#we are talking the wealthiest people from the countries with the worst human rights records

[arcticdementor]

Thread: I was sent this and felt the need to thread it here on Twitter. It will be long. It is purported to be an anonymous, open letter from a professor at UK Berkeley in the History Department. The only comment I will make is to say it is worth every moment of the read.

C Berkeley History Professor's Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy

Dear profs X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders.

Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

…

A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.

Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates' undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department's apparent desire to shoulder the 'white man's burden' and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it's fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. "Those are racist dogwhistles". "The model minority myth is white supremacist". "Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime", ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

…

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.

Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders.

Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald's and Wal-Mart.

For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

…

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

…

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach.

He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I'm ashamed of my department. I would say that I'm ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It's hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn't affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating.

No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

#twitter thread #threadreader #anonymous letter #berkeley #read the whole thing

[anthonymoosh-blog]

The Scramble for Africa.“A call for unity among African’s States”

Scramble for Africa:

The Scramble for Africa as a result of the Berlin Conference between 1884 to the early twentieth century was the worst disaster to have ever happened to Africa, and it was a crime against humanity. It began 1884 with the Berlin Conference and ended by the early twentieth century. Africa found itself being divided by non-Africans with imaginary borders, and Colonies. They partitioned Africa's with limited knowledge about Africa's history, culture, ethnic, language and traditional leadership leaving us with almost no past. They designed regional maps without providing any notification to traditional African rulers. This deprived African borderland communities of lucrative opportunities by hindering their movements, and forcing them to live differently than their customary life. A change is possible, we no longer live in the eighteen or nineteen centuries, it is now! A more peaceful and robust change is possible and very necessary, I remained optimistic.

Colonial Borders in Africa:

Post-independence government continued colonial practices and use of these artificial borders which were designed by the colonialists as political instruments and have increased instability and underdevelopment for borderland communities across the continent. Africans stop moving freely in their everyday activities, and nomadic practices, which inflicted economic hardship and social inconvenience. Changing the lifestyle and structural systems of African communities negatively affected African lives, administrative structures, social cohesion and economic well-being.

Traditional leadership:

The institution of traditional leadership in Africa pre-existed during colonial time and was the only known system of governance among indigenous people. However, after independence many African countries developed antagonistic relationships between traditional leaders and society. They further removed the chief’s rights; allowing them only the arbitration of domestic disputes and to sit on village development committees claiming that they lack the power to organize society.

The chiefs’ environmental authority was not recognized, and the chiefs could no longer function as custodians of the land, especially as custodians of customs, culture and values. They could neither allocate it nor protect it from any form of degradation. Several strategies were used to removed chiefs, and the aim was to destroy traditional leadership, and to bring in western democracy, and forgetting our own understanding of democracy (ruler ship) which was unique in its own ways, and nowadays refer to as “consensus”, All of this was possible simply, because we decided to continue the use of these improper borders in order for western democracy to function properly. This affected the traditional African governance structure.

There is a need for traditional authorities to be recognized through African Constitutions., We need to give back power to traditional leaders to restore dignity and role in society.

Traditional/indigenous leadership is still relevant as a trusted institution for governance by the majority of Africans. They still play an integral role in the governance system on the continent and as such they should not be silence. There is still hope for Africa to change the narrative.

Divide and rule:

Besides artificial deliberate borders, European colonial powers employed “divide and rule,” “direct rule,” and “assimilation” policies, which forced the loss of social norms, identity, and social order for Africans. For instance, it took 30 years to settle the boundary between Congo and Uganda. Yet they are all African (same people), but with different nationalities and have developed hostility through resource competition, which often led to traditional Africans breaking away from their original tribes to form new communities. This problem is still prevalent with almost no intervention from political leaders on the continent. We have contemplated what damage the status quo has done and is still doing — it is time to start to think about an alternative, because the sustenance of democracy is the responsibility of every citizen through its traditional values system.

Why should Africa unite?

Kwame Nkrumah a long time ago thought ‘Africa ought to marry or perish!’ Without honest African unity, our continent will continue at the mercy of imperialist authority and exploitation. In February 2009, upon the individual nominated chairman of the 53-nation African Union in Ethiopia, Gaddafi told the assembled African leaders: “I shall continue to insist that our sovereign countries work to achieve the United States of Africa”. The African Union, by contrast, has fixed itself the errand of edifice, a “united and integrated” Africa by 2025. Africa has a great potential good number of Africa’s resources remain unexploited.

As we navigate these stormy times as a continent permit me to give profound reasons why Africa's obligation to marry is urgent and necessary.

Africa’s Wealth:

Africa is enormously wealthy! When people say Africa is rich they are not talking about physical cash. In fact, Africans have the wealthiest land mass on the earth. This wealth can be found in its gigantic mineral resources and in its titanic agricultural potential. Africa’s limestone wealth includes a broad form and giant measurements of assets that are life-threatening to the expert and industrialized enhancement of humanity, e.g., gold, platinum, diamonds, manganese, cobalt, chromite, coal, radium, iron ores, chromium, copper, lead, zinc, tin, titanium, antimony, tantalum, germanium, lithium, phosphates, bauxite, uranium, petroleum, and natural gas. Parallel records may well be provided on the subject of Africa’s agricultural potential, which remains largely untapped. According to a research done by the All African People’s Revolutionary “There is an estimated 632 million hectares of arable land in Africa, only 179 million hectares are actually cultivated, less than 30% of its arable land. In fact, this arable land is in just four countries (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and the two Sudan's), where nearly 40% of this uncultivated land is located”, there is enough agriculturally-rich land to feed Africa’s 1 billion inhabitants numerous epochs over. However, with the colonialist imaginary borders and partition of the continent this wealth is unevenly distributed, and Africans can only benefit from this wealth when it is developed and shared on a continental basis.

Common currency:

African states have been unable to achieve a stable single currency, and low inflation rates, but a Common Currency One of the best ways to integrate Africa’s economy, enhance inter-African trade, and gain control in setting the prices of African exports is through the use of a common currency. A collective African currency will eliminate the transaction outlay customers fee at what time trades a sundry currency other than their own, exceptionally for folks intricate in inter-African trade. Secondly, the prices of goods and services will be more transparent, and thus more comparable, when there is a common currency. Thirdly, the African familiar currency will turn into an intercontinental currency of privileged importance that billions of people, inside and outside of Africa, will have to acquire to purchase anything made and sold anywhere in Africa.

This would enable Us solve the trade deficit (Balance of Payment) that exists between Africa and other continents. It will definitely lead to the common currency appreciation against USD, Euros, Pounds etc. The far-off funded conflicts in South Sudan, Central Africa Republic, DRC Congo amongst others cannot happen, and Senegal will cease Paying imposing taxes to France. Common currency will grant easy access to loans with lower interest rates and will lead to low public debt.

Free trade:

Single continental market for merchandise and services, with free movement of business professionals and investments, accelerating the institution of the Continental Customs Union, and the African customs union. Free trade will increase intra-African trade through superior management and coordination of trade liberalization and facilitation across Africa. Enhances competitiveness at the productiveness and endeavor horizontally by exploiting opportunities for ascend production, continental market access, and better reallocation of resources.

According to a research paper published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in February 2018, Continental Free Trade Agreement eliminating all tariffs could generate welfare gains of USD 16.1 billion, at the expenditure of USD 4.1 billion in trade revenue losses (representing 9.1% of contemporary levy revenues).GDP and employment are likely to cultivate by 0.97% and 1.17% respectively. Intra-African trade advance is estimated at 33% and the continent’s trade dearth is estimated to crash by 50.9%. The aims are to boost intra-African trade by making Africa a single market of 1.2 billion people.

Agriculture:

The need for Africa to diversify its economy from commodities alone has been mentioned constantly by many economic commentators. The agriculture sector is tremendously important to Africa's economies, but over the years has been the most neglected sector in Africa's. A study from 2016, shows that the agricultural sector employed about 65% of the continent’s labor force, and 75% of its domestic trade. After all, only one country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has the agricultural potential to feed the entire continent. How, then, Africans are starving when only one of Africa’s micro-states is capable of feeding the whole continent?

There is absolutely no reason for the people of Africa to be going hungry anywhere on the continent with these arable lands,favorable climate and huge water bodies located throughout the continent. Agriculture will also lead to the creation of a more viable African marketplace for food. There is a need to boost agricultural productivity to attain sustainable manufacturing agribusiness growth as an agency of wealth and task creation. The agricultural potential of our great continent can only be realized when we plan continentally, and this can only be done by a unified Africa.

No independent African State today by itself has a chance to follow an independent course of economic development. This position will not change unless we have a unified policy working at the continental level. The major problems facing Africa do not affect various states separately, nor can they be solved separately. Our unity is their disaster, but we must each and every African fasten on the utter dream “we must unite".

Reference

Improper Design and its Impact on African Borderland Communities

https://africaupclose.wilsoncenter.org/colonial-borders-in-africa-improper-design-and-its-impact-on-african-borderland-communities/

https://aaprp-intl.org/10-reasons-why-africa-must-unite/

Prinston anthony sieh moosh Nimene Is a master candidate at cavendish University Uganda studying international relation and diplomatic studies.

[labourpress]

Jonathan Ashworth speech on child health

Jonathan Ashworth MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, speaking at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said:

***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

Good morning and can I start by paying tribute to the Royal College and to thank you for hosting me today. It is a pleasure to be at this great Royal College. A Royal College embarking on celebrating 21 years since granted a Royal Charter, 21 years where you have spoken out for children and ensured the voices of children are heard at the very highest level.

It was Nelson Mandela who told us: “There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.” If that great man was right, then our country is in a great deal of difficulty. The state of children’s health in the UK, and in England in particular, should be a matter for profound concern and concerted action. But sadly currently it isn’t. 

We can point to nearly any element of children’s health, from care for disabled children, to child and adolescent mental health, to childhood injury, and, to childhood obesity. In all those areas we find examples of good practice but the overall picture reflects social inequality and failure, sometimes on a massive scale.

And my argument today is despite all the other challenges that face us as policy makers, from how we navigate Brexit with its inevitable impact on the NHS or we confront the fiscal and societal challenges of an ageing population, we must not allow the health and wellbeing of the next generation to be neglected and overlooked.

So as Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, I want to put children’s health at the heart of Labour’s vision for a 21st Century National Health Service, and at the heart of our drive to improve the health of our nation.

It’s an ambition that has long been part of my Party’s mission. In the Labour manifesto of 1945 we stated: “Labour will work specially for the care of Britain’s mothers and their children – children’s allowances and school medical and feeding services, better maternity and child welfare services.”

During the recent General Election campaign, in which the future of the NHS played such a central role, we quite deliberately placed a focus on children’s health - talking of an ambition to make Britain’s children the healthiest in the world.

So today I want to say a bit more about why children’s health is so central to my vision to improve the wellbeing of the country.

And I’m also here today to announce Labour’s new Child Health Forum, where we’re inviting experts like yourselves, and members of the public across the country, to get involved with developing the detail of our policy platform.

We know that what a child experiences in the womb and through its early years has a profound effect on the rest of its life. As the review into health inequalities carried out by Sir Michael Marmot and commissioned by the last Labour Government stated:

“The foundations for virtually every aspect of human development – physical, intellectual and emotional – are laid in early childhood. What happens during these early years, starting in the womb, has lifelong effects on many aspects of health and wellbeing – from obesity, heart disease and mental health, to educational achievement and economic status.” 

The message is clear - if we don’t get children’s health right we will never have a healthy adult population in this country.

Yet when we consider how we are placed internationally we see the United Kingdom is not doing well in key areas of child health compared to other countries in Europe. For example, the rate of deaths to children under the age of one year old is higher than all our neighbouring countries and considerably higher than Scandinavian countries.

Breastfeeding remains lower than many other comparable countries; we fare poorly on aspects of physical health such as obesity.

Just last week the Children’s Commissioner revealed that there are estimated to be over 2 million children with health-related vulnerabilities, including 800,000 with mental health disorders.

Sadly the Government’s response to the issue of child health has been piecemeal, fragmented and unstrategic.

Indeed the Sustainability and Transformation programme have had shamefully little to say about improving children’s health and wellbeing.

In the general election we said we would halt these plans and review whether they’re really delivering for patients. Whatever the future of STPs today, a big test of them will be whether they deliver for children.

And now we see the consequences of the lack of an overarching approach. Let me offer three examples.

Firstly on immunisation. It doesn’t matter whether it is vaccination against measles, mumps, rubella, meningitis, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and even polio.

Immunisation rates are falling and, in some cases, have been on a downwards slide for each of the last three years. Children in England are not being protected as well as children in the rest of the UK.

In the official report on immunisation, vaccination coverage in England at one, two and five years of age was, for all reported vaccinations, below that of the other UK countries.

Secondly in the crucial area of childhood obesity, we are currently failing our children on an enormous scale.

Not only has the Government’s feeble effort at a childhood obesity strategy fallen flat but they continue to push through massive cuts to public health and education budgets.

They even tried, and hopefully it would seem failed, to deprive children in the first three years of primary school of their free school lunch. 

It’s important to recognise that childhood obesity not only leaves children susceptible to major health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma and cancer in later life, but, during childhood it also is associated with poor psychological and emotional health due to issues such as stigmatisation, bullying and low self-esteem.

But despite all of the evidence, there is a profound lack of action - and the result is that levels of obesity amongst our schoolchildren are continuing to increase.

More than one in three children in year six in our primary schools are either overweight or obese – and there is little sign of the problem doing anything other than getting worse.

If the crisis in childhood obesity is not tackled, half of all UK children will be obese or overweight by 2020.

Not only is it a betrayal of the nation’s children it makes no sense for the future sustainability of the NHS either.

The UK spends about £6 billion a year on the medical costs of conditions related to being overweight or obese and a further £10 billion on diabetes, but less than £638 million a year on obesity prevention programmes. Unless we act we are building up future pressures on the NHS.

Thirdly, perhaps the Government’s biggest failing is on Children’s Mental Health. 

Half of all lifetime cases of psychiatric disorders start by age 14 and three quarters by age 24.

Around 13 per cent of boys and 10 per cent of girls aged 11-15 have mental health problems – at least three young people in every classroom.

Suicide is the leading cause of death in young people aged 15-24. Supporting our young people’s mental health is crucial, particularly through prevention and early intervention.

Yet just 11 per cent of children’s mental health needs are met by the NHS while the NHS spends 14 times more on adult mental health than the children and adolescents’ service.

We know that in in many parts of the country CAMHS budgets are raided to fund wider gaps in the NHS because of the lack of ring fence.

Cuts in one part of the system as usual lead to pressures elsewhere in the NHS. Indeed today I’m publishing our new analysis from the House of Commons Library that shows the number of young people presenting at A&E with mental health problems has risen 33 per cent over three years.

The backdrop to all this is of course inequality in health and rising child poverty.

For example, infant mortality, an area where the UK has one of the worst records in Europe, is more than twice as high in the lowest socio-economic groups in our society compared with the most well-off. 

Similarly, obesity is twice as common amongst children living in the most deprived areas as compared to children in the most privileged areas.  

Your own RCPCH report, State of Child Health, from earlier this year makes clear: “Children living in our wealthiest areas have health outcomes that match the best in the world. But the gaps between the rich and the poor are stark, and some of the outcomes amongst our deprived groups are amongst the worst in the developed world.”

The number of children living below the poverty line has increased by 400,000 since 2010, reversing a decade of major progress under Labour. At a local level, the figures are even more appalling: in some areas as many as 47 per cent of children live in poverty.

A boy born in Chelsea has a life expectancy of over 84 years. Yet just 5 miles away, a boy born in Islington can only expect to live to around 75 years of age.

Child poverty is a scar across Britain and one we’re determined to confront.

A third of the most deprived children are predicted to be overweight or obese by 2020 compared to just under a fifth of the most affluent.

And 5-year-olds in the most deprived constituencies are almost seven times more likely to live with dental disease than their peers in Jeremy Hunt’s local authority in Surrey.

So improving the health of all our children regardless of their background is central to Labour’s health strategy. Put simply, no child will be left behind under the next Labour Government.

Just as the last Labour Government had as its driving mission to eliminate child poverty, so for me as Health Secretary in the next Labour Government it will be a driving mission to defeat child poverty and child ill health.

So what should our response be?

Our starting point will be familiar to everyone engaged in the debate about the future of the NHS, namely workforce and resources.

So first on workforce.

Today you have published new evidence of the strain on the paediatric workforce.

Prior to reaching consultant level, children’s doctors train for around eight years. 

This study shows that almost 1 in 5 of paediatric trainee positions are currently vacant even though trainees themselves report high levels of enthusiasm for the speciality.

Even more alarming is that this figure jumps to nearly 1 in 4 in more senior trainee positions, and almost 90 per cent of children’s units express concern over how they will cope over the coming six months.

I’m also publishing today new analysis of the community child health workforce with 10 per cent of school nurses, 11 per cent of health visitors and 12 per cent of district nurses lost to the NHS in the past two years.

It’s a scandalous loss of expertise and particularly concerning against a backdrop of a drop in nurse trainees.

As if the cuts to the current workforce aren’t bad enough, there appears to be no account being taken of the growth taking place in the overall number of children. In the next ten years, the number of 0 to 16 year olds in the UK is projected to grow by almost 700,000.

So, to make sure all children have access to the services they are entitled to, and to reduce health inequalities, we are committed to investing in the child health and public health workforce. 

We would ask Public Health England and Health Education England to work together to identify how the public health workforce will need to be developed and shaped to support the UK’s new ambition of having the healthiest children in the world.

But it’s not only in the area of workforce that the Government are failing our children:

This Government’s failures in acute services are well documented. The sustained underfunding of the NHS has pushed staff to the brink and has caused a collapse in patient standards. Waiting lists are up, treatments delayed and A&E targets have been abandoned.

Our research reveals the impact this is having for children in hospital.

Procedures to repair broken bones, remove rotten teeth or insert grommets are among more than 40,000 operations that have been cancelled over the last four years.

Over 12,000 surgical procedures on children and young people were cancelled last year alone, that’s an increase of 35 per cent in three years.

These are children waiting in pain and suffering for treatments and, as you in this room know, there will be serious long term effects to their physical and mental wellbeing.

In a separate piece of research we looked at the number of hospitals which have had to close wards because of maintenance problems – one hospital in the North of England told us of a utilities failure in their maternity unit – no electricity throughout the night, beds that couldn’t be adjusted, and no heated mattresses for the babies.

So the NHS’s biggest financial squeeze in history, capital budgets raided, public health budgets siphoned off, with valued early intervention services at risk, and the outcome is that local authority public health services are planning on spending less on 0-5 children's health this year than last.

It is beyond debate that our NHS and care system now needs more investment.

And at the election Labour pledged a boost of £7bn to turn round NHS services and deliver a long overdue pay rise for staff by scrapping the pay cap.

And we promised to properly and effectively ring fence local authority public health spending in order to protect non-NHS services too.

But for Labour it’s a priority, not only to boost investment in our health and care system, but to make sure that money is used well.

And for me the starting point in gaining best value for health spending is to prioritise prevention.

So improving children’s health services is not only the right thing to do in putting children at the heart of our NHS policy, we will also instigate a new drive for effective action on prevention across government.

Labour strongly supports a ‘Health in All Policies approach’ and there is no better place to start than by addressing the serious problems confronting the country in children’s health.

At the election we began to set out the basics of how this would work:

Labour would introduce a Child Health Bill, legally requiring all Government departments to have a child health strategy to set out how they will support this new ambition and to work in an integrated way in order to deliver that strategy.

We want to work with experts like you to develop a new Index of Child Health to measure progress against international standards, looking at for example obesity, dental health, under 5s (including breastfeeding, immunisation and childhood mortality), and mental health.

Let me be very clear on this, unlike the current government, we do not shy away from developing clear plans for better child health, neither do we shy away from collecting and publishing the data that can inform those plans.

Labour is not scared of setting targets to improve our children’s health and we have a strong track record of taking the action necessary to achieve our collective goals in improving health.

One of the areas where we face a number of challenges is around diet and nutrition.

I’ve spoken of how the UK has one of the worst childhood obesity rates in Western Europe.

Tooth decay is the single most common reason why children aged five to nine require admission to hospital. More than 4 in 10 children in England (42 per cent) have not seen an NHS dentist in more than a year even though ideally, they should have a check-up every 6 months. The role of dental public health has been diminished in recent years, and we will make it a priority.

The Labour Party’s manifesto pledged to halve childhood obesity within ten years. And we would introduce legislation banning junk food advertising from being broadcast before 9pm, stopping unhealthy food from being promoted during primetime television, such as the X Factor, Hollyoaks and Britain’s Got Talent.

Our Shadow Education Secretary, Angela Rayner and Shadow Public Health Minister, Sharon Hodgson, pledged to extend free school lunches.

I want to see more schools do what the Charlton Manor School I visited in Greenwich does, where the inspirational head teacher, Tim Baker, has deliberately put healthy eating and nutrition at the heart of the school ethos.

We want also to go further and do more to help mothers and under 5s:

Breastfeeding rates in the UK are among the lowest in the world. Just 44 per cent of mothers in England were recorded as breastfeeding at their 6 to 8 week health visitor review in 2014/15.

For Labour in Government it will be a priority to offer better support to mothers and to reinstate the infant feeding survey.

We should be considering specific initiatives, like the “1001 Critical Days Strategy”, to give support to mothers from conception to age 2.

So Labour would develop a cross-departmental initiative to support breastfeeding, with a national public health awareness campaign promoting breastfeeding, including in the workplace and proper investment in peer support. 

We fully understand that a successful approach to breastfeeding requires the time and resources being available to give proper support for new mothers, whilst making sure that mothers who are unable to breastfeed, for whatever reason, are also supported.

Perinatal mental illnesses affect at least 10 per cent of women, but access to mental health services is variable at best. Maternal mental illness approximately doubles the risk of subsequent mental health problems in children.

According to one estimate, the long-term cost to society of a single case of perinatal depression is around £74,000, mostly because of adverse impacts on the child.

The NSPCC have done some excellent work as part of their All Babies Count campaign to make the case for pregnant women and new mums at risk of, or suffering from, mental illness to be identified as early as possible and given appropriate and timely expert care. We agree.

Of course the Prime Minister has promised parity of esteem for mental health - but has so far failed to deliver. Labour’s strategy will be focused on prevention and early intervention, whilst ensuring acute CAMHS receive the money they have been promised.

Labour will work towards eliminating the scandal of Out of Area Placements for acute mental health treatment.

And Labour will introduce statutory high quality PSHE into all schools to ensure teachers, parents and pupils know how to spot, report and cope with online, and other types of abuse and bullying.

We know there are many pressures which can cause adverse childhood experiences from poor housing and deprivation to problems at home. Its time also for a full understanding of the pressures of social media and to ask ourselves what action should be taken.

Social media has revolutionised the manner in which young people communicate with themselves and the outside world.

An increasingly digitised world brings welcome benefits but also negative effects such as cyber-bullying.

The University of Manchester produced a report last week, looking at the common themes in the lives of young people who die by suicide. The study found suicide-related internet use in 26 per cent of deaths in under 20s, and 13 per cent of deaths in 20-24 year olds, equivalent to 80 deaths per year.

We know that a child growing up with a parent who has alcohol or drug abuse issues can impact on the health and wellbeing of the child. I have worked with an excellent charity called NACOA and I spoke in the House of Commons earlier this year about my own experience as a child of an alcoholic. We believe it’s time to put in place a clear cross-government strategy to support such children.

The shameful picture of child health in England is terrifyingly real and should be receiving urgent attention from all who are concerned about the future health and wellbeing of our country, and particularly, its children.

Of course, there are other extremely important challenges facing us at the present time but that is no excuse for the current disregard for the state of child health.

The Conservative Government is squeezing our NHS and taking money from our public health system and our schools.

Labour will make child health a national priority and one which brings together all of the academic, medical and economic expertise that we have in this country, to design and implement a programme that can ensure that, at some point in the not too distant future, we can point to our record on the health of our children with pride rather than dismay.

Labour has a strong track record on improving the health of children and young people. Amongst many other things, we can proudly point to the success of Sure Start and the continuing success of the teenage pregnancy strategy.

We also created a properly resourced public health system that enabled us, for example, to implement, right across the country, the very important Healthy Schools programme. 

Much of this success is in danger of being reversed. The raiding of public health budgets and the downgrading of the public health system, including the invaluable network of Public Health Observatories, places us at an enormous disadvantage in taking forward steps on child health.

Nonetheless, despite being in opposition, Labour has shown the way forward on child health. For example, it was Labour that managed to steer through Parliament the legislation on protecting children from tobacco smoke in cars and the introduction of standardised cigarette packaging.

In the absence of government leadership and action on child health, Labour will, over the next 12 months, convene a series of workshops which will draw together the evidence and expertise that we know exists in abundance in the field of child health.

We will develop evidence-based and feasible proposals for the action that is needed, not just to halt our relative decline in terms of the health of our children, but to create a dynamic programme for the country that can gain widely based public, professional and political support and which will give our kids the chance to have the healthy childhood they deserve.

So today I’m launching our new Child Health Forum, so that you can feed in your ideas, let us know what you need from the nation’s health and care system, and together we can work to give every child in the UK truly the best possible start in life.

Thank you.

[newstfionline]

A Scion of Mexico Fights Corruption, and Becomes a Target

By Azam Ahmed, NY Times, Aug. 30, 2017

MEXICO CITY--President Enrique Peña Nieto sat before the nation’s titans of industry and allowed himself a smile.

Mexico’s business elite had invested record amounts of money in the country, giving life to the president’s promise of an economic renaissance and a welcome bright spot in an otherwise bleak landscape of scandals hovering over his administration.

But the president needed more from the nation’s top business leaders, perhaps his most important allies. He needed loyalty. According to five people who recounted the private gathering in May, the president turned to Claudio X. González Laporte, a corporate chairman revered in Mexico.

Your son, the president told him, needs to stop being so critical of the government.

The room fell quiet. Mr. González’s son had spent nearly two decades fighting the twin plagues of corruption and impunity blighting Mexico. But his latest endeavor, an investigative news group that has exposed contract rigging by Mr. Peña Nieto’s allies, was making too much noise for the president’s liking.

“Civil society should not spend so much time talking about corruption,” the president scolded Mr. González. The powerful crowd sat stunned at the attack on one of their own, until Mr. González broke the silence.

“I’m proud of my son and the work he is doing,” he responded.

Even in Mexico, where state pressure is often delivered with a heavy hand, a president openly attempting to silence a member of one of his most trusted constituencies was seen as exceptional, according to the people who recounted the exchange. The president’s office denied the rebuke, saying Mr. Peña Nieto had offered a more general message to the crowd, encouraging it to focus as much on Mexico’s achievements as on the government’s shortcomings.

But the episode was only the latest in a string of attempts to silence Mr. González’s son and his work.

Those attempts include exhaustive government audits and the targeting of Mr. González’s son with advanced spying technology purchased by the Mexican government for the sole purpose of investigating terrorists and organized crime.

On two occasions in 2016, Mr. González’s son received messages on his cellphone intended to deploy the spyware, hacking attempts that came shortly after damning reports published by his group, according to an independent forensic analysis.

“We are under siege,” the son, Claudio González Jr., said in a statement to The New York Times, declining to be interviewed. “But we will continue to denounce corruption and impunity whenever we find it, be it public or private.”

“Mexico is not condemned to be corrupt,” he added.

The spying scandal has rocked Mexico. Nearly two-dozen people, including some of the country’s most prominent journalists, academics and human rights lawyers, as well as international officials investigating crime in Mexico, have been targeted with sophisticated cybertechnology, known as Pegasus, that was bought by the government for tens of millions of dollars.

The government has denied knowledge or responsibility in all of the cases, and has begun its own inquiry to determine who authorized and ran the spying campaign.

But Mr. González Jr. is perhaps the clearest instance in which the president has been described as openly criticizing and trying to silence a target of the spying, potentially bringing Mr. Peña Nieto closer to the hacking scandal than in any other case.

And that is not the only punitive action the government has taken against the family.

In a single day this year, the authorities initiated nine separate audits of organizations that Mr. González Jr. has been deeply involved with, and the government has signaled that it may revoke some of their nonprofit statuses, according to representatives of the organizations and others with firsthand knowledge of the audits. Some donors are already considering halting contributions, fearful of being seen as taking sides against the government.

“If you combat corruption, corruption will combat you,” added Mr. González Jr., who received a personal audit from the government on the same day that his organizations did. “Change comes at a price.”

The president’s office rejected assertions that it had tried to intimidate the González family, or any critics in Mexico, “in any way.”

Mr. Peña Nieto came to office five years ago promising to fix Mexico--to modernize its economy, mend its reputation for violence and repair its broken rule of law. Transparency would shine a light on the corruption that stunted the nation, he pledged. His party, synonymous with autocratic rule during the seven decades it was previously in power, would become the change agent the country needed so desperately.

But violence has soared and freedom of speech has been stifled by murder and money. Mexico is one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists, and nearly all of those homicides remain unsolved. Across the country, drug-war violence has reached a 20-year-high, puncturing the image of a new Mexico that the president has tried so hard to promote.

Now, the efforts against Mr. González Jr. and his group, Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, offer a new window into how criticism is handled in Mexico, even within the most elite circles of society.

Mr. González Sr., 83, is one of Mexico’s most venerated--and wealthiest--figures in the business world, the chairman of Kimberly-Clark de Mexico for decades. And his son, 54, is a rarity in such elite circles, considering the family fortune. Mexico’s rich are often criticized for their indifference to social causes and their tendency to bend to the will of the government.

But Mr. González Jr. has leveraged his privilege, pressuring his peers to take on social issues. He started a nonprofit, Mexicans First, to promote public education in Mexico, which is among the worst of all members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the research and policy organization of the world’s richest countries.

Nearly two years ago, he co-founded the anticorruption group, focusing on investigative journalism, research and legal action. The group hired some of Mexico’s most prominent journalists, giving them license to pursue whatever targets they saw fit, an unusual freedom in a media landscape dependent on hundreds of millions of dollars in government advertising.

Their stories include an investigation into land grabs by a state governor in beach towns like Tulum, the revelation that government-favored companies were leaked information to help them bid on public contracts, and an investigation detailing how a friend of the president’s had collected more than $650 million from the government by gaming public contracts to provide electricity meters for the country.

Mr. González Jr. has been unsparingly vocal himself. At a conference at Ibero-American University in Mexico City on Feb. 1, he criticized the president personally, telling a panel, “If there were such a thing as a hall of infamy, Peña Nieto would be in the top 10.”

A few weeks later, on Feb. 27, the tax authorities announced nine audits related to five organizations that were either founded or run by Mr. González Jr. in the last 20 years. Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity was not among them. Its audit came later.

People close to Mr. González Jr. say that he was aghast and asked an economist to calculate the odds of even five audits randomly occurring on the same day against firms he was affiliated with. The answer he got back: 1 in 200 quadrillions, or a 0.0000000000000000000000000204 percent chance.

The government says it is prohibited from discussing individual cases, but it noted that the tax authorities had started a series of audits of nonprofits--to prevent money laundering through donations. The initiative was announced less than two weeks after Mr. González Jr. and his organizations received their audits.

To those involved in the groups, the audits were an obvious scare tactic, an overt way to threaten their activities. But even before that, in the summer of 2016, someone using government software had secretly tried to hack into and take over Mr. González Jr.’s cellphone.

In July 2016 and again that August, his phone was targeted by Pegasus, a software sold to the Mexican government by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms manufacturer, on the condition that it be used only to monitor criminals or terrorists.

When the target clicks a link in a text message, the software infects the user’s phone, tracking every detail of the person’s digital life, including encrypted messages. It can even use the camera and microphone to spy on the person.

The hacking attempts came weeks after reports from Mr. González Jr.’s anticorruption group and another organization that struck at the president’s allies, including the governor of Veracruz at the time, Javier Duarte, who is now under arrest and charged with overseeing a vast empire of corruption.

Two reporters working for his nonprofit were also targeted with the spyware, according to an analysis by researchers at R3D, a digital rights group in Mexico, and Citizen Lab at the Munk School at the University of Toronto.

In recent months, forensic evidence of a broad hacking campaign against government critics has emerged. The targets have included lawyers investigating the case of 43 students who disappeared en masse after clashing with the police, a journalist who revealed a questionable real estate deal by the president’s wife, academics fighting corruption and the family members of critics, including a teenage son living in the United States.

The government has begun its own investigation, but its approach has sent a chill through the hacking victims. Rather than simply demanding that the government agencies with the software release their target lists and the information obtained, prosecutors are demanding the phones of everyone who claimed to have been targeted.

The hacking victims have balked, worried that the request is meant to further intimidate them or provide the government with all the information that the hackers were trying to steal in the first place.

The Mexican government, by contrast, says it needs the phones to verify the presence of the spyware on them, calling that an “indispensable” part of establishing whether a crime has been committed.

But there is strong evidence to suggest that such a request is unnecessary. A similar investigation conducted in Panama, where the former president has been charged with using Pegasus against more than 150 of his adversaries, never required the victims to turn over their phones, according to court documents and interviews with several of the targets there.

“It is absurd that the authorities in Mexico would ask the targets to hand in their phones,” said Balbina Herrera, a target of espionage and a presidential candidate who ran against Ricardo Martinelli, the former Panamanian president accused of the spying. “They are simply re-victimizing them.”

Forensic experts also say the Mexican government does not need the victims’ phones to conduct a thorough investigation.

“Phones aren’t needed to prove illegal targeting with NSO spyware,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior investigator at Citizen Lab, who confirmed the use of Pegasus against Mr. González Jr. “In the Panama investigation, victims were shown what the government had taken, and asked to confirm it was their information.”

#Mexico #Enrique Peña Nieto #Claudio X. González Laporte #Claudio González Jr. #corruption in Mexico #Pegasus spyware