Posts Tagged ‘Dennis Kavanagh’

Only nationalisation and CCTV can stop abuse in care homes

07/06/2011, 01:00:56 PM

by Dennis Kavanagh

Satan and the sociology professor sat perched on a roof in Srebrenica watching a man with a Kalashnikov taking pot shots at the people running away from him. The professor explained the complex causes of the conflict and the culture of brutalisation that had transformed the once peaceful farmer into a cold blooded killer. In the pause that followed, Satan turned to the sociology professor and remarked, “But that doesn’t quite explain the glint in his eye though, does it”?

That was Radio 4’s superlative Harry’s Game, but had Satan taken up in one of the dilapidated office chairs in Winterbourne View care home I wonder if the same observation would occur to him. In a week that saw Jon Ronson argue in his book How to spot a psychopath that sadists are practically everywhere; we needed only to tune into last week’s Panorama to spot a number of them. The most vulnerable people in our community had been warehoused on an industrial estate in Bristol; though “warehoused” implies some care over the goods stored. This was an oubliette, a forgotten place in a land that wanted to forget about these people. Secret filming by Joe Casey gave these forgotten people eyes and ears and voices, and last week we heard their screams, their pleas for mercy and their howls of pain.

On the left, we often bury unfashionable impulses that would have protected these people. Go on, give into your inner socialists, you know this was about the market. Give into your inner authoritarian; you know secret filming was the only way to tell the truth about what happened.

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Shoesmith outrage: a pox on all their houses

30/05/2011, 09:21:39 AM

by Dennis Kavanagh

Sharon Shoesmith addressed the assembled media last week, fresh from her court of appeal success and promptly rammed her foot so far down her throat it’s a wonder she  didn’t knock her teeth out.

“I don’t do blame”, she revealed, seconds before blaming the police and health departments for the Baby P scandal. “You cannot stop the death of children”, she told the BBC later, an extraordinary statement from someone whose department was supposed to do exactly that. My personal favourite was “I haven’t thought about compensation”; maybe she was asleep while her barrister and the court of appeal discussed damages and remedies before remitting the case back to the administrative division of the high court to settle exactly that question.

If she was never “in it for the money”, as she assured the Guardian later, presumably we’ll see a whacking donation to childline or NSPCC. That at least would put a fitting stop to the merry go round of public money behind two lots of high court hearings, representation of three public bodies and enormous sums in court time.

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The Twitterati have made an ass of the law

24/05/2011, 05:19:59 PM

by Dennis Kavanagh

If you asked John Selden back in the 1600s what he thought of super-injunctions, he may well have said: “Equity is a roguish thing: for law we have a measure, know what to trust to; equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor”.

He went onto say that he didn’t know the length of the chancellor’s foot and that’s a bit like an uncertain law. Times change, and with all due respect to Johnny, I’m not sure I want to ask our lord chancellor, Ken Clarke, what his shoe size is in case he thinks I’m coming onto him. Our modern day answer to Selden came in the form of John Hemming MP yesterday when he revealed that Ryan Giggs had secured a super injunction against a former Miss Wales.

He justified the intervention on the basis that Giggs’ lawyers were going for the Twitterati, and managed to upset the Speaker, Nick Clegg and the high court in the process. Upsetting Nick Clegg is a noble goal, it is a shame that this important constitutional debate is circling round the tabloid drain of “guess who’s sleeping with whom this week”. That said, before we walk away from the tabloid sewer with our noses held tightly, it’s worth recognising that some serious issues are at stake.

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There’s no excuse. Ken Clarke should be sacked.

21/05/2011, 10:30:40 AM

by Dennis Kavanagh

It’s 1991. A young and charismatic Bill Clinton indicates that he will seek the nomination of the Democrat party for president; the Super Nintendo is launched; the first gulf war is in full swing and good old Lord Lane in the UK abolishes the “anachronistic and offensive” marital rape exemption in R v R.

Shocked? Don’t be. The current rape debate really is taking place in a country where you could quite lawfully rape your wife up until the invention of 16 bit gaming technology. While Bush Snr was threatening to bomb Sadaam back to the stone age, Fred Flinstone sexual values were in full swing over in Blighty. Little surprise, then, that the backdrop to the latest discussion over rape takes place in a country where around 60,000 women are raped every year – the majority by partners or men they know – and only a tiny fraction, around one in ten, report it to the police. Of these few cases, less than 7% result in conviction according to rape crises England and Wales.

Rape and offences of assault by penetration are in this unique position because they’re often difficult evidentially. They’re not taken seriously and a set of myths have grown up around rape that make securing convictions the exception rather than the rule.

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Jonathan Todd reviews “The British General Election of 2010” by Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley

11/10/2010, 04:50:33 PM

“The characteristic virtue of Englishmen is power of sustained practical activity and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles.”

So said R. H. Tawney. Whereas the mantra of Alicia Kennedy, Labour’s director of field operations, during this year’s general election was ‘where we work, we win’ – a eulogy to the power of sustained practical Labour activity. Now, we can test the quality of that activity by reference to a simple principle: did it secure Labour representation as effectively as it could have done?

Only now is it possible fully to answer this question. Because Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley have just published the 2010 edition of what used to be known as the ‘Butler book’.

Kavanagh and Cowley have ably stepped into the big shoes of David Butler, whose foreword to the 2010 volume means he has been involved in these election studies for 65 years. Cowley’s revolts project, which, though struggling for funding, has so far just about made into this parliament, has debunked many myths about backbench behaviour. This study of the 2010 general election is equally successful at disentangling hype from reality. (more…)

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