GUEST POST Grandparents or adoption: who would you choose?

Peter Hulme, Campaigns Officer for Grandparents Plus, introduces the charity's campaign Keep Families Together.

Who would you want to bring up your children if you weren’t around? Some readers might not have thought much about it. But for many others this will be a question that has deeply affected you personally or someone close to you.

There are very good reasons for trying to keep children with grandparents or other family members if the worst should happen. Our charity, Grandparents Plus, is campaigning for more support for grandparents and other family members to Keep Families Together and to stop children being needlessly taken into care or put up for adoption.

It is estimated that 300,000 children in the UK aren’t able to live with their parents. Most of them are living with grandparents, older siblings or other family members. This could be because parents have died or because of parental drug or alcohol misuse, illness, domestic violence, disability, imprisonment, abuse or neglect of children or a combination of these factors.

Grandparents Plus has launched an interactive video entitled “Who would you choose for me?” to highlight the issue. It features a girl who cannot live with her parents and must either be raised by her grandparents or placed with an adoptive family. The viewer gets the chance to decide how her story should end.



Policy makers and service providers all too often fail to recognize the contribution of grandparents and other family carers in raising children. In many cases they don’t get the support they need. In other cases they are obstructed from raising their grandchildren because of age discrimination by children’s services.

Grandparents Plus aims to fight this injustice through our Keep Families Together campaign. Our research shows that when deciding where children should be placed local authorities often give greater weight to the ‘permanency’ of adoption instead of recognising the love, stability and family links that grandparents and other family carers can provide. Families are being torn apart because adoption is seen as the default option.

Some grandparents are afraid of getting support from social services because they fear their grandchild will be taken away. One grandparent, a former district nurse, told us: “I didn’t want [social services] to be involved because I worked with them for 30 years and they often make the wrong decision.”

In other cases grandparents have had to spend thousands of pounds on legal costs to prevent their children being adopted. You can read more about these cases in our new report Too Old to Care?

We recognize the value of adoption for many children. But placement with family and friends is usually preferable because of the continuity of family relationships and sense of identity – as well as love and stability - that they can provide for a child. High rates of placement breakdown for adoption (from 10-50 per cent) reflect the fact that it is just not that easy to “transplant” a child from one family to another.

Grandparents and other family carers make a massive contribution to society by giving children a secure future and save the country billions by keeping them out of care. But they need more support from local and national government. They should be recognised as carers, protected from welfare cuts, given a national allowance and access to respite care.

State interference can be catastrophic when children are taken away from families unnecessarily. It is far more sensible for children’s services to work in partnership with the wider family to support those who are willing to step in to care for children. We all need to ask ourselves: “What future would I want for my child?”

Back our campaign to support family and friends carers: Keep Families Together.

Further reading

• www.keepfamiliestogether.org.uk
• Real stories of grandparent carers: Tony and Christine (video)
• Metropolitan Mum: reaction to "Who would you choose for me?"
• Virtual Granny: reaction to "Who would you choose for me?"
• Third Sector praise for the Keep Families Together campaign

Artdejardin sculpture garden, Wing

After seeing Wing maze and having lunch at the King's Arms, I visited Artdejardin. The leaflet I picked up there describes it thus:

Artdejardin is the strikingly beautiful garden based in the the picturesque Rutland village of Wing. There are over six beautiful acres of garden, woodland and meadow ... incorporating breathtaking sculptures that reflect and heighten natures finest creations.

The six acres are split between garden, meadow and woodland. Half the fun of the place is the excitement of seeing what is around the next corner, but the garden's website has a list of the artists whose work is on display.

The only disappointment is that you cannot get a cup of tea there. But it seems they do teas in the village hall on Sundays, and Wing Hall, with its cafe and farm shop, is only just outside the village.

Rebekah Brooks and the Chipping Norton Set

Dominic Sandbrook, writing on high50, is not convinced by the theory that Chipping Norton is home to an evil cabal of politicians and journalist who run Britain:

The truth is that Chipping Norton could hardly be a less appropriate headquarters for a Dan Brown-style international conspiracy. In a wildly overwrought column, the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne laid into the “louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral” conspirators, but none of those words really apply to poor old Chippy. Of all the popular Cotswold towns, it is easily the most unpretentious.

You want louche? Try Stow on the Wold. Amoral? Bourton-on-the-Water. Power-hungry? You don’t know power-hungry until you’ve been to Moreton-in-Marsh.

Alan Reid welcomes exoneration of Mull of Kintyre pilots

Liam Fox, the defence secretary, apologised in the Commons today to the families of two RAF pilots originally blamed for the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash.

Two RAF air marshals had accused Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Richard Cook of gross negligence over the crash on the Mull of Kintyre in which they died  along with 27 other people. Many of the passengers were among Britain's leading anti-terrorism experts.

The apology came after a fresh review found that Tapper and Cook should not have been blamed and the earlier ruling has now been set aside.

Alan Reid, Lib Dem MP for Argyll and Bute, has welcomed the setting aside of the original verdict:

"So many people – friends and family of the pilots, my predecessor Ray Michie, and others – campaigned for many years to overturn the original verdict which found the two young pilots, who died doing their duty, guilty of gross negligence.

"This review is long overdue. Where the previous Labour government stalled and obstructed, the Coalition Government has ensured that justice has been done.

"I hope that today’s report and conclusions will help many people to put this horrible accident behind them and I join them in remembering and paying tribute to all those who passed away on that disastrous day.”

The setting up of the new inquiry was announced by Nick Clegg when he took prime minister's questions on 8 September 2010.

A record day on Liberal England - thanks to Stephen Fry

On Monday, thanks to my post about Johann Hari and Amazon, this blog had the most visitors in a day since the coalition negotiations were taking place just after last year's general election.

Then yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon I was looking at Statcounter at work (as you do) when I noticed that I was suddenly getting an enormous number of hits on a post about a British Psychological Society report called Understanding Bipolar Disorder and that they were all coming from Twitter.

Bipolar disorder. Twitter. A huge volume of traffic. Could it be?

I went on to Twitter myself and sure enough...

The result was that yesterday this blog had 7887 unique visitors, which is by a long way the most visitors it has ever had in one day.

So thanks to Stephen Fry - and zany_zigzag, of course - I have done a good job of promoting this report for my employer while boosting my own readership. Call it inadvertent synergy.

Lembit Opik and Brian Paddick to sue over phone-hacking

Lembit Opik and Brian Paddick have both been contestants in I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! and both hope to the Liberal Democrat candidate in next London Mayoral election.

Now they have something else in common, reports the Guardian. Both are to take legal action over the phone-hacking scandal:

Öpik said that having been to Scotland Yard to review evidence a couple of months ago, there was "no doubt" in his mind that the News of the World had hacked his phone.

"The closure of the newspaper will do nothing to stop the legal action that myself and others are taking … I'm not going to let go of it. Nor will other people," he said.

Paddick told the BBC over the weekend: "I'm not suing News International, I'm suing the police. They failed in their legal duty to investigate properly first time around."

Six of the Best 173

Mark Valladares, writing on Liberal Democrat Voice, is critical of the Lib Dems' English Party: "From defining the time allowed to deal with disciplinary cases, to establishing a framework for the recognition of council groups, from mandatory tithing to restricting the rights of candidates to campaign in selections, the English Liberal Democrats have been hard at work, often producing guidance that would be difficult to absorb by well-organised, enthusiastic Local Parties with lots of volunteers to share the load, but are an appalling burden to small, struggling ones."

Caroline Woodbridge is aghast at plans to ban buses from the centre of Southwold.

Happier transport news from Cambridgeshire, where Meldreth and Shepdreth (two of my favourite station names) are celebrating their 160th birthday and Foxton its 163rd: "Free ice cream will be served at all three stations by Gocold, a business situated at Meldreth Sidings," reports Focus on Bar Hill.

Alex Foster at Niles's Blog risks expulsion from Nottingham by admitting that he has never read Alan Sillitoe.

Andy Boddington at 24dash.com introduces us to the reality of living with bad neighbours: "The rowdiness began last October when the tenant upstairs invited her boyfriend to stay. I knocked on their door and complained about the noise and complained the next day, time and time again. But he simply squared up to me saying he could make as much noise as “he” wants up to eleven in the evening—if only it stopped at eleven rather than 4am or as today 7am! This not simply Saturday night noise. The level of anti-social behaviour is never related to the day of the week, only I suspect to the availability of money for booze and drugs."

NitrateVille pays tribute to Sgt John Sweet, American star of A Canterbury Tale.

The turf maze at Wing

The maze at Wing is one of eight remaining turf labyrinths in England. It stands at the side of a minor road just outside the village. I love the way you can come across such rarities and find them well tended but hardly signposted.

As to how old it is... Britain's Historic Sites says it "may be well over 2500 years old", the Stone Circles site says it is Medieval, while the interpretation board beside the maze makes much of the Viking derivation of the village's name.

Anyway, we know Shakespeare was familiar with turf labyrinths, even if he knew them in decline:

"The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud
and the quaint mazes in the wanton green
for lack of tread are undistinguishable."

Certainly, the Genuki page for Wing says:

By the 19th century the maze seems to have lost some of its magic, for the Leicester and Rutland Directory of 1846 talks of: "An ancient Maze, in which the rustics run at the parish feast".

Johann Hari used Amazon reviews to get revenge

On Saturday I wrote about Johann Hari and Nick Cohen's revelation that those who cross Hari tend to find that their Wikipedia entries are vandalised shortly afterwards.

In that post I directed you to one on the Jack of Kent blog where this story is discussed in much greater depth. Reading that post and the informative comments on it, a fair summation of the state of play would be that the David r who has edited the Wikipedia is the same person as the David Rose about whom Hari has written in the past.

Over the years Hari has given quite specific information about Rose, whose career parallels Hari's to some extent, However, despite this information, none of the commenters on Jack of Kent has been able to prove that Rose really exists.

In my post I mentioned that somewhere at the back of my mind was the memory that Hari had once written pejorative reviews on Amazon. That is a good definition of the wisdom the years bring: you know important and  interesting things but can't quite remember them.

Fortunately, a reader has sent me a cutting from Private Eye - my readers have been very helpful today.

The first cutting is from the Eye for 25 July 2003. It runs in part:

Before Hari's literary talents were as widely known as they are today, he flexed his literary muscles by posting witty and acerbic reviews of the books of Cambridge University professor of Greek literature and culture, Simon Goldhill, on the US version of the online booksellers.

On 4 June 2000, while still studying social and political science at Kings College, Hari posted the following about the prof's Aeschylus: the Orestia: "Pompous drivvel [sic]. This Goldhill man has the prose style of a dead worm and even less warmth and charm. He clearly loves himself. Fine. Nobody else will."

Then on 23 October 2001 he posted a review of Goldhill's Being..."

Sadly, my cutting stops at this point, though Being must be Goldhill's Being Greek Under Rome.

I went to Amazon to see if Hari's reviews were still there. They are not.

But, interestingly, somebody called Anthony Barber from Northumbria has contributed equally abusive reviews of Aeschylus: the Orestia and of Goldhill's Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia. He is also damning about Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, a volume which Goldhill helped to edit.

This is intriguing but does not, of course, mean that Hari is Barber.

How Goldhill upset Hari? The next issue of Private Eye discussed this very point:

The last Eye's account of reviews of Cambridge professor Simon Goldhill's books posted on Amazon.com by Johann Hari, one of Britain's most "creative" young journalists,
has caused the prof to abandon his lofty "no comment" stand.

When the Eye asked Hari, now a star columnist on the Independent, why he had posted reviews in 2000 and 2001 describing the Cambridge classics professor's learned tomes on Aeschylus and Hellenism as "pompous drivvel" [sic] and "the bowels of mediocrity", he told us that while a student at Cambridge he had formed the view that Prof Goldhill was "a complete arsehole" after disagreeing with the professor over dinner about the merits of Mo Mowlam (Hari pro, Goldhill anti).

Now Prof Goldhill tells the Eye: "I have never knowingly eaten a meal with Johann Hari. I have certainly never discussed Mo Mowlam with him; there was a disciplinary matter which followed a complaint from the staff about his unpleasantly arrogant rudeness."

Hari's recollection may have been the true one here. He may not be David Rose.

But it is a fact that those who cross Hari fare badly on Amazon as well as Wikipedia.

Later. It seems the "drivvel" review can still be found on the German Amazon site. Thanks to friends on Twitter.

Lembit Opik's latest reality TV series

A reader kindly draws my attention to the latest television appearance by former Lib Dem MP and London Mayoral wannabee Lembit Opik.

He is appearing in cariad@iaith (which I am reliably informed translates Love for Language) on S4C, nightly this week (8.30/9.00 Sky 134, English subtitles available).

The programme's website describes it as follows:

Eight celebrities are set to spend an intense week learning Welsh in an eco-friendly chic campsite in Pembrokeshire.

Among Lembit's fellow contestants are Colin Charvis and Helen Lederer.

My reader comments (a little acidly):

One might ponder that such a course might have been more appropriate before securing Montgomery rather than after losing it.

The Story of the Post Office Underground Railway

This video tells the story of the Post Office Underground Railway, which operated under London's streets between 1927 and 2003 - and always seemed to be on Blue Peter.

britishrailways.tv

News of the World and the victims of 9/11

For some accountable reason, when I checked late last night the front page of this morning's Daily Mirror was not included among Tomorrow's Front Pages on the Sky News site.

The headline on the Mirror's front-page story runs: Phone hacking: 9/11 victims 'may have had mobiles tapped by News of the World reporters'

The details of the claim about 9/11 come some way down the story:

a former New York cop made the 9/11 hacking claim. He alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.

Now working as a private ­investigator, the ex-officer claimed reporters wanted the victim’s phone numbers and details of the calls they had made and received in the days leading up to the atrocity.

A source said: “This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their ­relatives.

“His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the ­relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look.

“The investigator said the ­journalists seemed particularly interested in getting the phone records belonging to the British victims of the attacks.”

It is all a little tenuous, but if this story turns out to be true, Murdoch will have more to worry about than whether he manages to take over BSkyB.

"The pillars of the establishment are tumbling": Nick Clegg in the Independent

Andrew Grice has a substantial interview with the Liberal Democrat leader in this morning's Independent:

The deputy prime minister senses a rare opportunity in the hacking scandal to carve out a separate niche. The Liberal Democrats have never wooed or been wooed by the media moguls. Unlike David Cameron and Ed Miliband, Mr Clegg did not attend Rupert Murdoch's annual summer party in London last month. He has twice been through the mincer of the ruthless Tory-supporting press machine – during the "Cleggmania" of last year's election and the ill-fated alternative-vote referendum in May.

Grice also pays the obligatory compliment to Nick's powers as a linguist, as well as showing us what he does all day:

Mr Clegg, who speaks in Spanish to his wife Miriam and in Dutch to his mother, is at ease as he conducts most of his Paris meetings in French which is judged "better than Tony Blair's" by impressed officials. Mr Clegg meets François Barin, the French Finance Minister, then delivers a long speech in French to business leaders.

He has a private one-to-one lunch with François Fillon, the prime minister; answers questions at "town hall" meeting staged by the British Council; hosts a reception for defence staff at the British ambassador's residence before squeezing in interviews with the French media. It's not for show; behind the scenes, some serious business is discussed about the ever-closer Anglo-French co-operation on defence.

A cat in a sink yesterday

This is Bessie who, technically speaking, is not my mother's cat...

J.W. Logan's daughter Nora was an imprisoned suffragette

Later. In fact it seems that it was Isobel Logan, Nora's sister, who was imprisoned. Nora was arrested for suffragette activities but was probably not imprisoned. See this note from Nina Boyd.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my hero J.W. Logan - or Paddy Logan - who was the Liberal MP for Harborough  from 1891 to 1904 and from 1910 to 1916.

I have known for years that one of Logan's daughters, Nora, was a campaigner for women's suffrage. I recently discovered an exchange in Hansard that suggests that went to prison for her beliefs.

The exchange came on 15 July 1908 - a time when Logan had temporarily retired from politics owing to poor health. J.G. Swift MacNeil (MP for South Donegal and, interestingly, a Protestant Irish Nationalist) asked a question of Herbert Gladstone, who was Secretary of State at the Home Office:

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention has been directed to the statements of Mr. J. W. Logan, who was for many years a Member of this House, that the ladies, of whom his daughter is one, who were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment in connection with the agitation for woman suffrage, are placed in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, have prison dress, have coarse prison food to eat, are not allowed to have letters or books or newspapers, except one book a week from the prison library, which they are not allowed to read until after 5 p.m., and that the one hour out of the twenty-four in which they are not in solitary confinement is spent half in chapel and the remaining half at exercise in a yard where they are not allowed to speak to any person; in what respects, if any, does this punishment differ from the prison discipline enforced on prisoners guilty of heinous crimes; how many 848 ladies are at present subject to this treatment for offences of a political character which has been inflicted on them in the discretion of a magistrate; and whether he will in these cases advise the exercise of the prerogative of the Crown for the removal or reduction of the cruel and humiliating incidents of such an imprisonment.

The more you learn, the more there is to find out.

Liberal Democrats should support the Labour motion to postpone BSkyB takeover

Last night I tweeted that the Liberal Democrat MPs should support Labour's Commons motion opposing Rupert Murdoch's takeover of BSkyB. Simon Hughes said the same on Sky News this morning, says Liberal Burblings.

Of course they should. As Simon said,  we are "a party that’s never been close to Murdoch, never been in this inner loop." He might have added "unlike Labour".

Simon did go on to say:

"I think we should make clear that we think there should be a postponement of the decision.

“There shouldn’t be a takeover while the investigations are going on and we should let the police investigations run their course.”

I would add that Murdoch, like the supermarkets I complained of the other day, has become over-mighty and the government must act.

We need not fear defeating the government. If there is a majority for postponing the takeover in Commons - and there clearly is - then it must be able to assert itself without bringing down the government.

Besides, largely because of the phone-hacking affair, the Conservatives are slipping in the polls and unlike to welcome the prospect of an election.

As I argued the other day, for the Coalition to work well we need the two parties to be equally scared of at the prospect of a general election. We are now rapidly approaching that happy state of affairs.

The Deighton Family: Travelling Light

They are not quite The Watersons, but while we are talking of musical Yorkshire families we may as well mention the Deightons too.

I remember seeing them playing Travelling Light on television in the 1980s (I think it was a daytime programme it cannot have been the performance in this video), rather liking their home-made feel and feeling a little guilty about it.

Then I discovered that their second LP, Acoustic Music to Suit Most Occasions, had been named Record of the Year by National Public Radio in America and felt vindicated. You can read a bit more about them at All Music.

I cannot recall coming across them after that. There are a number of songs from a Deighton Family "reunion" on Youtube (one is The Girl form the North Country Fair), so I suspect that was because they broke up.

The News of the World makes its excuses and leaves

Johann Hari, Nick Cohen and Wikipedia

The Diary in this week's Spectator is written by Nick Cohen. It is largely devoted to a strange experience that he had after having his book What's Left reviewed by Johann Hari in a small American journal. When the review appeared, Cohen thought it to be riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, so he sent a reply pointing out all the mistakes and it was published.

Cohen thought no more about the incident until he looked at his Wikipedia entry:

As well as learning that I was a probable alcoholic, a hypocrite and a supporter of Sarah Palin, I noticed that all reviews of my work were missing except Hari’s effort. Far from saying that he had made wild allegations and I had responded by quoting from the book, a writer working under the pseudonym ‘David r from Meth Productions’ suggested that I had made wild allegations while Hari ‘had offered quotes from Cohen which he argued backed up his claims’.

It turns out, says Cohen, that the David r had also attacked the Wikipedia entries of Cristina Odone, Francis Wheen, Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson after they have been involved in disagreements with Johann Hari.

So who is this David r?

A blog post by Jack of Kent this afternoon reports some detective work, and this is being taking forward by the commenters. Suffice to say, there are remarkable similarities between the career of David r and that of Hari.

At the back of my mind I seem to recall an old Private Eye story about Hari posting highly critical reviews of the books of people who had displeased him on Amazon. Can anyone confirm it?

In search of the Wise Woman of Wing

Today I have been to Wing in Rutland. The Genuki website about the village tells a remarkable story:

However, one woman in the early 19th century became famous as the 'Wise Woman of Wing'. Amelia Woodcock was a herbalist, and her medicines were sold around the district by a man riding on a donkey as well as from her cottage. Her house no longer exists but 'City Yard' is a reminder of the time when gentry and city folk visited the wise woman. She died about 1850 but her remedies were still for sale in Boots the chemist in Uppingham right up until the 1950s.

The story is expanded in an 1876 issue of Notes and Queries (partial PDF here; scrappy but full text here):

Although she continued to live in her humble cottage at Wing, she was visited daily by persons who - as I am told - "came in their own carriages"; and I am further informed, on good authority, that medical men also came to consult her.

Her patients were taken in regular turn, without distinction of rank ; and they were so numerous that, as she was unable to .see them all on the day that they came to her, many persons were obliged to take lodgings in the village or neighbourhood until the Wise Woman could see them.

And Genuki suggests that "City Yard" in the village is "a reminder of the time when gentry and city folk visited the wise woman". (As far as I can see from the map, City Yard runs behind the King's Arms - last time I visited the village there was a second pub called the Cuckoo but that has now gone - so the footpath sign in the far right of the photo is pointing you that way.)

But I wonder about the story, and not just because my experience is that popular etymology of this sort always turns out to be wrong. It is no surprise to find a post on a family history board from someone who has been trying to research it and come up with very little.

But I have found one indication online that there may be something to the story. A jocular letter to the British Medical Journal from 1853, written by an anonymous doctor, tells of his unsuccessful attempts to gain relief for problems he was experiencing with his hearing:

I must say, from my own experience, that I can excuse anybody for going to various quacks, when "the faculty" have failed to give relief. The desire for cure is so strong in the human breast, that, if I did not believe the "wise woman of Wing" to be a sorceress, I could imagine myself becoming her patient.

So a contemporary writer assumed that his readers would all of heard of the Wise Woman of Wing without further explanation. Maybe there is something in the story after all?

Interestingly, I find that Lord Bonkers took Colin Powell to see the lady as recently as 2002. He may have been confused about the date or his companion's identity, but his observation that she was "Terribly Wise" betrays his characteristic shrewdness.