Councillor Bob Piper

Anyone who saw and was appalled by the disgusting treatment received by people with serious learning disabilities at Castlebeck’s Winterbourne View hospital must surely welcome the response by the government to review how and where people with learning disabilities are treated. But carrying out the review needs to take into account not just the views of professionals, but also those of the individuals and their carers. No treatment about me, without me, is a slogan Lansley was fond of quoting, so whilst I am pleased to hear there will be a review, I will only extend a cautious welcome.

One of the recommendations from the Winterbourne inquiry was that people with learning disabilities should be treated nearer to home. Whilst people get all worked up about acute hospital care if it cannot be performed by a local hospital, commissioners don’t blink an eyelid about dispatching people with learning disabilities all over the country. A remedy for that requires investment to ensure we have appropriate assessment and treatment centres, psychiatric intensive care units, and rehabilitation units available. Whereas hundreds of millions of pounds are invested in flash new acute super hospitals, those who require mental health or learning disability treatments are frequently at the back of the funding queue and find themselves shuffled off into private sector units. Commissioners not a million miles from where I live have been known to allocate placements in private sector establishments with no CQC inspection and no known history of treatment.

Also, I am pleased there is to be a review of whether hospital or residential placements are necessarily the best way of delivering services. As the Minister, Norman Lamb has acknowledged, a lot of rehabilitation and treatment is better done in a community setting.  But it must not be an excuse to cut services and leave the burden of dealing with people with serious learning disabilities to carers who themselves are unable to cope.

Finally, whilst I welcome increased CQC inspections of establishments, a greater rate of return can be had by supporting independent advocacy organisations who use the expertise of service users themselves to audit care and treatment, either in a hospital or community setting. If an organisation like the excellent Changing Our Lives had been given the opportunity to inspect and audit an establishment like Winterbourne View, there is no way that Castlebeck and their crew of ill-trained thugs would have been able to get away with the abuse that they did.

(Declaration of interest: I am the Chair of a mental health trust which provides both hospital and community treatments for people with mental health and learning disabilities)

There are no arguments left against a boycott of Israeli goods

I first met Russ Escritt over 30 years ago when he was a firebrand student leader of an occupation of the University Senate building at Warwick, in a protest over a hike of fees for overseas students. Decades later I bumped into him again as a regular visitor to Bearwood Jazz, where he could often be seen with a variety of cameras in his role as one of the country’s finest jazz photographers. He bought the same passion to his photography that he had to his politics back then in his student days.

It is with real regret that I received a message from Richard at Bearwood Jazz this week that Russ has sadly passed away after a long and debilitating illness..

Andy Hamilton’s son Graeme paid this tribute…

Heartfelt sadness due to the loss of such a dedicated and loveable chap. It can never be over looked, the immense contribution Russ has given to the Birmingham jazz scene and the part he played using his camera to silently visualise the many emotions and good times. He will be missed as he was loved by all of us and my father always spoke kindly of him. A picture can be worth more than a thousand words! In a way, you will live on always through your Art. Peace…

And here is one of Russ’s finest…

Despite the zeal of the revolutionary abstentionists to boycott the elections for Police and Crime Commissioner elections, we were fortunate in the West Midlands to see the election of Labour’s Bob Jones.

Bob made it an election promise to scrap any proposals to privatise front line policing… and he’s got right down to work on day one and done it!

Good start lad!

That’s the way, lad.

Mr Jones has pledged to introduce community-led local policing boards and said he would use the role to “highlight the appalling financial settlement” the police force has received from the government.

West Midlands Police Chief Constable Chris Sims congratulated Mr Jones on his election and said the pair would be meeting over the coming days.

Mr Sims said: “We are entering a new era for policing governance and I am confident that we will be able to build on recent successes.”

Patrick Burns, the BBC political editor in the West Midlands, said the result of four district counts showed the “near-collapse” of the Liberal Democrat vote, even in MP Lorely Burt’s Solihull ward, where the party’s share of the vote dropped from 43% at the last general election to 3.4%.

In Coventry, the Liberal Democrat candidate, Ayoub Khan, polled just 783 votes, even failing to match the number of spoilt ballot papers (884).

Not often I agree 100% with Luke Akehurst, button this dissection of Guardianista John Harris is right on the money. After years of banging on about 'tactical voting' to try to get Labour voters to vote Lib Dem, they Re now revolutionary abstentionists!

The great man is 80 today.

From Hansard.

First, as I said earlier, only Labour has given the people of this country a say. Not John Major, not Margaret Thatcher—only a Labour Government consulted the people.

If there is one lesson we can learn from events like the Hillsborough inquiry and the revelations about Jimmy Savile's predilections for young people, it is that for all the emphasis on 'whistle blowing' in recent years, the scales of justice are heavily weighted in favour of the wealthy and powerful.

For 23 years the relatives of the 96 victims at Hillsborough had to fight bureaucracy, a venal media, and those protecting their office in order to establish in the public realm what they knew all along. Their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and friends were killed as a result of massive errors of judgement by an establishment that were prepared to blacken the name of the dead to cover up their own incompetence.

And now the truth about the vile predatory nature of Savile's behaviour is gradually leaking out, more and more people, young and vulnerable at the time, are saying that they told people when it happened, but it was either covered up or they were not believed.

Last year at a private hospital for vulnerable adults with severe learning disabilities, a whistleblower wrote on two occasions to the Health Service Regulator, the Care Quality Commission, complaining that the staff at Winterbourne View were abusing patients. Despite the fact that Avon and Somerset police were aware of 29 incidents at the home between 2008 and 2011, and South Gloucestershire council received 40 “safeguarding alerts”, no-one believed the whistleblower… until the BBC Panorama programme provided incontrovertible filmed evidence exposing a hideous catalog of abuse (what a disgrace that the same corporation refused to show a film they had also made exposing Savile).

Winterbourne View was owned by Castlebeck, which in turn was owned by Lydian Capital Partners, a Geneva-based investment fund backed by a consortium of investors including Irish billionaires Denis Brosnan, Dermot Desmond, JP McManus and John Magnier, the racehorse breeder. The NHS and local authorities pay Castlebeck an average of £3,500 a week to care for each patient. Since 2006, when Lydian Capital bought the company, yearly receipts have risen by 80% to £55m.

Not much chance for a simple whistleblower when faced with that sort of vested interest, I guess. Those who are finally starting to see the truth emerge from Hillsborough have done brilliantly to keep the flame alight in their quest for justice. That there were so many affected must have helped them enormously. But the fact remains, when faced with a powerful and wealthy establishment, more often than not the concerns of ordinary working class people will be brushed aside or swept under the carpet.