So who are the Nutters now?

The government's attempt to gag Professor David Nutt over his views on the correct classifications for drugs and his desire to spell out the true facts over their various dangers is shocking.

It's such a clear case of trying to make the facts fit the story rather than letting the story tell the facts. And surely we've all had enough of that from this particular government?

Why employ independent advisors at all if you're not interested in listening to their advice?

Anyone who's worked with young people knows how important it is to tell the truth about the various dangers they face growing up. It's no good a parent who drinks to excess lecturing a son or daughter about the risks of cannabis without first of all confronting their own addictive behaviour. Information has to be given in context and if the professor has determined that horse riding is more dangerous than ecstasy, it's because he's researched the subject so who are the government to decide these facts should not be publicised?

Let's hope all the resultant publicity helps Professor Nutt get his message across loud and clear.

MP's Expenses (again) and Fairness

One word keeps popping into my head over the MP’s expenses scandal: fairness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting their treatment has been unfair but because of the way some of them are being disciplined (or asked to pay money back) and others aren’t, it does seem that the experts called in to sort out the sorry saga are only making it worse.
I have no sympathy for all those who got on the gravy train and rode is as hard and fast as they could. But I do feel that when (some) people acted in good faith within the rules and checked again and again that their arrangements were approved, then it is hard to punish them retrospectively.
However, it’s also scandalous that some MP’s appear to be going to get away with huge cons – as in avoidance of capital gains tax, flipping homes, and, it seems, acquiring additional homes that they get to keep at our expense.
So I would just put in a simple word for fairness. All should be treated equally. If retrospective payments are to be required of the few, they should also be of the many. If some people are being required to pay back a few thousand pounds, how does that make it right that others are getting away with profiteering on a much bigger scale?
It’s all a big muddle at the moment, but one think I’ve learned over years of counselling is that unfairness can be the cause of huge turmoil.
Young people, for instance, (and this applies to the tiny ones as well as the troubled teens) can be deeply affected by situations they deem unfair. If they’re told off for something they know is not their fault, or if they’re misunderstood or misrepresented, or not listened to, they can develop a deep sense of injustice. If this happens often, they begin to feel the whole world is against them, and resentment can fester. More often than not, this leads to them acting out or playing up, simply because they’ve learned this is what’s expected of them (even when they’ve not been guilty) so they just conform to other peoples’ expectations of them. This, obviously then leads to more rows, more shouting and on to more bad behaviour.
It’s all so obvious really, isn’t it?
But it seems we need constant reminding that if we want people to perform to their best, they need to feel they’re treated fairly.
I dare say this whole expenses fiasco could have been avoided if only the MP’s had realised long ago that we the public would not have deemed many/most of their expense allowances fair.

BBC DG's £834,000 salary

I heard Sir Michael Lyons on the World at One today telling listeners that BBC Director General Mark Thompson is having his £834,000 salary frozen for 3 years. Poor man, doesn't your heart just bleed for him?

It also came out the Mark Thompson earns 60 times the salary of a junior Grade 2 employee working outside London who'd be on around £14,000.

Once again it makes you wonder about the sensitivity of people in 'high office'. I mean how can Sir Michael Lyons believe that this news about Mark Thompson will elicit sympathy? Or was in any way a good example to justify how tough the BBC is being with its employees.

And how does Adam Crozier sleep at night knowing that he earns £3million a year while his posties - the ones who do the real hard graft - are on so much more lowly wages.

And I feel the same really about MP's spouses who are now creating about the fact they may be banned from working for them in future. If it's true that they've been on £30,000 a year, how come? The average pay for most secretaries is surely much more likely to be around £18,000 so how come MP's partners are entitled to so much more?

What really bothers me is the lack of sensitivity, the lack of empathy. People on huge salaries never seem to stop and think how they come across to the rest of us. They don't seem to feel embarrassed at all. Do you really think someone can believe he is worth £3 million? Particularly when he seems to be so spectacularly bad at people management....?

One can only imagine that their general attitude is that they think they're worth these big salaries; that they think they're somehow special.

I wonder if the thought never occurrs to them that gross inequality matters, that it sends a bad signal to staff and society in general, that it can contribute to bad staff relations and divisions in society?

Planned Closure of St. Marks Minor Injuries Unit in Maidenhead

So I’ve just come back from the Minor Injuries unit at St. Marks Hospital in Maidenhead where I received wonderful and speedy treatment. The staff are friendly and helpful, the waiting areas clean and tidy, the quality of nursing care superb, and the facilities ideal........yet inspite of this, the unit’s under threat of closure in the New Year.
It beggars belief really - for the place is clearly popular with locals and provides an excellent, efficient service. It means that patients can get treated for minor injuries speedily without having to go through their GP. And it helps relieve the pressure on local A&E departments.
So you would think, wouldn’t you, that all in all, everyone would be satisfied with this situation?
But as far as I can understand it, the GP’s are having to fund the unit and are finding it expensive. So even if the system works really well for all parties, it may not be allowed to survive purely because of a funding issue.
So from the New Year, if the unit does indeed close down, patients like me will either have to waste everyone’s time by going to our GP- who will then presumably refer us on to someone else for appropriate treatment - or clutter up the country’s already overstretched A&E departments.
It all seems so counter-intuitive, particularly when a system works well. But isn’t that so often the case nowadays.....anything simple that works well gets over-hauled until it’s complicated and less user-friendly. More’s the pity.

Nick Griffin's body language

Nobody likes to watch another human being squirm.....unless it's Nick Griffin, that is.

I imagine many of us will have felt the BBC's decision to invite him on to Question Time was vindicated simply because we all got the chance to check him out properly - not just listening to his extremist views but also to watch how he presented himself and how comfortable or uncomfortable he appeared whilst voicing them. I was fascinated by his body language: his use of the smile to cover embarrassment, even when it seemed most inappropriate and his use of laughter to deflect attention away from the seriousness of some of the remarks - both seemed to be studied tactics he's developed to try to wrap up some of the more outrageous things he says and make him appear soft and cuddly while he says them.

But it didn't work for me; instead these feeble attempts at appearing human only made him more slippery. And by the end of the programme, he was looking truly uncomfortable. Interesting that most of his discomfort seemed to surface whilst he was defending his position on gay rights (or rather his view that there shouldn't be any). At this point he really did look as if he wished he were somewhere else. I wonder what that really says about him?

Overweight children removed from parents

Despite newspaper and media reports, I can’t believe that Social Services have removed a couples’ children purely on the grounds of weight.
I’m sure the professionals involved will have taken a broad view on this, not simply based a decision on the fact that the whole family is over-weight.
Some people, it must be said, do have issues around food, believing it to be more than simply nourishment. I’m sure many of us have had times when we’ve used food as a comfort rather than as fuel. But for some, this becomes an obsession so they end up fully believing in the power of food to make them feel better.
Sadly, it doesn’t work. Instead of feeling happy after stuffing themselves, they end up feeling guilty. And feeling guilty makes them feel worse, so the viscious cycle of comfort- eating can get perpetuated as they try yet another bar of chocolate to cheer them up. And we all know that the more you eat, the more you want, so it becomes so easily to pile on the pounds.
I’m not in a position to know what’s been happening in this particular family but if they’ve all got caught up in a merry-go-round of comfort eating, it’s easy to see why Social Services might be concerned. Anyone who’s obsessed by food can easily get confused into thinking that food somehow equates to love.....and that by pressing food on people, you can demonstrate your love for them.
But as most of us know, there are far better ways of showing love and affection. Sadly not everyone learns this – and if this couple never learned how to express love more appropriately, it’s possible they’ve focussed on food instead.
Sad though, that it has come to this. You’d think there would be better ways to help the family resolve their problems than by putting them through the heartbreak of separation.

Working Dads too scared to take Paternity Leave

How sad that fathers today feel unable to take paternity leave when they’re entitled to it.
It seems that business can’t shake off the idea that people need to be at their desks, working long hours in order to prove themselves. Why can’t we wake up to the fact that happy staff are likely to be more productive ? And that someone with a new baby is also likely to be distracted and unable to give their full attention to the task in hand if they feel they’re missing out on being at home with the new arrival?
It’s obvious that new babies need to see as much of both parents as possible and that if their father is not around in the early days bonding is likely to be difficult for both. It’s obvious too that new Mums need as much help as they can get.
And yet it sounds as if fathers are worried they’ll be frowned on for asking for time off......in much the same way as women have learned never to mention the kids whilst at work.
It’s almost as if there’s a great conspiracy to pretend that most people don’t have families. And what’s bizarre about that is that surely most people go to work in order to be able to have a family, and then to support that family and ensure a decent standard of life....?
So why can’t we all acknowledge this and get on with making the workplace a family friendly place instead of somewhere that exists on an altogether different planet?

Goldman Sachs Bonus Culture and MP's Expenses........still they don't 'get it'

How are we ever to address our broken society until those in power, and well-paid jobs , learn how it must feel to be totally powerless and poor, or unemployed.
I know we don’t learn empathy in school......but i would surely help if we did? If only our MP’s could understand that most of us, let alone those on benefits, would give anything to be able to afford cleaners and gardeners. And that the idea of having these services paid for by somebody else (ie the tax-payer) sounds really too good to be true. After all, most of us manage to do our own cleaning and gardening. And we fit it in around our full-time jobs....so why are MP’s so different, many might ask.
And this is the point, surely, that MP’s (or many of them at least ) seem to have become detached from the rest of society. They’ve been gradually seduced by their ‘allowances’ into feeling entitled to a grander life-style, with better pay and more luxuries than the rest of us. And this is surely why we’re finding it hard to forgive them for transgressions or understand their current petty grievances.
And something similar seems to have been going on with the bankers who have gradually grown so accustomed to their own extravagant expectations, that they’re jumping back on the bonus gravy train at the earliest possible moment, even though it seems indecently early to the rest of us.
If only they too could put themselves in other peoples’ shoes.....not the shoes of the poorest, necessarily, just the shoes of the everyday working man and woman whose average salary is around £24,000. These people, the majority after all, can only dream of having half a million pounds and probably never will even if they slog their guts out for a lifetime. The idea that some fat cats who happen to work in the financial sector can expect such hand-outs once a year purely for doing their jobs is what sticks in the gullet. I can’t help wondering how we’ve got to the stage that some people feel this is their entitlement. How did banking salaries and bonuses become so out of skew with the rest of us?
And what do these people who are in receipt of such huge amounts of money think about the rest of us who aren’t? Do they ever stop and give a thought to how they’re reinforcing a great divide in society? How what they feel to be ‘appropriate’ rewards feel like greed to the rest of us?
Don’t you just wish that for once, a banker would speak out and express some guilt or at least humility? That one of them would acknowledge publicly that such rewards probably contribute to resentment amongst those less fortunate....and how damaging that can be? How refreshing would that be?
And the same goes for MP’s. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if one of them really spoke the truth for a change and acknowledged that they’ve become far too easily accustomed to a lifestyle which is way out of sight for most of their constituents. And that anyone who’s so out of touch can hardly be expected to know how to govern in the interests of the majority.
Then we might begin to feel they ‘get it’.

Women who don't value themselves except through work

Following on from the piece below, I’ve been thinking today about the film Julia and Julie which I saw over the weekend.

It gives two interesting examples of people (both women, incidentally) who can’t seem to value themselves in any other way than through work.
Julia Child (apparently well-known to any American for bringing the art of French cooking to the US) and her modern-day fan Julie (who devotes a year of her life to creating every recipe in her mentor’s book and blogging about it) both seem to need some form of public acclaim before they can be satisfied with their lives.
But being totally immersed in these projects isn’t enough: they both need more than that, they need to know that other people are appreciating what they’re doing before they can feel satisfied with it....or themselves.
Julia Child wasn’t satisfied with being an extraordinary cook. She felt a desperate need to get her work ‘out there’, to be published.
And during the course of writing her blog, Julie is forever saying to her husband, ‘I’m going to be a writer!’ It’s her husband who has to remind her that by very virtue of following all the recipes and writing about it, she is a writer.
But she’s clearly not going to be satisfied until she knows people are reading her blog. And then she’s only truly excited when she gets calls from agents and publishers who want to turn her blog into a book and publish it.
I believe many of us can relate to this, but it raises an important issue. How much is doing some intrinsically valuable...and how satisfied can any artistic person feel simply pursuing their art if there’s never any likelihood that others will get to see/hear/read/listen to it....and appreciate it?
And following on from that, can writers, musicians, artists ever achieve total satisfaction if their work goes unpaid? Or is it only by receiving a financial reward that insecure, artistic types can finally feel they’ve arrived? Does the fact that someone else is prepared to reward their efforts convey the final seal of approval they so desperately crave?

Stressed out young people

Sad news today of the suicide of two young girls in Glasgow, following on from a report of anxiety overload in young people aged from 18 t0 24. 66% questioned in a recent survey report feeling stressed out or worried about money, jobs, and school or university pressure.
None of this is surprising in these uncertain times. There's more pressure on everyone nowadays to be well-educated in order to secure on of the few jobs available, and then keep it. And prospects for our young today are so bleak. I've blogged previously here about the hell of being unemployed and it's certainly no way for young people to begin their adult lives. Then if they are employed they're likely to be on a relatively low wage, so hardly surprising that this incurs money worries.

Something I'd like to see addressed here though is this habit we seem to have aquired in the last 20 or so years to label people according to their work - and then to judge them accordingly.

Young people easily fall into the trap of thinking they don't amount to anything unless they've got work, and yet, as I so often say to their parents, they are so much more than the sum of their exam results!

Why don't we stop and value our young people for who they are rather than what they're capable of? If we could only bring ourselves to do that - as families as well as society - then we could help them see that there's always something to get up for.

Most people have skills to impart - a young musician, for instance, could help inspire other youngsters at a youth group. Kindly types could volunteer to befriend the lonely. Out-going jolly young people would be hugely welcome visitors for the elderly.

There's huge scope for matching up people with time on their hands, to local needs. And if we could only begin to value the things that people do in their spare time, as well as in paid work, we might begin to encourage some of today's young to use any enforced period of unemployment to broaden their experience of life whilst contributing greatly to society.

How on earth can parents handle not knowing if their child's been abused...?

How our hearts go out to all those poor children who were so horrifically abused at their nursery.

And all those of us who are parents must be wondering how on earth their parents are supposed to cope when they don't even know if their own children were amongst the abused. Uncertainty is always hard to cope with, and it sounds as if they're going to have to live with uncertainty for a while yet.

I'm sure the whole nation is struggling to get its head around how this kind of thing can happen....and so many parents today must be wondering if their own offspring are safe in their nurseries or play-groups, or schools.

The first piece of advice I'd suggest for the Plymouth parents is to try to stay calm and keep a clear head. Going into a panic won't help anyone, and particularly the children. It's probably far better to hope for the best, not to fear the worst at this stage. For fearing the worst and stressing out risks passing your own fears and anxieties on to your youngsters.

But if the news is confirmed and your child was involved, then there's a lot you can do to help yourselves and her - or him - for we don't even seem to have been told at this stage if one or both sexes were involved.

First of all, take care of yourself. Everyone is saying that the children were too young to know or understand what was going on. This doesn't necessarily mean they won't be affected at some time in the future, for trauma has a nasty habit of lurking around and coming out at a later date. But for now, you'll need someone to talk to. You're bound to be going through a whole turmoil of emotions from guilt - as in 'how could I have let my child into this situation', to bewilderment and disbelief that something so dreadful could happen, to anger at anyone and everyone who allowed/permitted/facilitated it.

All these feelings are perfectly normal and the best way to deal with them is to talk about them. Try to find a counsellor nearby who will listen to you carefully and help you make sense of all your mixed up feelings. You need to work towards getting over any guilt, for you can't possibly be held responsible for what happened to your child. You weren't there, watching over him or her, all day every day. But you'll still need to be able to express your guilty feelings and go over and over them until you've managed to see that you are not at fault .

Any anger that you feel is perfectly understandable but the key thing here is to let it out in an appropriate way and in appropriate places. Don't let those nearest and dearest to you be the butt of any outbursts but learn, instead, with the help of a counsellor some useful ways of getting rid of your anger without harming others. There are tricks that are helpful, like learning to recognise the beginnings of anger building up inside...and then giving yourself the choice of letting it all out, or deciding to cam yourself down for now and let it out later. You may find that going for some vigorous exercise works for you, or attacking a punch-bag. But your anger will be directed mostly against the perpetrators of this horrendous crime....and you may find it difficult to think of ways you can express your anger towards them. Some may find that writing things down helps...so you could write some letters to these people, probably ones that you never post, but that allow you to get everything you feel off your chest.

Above all, find some help. Find a good counsellor and build up a relationship of trust so that you can discuss everything that's going on inside. And together you can work out a strategy for how to deal with your child as he or she grows up. It'll probably be important to let your child be your guide here, for all of us react in different ways to different events so every child will need a different approach. But work with some professionals so that you and your child are in good, safe hands.