October 2011 Archives

What's worse: being dragged through the courts wrongly accused of murder or being dragged through the courts wrongly accused of child abuse? Stupid question? Hobson's choice?

Try suggesting that to former Premier League manager Dave Jones, who was falsely accused of abusing two teenagers as a care worker in a children's home after retiring as a footballer.

The former Southampton, Wolves and Cardiff boss, who has updated a book on his experiences, has told The Independent that it would have been preferable to have been fitted up for a murder he had not committed.

Once regarded as a bright, progressive young manager, Jones has not been offered a job in the top-flight of English football since the unfounded accusations went to court nearly 11 years ago. 

The book's title, No Smoke, No Fire, is a reference to the judge's comments at the end of the trial, which collapsed when it became apparent that the two witnesses had concocted their stories in a greed-driven mission for compensation.

Despite the lies - and the judge's words - Jones's career was in shreds, his family placed under unimaginable stress. The verbal abuse has continued long after the trial.

And the police? Jones describes their investigation as "incompetent" but they were intent on ploughing on regardless, unquestioning of the motives of the complainants and ultimately bringing 13 charges. "I lost faith in the judicial system," Jones says.

Anyone who has been falsely accused of a crime as vile as this would surely sympathise.

As for the police, well, life just goes on.

Immigrants to the UK are probably accustomed to demonisation, as are single mothers and, of course, teenagers (usually for being, um, teenagers). To the genus scapegoat, we can now add older people. 

We have in the past come close with the famous "bed blocker" tag, but the Intergenerational Foundation - a left-leaning think-tank of all things - has come up trumps with bedroom-blockers.

These are retired home owners who have the nerve to remain in their own properties long after their children have moved out and their partners or spouses have died. The bare-faced cheek of these people.

The foundation suggests that they should be taxed out of their homes and - I paraphrase - bugger off to a one-bed granny flat perhaps, and let younger families buy their home, the home that is a repository of memories and a place their children, grandchildren and relatives can stay. Kinship support anyone?

Speaking of support, there may come a time when that older home owner might need extra help, perhaps from a close friend or family member who could stay overnight or even move in as a carer. The alternative - a move into a one-bedroom flat - would make this support difficult, uncomfortable or just impossible to maintain.

But not to worry: we have a network of successful care homes where they could spend their final years, no? Well, we do, but that is assuming the companies running them do not go bust, that the settings meet inspection standards, they have enough staff, those staff are trained and all those horror stories we read are the exception. And who wants to end their days in even the best of residential care?

One other thing: no one before has thought of blaming the elderly for the nation's housing shortage, yet it is our inability to build housing, social and private, at both ends of the price range that is the root of the problem, whether the Intergenerational Foundation wants to admit it or not. Its efforts would be more appreciated by this blogger on addressing this and lobbying for new-build so we can all have somewhere decent to live.

Small mercies, though. The think-tank stopped short of describing older home owners as pension-snatchers; but that cliché "a burden on society" presses weightily on the lips.

Retirement from politics has done little to broaden the anthropological horizons of Edwina Currie (pictured in her finery). Perhaps her mind has been on other things, dancing perhaps, so she must be strapped for time to muck up on issues such as poverty. 

Yet muck up she did, in a different sense, when she told 5 Live that she doubted anyone in Britain was going hungry in 2011.

Mind you, if listeners heeded the advice of Margaret Thatcher's former health minister and were left to choose between eating a boiled egg and starvation, malnutrition would surely follow.

But, in the real world, her poorly timed cry of disbelief came days after publication of a shocking report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies into child and working-age poverty.

The findings, summarised on the JRF website, indicated that the target for eradicating child poverty by 2020 looks unlikely to be met and, if anything, the figure is set to rise to 3.3 million compared with 2.6 million in 2010-11.

Despite enough anectodal evidence of parents, especially mothers, foregoing meals in order that their children may be fed, and of older people having to choose whether to eat or keep their homes warm, Currie insisted that these tales represented political point-scoring.

What she makes of the rise in food banks is anyone's guess, but charities have been launching them for a reason, one that seems to have eluded Currie.

It might be better that Currie has left politics because her comments about poverty (and why she was asked for them I cannot fathom) have left Egg-wina as a national yolk - and a rotten one at that.

Picture: Rex Features

Assuming councils have to cut some services, where does the axe fall?

An article on The Guardian website written by the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire Council, Keith Mitchell, suggests libraries.

However, the bookish county has risen up, with its literati adding their outrage to the general disapproval. 

Understandable, too. Morally, libraries should not shut, particularly as UK literacy rates continue to be a concern.

As a side issue, is not the running of them by volunteers one of the prime functions of a Big Society?

However, back to the point: cuts there will be. And Mitchell says it is better to cut library services than social care, although he would do well to remember that in February his council did vote for "savings" of £119m in adult care over four years.

Nevertheless, it was encouraging to read an article by someone who has a bit of reputation for verbalising what the right of the Tory party thinks actually speaking up for social care.

He ends the article: "Everyone involved in social care has a critical role to raise the public profile of social care. I am afraid the village shop, school, pub and library will always score highly with electors because of their visibility while the importance of social care will remain invisible to most electors until they or their loved ones need it."

Convinced? Let me know below.

Picture: Rex Features

Innocent times. How often have we heard those two words, an exercise in retrospection, uttered by a speaker from behind rose-tinted specs?

Innocent times: when hospital consultants were doctors who wore bow ties rather than accountants wielding red pens; when the radio news was read by men in dinner jackets and the (dreaded) commercial radio "weathergirl" was as distant a prospect as a neutrino breaking Einstein's speed limit; when you could "leave your front door open". Enough, before I ruminate about old maids cycling to church and drum majors (pictured) strutting their stuff at the Festival of Britain. 

Whether those innocent times went through the mind of London mayor Boris Johnson at the Conservative party conference as he set out his vision to reduce gang activity only he knows. Certainly his insistence that miscreants desist from swearing at the police sounded like a paean to those apparently golden days.

I was reminded of the aforementioned innocent times at the weekend while reading these comments about public disorder attributed to a senior police officer.

"A strange lack of parental control in these modern days, caused by mistaken kindness and the fallacies of modern psychiatric education. The hysterical clamouring of youth for any sort of adventure..." And so it goes on.

Another comment came from a senior worker - probably a voluntary worker - with young people: "There is a dangerously soft attitude present which whittles away all personal responsibility for wrong doing, and the child comes to regard himself not as sinful, but just as 'a psychological case'."

Stirring stuff. Only the comments were made in, um, innocent times: in the mid-1950s as the "cosh boys" and razor gangs were taking their brand of violence to the streets of Britain.

I cribbed the quotes from Family Britain, part of historian David Kynaston's Tales of New Jersusalem series on post-war Britain.

But they do make us question whether our yearning for "more innocent times" is merely a reflection of our contemporary naïvety.

Picture: Rex Features