Stop Hate Now!

Over the period of the referendum, there has been an increasing tide of racism and unashamed refugee and immigrant blaming.  This would not have happened without the referendum. It’s been open season for any idiot to come out with the schrodinger’s refugee who both stole jobs and claimed benefits.

The BBC have run programmes focussing on how some migrants are working for lower than the minimum wage. When people have highlighted the illegality of the people employing them and their blatant flaunting of the law or the links with human trafficking. The torrent of abuse has been relentless. They include calls for my own deportation. Not sure where to, since I was born in the town I live in.

The local press have run stories of European migrants paying thousands of pounds for advice that they could have got for free, only to have a stream of comments from people saying that they should not be entitled anything and the should simply go back.

When I joined other local people to protest about chief xenophobe and hypocrite Nigel Farage coming to the town I live in, the town I was born and brought up in, I again faced abuse from those from the left, the right and people who badged themselves as coming from faith communities because this was challenging mainstream politics. Friends of mine have had their houses attacked for standing up for the their town not to be invaded by one more racist that wants to halt immigration but also wants the freedom to employ immigrants when he chooses to. Despite my taking this action on my own time, UKIP continue to want to bring my employers into this. That’s nothing new since they distributed leaflets to EVERY household in Kettering where they were standing citing the fact that the council gave money for a discrimination service (my employers) as a waste of council resources.

When talking about the level of racism in the country at the moment, a colleague said that the genie was out of the bottle and it wasn’t easy to put it back.

With the news of Jo Cox’s death, it’s time to say enough is enough and the hate must stop. Regardless of the actual motives of the perpetrator, she died because she stood up for what she believed in and the included challenging hate. The hate has to stop right here, right now.

You've got to do this NOW!

Some numbers are just too big.

Numbers like £77 million are too big.

Then something dreadful happens and the number changes to £84 million. Then if you scope in that £84 million pounds is to be taken out of Northamptonshire County Council services over just 12 months with a plan to outsource of nearly all council services, it simply is too much.

This comes on top of over £226 million cuts since 2010 and further planned cuts over the following four years.

In December 2015, the County Council proposed it budget for the next financial year factoring in £77 million of cuts. Challenging and cutting services deeper than the bone. In January new cuts were announced bringing the total to £84 million. The additional cut has brought about a situation that even in Scrutiny meetings (which are controlled by the same political party as those proposing the cuts) hear from senior officers that there simply isn’t anything more to cut.

I notice that when invited to County Hall staff are no longer allowed to offer tea of coffee to guests and when in meetings convened by the County Council agendas are shared one between three. As idiosyncratic as this may be, it is nothing compared to the really serious questions about the future of the County Council and the services they provide to local people.

It seems like the administration has high hopes for the outsourcing of the functions of the County Council. These were announced in 2014 but no business plans have been shared so really, how is it going to work? An interim Chief Executive of the Well Being Community Interest Company departed in December after six months after fronting a whole series of consultation and business development meetings with a whole range of partners over the County.

The Government have shown some mercy with an additional £1.7 million but juxtaposed the other immense numbers it is simply a drop in the ocean.

Local people have come together with a new campaign called Save Northants Services.

So if you care about local services - Act NOW. 

The budget will be agreed on Thursday at a Cabinet meeting. Make sure you get you voice heard.

Members of the public can request to speak for 3 minutes at the meeting, by contacting Barbel Gale; email:  bgale@northamptonshire.gov.uk or phone 01604 367730.

Please request the opportunity to speak also ask for a copy of the reports for agenda items 5 and 6, which are not yet published on the website.

Please note that a request to speak to the Cabinet meeting next Thursday has to be submitted before 12.00 noon  next Tuesday (16th).

Save Northants Services is encouraging as many people to register to speak as possible. Please let us know if you submit a request. Thanks

Human Rights - Time to Act

The Conservative manifesto pledged to scrap the human rights act within the first 100 days.

Even in the last parliament there was the attempt to construct the infamous "Bill of Rights" which was struck unceremoniously into the long grass. With the conservative parliamentary majority there still maybe legal and political difficulties in the actual repeal of the act.

A number of groups have swung into action to campaign on this issue. Liberty, one would have thought would be a front runner in this but simply have this in the campaigning section of their website. The British Institute of Human Rights have been active on social media and have been promoting this blog post, but there is little in terms of a real plan. In some ways that understandable when so little details have been published on the actual proposals on abolition. 

Swiftly post-election Adam Wagner published this on the exciting new website rightsinfo.org. He advocates engaging with the process of reform and the construction of any bill of rights. However this is hard to do with little clear proposals. I really like Amnesty's "Do the human right thing" campaign but again it seems to be little but collecting email addresses and phone numbers. So far the most constructive thing I have seen is this petition launched yesterday and already gaining over 80,000 signatures.

For the voluntary sector remember all that glitters is not gold

Once upon a time in the Shire, the government decided that it wanted to stop investing in all machinery (snow ploughs, pneumatic drills, electric kettles, paper shredders etc) and instead wished to commission the invention of seven kinds of service to deliver the outcomes that the all the machines used to deliver. All the manufacturers and service providers in the Shire spent all their time for months and months for there would be no more purchases of machinery and adapting to this new environment would be the way their businesses would survive and the way that they would keep jobs for their staff. However as time went on, the requirements of the Shire kept changing:  

The new purchase must be suitable in the light, in the dark, in the summer and the winter, in urban environments and rural communities. Manufacturers and service providers came from far and wide to see if they could meet the challenges and win the prize of investment from the Shire. Artizans across all the towns and villages in the Shire sat up late at night and slaved over candlelight to come up with plans, designs, costings and risk analyses for all possible eventualities. They knew that Artizans and mythical beasts called bid writers across the country would also be competing for the same prize.

When the time came, they all submitted their plans to the Big Hall in the Shire and anxiously awaited the results of the government’s consideration. All were worried that the Shire government would decide to invest somewhere else and leave their workers jobless and at risk of their families being turned out on the streets. After some time three local lucky businesses were told that their plans were the best and that they were successful. In these places, there were parties with much fizzy pop and cakes as workers celebrated that they would have job security in the business that they worked in as their skills, hard work and industriousness was so obviously appreciated and rewarded by this success. For those that were unsuccessful there was sadness as in the few weeks before Christmas redundancy notices were handed out. Workers went back to their families and shared the bad news of their impending unemployment. Crisis plans were made to buy less presents for the festive period and turn off the heating more often. Some looked to find support from credit unions and foodbanks.

It was a Shire divided of those who were confident and had glasses full and those looking to the future to find a way of putting bread on the table anxious about making ends meet today. To those that had little to be hopeful for it was a time of great stress with little to look forward to. Children were told that there would be cut backs, mothers and fathers discussed how economies could be made in the household budget and wondered how they would cope with new babies and older relatives that had recently become ill and could no longer contribute money to the housekeeping.

Then suddenly on the Friday before Christmas there came the news that the government in the Shire had changed its mind and was thinking of a completely different plan. The politicians and the mandarins had decided the plan they had before was not the right plan. Instead, new plans included the selling off of the Big Hall and all the machinery for all the services. Instead, there would be big purchases of four magic beans and 95% of the people working in the Big Hall would also lose their jobs. Suddenly Christmas looked bleak for an awful lot of people. Suddenly all in the Shire were united by a future that looked bleak to all.

Race to the top - we're concerned - should you be?

It's over two weeks since I and the Chair of Weelingborough Black Consortium wrote to the Chief Executive of Northamptonshire County Council  about our concerns about the consultation on improving educational achievement, "Race to the Top". It's disappointing that there's been no response.

They appear to make statements comparing free school meal (FSM) with non-FSM kids (p. 3) and then leap to talking about specific groups within that – white ‘working class’ boys and looked after (p. 6).

There is no evidence that white FSM are the lowest achievers in the area. Nationally Gypsy/Roma are the lowest achievers, even if you only look at FSM kids. FSM is very misleading when described as ‘working class’. Most working class people do not qualify for free school meals.

Senior academics in this field, Professor David Gillborn, Dr Nicola Rollock, Dr Paul Warmington (University of
Birmingham) & Sean Demack (Sheffield Hallam University) present the following analysis:

"The best available data demonstrate clearly that working class pupils, in all ethnic groups, achieve less well on average than their middle class peers. However, the current debate is skewed by a focus on the smaller inequalities of achievement between working class children in different ethnic groups. The broad image of ‘White working class’ failure reported by many commentators is based on data that describe the low average
attainments of those in receipt of free school meals (FSM). This is a crude indicator of family poverty and does not capture the everyday meaning of ‘working class’: most people who think of themselves as ‘working class’ would not be placed within the FSM group in educational statistics."

The County Councils own Equality Duty Report for 2014 states: "Most ethnic groups results track just below national averages when compared to national results by ethnicity. Exceptions to this include ‘Pakistani’, ‘Indian’, ‘Other-Black’ and ‘Mixed: Black/ White African’ where results indicate these groups are achieving slightly above the national comparator" and graphs show that national trend that demonstrate lower acheivement for African caribbean, Somali, and Gypsy/Roma/Irish Traveller pupils, is clearly present in Northamptonshire.

When the County Council is publishing evidence which contradicts the proposals in the consultation document questions have to be asked as to why this approach has been taken. For freedom of information requests it is clear that no Equality Impact Assessment took place and this consultation was conspicuous by it's lack of engagement with Black communities in Northamptonshire where had these proposals had clear evidence this could be presented and the proposals justified.

If you feel strongly about this please sign the petition on the matter here

Leader of Northampton Borough Council "Staff work" in "holiday camp"

You can read the article about this here

As a local resident proud of my Northamptonian heritage I'm really disappointed by the comments of David Mackintosh about Council staff and his statement that when he talked  "to businesses across the whole of the town, the terms and conditions under which ... staff work[ed], frankly they ... think this is a holiday camp".

Perhaps he could do working people of the town a big favour and name and  shame these organisations so that we can know what they think about the need for decent pay? Perhaps we should look at all of the facts to see whether this is an objective assessment or an off the cuff remark.

For our town to thrive we need excellent public services staffed by well trained, well motivated individuals who know that they are valued by the people that they serve and the people that lead thier organisations. We only have to look at the effect of the County Council altering the terms and conditions of their staff on the services they deliver. The result - abysmally poor levels of experienced permanent staff in social services and a heavy over reliance on expensive agency staff to deliver basic service levels that are still classed as "inadequate" by inspectors.

The Borough Councils expenditure on staffing is a big proportion of the budget. What a shame, that the Council leadership don't try and get the most out of this spending by valuing the best resource that they have and choose rather to have a race to the bottom for both staff and local services.

Bringing Human Rights home to Northampton

Today, Northamptonshire Rights and Equality Council were supporting partners to the British Institute of Human Rights countrywide tour with an event hosted in the Cheyne Walk Club in centre of Northampton.

An audience of over forty people gave up a whole day of their time to debate, discuss and engage with the concept of human rights in twenty first century britain and aboard. The Human Rights tour has been taking place since 2011 and for the first time it had arrived in Northamptonshire.

With a wide range of information about human rights including detailed description of the background to the establishment of the human rights and the framework of rights, the sessions covered case law, the balance of absolute and non absolute rights. There was a wealth of information delivered in an approach that could only be described as extremely user friendly.

It was really positive talking with others in the break at the event at a time where human rights has been hitting the headlines with both the media and the breadth of the political classes having their say.


The trouble is that we are all too comfortable to accept human rights as an idea that should be upheld in a far off foreign land. For right here and right now, human rights doesn't have a poster boy or poster girl that we can all relate to as it is about all humans many of which we will never really share a similar experience with. Much of the time arguments of social justice promote the concept of "that could be you ... so support their cause". All too often human rights battlefields require supporters to support causes that they will never experience, so the support has to be there with the argument that "this is the right thing to do"and the human rights cause, particular in these times desparately need you and many others to do the right thing.