The image of care

When I was younger (yes I can remember when I was) I had a healthy interest in politics. Without going overboard towards the excesses of the ‘far left’ I was firmly entrenched in the Labour camp. And while my views have mellowed over the years I’m still a Labour voter and expect I will always be so inclined. I’m not one of those people who ‘hate Conservatives’ and I doubt I would ever find my collar felt by Mr Plod while demonstrating against any one of a number of issues. But this week’s savage cuts by a government managed and run by mega-wealthy public schoolboys is enough to make me grow my hair, roll a few joints and get real angry.

The actor Ricky Tomlinson (aka Jim Royle of the Royle Family series) sums up the idiocy of the government’s scything of benefits here. His article summarises the issue far better than I could but there is an important further point that I feel needs making. And that is the ethics of this round of cuts which Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Co are desperately trying to shy away from. By rooting out disabled people and families in social housing where there is a spare room to stand before the Conservatives’ axing squad, they are neatly dividing and ruling over the most vulnerable people in our society. It has not escaped our notice that the elderly are exempt from the axe (as indeed they should be anyway in a country as wealthy as ours), presumably because they would have the audacity to go out and vote against cuts targeted at them.

But the most despicable thing about this legalised thieving of our government is the quasi generalisation put out by Conservative spin doctors that some people on benefits are lazy slobs watching daytime TV while robbing the country of all its money. This view is propagated by nasty apparatchiks with frothing mouths who clog the airwaves on phone-ins telling us how they have seen their so-called disabled neighbour walking to the off licence to buy cigarettes and cheap lager ‘with our money’.

So, to redress the balance, here is my take on the real scroungers; those who should be facing the biggest cuts. How about the hundreds of thousands of people living off unearned income, whose only ‘work’ is to log on and find out how much interest they have ‘made’ in the last week; or how about the scum who run ourbanks and who lost billions of our money and who still pay themselves obscene bonuses with our money.

As if it’s not bad enough for disabled people and some families on social housing to live off a few scraps the government throw at them. Now the humiliation of having to live off even less as another apparatchik comes round to assess if the empty spare room justifies their evacuation. Of course, Messrs Osborne and Cameron will sleep very soundly in the knowledge that if the said family are out on the street, they will be able to choose from the wide range of loan sharks like the one exposed here and one of whose lobbysits is a an adviser to a certain David Cameron MP.

Pass the sick bag.

The issue of freedom of the press is one where the ink will just not dry. I generally agree with Nick Cohen but on this one I fear he has lost the plot.

If left to its own devices and self policing, the media moguls will continue to govern the country (and I include the Guardian, BBC et al with the Murdochs in this). Think about it, ‘freedom of the press’ is a no negotiation mantra trotted out by an interesting alliance of left, right and centre. What this unholy alliance conveniently forgets is that the press has very little freedom. Whether it be pathetically going on bended knees to advertisers, PR agencies or think tanks (listen to Today on the radio each morning and count the number of reports from think tanks on the news slots), the press does not have as much ‘freedom’ as we like to think.

I rather like the idea of Big Brother poking its nose into the disgusting pig’s trough that is the UK media and spewing out the sh*t that poses for ‘responsible journalism’. But ‘hang on’ cry the hacks from the red tops, ‘if we’ve done something illegal, then Mr Plod and his mates will be feeling our collars’. Quite so, but for me it’s not enough to cower behind the safety of ‘free speech’ knowing that only the rich and famous will take legal action; the good folk who have no money and who have been named and shamed in the red tops and beyond, have no recourse to expensive lawyers.

I’m not well qualified to know if headlines like ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ is in the public interest or if it falls within the boundaries of free speech. And I realise that regulation could be the start of a slippery slope that ends with a single newspaper called Pravda. But there has to be a middle ground, which curbs the enthusiasm of a press mob seemingly out of control. I hope that the cross-party agreement works, but I fear that the double edge sword called ‘freedom’ can draw a lot of blood.

There is no need for an introduction to this story from The Guardian.

The ubiquitous Mr Aso, as the article points out, has a track record for insensitivity. This latest tirade against the elderly is actually an extreme example of how societies are increasingly ‘valuing’ older people. Yes, it’s true that as we get richer and more savvy about health, so people in developed countries live longer, and this is a cause for celebration, not an excuse for propagating a form of ageist cleansing.

It’s not just about the economic and social impacts of populations that lives longer. As I go about my business in London, I see older people marginalised by a society that is designed and fine tuned to give younger people economic and social power. What used to be taken as given, that a younger person would vacate a seat for an elderly passenger struggling with shopping is now met with a grunt or shrug as the said younger person continues to carry on his or her obsession with the nonsense to catch up with on FaceTwitter.

The job market is also becoming a no-go area for people who who have the audacity to reach 50, never mind 70-plus. Despite evidence pointing to the ‘employability’ of people with knowledge and experience, companies and organisations prefer ‘high-flyers’, some of whom, as we know are responsible for bringing western economies to the brink of collapse as Matthew Syed points out in his excellent book ‘Bounce’.

All of this is unfortunately a sideshow to the main act of how care for the elderly – both health and social – is being compromised by government cuts. This Daily Telegraph article is one of many that adorn the pages of our broadsheets.

And in the scramble to save money, it seems that the budget axe falls first with the ageing population.

The government had better watch its step. Countries as diverse as The Netherlands, Israel and India, to name just three, all have designated political parties representing older people and before the likes of Mr Aso have their way and see funeral companies’ profits soar, they may like to consider that in democratic countries, ageing people still have the vote.

Being a web-based company, Care Images never rests and we are open for business 24/7/365. That said, at this time of year we do wind down and enjoy the festivities (let’s hope The Great Escape is screened again!)

Many of our clients are people who spend their working week helping vulnerable people, some of our models are living with the consequences of cuts to services and benefits. The current coalition government appears to have a policy of blaming the poor for the incompetence of the rich (bankers smugly carrying on their bad work). Everyone involved in care – practitioners and service users – will be affected as the axe continues to fall. And yet, despite the government’s policy, there is an enormous amount of great work out there enabling people to lead fulfilling lives. We regularly field calls from social service departments and charities telling us they need images to highlight the excellent work they are doing and we hope, in our very small way, we are helping promote the image of care.

We wish our clients, models and supporters seasonal greetings, and we look forward to being of service in 2013.

Best wishes
Mark Rivlin and Tim Brown

The late and great comedian Frankie Howerd had a memorable line tagged to many of his routines. He would regularly complain to the audience that we were rowdy saying, ‘Titter ye not’. If the laughtermaker were around today and still treading the boards, he would surely change the tagline to ‘Twitter ye not’.

The networking giant has lost, dare I suggest, hash-tag brownie points for allowing people to mention the wholly innocent Lord McAlpine in connection with child abuse claims. While Lord McAlpine is absolutely right in instructing his legal team to pursue damages, the proceeds of which he will donate to Children In Need, there is an element which is worrying. Certainly the BBC is responsible for a shabby, lazy and disastrous probe into child abuse in a children’s home in North Wales broadcast on Newsnight and according to The Lawyer magazine, a settlement has been reached. But is pursuing the few thousand people who tweeted and retweeted on the subject really necessary? The fact is that Twitter and Facebook are the 21st century equivalent of a chat in the pub over a quiet drink. But of course there aren’t enough greedy lawyers to hang around every snug waiting for someone to say that a certain footballer is a ‘lazy xxxx’ and then collect the money. Today, all a lawyer with a cash slot machine in his eyeballs needs to do is type a few words into a search engine and hey, thousands of mugs who have said something about a ‘celebrity’ are there for the taking.

So what is the answer? How does an ordinary Joe using Twitter know what is potentially libelous? Are we entitled to express our opinions when we believe issues need to be raised? Yes, it’s true, those people who jumped on the completely false McAlpine bandwagon were wrong. But again, is repeating what someone says a criminal offence? We surely don’t want to go down the route where millions of blogs (like this one) are subject to possible litigation, but on the other hand we don’t want people sending malicious lies and rumours viral. The best chat rooms and forums have moderators who make sure the boxers punch above the belt. But that idea is impossible to police throughout the Internet.

The bottom line of this is that the Internet has revolutionised our lives, mainly for good. We will never completely stop the spammers and scammers, nor will we ever stop online pub talk reaching audiences of millions. While completely understanding Lord McAlpine’s anger, there is really no need to go for the thousands of people potentially implicating in spreading the malicious rumour. The BBC should pay up for a disgraceful piece of journalism. The bloke from the snug deserves a slightly wider berth.

One thing the late Sir Jimmy Savile will not be doing is resting in peace as horrific evidence emergence of his predatory sexual advances towards teenage girls and vulnerable people. From the BBC to government departments, it appears that no-one was able to nail the former miner and, pardon the expression, clunk click him into a cell for a lengthy sentence. Far from being punished for what looks increasingly like a scheming and manipulative pursuit of girls for sexual gratification, Savile was courted by the establishment presumably because it was good to be associated with an iconic figure who raised millions of pounds for charity.

Savile’s decades of alleged abuse over the 60s to the 80s mirrored our society at that time. The sexual exploitation was often carried out by people who were paid by the state to look after or act as role models for its most vulnerable members. From care home staff to clergy, from teachers to care workers in special needs long stay hospitals, once the doors were shut (we now hear that Savile had a set of keys to plunder inmates at Broadmoor Hospital), it was open house for the abuse to take place. It will be interesting to see how much the establishment knew about Savile’s alleged crimes and how far and high the network of abuse spread. This article in the Independent by Paul Gambaccini forecasts that much more evidence will be uncovered.

Of course, abuse of children continues to blight our society today as the case of the paedophile ring in Rochdale harrowingly showed. But in the case of Savile, it is clear that it was a lethal combo of power and iconic status that enabled him to carry out the alleged attacks with impunity. This obsession with celebrity and fame was particularly misplaced with Savile, a B-list player who somehow manipulated TV chiefs into believing he was a superstar. Once this iconic status was confirmed, Savile had the freedom his alleged perverted actions craved. In short, he knew he was untouchable, the poor girls he allegedly abused had the right to remain so themselves.

Their heartbreaking tales of fear and humiliation are terribly sad and they leave a public already reeling from tales of incompetence among some social work professionals. Our clients at Care Images are hardworking, diligent and caring people who have chosen a career in care to help people. Savile’s legacy also affects their work because some of the country’s less scrupulous news organs will use his case as a stick to beat social and charity workers.

When Savile died a year ago, his coffin was visited by well-wishers before he was buried. This macabre ritual – reminiscent of former Soviet leaders who would lie in state for days as thousands of people paid their respects – is sadly poignant. The odious Savile, it seems, was not only lying in state, but while alive and kicking, was lying in bed abusing young girls with the keys to the room provided by the state.

The real truth surrounding the terrible events at Hillsborough in April 1989 when 96 football fans were crushed to death has finally come to light. The Independent Review Panel has found what decent people have known for 23 years, that lies, deception, slander and deceit conspired to rob grieving families of the truth of what happened to their loved ones. The ubiquitous Sun newspaper and its editor at the time Kelvin MacKenzie both offered grovelling apologies as soon as the report hit the Internet and there will be a number of serving police officers, former politicians and legal advisers who had led us to believe that the Liverpool fans were to blame for their own deaths, who will be anxiously expecting a knock at the door from Mr Plod. And justifiably so too, for the report makes very uncomfortable reading. We now know that documents and witness statements were manipulated, that the security resembled an episode of Dad’s Army and that the stadium itself was not fully safe for one of the biggest sporting events of the year. MacKenzie’s orgy of abusive editorial comment directed at people who had gone to watch a football match was nothing short of disgusting – hopefully he will never get a decent night’s sleep again as long as he lives. And it would be interesting to hear what the prime minister at the time, one Margaret Thatcher, has to say about the report given its findings surrounding incompetence and negligence of the police and ambulance services.

But there is one point about this horrific event that has never properly been addressed. The FA Cup semi-final was between football’s big-two of the time, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, and Sheffield was geographically the right neutral venue (although as we now know clearly wrong in terms of ground safety). But why on earth were the Liverpool fans given the Leppings Lane end of the ground and not the much bigger ‘home’ end where the Sheffield Wednesday fans stood? With respect to Forest, Liverpool, even 23 years ago when English football was not the global brand it is today, had a much bigger following than the east Midlands club. It was surely obvious that more fans from Liverpool would turn up with or without tickets and so the massive crush outside and inside the stadium would have been much more manageable if the Liverpool fans had a bigger area to go into. That the Football Association did not think of the consequences of this is staggering, especially as the same teams met at the same venue the previous year with the same arrangements, and the Leppings Lane end then looked dangerously full.

Hillsborough had precedents; Bolton, Ibrox, Bradford to name three of the bigger football tragedies over the years. But Hillsborough will stand out because of the vitriol aimed at the victims – indeed it would not be going too far to suggest that the cover-up orchestrated by the powers of the time was made easier because the scapegoat of Liverpudlians being drunken louts was so much part of establishment thinking that they assumed the country, with the help of Mr MacKenzie, would buy it.

The families of the victims knew better and their tireless campaigning has finally seen the truth emerge. As for Mr MacKenzie’s tirade against so-called drunken louts; it is he who should be serving behind bars.

When neurosurgeon Lutwig Guttmann launched the first Paralympics in 1948 he could hardly have imagined the event 64 years on. From the humble beginnings of a makeshift athletics field at Stoke Mandeville Hospital to a global reach of hundreds of millions of people, the Superhumans (as UK TV broadcaster Channel 4 has dubbed the competitors) will display their immense talent in front of sell-out crowds at every venue. A combination of huge sponsorship money, South African athlete Oscar Pistorius whose ‘blade runner’ prosthetics and talent have won over millions of fans from the able-bodied Olympics and the excitement of a summer the British people never want to end are making these Games an irresistible prospect. In London 2012, disability is at last cool. Even The Sun, never known for taking on social issues ran a front-page splash today on squaddie Derek Derenalagi who had been given up as dead while on duty in Afghanistan and who will be ‘going for gold’ at these Games.

At Careimages, we are proud of our involvement, albeit small, in highlighting disability (learning, physical and sensory) issues through our photographs and blogs. And to celebrate the Paralympics we have commissioned photo-journalist Julio Etchart (julioetchart.com) to provide images from the Games. His shots will not only reflect the athleticism of the Superhumans but also of able-bodied and disabled people watching them, as well as interesting background reportage that Julio specialises in.

We respect and admire the Superhumans but there is still much work to be done for the also-rans in the world of disability in relation to access, inclusivity and prejudice. I understand that Channel 4 need to raise the ante and a strapline with Superhumans will put bums in front of TV screens, but my wager is that disabled people round the world would rather be seen first as humans, equal to those with two legs and so-called intellectual ability and as a first resort being able to watch a film in a cinema and fly on a plane with them.

Guttmann’s legacy lives on and we are delighted to represent his vision through Julio’s lens. Watch out for the images, they reflect a very different world from 1948. Maybe, just maybe, after these Games, people will start using the word ability to describe disability.

Fast backtrack a year, with parts of the UK in flames, rioting and looting, the country seemingly in freefall. How had our green and pleasant land become so unpleasant, even repugnant? And with the Olympics only a year away and the world’s greatest athletes arriving and hundreds of millions of people watching our every move, there was an inevitable and justifiable aura of doom and gloom.

So how did we turn it round? The cynic in me suggests that it was money, the billions of corporate and government money that bought us love, medals and a logistics triumph (not to mention the 80,000+ volunteers – including myself), or ‘games makers’ as we were spun in corporate speak. But emerging from my cynical skin, there was something quite remarkable about these Games, remarkable inside and outside of the citadels of sport which produced so much drama. The fact was, that for two weeks London became a wonderful place to live. People out there who frequent public transport as I do will testify to the fact that the buses, trains, underground and DLR, whether near or far from a venue, were full of hope not despair. We interacted, helped, conversed and enjoyed. Daily issues which blight our society and which emerged with so much venom a year ago; race, class, hatred, envy, greed, selfishness and violence were wiped off our streets, our buses, our roads, our pubs and our estates by the awesome feats of not only our Olympians (and step forward Mo Farrah and Jessica Ennis for their gigantic efforts) but also by modern folk heroes led by the irresistible Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps.

When a human being’s run, swim or striking of a table tennis ball arouses senses hitherto the monopoly of great composers or artists, we know we have reached a Utopia where meritocracy trumps colour of skin, class and lifestyle. And that is what happened in London, we became a meritocracy. The best won medals, the rest were awesome too. The rest of us watch with admiration and respect, qualities that were conspicuous by their absence in last year’s inferno.

Surely it is only sport that can make such an impact on people’s lives. I’m sure the chattering classes – conspicuous by their complex analysis of art, literature and music – would argue that the pen is mightier than the fencing sword and it is ideas, literature and jazz music, not volleyball and boxing that shape the world. Not so. Sport’s simplicity and accessibility are perfect entry levels for the likes of Nicola Adams, the young woman from Leeds who took gold at boxing who has won the hearts and minds of the nation. And one year on from meltdown UK, for every youngster from a sink estate who wants to emulate Nicola, and walks into a local gym with a dream of earning gold rather than looting it, we have the raison d’etre for what has been the greatest show on earth.

Guest blogger Geoff Gunby writes a moving article about the nature of depression and his own battle with it.

I’ve never had any problem telling people that I have suffered from depression, because, in my experience people just don’t want to know.

Their eyes glaze over and their faces take on that ‘let’s talk about something else’ expression. You just know that you might as well have told them that you’ve just cut up a herd of cows with a chainsaw.

This almost magical effect, it just doesn’t apply to strangers or passing acquaintances, but also to health professionals, nearest and dearest and friends I’ve known for years. Something about it embarrasses them. Nevertheless I don’t want to launch a diatribe about how the world won’t listen or how uncaring people are because I don’t believe that things are that simple.

If people are annoyed when someone says that he or she is depressed we have to ask why. Time and time again I hear it said that we citizens of the western world are faced with an epidemic of depression. It’s life shortening and costs working hours. There seems to be no easy explanation of why this should be given the comparatively easy lives we have. There is something there, something huge and yet somehow imperceptible, like the elephant that has been in the living room for so long that it has ceased to be something worthy of even the most flippant comment.

But what could it be, this group secret of which mention must never be made? This dark mass in the corner, that takes up so much of our time with its constant demands without our being ever being really aware of its over-solemn occupancy? The mention of which brings out such a quiet rage in the people around us. As with anybody else all I can do is to look back at my own experience of what Andrew Solomon terms ‘The Noonday Demon’ and try an make a few connections.

In 1970, when I was nine years old, Unilever sacked my father. He had moved to the seaside town I grew up in to work for Birds Eye foods in their laboratory. As part of a general rationalisation of assets the lab was relocated and my Father suddenly found himself surplus to requirements. The effect on him was quite stunning. It was as if a miniature atom bomb had gone off in our middle class home, the fallout from which would never entirely leave us.

Dad had never been an easy person, irritable, violent, perfectionist beyond all reason, but he had always had a kind of energy which got things done, kept the garden tidy and kept him interested in life. Thus I had always forgiven him his excesses. Overnight, it seemed, things just came to a halt. The grass on the lawn that he had been so proud of grew two feet tall, the vegetable patch was abandoned and he spent long hours on the sofa with his head in his hands. The swing at the bottom of the garden hung rusty and useless as yesterday’s cliché, love and kindness were a thing of the past. Too proud to claim benefit he heaped humiliation on himself by borrowing from his own father to pay the mortgage. He argued with and struck my mother on several occasions. He subjected me to mental torture, making me stand in front of him while he told me how awful my life was going to be, how I would grow up friendless, and how I had no idea about anything. Of course at the time I didn’t understand what was going on only that I didn’t like it.

I had no idea that my father was depressed, had perhaps suffered what people used to term a nervous breakdown. In time, my mother went back to work as a teacher, my father got a job in the NHS and things were OK again. Except that they weren’t.

Between my parents things were never quite the same again and in my eyes, my father, who I had once worshipped no matter what his faults, was effectively dead. Someone to get money from if possible and to otherwise be avoided. In this period and the loss of direction that came with it were laid the foundations of my career as a delinquent, my failure at school and my inability to take pleasure in anything I later achieved. In other words the template for my own future depression.

I can’t say for sure when it started. All I know is that as my twenties progressed, I began to be aware that things weren’t right. A disastrous love affair, a pointless MA in Media Studies, moving to London with no clue as to what to do, the constant anxiety about the epilepsy which was slowly starting to control my life, the death of my beloved grandmother from cancer; all of these caused me pain, but wouldn’t it be the same for anyone? Nobody can go through life without some sorrow but people carry on and yet somehow I found myself less and less able to do so. There was something, something more, isolating me, colouring my thoughts. darkening the future, something I couldn’t get a hold on.

For years I carried on, writing novels that were never published, doing odd jobs, buying a house, getting married, travelling around, seeming to be having a good time. Yet all the time experiencing a growing emptiness, hearing an ever louder self accusatory voice pushing me towards taking my own life. Down and down I sank until there really seemed to be no hope. I had stopped working and gone on Disability Benefit because of my epilepsy and gradually I became paralysed to the point where doing anything was an almost unbearable effort.

On the surface yes, I was moving forward, was learning to paint, thinking of moving to Portugal but underneath it was hopeless. And still I just thought it was me. Finally my GP sent me for counselling after I had been to see her about something else but still it didn’t really register. I think the low point was when I told a friend’s wife not to take her kids to Disneyland because Walt Disney was a tool of the CIA. She just snapped and for about an hour berated me for being so miserable. Next day I went and sat by a pond in a park in Chester and cried for hours, watching the rain fall into the dead water.

And then it was over. My marriage broke up, I didn’t go and live in Portugal, met someone else and had children with her. And I was happy for the first time since I didn’t know when. Afraid that the darkness might just come back some day I’ve asked therapy on a couple of occasions but have given up after being made to do a kind of phone quiz and then been told that I may have been depressed but that it was now ‘in remission’.

So maybe that’s it, everybody’s happy nowadays, if a little anxious, just that I can’t help wondering what happened to me. So many books, so much research, so much pontificating, all pointing to the simple truth that everybody has their own depression. Mine wasn’t too bad, after all I’m still here, even if it did last a long time. And yet there has to be a common thread somewhere, surely?

For me the thread that leads back to the elephant comes not from looking at depression but from those who are not depressed. From the relative ease with which I cleaned out my life and started afresh. The whole process took on its own momentum – with my wife went her friends, her inlaws, a whole existence. Really I behaved so oddly that only my true friends stuck with me and it was all for the good. Change your life and change yourself. Use your choices.

Of course things are not quite that simple. But still it seems to me that the oh-so-polite anger that lies behind our friends’ refusal to acknowledge our pain is their own fear that it could happen to them. They too are simply running out of choices, and the choices they do have don’t amount to much. Surely you, sad as you are, can see that we are both the same? A tempting elephant but surely much too simplistic to cut it in the nervous world of pachyderms. Or then again…