Social workers’ mind-boggling pose

WE have all looked on with incredulity as social workers in various parts of the country, instead of helping to ease the path of abandoned children into the loving arms of would-be adopters, have followed a set of politically-correct rules that broke the hearts of eager would-be parents and kept babies and children in institutions, possibly for years.

We thought the over-zealous application of absurd rules, especially the mean-spirited decision to prevent white couples adopting a child from a different ethnic background, couldn’t get any more draconian. We were wrong.

Now the director of children and young people’ services in Rotherham, Joyce Thacker, has decided caring would-be foster parents couldn’t make a home for three east-European children because they had voted for the United Kingdom Independence Party.

Ms Thacker says that the three children have been removed to “protect their cultural and ethnic needs”. What about their need for a loving and caring family, to bring them some love and stability in their young lives. Is it any wonder there are thousands of children kept in institutions when there are also thousands of would-be adopters and fosterers who would make fabulous and loving stand-in parents?

What comes next in this absurd example of ideological tosh? Will the fans of Manchester City be refused fostering or adoption rights because they do not support Manchester United or Chelsea? Will the fans of “Coronation Street” lose out because “EastEnders” better portrays the totalitarian ideology of the Marxist Left? And what about “Suffer Little Children to come unto me”? Not in Rotherham, that’s for sure.


Tory toff Lord Freud has a unique way of making us all feel much better in these difficult times.
Ironically, on the 70th anniversary of the 1942 report by William Beveridge on social insurance and welfare reform, the good lord says the benefits system is dreadful, allowing lone parents and sickness claimants to have a lifestyle on the state.

His soloution is simple — take risks. He said: “We have got the circumstances now where people who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks because they have got least to lose.”

But you can rest assured that Lord Freud understands the plight of the poor and explains his position quite nicely: “I think you don’t have to be the corpse to go the funeral.”

I wonder if Lord Freud heard the rumbling of Beveridge, the great economist and reformer, turning in his grave.


JUST when you thought it was safe to answer the phone without being asked to complete a survey and your letter box was no longer jammed with leaflets advertising everything from take-away meals to double-glazing and loft insulation, a new peril awaits the unwary front-door openers among us.
Street pedlars (door-to-door salesmen and women in reality) were banned in the UK in 1871. But now Jo Swinson, the Lib-Dem business minister, has decided the ban is too restrictive and street pedlars can now come knocking to sell us things we neither need nor want and probably don’t work.

It could also, of course be a brilliant cover for rogue traders and cold or bogus callers who prey on the elderly. So keep your door locked and maybe consider a big dog with even bigger teeth. Or a shotgun.



FINAL WORD: What about a little, shall we say, titillation from Germany? A woman has been charged with “attempted manslaughter with a weapon” trying to smother her boy friend to death with her 38DD bosom.
The hapless victim said: “She grabbed my head and pushed it between her breasts with all her force. I couldn’t breathe. I must have turned blue.”

And we thought Germans didn’t have a sense of humour.