he was growing up in Splott in Cardiff. Apparently back then, not working carried some degree of stigma, and there was one man in the neighbourhood who did not work, for some unspecified reason, and he was shunned by the community for that. The reason could, of course, have been quite genuine — he may well have had a disability or some health problem that he did not feel comfortable discussing with all and sundry. He interviewed various benefit claimants, including a family of several children with a single mother, a long-term unemployed family in an ex-industrial northern town where the father had calculated that working would not make him much better off than staying on benefits, a family from Spain who were on housing benefit so they could live in Islington, and a woman with ME who had been failed by her ATOS assessment (although she easily won on appeal).

The whole thrust of Humphries’ argument was the need to cut the benefits bill, ignoring the issue of whether what the bill pays for is worth paying for or necessary. The reason why a modest flat in a district close to central London, where the work is, costs so much was conveniently glossed over (it was nothing like that expensive twenty years ago, before prices and rents became inflated by the sale of council properties and buy-to-let mortgages). Why a man in a northern town regards the work that is available as not worth doing was not asked (the fact is that there were serious jobs in the north until the factories and mines were closed down, and a large town like Middlesbrough cannot survive with just supermarkets and council jobs). The history of unemployment and benefits in the UK is a history of political decisions — unemployment figures (derived from numbers of dole claimants) used to threaten workers not to go on strike or demand rights, incapacity benefits later used to artificially reduce unemployment numbers, and so on. None of this is of the current claimants’ making, so we saw someone who had never had to worry about finding a job, not for a good few decades at least, making someone from a community which had been deliberately impoverished look like a scrounger. If you have ever had the notion to tell someone, “I’ve worked hard all my life”, you should consider yourself lucky that you had the opportunity to do that. Some people do not.

Humphries also travels to New York to interview officials and charity workers involved with the “workfare” scheme there, and those dealing with its fallout. Early on, he presents it as a system whereby benefits are delivered only to those who prove that they are looking for work — the same is true of Jobseekers’ Allowance in the UK, in which claimants are required to keep a diary of their ongoing search for work, and are given jobs to apply for. Towards the end, he showed some of the soup kitchens and charity food outlets that have appeared in New York to serve people who are unable to receive welfare as their two-year allowance has run out with no work in sight. He also interviewed two women who had been in white-collar jobs and made redundant, and were afraid for the future as they had found themselves unable to get any more work. This provided some counter-balancing to the sermons from middle-class men in suits about personal responsibility (one of them claimed that people went back on welfare because they lacked the personal organisation to keep a job. But it did not seriously examine why people lost jobs and could not find anything else: people will not employ them, often because they are “overqualified”, and it might be assumed that they will not stay if employed, or they do not have experience, or the social skills the human resources department decrees that the job requires.

Last week’s Panorama really did bring the programme to a new low — the 30-minute format is something I have criticised again and again (such as here) as it lends itself to sensationalism rather than to serious investigation, but this just was not Panorama — it was more like a cheap prime-time infotainment piece, a bit like Saints and Scroungers without the “saints” (who were often people who helped the poor and disabled find benefits they were entitled to). The aim was obviously to show that the benefit bill was as high as it was because of fraud, and that “fraud costs all of us”, but the over-investigation of fraud can sometimes detract from the purpose of the benefit and make life very difficult for real claimants, so as to satisfy the mid-market tabloids. Nobody would object to someone who had been found out claiming benefits when they are not living in the country, or were perfectly well-off in their own right, or not as disabled as they claim to be, being punished or having their benefits cut, but some benefits are in fact not means-tested and the programme did not make that clear. It also did not mention that the rate of disability benefit fraud is extremely low, and therefore the cost of welfare is not being significantly inflated by fraud; it is just high because there is a lot of disability, and some people’s needs are severe and complex.

What makes this all the more disgusting is that excuses are being manufactured to “cut the benefits bill” at a time of scarcity when many people are falling into poverty. The same cannot be said of the introduction of Jobseekers’ Allowance under John Major — that happened in 1996, after the early 1990s recession had ended, although with much the same media baiting of the “workshy”. This time round, it is benefits as a whole that are being attacked, with the media — not just the newspapers which support the Tories because their wealthy owners tell them to, but the BBC which is paid for by public subscription — joining in the chorus. We have a welfare system partly to make sure people do not fall into destitution, partly to make sure that people with disabilities and other complex needs can live dignified and productive lives, and partly to pay for the costs of ideological trends (such as globalisation) and political decisions. If we wish to cut the benefits bill, we need to get people working, and that means reducing our reliance on imported manufactured goods, for a start. People who can work, and are offered a serious job (that is, one with prospects), will do so. Those who cannot, because of their own or a dependent’s disability (or because of prejudice, or some other genuine reason), must be supported. The alternative is to lose our status as a civilised country.

The rejections were generally based on the fact that the opinions issued were indicated to be those of the people interviewed or the columnists who wrote what were stated to be their own views, neither of which are prohibited by the Editors’ Code, on which the PCC bases its judgements. The same code vaguely states in clause 2, “A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for”, which is open to very liberal interpretation, such that the newspapers’ refusal to print substantial letters from patients and patient advocacy groups in response to the anti-patient propaganda was found not to be in breach of the code (p8 of the ruling):

Clause 2 (Opportunity) did not amount to a requirement that balancing or opposing views must be published by newspapers in a comment piece or in response to an article. Rather, it stipulated that individuals must be afforded the opportunity to respond to published inaccuracies when appropriate. While it understood the frustration of the complainant that alternative viewpoints on ME/CFS were often not published, the Commission had not established any significant inaccuracies and as such did not consider that the terms of Clause 2 were engaged.

In fact, the Spectator did publish a letter in response to Wessely’s piece, but other newspapers printed collections of short letters in which large chunks were edited out of some submissions. One of these was from Neil Riley, chairman of the ME Association, reproduced by them here, and the reader might note that the full text of the letter is in the comments and contains fuller refutations of the accusations in the piece by Rod Liddle, which was being replied to. The general tone of the articles they published were hostile to ME sufferers and portrayed them as ignorant and ungrateful towards those treating them, and in some cases lapsed into pejorative language, particularly in Rod Liddle’s article. The code does not make any reference to balance, and it cleverly permits the dissemination of opinion through selective presentation of facts, such that they may only cite certain opinions and barely acknowledge that others exist. There is a section on “discrimination”, but this only refers to the unnecessary reference to an individual’s race, sex, religion etc., not to remarks against whole groups. One section of Invest in ME’s complaint, referring to this clause, was rejected because the clause does not protect groups.

The PCC is not a regulatory body; it has little sanction and can only issue slaps on the wrist, not fines or suspended circulation. Nick Davies, in Flat Earth News, noted that of all the complaints made to the PCC, more than 90% were rejected without any investigation; of these, the majority are resolved through an apology or clarification, and of the 1.6% of total complaints which lead to an adjudication, just 0.69% were upheld (Flat Earth News was published in 2008, and these figures relate to a ten year period up to either that year or the year before). It is not in the interests of the PCC to uphold complaints, which is why the code is so vague; the current chair of the commission’s Editors’ Code of Practice Committee is none other than Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail (he was its chairman from 1999 to 2008), which is notorious for all the dirty tricks seen in the ME hatchet job, often perpetrated against other minority groups: disabled people (often indirectly, by running prominent stories about benefit fraud, making it look more prevalent than it really is), benefit claimants, certain minorities such as Muslims (with repeated, prominent stories about one tiny and diminishing group of extremists in particular) and Gypsies/Travellers; according to Davies, the paper has a racist internal culture. There is no reason to expect the PCC to take a stand against biased, bigoted reporting; it understands the trickery journalists and editors use to advance such agendas, because it’s stacked with present and past practitioners.

The proposal is to be found here (PDF) and the “future strategy” is on page 4. The proposals are as follows:

• Focus spend on peak-time programmes: breakfast, mid-morning and drivetime; sport; and faith on Sunday mornings
• Increase levels of sharing programming in off-peak slots: weekday afternoons, Sunday afternoons and evenings
• • On weekday afternoons most stations would share programming with their neighbouring stations, although a few, which serve a particularly distinct audience, would remain separate
• • On weekday evenings between 7pm and 10pm, programming would be shared across England, with all stations coming together except when providing local sports commentaries
• • At other off-peak periods programme sharing would occur at a variety of levels. Some would be akin to the regional television areas, and during the late evening in five larger areas: the North; the West Midlands; the East Midlands; the East and South East; and the West and South West
• • All stations would broadcast Radio 5 Live from 1am until the start of their breakfast programme
• • A number of locally split breakfast programmes would end
• Within all shared programming individual stations would continue to provide local news bulletins at present, and would be able to leave the shared schedules in times of civil emergency or bad weather
• BBC London would lose a number of off-peak programmes and reduce other spend to bring the station more in line with other BBC Local Radio stations

BBC London has five fairly high-profile broadcasters who are also known for broadcasting off the station: Paul Ross (breakfast), Vanessa Feltz (mid-morning), Robert Elms (early afternoon), Danny Baker (late afternoon) and Gary Crowley (Saturday early afternoon and evening). I’m aware that all these presenters are liked and disliked by different groups of listeners; I find Paul Ross and Danny Baker irritating and Vanessa Feltz particularly so, but Danny Baker has quite a few admirers and Feltz seems to be particular with women and seems to have a strong Jewish listener base. Elms, as I have said before, has a strong line on local interest matters such as local history, arts and architecture, interviewing people running or taking part in local cultural events, and also interviews musicians and runs musical features. Gary Crowley is a well-renowned musical presenter who also has a strong interest in the local musical scene.

London does have a lot more off-peak programming than some of the other regional stations, however; many local stations do not broadcast between 1am and 5am, relying on Radio 5 Live for that. However, BBC London seems to have a very long reach, being clearly audible well across most of Surrey and into West Sussex, particularly in the case of the big towns of northern West Sussex (East Grinstead, Crawley and Horsham). The same may be true of towns in the home counties north of the Thames. This makes some sense as many of those listening will have come from London or will be people living there who commute into London, or who have some other connection with London. So, it may well be that at least one local radio station in that area is superfluous, and the two stations’ programming could be merged (BBC Surrey was actually part of Southern Counties Radio until quite recently, and the two counties seem to share much of their programming).

Other regions already appear to share programmes: for example, several regional stations in the midlands, from Hereford & Worcester to Nottingham (but not the West Midlands or Warwickshire) share Ed Stagg who appears on weekdays at 7pm, while late-night listeners from Kent to Dorset and up to Oxfordshire are invited to “Go to bed with Paul Miller, and put a smile on your face!”; the same group of stations share Chris Spedding on the 7-10pm slot. Maybe a lot of people in Surrey and northern West Sussex already tune into BBC London; how many people, even in the Surrey parts of south London, listen to BBC Surrey, or listened to BBC Southern Counties during its day? Perhaps we could share some of our presenters, like Danny Baker whose programme is in no real sense London-centric, but how strong would Robert Elms be beyond London? He often admits that he does not know much about London beyond (that is, south of) the Thames, so it might not be much use asking him to cast his net wider still.

Local radio also fulfils bread-and-butter functions such as traffic news and local news that would not get on wider regional programmes, let alone national ones. There is traffic news on some national BBC stations, but it’s often so widely spread that it is hardly worth bothering with — a few stories about major motorway jams and that’s it. These stories break at other times besides breakfast, mid-morning and drive-time — in particular, a major city needs traffic news in the afternoon and late evening as well, something not provided for by this new schedule. While London does have rival commercial news-oriented stations, like LBC, many other parts of the UK have seen their local radio stations merged into the Capital Radio network, leaving only certain peak-time programmes to local presenters. Have the BBC Trust considered whether their cuts would leave some major regional centres without any local stations with a heavy discussion content at all? The wider proposals, titled Delivering Quality First, mention that “at all times of day [the BBC] will continue to provide local news and information”, but this would still rely on local radio offices and staff (and introduce possibilities for glitches when transferring from the regional to the local coverage), so the amount saved would not be enormous; the presenters are self-employed and are not being paid for a full day’s work, after all.

Although many of the regional stations do already share regional programming, then, I am not convinced of the necessity to merge the London station into the various surrounding regions. London is a city of 10 million people; the regional groupings most likely account for that number of people for the whole groups. And which region would London be grouped into? The different parts of London, particularly towards the edges, have closer links with their own neighbouring home counties than with those on the other side, which leaves two options: either redraw the outer regional groupings to produce a big one which includes London, Surrey, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire and the Thames Valley, or divide London between the two regions. Neither option would prove very popular, either inside or outside London. Incidentally, the provision for “civil emergency or bad weather” does not convince: at the time of the London bombings in 2005, the BBC London station joined with Radio 4 and the BBC Asian Network, and I am not sure what other programming was cancelled. If a local station’s presenters are sacked, how would they be suddenly reinstated at a time of civil emergency?

The set of proposals which includes the reform of BBC local radio may be called Delivering Quality First, but its entire focus is on saving money and, although it has the potential to dump some dead wood, it also reduces the potential to nurture talent and it remains to be seen whether they will indeed throw out the jabbering sensationalists (like Vanessa Feltz in London) or the local treasures (like Robert Elms), people with some degree of local knowledge and enthusiasm for the communities they serve who give the stations their character. We can already listen to these regional programmes online, so perhaps listeners in London should take a listen to the likes of Paul Miller and see if he does what it says on the website, because we could end up hearing a lot more of him. Smile!

This article by former Tory peer, Baroness Shreela Flather, appeared in the UK Daily Mail on Friday, and consists of a broad-brush attack on Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim “migrants” (note: not all — perhaps not even most — Muslims of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin in the UK are migrants at all), accusing them of maintaining multiple families through polygamy so as to milk the state for benefits. The trick, supposedly, is to marry one wife under Islamic law (i.e. not officially) and another officially, so that one wife (and her children) gets benefits as a single parent, while another gets social security as a married couple.

Two articles have been published exposing the claims in Flather’s article: this one sheds some light on Flather’s background, while this one at Left Foot Forward notes that although birth rates among those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin in the UK are higher than average, they are “not so much higher as to assert there is a general culture of very large families”; according to a Runnymede Trust report published in 2005, their birth rates were both below 3, and thus “far too close to the replacement rate of 2.1 – or the mythical 2.4 children that was deemed to be the ‘normal family’ for most of the immediate post-war period, to be described as some epidemic of large families among these communities”. Furthermore, the rate had been in steady decline, year on year, since 1983. (Report in PDF here.)

I find its central claim about “migrants” being able to bring wives not officially married into the UK to be suspect. In Pakistan, Shari’ah law is the law as regards marriage; any marriage of Muslims within the Shari’ah (that is, up to four wives) is recognised. This is not the case in the UK, which is what would result in the wife being able to claim benefits as a single mother; but this raises the issue of what basis the wives use to migrate to the UK when they have no legally recognised relationship with any British citizen or resident. The man can only bring one wife, and the first wife (should any jealousy arise) could easily claim that she was the “real wife”, by British legal standards, as she was the first woman he married, as all such marriages are recognised in Pakistan. The marriages would have to be conducted in the UK for the second wife to be the official wife, yet how did either of the wives get to the UK? (I should make it clear that I am aware of similar scams being perpetrated by Muslims in the UK and USA for years and in fact some Muslim speakers and bloggers have condemned it. However, this does not explain how anyone can get a second wife into the country on this basis.)

What irks me most about this article, however, is the suggestion that Flather was “brave” to be making it. It’s not brave for a member of the Establishment to be making broad, unsubstantiated claims about an unpopular minority group in the popular press. Bravery requires that there be some risk of personal harm or loss (such as when an ordinary person speaks out about abuse going on within a powerful organisation), not merely the possibility of public censure. It seems that every time someone makes a public attack on Muslims, however ridiculous or insulting the claims are, the reputation for violence Muslims picked up during the Rushdie era (and that was more than 20 years ago) is exploited, when in fact nobody has ever suffered serious harm in the UK for making this sort of public statement and Flather has no more reason than anyone else who has done this (and there are many) to expect it to happen to her, given her long-standing middle-class status and lack of any real connection to the two communities she attacked. Her attack was not brave; it was cowardly.