HERE’S A BUSINESS EAGER TO GET RID OF CUSTOMERS. If you have symptoms of common sense, walk on by.
HERE’S A BUSINESS EAGER TO GET RID OF CUSTOMERS.
Tag Archives: political correctness
Telegraph The Orwellian double-think of the woke elite blinds them to their own ridiculousness Both Cambridge and the Booker Prize claim to be defending free speech while simultaneously cancelling people they disagree with
Telegraph The Orwellian double-think of the woke elite blinds them to their own ridiculousness Both Cambridge and the Booker Prize claim to be defending free speech while simultaneously cancelling people they disagree withMADELINE GRANT28 June 2020 • 7:00amWith the Archbishop of Canterbury urging ecclesiastical iconoclasm with a vim not seen since the days of Thomas Cranmer, one could almost think the culture war’s excesses had lost their ability to shock. Yet last week produced two examples so blatant, so deranged and so shameless as to astonish even the most cynical observer.
Archbishop of Canterbury says Church needs to reconsider portraying Jesu…Statues in Canterbury Cathedral are also going to be looked at “very carefully” to see if they should be there, …
First, Cambridge University’s defence of Dr Priyamvada Gopal, a lecturer in postcolonial literature who sparked a (not unreasonable) public backlash after tweeting that “White lives don’t matter. As white lives”. Amid calls for her dismissal, Cambridge released a supportive message, apparently condemning “cancel culture” in all its forms:
Cambridge defends academic who said ‘white lives don’t matter’Dr Priyamvada Gopal, an expert in postcolonial literature, claimed her tweets were ‘speaking to a structure and …
“The university defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks”.Noble sentiments indeed, but it also happens to be a lie – and one so barefaced that it would almost be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Under a “progressive” new vice chancellor, Cambridge has led the way in appeasing the outrage mob. It has singularly failed to defend conservative academics such as the sociologist Noah Carl – summarily dismissed after an open letter from faculty members accused him of racism. It took university authorities just 48 hours to rescind Jordan Peterson’s visiting fellowship, while the students’ union claimed his “work and views” were “not representative of the student body”. Curiouser and curiouser. In claiming to value free speech (but only for certain opinions) Cambridge is guilty both of double standards, and double-think.
Intolerant zealots are strangling the intellectual freedom of our univer…Academics have a duty to win the debate, not stifle it
Jordan Peterson accuses Cambridge University of being ‘unprofessional’ a…The controversial professor Jordan Peterson has said Cambridge University is “unprofessional” after he found out…
Similar sleight of mind can be seen in the tragicomical conduct of Booker Prize organisers, who sacked their long-time patroness Baroness Nicholson as honorary vice-president for the “crimes” of voting against gay marriage in 2013, believing in biological sex and “misgendering” someone on Twitter. An equally Orwellian statement followed:
JK Rowling has ‘fallen in with the wrong crowd’, says trans activistFox Fisher said Rowling was ‘fearful’ of transgender people and needed to spend more time with them
“We deplore racism, homophobia and transphobia, and do not discriminate on any grounds. Literature is open, plural and questioning. We believe every author’s work should be approached by readers in the same spirit.”No satire could match this delicious declaration of support for openness and plurality of opinion, while sacking someone people disagreed with. Like adults who wear Crocs in public, they seem to have forgotten that we can see them.The double-think is as unsurprising as it is flagrant. Once-niche “critical theory” has infiltrated contemporary discourse, with its rejection of logic, reason and objective reality. And revolutionaries always become what they claim to abhor, like the French radicals who repressed formal religion and ended up worshipping an amorphous Cult of Reason, and replaced the judiciary with “people’s courts”. Today, we are similarly discovering what atrocities may be committed under the guise of the Rights of Man.Dominating every major wing of cultural life, small wonder that the Left feels so comfortable in its exquisite hypocrisies. Influential appointments have the ring of a cosy, quasi-incestuous club, a conveyor belt of Left-wing opinion linking Guardian editorships, heads of Oxbridge colleges, public health quangocrats and more. Readers may recall the popular game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, in which film buffs challenge each other to find the shortest path between an arbitrary actor and the prolific Bacon. A colleague suggests a version for the quangocracy; “Six Degrees of Shami Chakrabarti”.For how long can this state of affairs continue? Being obliged to parrot propaganda and declare the sky is pink to retain your livelihood is emotionally draining. Neither is it healthy for our institutions to be so consistently out of step with public opinion, overseen by a detached cultural elite that is only occasionally roused from its perch by a disobliging election or referendum result. Few of us wish to inhabit a monoculture, and the quality of artistic output is already suffering; take the Booker Prize’s own deterioration in the literary landscape.Worst of all, it will destroy genuine progress. In liberal California, presumably to pave the way for “affirmative action” measures, the legislature has just voted to strike anti-discrimination commitments from its constitution – a development that should terrify all thinking people. Britain is never far behind America and already ours is a topsy-turvy world, in which bullies feign victimhood, discrimination masquerades as social justice and “feminist” activists use the mantle of progressivism to hound women with impunity. Truly, we are through the looking glass now.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16060/political-correctness-britain-trevor-phillips
‘Political Correctness’ in the UK: Shut Down Discussion Before It Can Start
by Denis MacEoin
June 9, 2020 at 5:00 am
- Political correctness, whatever its commendable origins in a wish to protect minorities on a basis of race, sexuality, or religious belief, has come to do great damage in its sometimes neurotic condemnation of anything its advocates find offensive.
- Among some individuals, the word “Islamophobe” seems to have replaced the word Communist as sort of a new form of McCarthyism with which to smear, defame and neutralize anyone with whom one might disagree — presumably to shut down any kind of discussion before it can even start.
- While it is appropriate to… bring in balanced Muslim opinions about how to define “Islamophobia,” organizations with links to more radical Muslim groupings are probably not the most helpful partners.
- Without a serious debate on these issues, no one… can engage in comprehensive discussions about how Western societies should handle the problems of discrimination, integration, citizenship, free speech, secular values, human rights and all the areas of our collective lives that have come to the fore… in recent years.
- Trevor Phillips is uniquely placed to bring light to these discussions. A well-respected man in both British and international society, he should never be shut down by anyone, especially for the ostensible sake of political correctness.
| For many years now, Trevor Phillips has been one of the most prominent individuals of black ancestry in the United Kingdom. A well-respected man in both British and international society, he should never be shut down by anyone, especially for the ostensible sake of political correctness. Pictured: Phillips in 2010. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images) |
For many years now, Trevor Phillips OBE has been one of the most prominent individuals of black ancestry in the United Kingdom. He is a multitalented individual who has played significant roles in business, politics, journalism, and more throughout a long life (he is now 66). A full list of his achievements would take up most of this article. Here are only a few examples:
He was, until June 2018, the President of the John Lewis Partnership, Europe’s largest employee-owned company. He has also Chairman of Index on Censorship, the international campaign group for freedom of expression, and was founding chair of both the Greater London Authority, and of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission. Originally chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, and as head of the EHRC, Phillips was a controversial figure: he was an opponent of multiculturalism, apparently preferring a more constrained policy towards integration, a view he still maintains. Although a member (until recently) of the left-wing Labour party, he is still a senior fellow with the leading Conservative think tank, Policy Exchange.
Shockingly, on March 9, Phillips was suspended from the Labour Party on the grounds of “Islamophobia.” That this exclusion is shocking should be obvious given the man’s long history of anti-racism, principled and critical support for national counter-terrorist laws, rejection of Islamic terrorism and Muslim rape gangs, and his focus on faith-based integration. This latter is discussed in his 2016 book for the Civitas think tank, Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence.
As chairman of Index on Censorship, Phillips has a policy largely derived from the First Amendment of the US Constitution, in order to permit freedom of speech and the press. Although there are some restrictions in the UK regarding hate speech and national security, free speech remains a broad principle. It is here that Phillips apparently fell afoul of “politically correct” criticism.
“Political correctness”, whatever its commendable origins in a wish to protect minorities on a basis of race, sexuality, or religious belief, has come to do great damage in its sometimes neurotic condemnation of anything its advocates find offensive.
For many, especially, it seems. on the left, the notion of what is called “Islamophobia” has come to the fore as the perfect expression of politically correct speech and writing. This acceptance seems to have taken place despite the appalling use of anti-Semitic hate speech and anti-Jewish activism before and during the era of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Britain’s Labour Party. One is inclined to think of pots calling kettles black. If the politically correct can get it so wrong about antisemitism, may they not be equally wrong about “Islamophobia”?
It is not hard to define antisemitism if we are guided by the Working Definition given by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, but defining Islamophobia is fraught with difficulties. That it exists in some form, as do most prejudices, is hardly controversial. In the UK alone, 2018 saw a record number of attacks on Muslims, sometimes, not surprisingly, in response to Muslim attacks on non-Muslims.
In 2019, an Australian, Brenton Tarrant, murdered 51 Muslims in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — crimes to which he has now pled guilty. Such attacks, and often the speech that goes with them, reflect a deep-seated racism and bigotry that is rightly condemned across most countries. Less violent but equally unacceptable is the persecution of its Uighur population by China’s Communist Party.
It should go without saying that Trevor Phillips — and often many people accused of seemingly the most innocuous transgressions, such as a British teacher in the Sudan naming a children’s teddy bear Mohammed, or in present-day Nigeria, simply being a Christian — bears no resemblance to any of these.
In 2016, before the current row, Gatestone Senior Fellow Douglas Murray penned an article in the Spectator expressing admiration for Phillips and defending him against early accusations of Islamophobia. Yet, four years on, he has been termed an “Islamophobe” by a major political party and many in the press. Among some individuals, the word “Islamophobe” seems to have replaced the word Communist as sort of a new form of McCarthyism with which to smear, defame and neutralize anyone with whom one might disagree — presumably to shut down any kind of discussion before it can even start.
Phillips himself has worked alone and with colleagues on the problems surrounding the definition of Islamophobia. In 2018, he wrote the foreword to Policy Exchange’s response to an extremely flawed definition from the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims. The definition had been heavily criticized, not least by the police, for undermining free speech and counter-terrorism work. Phillips supported the author, Sir John Jenkins KCMG, who exposed the risks to free speech and a healthy democracy if the APPG report were to become law. The following year, Phillips — with Jenkins and Dr. Martyn Frampton — wrote for the same think tank a piece entitled, On Islamophobia: A Problem of Definition. In it, he differed materially from the views of Nathan Lean, the left-wing author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, who takes even the mildest criticism of Islam or Muslims as Islamophobic in nature.
One of the concerns expressed in Phillips’s responses to the APPG lay in the fact that the parliamentarians involved might have allowed themselves to be influenced too broadly by Muslim lobbies that seemed not truly representative, such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Engagement and Development group (MEND).
While it is appropriate to recognize Jewish contributions to definitions of antisemitism (such as the internationally supported IHRA version mentioned above) and to bring in balanced Muslim opinions about how to define Islamophobia, organizations with links to more radical Muslim groupings are most likely not the most helpful partners. To eradicate hatred for balanced and peace-loving Muslims, it is probably not all that productive totally to avoid references to Islamic radicalism or issues surrounding women’s rights, treatment of non-Muslims, prescribed punishments, treatment of children, and blasphemy to name but a few — which is what more traditionalist Muslims might prefer we did.
Without a serious debate on these issues, no one — from schools to political parties, think tanks, parliaments, churches and synagogues — can engage in comprehensive discussions about how Western societies should handle the problems of discrimination, integration, citizenship, free speech, secular values, human rights and all the areas of our collective lives that have come to the fore with the revival of radical and traditionalist Islam in recent decades.
Trevor Phillips is uniquely placed to bring light to these discussions. A well-respected man in both British and international society, he should never be shut down by anyone for the ostensible sake of political correctness.
Following Labour’s condemnation of Phillips as a supposed “Islamophobe”, Policy Exchange published another piece The Trial: The strange case of Trevor Phillips, again by Frampton, in which he dissected the charge raised against Phillips. In the end, it appears that however many enemies Phillips may have, he is assured of having many friends. This conclusion is reflected in that the UK government has just appointed him as an advisor to a formal inquiry into the disproportionate number of deaths from Covid-19.
Dr. Denis MacEoin is a former British university lecturer in Islamic Studies and a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the Gatestone Institute.
University lecturer has ‘no legal right to be anti-Political Correctness’ after claims he was ‘hounded out’ by left-wing colleague
Telegraph
University lecturer has ‘no legal right to be anti-PC’ after claims he was ‘hounded out’ by left-wing colleagues
Dr Andrew Dunn was, until recently, a senior lecturer in social policy at Lincoln University
- Camilla Turner, education editor
12 JANUARY 2019 • 9:00PM
Auniversity lecturer does not have the right to be anti-PC, an employment judge has ruled, after he claimed that left-wing colleagues “hounded” him out.
Dr Andrew Dunn was, until recently, a senior lecturer in social policy at Lincoln University. But after a series of spats with fellow academics he was repeatedly disciplined and eventually dismissed from his post.
As part of a claim for unfair dismissal, he told an employment tribunal how the university’s “discrimination” against him started in early 2015 when his career was “really taking off”.
Dr Dunn, who is the branch chairman for Ukip in Lincoln and stood as a candidate for the party in last year’s council elections, published a book titled Rethinking Unemployment and the Work Ethic.
In his book he explains that while benefit claimants generally want jobs, many remain on benefits because they are “too choosy” in the jobs they are willing to do.
He says that these arguments are unfashionable and so are rarely acknowledged by left-leaning social policy academics, which leads to government policies based on a flawed understanding of the issue.
Dr Dunn, 45, set up a Twitter account in January 2015 to promote his new book but was attacked when he posted an article summarising his academic research, with some labelling him a “Tory bigot”.
Andrew Dunn meets former Ukip leader Nigel Farage at the Ukip spring conference in Bolton 2017
But rather than jump to his defence, or even just ignore the online abuse he faced, he was astonished to see his “left-wing” colleaguesjoin in.
Sue Bond-Taylor, another Lincoln University lecturer in social policy, contacted the abuser on Twitter and urged him not to “discount the whole team off the back of the work of one member of staff”.
Meanwhile Dr Dunn felt that Liam McCann, now the acting deputy head of Lincoln’s school of social and political sciences, appeared to “sneer” at him and question why his work was worthy of funding.
“Insults, swearing and rudeness are commonplace on Twitter, but what happened involving [my colleagues] shocked me as I have never seen anyone behave in such a rude and disrespectful way towards a word colleague in view of the public on a social media site,” Dr Dunn told the tribunal.
He complained about the incident to his line manager and the university launched an inquiry which found that Dr Dunn, along with his colleagues, had all breached the institution’s “respect” policies.
He said that by finding him equally at fault with his colleagues “the inescapable conclusion” is that he had been discriminated against due to his “political philosophical beliefs”.
Over the next two years he had several other disputes over social policy with academic colleagues and students, he was eventually dismissed in August 2017.
Dr Dunn’s claim that he was discriminated against for his anti-PC beliefs was thrown out by the Judge Blackwell last month, who ruled that: “The belief that the tendency to favour what is palatable in social policy discussions over the truth (in colloquial terms this tendency is known as political correctness) is not a philosophical belief that has the protection of section 10 of the Equality Act 2010.”
A Lincoln University spokesman said: “The claims by a former employee made in this case were dismissed by a tribunal panel. We welcome diversity of opinion and debate on our campus while treating staff, students and visitors with dignity and respect.”
Telegraph
Teaching children boys have periods too is not education, it’s ‘mythinformation’
17 DECEMBER 2018 • 6:30PM
Children and their identity has become a hot topic in the classroom CREDIT: NA/GETTY
That’s it: my daughter’s getting home-schooled. It’s either that or risk having a 7 year-old earnestly assure me at pick-up time that “boys have periods too, you know.” And now that Brighton & Hove City Council have officially approved plans to teach children that “all genders” can menstruate, it won’t be long until British kids are being taught that girls have testes, Paris is the capital of Romania – and 2 + 2 = 5.
It’s a victory for transgender rights campaigners, but also for Dr Seuss, who may as well be running the show for all the sense our green-eggs-and-ham world now makes. And don’t get me wrong, I’m all for menstruation being inclusive (you can have it chaps, be my guest) but there’s a teensy-weensy problem here called ‘biology’. And I know all that’s semantics and we’re living in an emotion-governed universe where even the leader of the free world shows a total disdain for facts, but they sort of do matter. And schools are the one place you’d hope would understand that.
When I wrote about the hijacking of childhood by the trans lobby last month – and lamented the knee-jerk reactions of an education system too scared to question its agenda – the reader response was the greatest and most impassioned I’ve had in thirteen years at this paper. The letters and emails came from men and women young and old, gay, straight and trans – and almost all zoomed in on the following quote from Dr Godfrey-Faussett.
Are we encouraging our children to question biological truths? CREDIT: NA/GETTY
Reacting to the revelation that in one British school where a whopping 17 pupils were changing gender almost all had turned out to be autistic, the British Chartered Psychologist described what was going on as “state-sanctioned child abuse.”
It’s worth noting that not one of the Telegraph readers who wrote to me dismissed this as hyperbole. Not even those who admitted to having spent “a lifetime trapped in the wrong body” and were “grateful” for the medical advances that meant people no longer had to. Because much as the trans lobby likes to muddy the argument by declaring us all ‘transphobic’, that simply isn’t true.
Let people decide what’s right for them when they’re adults, was the general consensus. And I’d hope most fair-minded people would understand that the whole different strokes conversation does need to be had with kids. Certainly we’d all agree with the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health’s statement that “it’s helpful to children to learn the meaning of terms such as lesbian, gay and bisexual.” But at the right time.
Every parent knows how crucial timing is. And if anyone tries to tell me that primary school children are of sound and rational mind I shall point them in the direction of my daughter, who currently identifies so vehemently with a superheroine ladybird named Ladybug that she’d have the vile synthentic, highly flammable red and black-spotted onesie she refuses to take off surgically adhered to her body given half a chance.
Will she still be wearing that onesie next month though? Next week would be pushing it. But we’re not allowed to talk about fads. Fads are belittling to these fiercely progressive little humans whose innate, superior knowledge can’t be questioned.
Anna Friel playing the mother of a transgender child in Butterfly which was on earlier this yearCREDIT: ITV/ITV
For Dr Godfrey-Faussett, who has worked extensively with children in schools and knows how forcibly the trans narrative is being pushed (from the reading of books like Michael Hall’s ‘Red: A Crayon’s Story’, about a blue crayon mistakenly labelled red who is suffering an identity crisis, and Sara Savage’s Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl to primary school children to the instant dismissal of teachers accidentally using the ‘wrong’ pronoun with a child suffering from gender dysphoria) it’s that lack of any questioning that’s most dangerous.
Teachers certainly aren’t allowed to question, since that’s seen as making a judgment, and in her psychological and counselling field, this stance has been taken still further: “A lot of the accredited bodies are recommendations to us as mental health practitioners. So if an individual comes to us with questions about their sexuality or gender, we are strongly advised to affirm it as opposed to help them question or explore what may be underlying it. This in my opinion challenges what I see as at the heart of therapy.”
Children, on the other hand, are being encouraged to question everything, from their very essence to their physical shape and, now, even the workings of their bodies. But telling children that boys can menstruate is not education, it’s mythinformation, pure and simple.
15 DECEMBER 2018 • 5:58PM
The Advertising Standards Agency has announced it will ban adverts that contain gender stereotypes. CREDIT: GRAPHICA ARTIS/HULTON ARCHIVE
It hardly matters how the country votes, it always seems to be governed by the Left. Diversity audits, the regulatory state, endless restrictions on choice and speech, yes some of this is the result of political decisions, made by Tory MPs desperate not to be thought Right-wing by their smart London friends. But more often it emerges out of that tangled web of quangos, agencies, authorities, committees, and “co-regulators”, run by an unaccountable Blairite technocracy that is as addicted to social engineering as it is divorced from the mainstream of opinion and impossible to replace.
Thus last week we discover that the advertising regulator will ban adverts containing “gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence”. I have some sympathy with those who dislike advertising that portrays men or women in outdated roles – mothers doing all the housework, or fathers being poor parents. But harmful? It assumes that viewers – gullible, malleable and weak – make life choices based on the partial narrative of a 30 second advert. And there is already a mechanism for expressing “widespread offence”: not buying the products being marketed, or complaining to the company itself.
But the regulators, the Committee of Advertising Practice which writes the rules and the Advertising Standards Authority which polices them, conform to O’Sullivan’s law: any organisation that is not explicitly Right-wing will become Left-wing over time. Most people accept that these bodies have a role in stopping advertising which wilfully misleads or hoodwinks the public, or in ensuring that inappropriate content is not broadcast to children. But should they be acting like philosopher-kings, determining what is good or bad for adults?
The regulation of corporate speech has become a veiled attack on free speech itself. Ludicrously, an advert for Costa Coffee was banned for urging customers to buy a bacon roll rather than an avocado because it “discouraged the selection of avocados”, and the coffee chain was told not to in future “condone or encourage poor nutritional habits”, a recipe for misery if there ever was one. An advert for Ford was banned, meanwhile, for apparently encouraging dangerous motoring when it contrasted the aspiration and freedom of driving a Mustang with life’s quotidian frustrations, set against a reading of Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.
There is a unifying worldview behind these disparate examples: that people do not have the wit or the ability to make up their own minds. We are feeble victims who need to be prevented from making bad decisions and protected from irresponsible corporate power. We are, in effect, children. And if we look back in a decade or so and wonder how a nation of sophisticated consumers ended up with a far-Left Corbyn government, part of the blame should be shouldered by the irresponsible bodies that implicitly endorsed his own infantilising agenda. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, and the technocrats who extinguished freedom.
Note: While there will be difference sin the learning ability involved in learning to read , the idea that there is a specific mental disorder which makes reading abnormally difficult to going on impossible to read has always been suspect because of the ability of some schools, including those in poor areas , to achieve nigh on 100% of their pupils reading fluently. RH
Telegraph
Dyslexia no longer being diagnosed by councils who called the disorder ‘scientifically questionable’
Save
Roughly 10 to 15 per cent of children are thought to be dyslexic CREDIT: IAN HOOTON
11 JANUARY 2019 • 11:00PM
Dyslexia is no longer being diagnosed by councils who claimed the disorder was “scientifically questionable”.
Children across Warwickshire and Staffordshire now have little or not access to taxpayer-funded assessments, as officials “embraced a policy of not differentiating” between dyslexics and others who simply struggle to read.
However, experts have criticised the argument as merely a smokescreen for cuts.
It follows criticism directed at both local authorities in the House of Lords last October for a co-authored document arguing that “a diagnosis of dyslexia does not provide any additional information that is useful for addressing the difficulties nor does it predict the rate of progress”.
The guidance has since been withdrawn pending the outcome of a consultation.
However, The Daily Telegraph has spoken to experts and support groups in both counties who described the help available to dyslexic children as the “worst in 30 years”.
A major programme of in-school support in Staffordshire was cut last September, while parents in Warwickshire have reported being told by schools that dyslexia is no longer recognised.
It comes as Birmingham City Council, England’s largest local authority, said it was reviewing its special educational needs policy after two of its psychologists attended a conference at Durham University in September organised by scientists who questions the existence of dyslexia.
Meanwhile the British Dyslexia Association last night said it was “deeply concerned” by reports that at least 80 local authorities are planning to send representatives to a major conference at University College London this month staged by the same group.
Senior educational psychologists from both Warwickshire and Staffordshire county councils are billed as keynote speakers at the event.
Helen Boden, the BDA’s chief executive, said: “If you don’t test for dyslexia you’re effectively shutting the door for people applying for support.
“We risk losing a huge amount of talent – people’s lives are being messed about.”
“There is a major issue around costs.”
Both Warwickshire and Staffordshire county council’s last night insisted that they “do recognise dyslexia”.
However, a spokesman for Warwickshire said their approach “encourages teachers to identify and support all literacy difficulties as soon as a potential issue is identified rather than wait for a formal dyslexia diagnosis”, while a cabinet member for Staffordshire said: “The early support for all children with literacy difficulties does not discriminate by underlying cause.”
The comments follow the withdrawal of council-funded in-school special needs support in Staffordshire by services contractor Entrust, which is joint-owned by the council and Capita, leaving schools to use their own budgets to buy in specialist help.
The Daily Telegraph has seen an email from the company which said the decision had been made by local officials “due to financial pressures”.
Julie Cappleman-Morgan, co-founder of the Tamworth dyslexia support group Dig-iT, said: “Basically services have been decommissioned at a local level and people’s life chances have being massively hurt.”
Show more
Lesley Hill, who helps run the North Warwickshire and Coventry Dyslexia Association, said: “Availability is the worst it’s been here for 30 years.”
A diagnosis of dyslexia should allow council-funded support which could include extra literacy lessons, a laptop and specialist voice-recognition or text-reading software.
Last year Matt Hancock, the Health and Social Care Secretary, revealed he was dyslexic and that his career could have been “very different” had he not been given a spell-checker in school.
The 40-year-old later graduated with a first in Politics Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University.
However, Professor Julian Elliott, who is organising this month’s London conference, said: “If you’re testing for dyslexia, small numbers of kids get identified and prioritised but massive numbers with similar sorts of problems do not get helped.
“What a lot of services are trying to do are to find ways that would identify – rather than having a small number of children identified as dyslexic under very spurious criteria, they’re trying to find ways to identify all children who are struggling to read in local authorities.
“This could become a major move.”
Councillor Philip White, Cabinet Member, said: ” Staffordshire advocates early identification and evidence based intervention for all children experiencing literacy difficulties to ensure fair access to available resources and effective support.
“Children who do not make expected progress over time meet the BPS 1999 definition of dyslexia. This descriptor is accepted in Staffordshire.”
Meanwhile a Warwickshire County Council spokesman said: “We wish to state categorically that the council does recognise dyslexia along with many other special educational needs.
“The approach in Warwickshire encourages teachers to identify and support all literacy difficulties as soon as a potential issue is identified rather than wait for a formal dyslexia diagnosis.
“In this way pupils are supported at the earliest opportunity with appropriate support.”
Telegraph
Who’s the daddy? The truth about Britain’s paternity test problem
Richard Mason, the co-founder of Moneysupermarket, who discovered three sons from his marriage were not his CREDIT: HUW EVANS10 JANUARY 2019 • 7:00AM
When millionaire Richard Mason made the shock discovery he was not, in fact, the father of his three sons, he was quick to call lawyer Roger Terrell.
The farmer’s son has become a sought-after expert in the murky world of paternity fraud – and business is booming.
“Richard wasn’t in a very good place,” Terrell says of his client, who is the co-founder of the price comparison website Moneysupermarket.com. “Psychologically the impact of this is severe.”
Earlier this week Mason, 55, revealed his personal torment in a newspaper interview. He said that following a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis in 2016, he had been told most sufferers of the condition are infertile – and thus that it was extremely unlikely he would have been able to father his three sons, aged 23 and 19-year-old twins.
He confronted his ex-wife Kate, who eventually admitted she had engaged in an on-off affair with a colleague during their 20-year marriage, which ended in 2006.
Terrell represented Mason as he attempted to claw back a £4 million cash sum paid as part of his divorce settlement in 2008, while also pursuing his ex-wife for paternity fraud.
Richard Mason with his ex wife and the three sons he has discovered are not his CREDIT: KEVIN HOLT
Mrs Mason agreed at the end of November to settle matters with a payment of £250,000 – on the condition the biological father remained anonymous. Terrell believes the move may have been prompted by a desire to stop the identity being disclosed in court. In recent days Mason has suggested he will write a book about his ordeal and offer up a £5,000 reward to reveal the identity of the biological father of his sons.
Sensational it may seem but for Terrell, who established his solicitor’s firm in Peterborough in 1988, such stories are becoming routine work – albeit usually without such eye-watering sums at stake. He regularly receives enquiries from fathers as far and wide as Canada to New Zealand, as well as Britain: in total, the 64-year-old estimates he has handled more than 50 paternity fraud cases, 20 of which have gone to court.
“I’ve done these cases for senior partners in London legal firms, for doctors, for archaeologists, all sorts of sophisticated people,” he says. “Paternity fraud doesn’t discriminate.”
Certainly those in the business say such cases are far from refined to the sofas of trashy daytime television; this is a deceit that spans the class divide. Indeed until 1948 the Home Secretary was required to be present at the birth of a member of the Royal family, which Terrell says was to ensure the child was a genuine descendant of the monarch, and not an imposter being sneaked in.
Roger Terrell
Attempts to quantify the scale of Britain’s illicit fecundity are, as you might expect, vague. In 2016 a research project undertaken by scientists from KU Leuven University in Belgium suggested up to two per cent of British fathers may be victims of paternity fraud, adding that given a lack of hard evidence, prior scientific studies – some of which put that figure as high as 10 per cent – may have been overestimates.
Anecdotally, though, the numbers are on the rise. British testing firm DNA Clinics analysed 5,000 results selected randomly from between January 2014 and June 2016, and discovered 51 per cent of English men had been ruled out as being the paternal father of children they had been tested for a genetic link to.
This increase in cuckolded men discovering they have been deceived is, according to Terrell and other legal experts in the field, due to home DNA testing kits being “much more prevalent,” he explains. Now widely available online for under £100, it means we have more conclusive genetic evidence about where we came from than ever before.
“DNA testing is much more prevalent, much cheaper and that is why these cases will increase,” he says.
Prior to Richard Mason, Terrell’s most high profile case was a client called Richard Rodwell. In 2013, the then 46-year-old factory manager made headlines after being awarded £25,000 in damages against his former wife after DNA tests revealed their 20-year-old daughter and her 18-year-old brother were not his biological children. Following his 2005 divorce, Rodwell paid out £15,600 in maintenance for the children before finding out they were not his.
When they discovered the truth, they cut all ties with him. He spoke of suffering from depression in the fallout and feeling as if he had endured a bereavement; whatever money he had secured following the legal battle, he said, could never expunge the grief.
Another client, Andy Phillips from Telford, Shropshire, received a £19,000 out of court legal settlement after discovering he had for years been paying child maintenance to a son that was not his. He said at the time he would never be able to forgive his former partner for the hurt.
Having seen the impact of such cases at first-hand Terrell believes paternity fraud should be made a criminal offence, but admits “the police will not pursue criminal prosecutions”.
To add insult to injury, there is little legal assistance available to those who have been deceived attempting to claw back child maintenance. In 2015 an unidentified university lecturer known only as Mr X in court was awarded compensation after it was ruled he had been a victim of “clear deceit and fraud” at the hands of his ex-wife, a successful businesswoman, who tricked him into believing the baby she conceived through IVF at a clinic in Spain was his child.
Richard Rodwell who discovered his two children were fathered by another man CREDIT: DAVID CRUMP
But, because of legal precedent, the woman was not required to hand back the £60,000 in child maintenance she received after the couple split.
The close bonds forged raising a child mean other fathers simply cannot bring themselves to reveal the awful truth to their offspring.
Cheryl Grace, senior solicitor based at Stowe Family law in Leeds, currently has a client who has discovered his teenage daughter does not actually belong to him.
“He believed all the time she was his then his wife just turned round and said ‘she isn’t’,” Grace says.
Initially her client, whose marriage has since broken down, wanted to pursue a DNA test, but has since changed his mind.
“Now he has time to reflect he has realised he doesn’t want to risk ruining the relationship with his daughter,” she says, underlining that this really can happen to anyone.
“Human nature applies to us all,” she says. “It only takes a woman to get a bit tipsy at the Christmas party or be u
“Culturally Enriching” = Suppression of Free Speech, Vilification of Whites, Lower Wages, Effeminate Politicians
“Culturally Enriching” = Suppression of Free Speech, Vilification of Whites, Lower Wages, Effeminate Politicians
by
Prof. Rick Mehta Latest Victim of Politically Correct Witch Hunt
Prof. Rick Mehta Latest Victim of Politically Correct Witch Hunt
Paul Fromm’s commentary on the latest victim of Cultural Marxist thought control on campus
.
Yesterday Sung to the tune of the Beatles’ hit song
Yesterday
Sung to the tune of the Beatles’ hit song
Sung to the tune of the Beatles’ hit song
Yesterday, all our troubles seemed so far away.
Now it looks like hyper third world immigration is here to stay.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly, this is not half the Canada it used to be.
There’s a shadow of thought control hanging over me.
Oh yesterday, came sudden-ly.
Why Anglo-Celtic Canada had to go away, I don’t know—-politicians wouldn’t say.
I said something politically incorrect so I long for yesterday.
Yesterday, freedom of speech was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a place to hide away, is there a Euro-Canadian ethno-state where I can stay?
Oh, I believe in yesterday.
Why free speech had to go, I don’t know—–the Thought Police wouldn’t say.
I said something Islamophobic, now I long for yesterday, day, yeh yeh.
Yesterday, Euro-Canadian pride and patriotism was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a place to hide away, is your bunker A-OK? Eh?
Oh I believe that European Canada will once again have its day……mmmmmm…..
Tim McCartney Murray
Anglo-Celtic Canada R.I.P.