Light years ago, before Jimmy Savile was even a twinkle in his Father’s eye, and Tesco’s hadn’t been invented, and there wasn’t a career in Television to be had, no matter who your Father was, ‘cos hardly anyone had even caught up with the new fangled radio…there was such a time you know, probably before you were born; back then there was an individual called ‘the cruelty man’.

The ‘cruelty man’ worked for a charity called the NSPCC. Wealthy people gave the NSPCC money so that they could send the ‘cruelty man’ out round the ginnels and backyards to make sure that the ‘deprived’ did actually feed their children occasionally, and only battered them to within a regulation whisker of their lives. It was fairly effective, and a lot of people around and pontificating today only exist because the cruelty man caught sight of their Mother or Father slipping between the slats of the drain cover and shouted out ‘somebody feed that little shaver, it’s too thin’. He would go in search of the parents, and if he found the reason they hadn’t been feeding the kid was no money he’d slip a hand in his pocket and find a biscuit or a piece of bread.

Pretty flying by the seat of his pants stuff, he didn’t have anyone to write him learned reports on how to spot a starving child, he just reckoned that if they were thinner than his thumb, they could probably do with that biscuit. When he spotted a kid with two black eyes, a torn ear, and his left arm on back to front, he didn’t agonise about the cultural reasons why this should be so – he grabbed the kid and gave it to someone who could be trusted to at least let its ear heal before giving it another clip round the lug-hole.

Sometimes the kid had its entire head on back to front and there was nothing to be done other than arrange a decent burial – it wasn’t the kid’s fault, after all.

We’ve come a long, long, way since those days.

We built vast red brick universities to train people for years on end in the art of how to spot a starving kid, and what to do when you did. We didn’t send them out with biscuits in their pocket any longer – we gave them clip boards so they could tick off the various supervisors they had notified that they had indeed spotted what might potentially be a starving kid, and could a meeting please be convened next month, (or perhaps the month after if that conflicted with the holiday season) to discuss whether in fact a starving kid had been spotted, or whether this was a facet of some strange culture that must be respected.

We still seemed to be arranging for the burial of kids with their head on back to front, although we had managed to drive down the unemployment figures.

We’ve come a long, long way since those days.

We enlarged the red brick universities and trained some of the people for even more years, gave them titles like ‘Doctor of Social Sciences’, and sent them out to stand over the people we’d trained ‘how to spot a starving kid’ and make sure they were ticking the right boxes on their clip boards. We didn’t give them biscuits to put in their pocket either.

We were still burying kids with their head on back to front. Look on the bright side – the unemployment figures were the best they’d ever been.

We’ve come a long, long way since those days.

Michael Gove is the latest to try to stem the tide of burials. He’s set up the ‘Serious Case Review Panel’ to look into why the latest kids had their head on back to front. So far, he’s hired some pretty exotic help:

Peter Wanless. Peter has wide experience of spending large sums of money. He spent 4 years as Chief Executive of the National Lottery Board, doling out some 750 million a year collected from the deprived via various scratch cards and weekly lotteries in the hope that they might escape their misery. He is also on the board of ‘Go-On UK’ which is now in the process of distributing up to 500 millions of pounds which absent minded widows and pensioners have left lying in dormant bank accounts….apparently these credentials resulted in him being ‘the perfect person’ for the NSPCC to appoint as their CEO all of 26 weeks ago. Such lengthy experience of child protection work will no doubt stand him in good stead. Not known to keep biscuits in his pocket. Last heard of late last night fighting a rear guard action to explain why the NSPCC had apparently given Stuart Hall, now a convicted sex offender, a reference.

Then there is:

Nicholas Dann. “Nicholas Dann is Head of International Development at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), the government body charged with the investigation of accidents and serious incidents to aircraft. He has over 10 years’ experience as a senior inspector of air accidents during which time he has investigated a wide range of accidents, both in the UK and overseas.”

Mmmn, Last heard of explaining why he didn’t have a clue why this pilot ended up with his head chopped off.

Give me strength.

All is not lost. We have a barrister on board. Elizabeth Clarke. I am glad that Ms Clarke now feels able to put the trauma of her last husband being shot dead by police and the disclosures of her affair with Mr Justice Mostyn behind her; I am fully behind anyone who can get on with a new life. At least there is one person on board who knows what a messy personal life looks like.

Who is this? Jenni Russell? Good Lord! A Sunday Times journalist, one of that fearless breed of Murdoch investigative reporters, never afraid to plunge to the bottom of any story (especially if they think they might find the BBC at the bottom of it). And a friend of Ed Miliband’s.  The Children are safe at last!

And er, that is it. Not a Mark Williams-Thomas or even ‘lesser spotted’ child protection expert in sight. Narry a biscuit in a single pocket.

Which may explain why the child protection expert’s expert body is being urged to take up the expertise of the expert’s expert expert….

The Victoria Climbie Foundation – motto ‘save a thought for the children’ – is offering to advise the experts that advise the experts that advise the experts…

And the man with the biscuit in his pocket is nowhere to be seen. Far too old fashioned.

How far we have come.

wiggia June 20, 2013 at 08:26

The words you didn’t want to hear when you thought you had got away with it
“The mans coming”

charlotte June 18, 2013 at 22:38

I can hear the powers that be saying ‘Oh, we’d better look like we’re
taking this seriously. What we’ll do is get some experts to deal with the
problem and it will look like we reeeally care. We’ll pay them a good lump of
money for a report.’ Minion. ‘And what shall we do with the report Sir?’ Power
that be. ‘I don’t know, burn the bloody thing.’

carol42 June 18, 2013 at 20:20

I remember the ‘cruelty man’ they did rescue a friend’s sister who was
being sexually abused by her father, we were too young to know then, just
remember an ambulance and police arresting the father, I was told when I was
older as I was still friends with the younger girl and he was out. Must say
though he was always ok to me and never did anything untoward. If I remember
correctly they were almost all retired police or Forces so not afraid of the
parents the way they seem to be now. When I see the word ‘expert’ my immediate
thought is I don’t believe them and they are part of a fake charity. I don;t
believe in global warming, second hand smoke, alcohol limits etc. They have
destroyed their reputations by using junk science and I have never paid the
slightest attention to any of their ‘studies’.

Ted Treen June 18, 2013 at 21:53

Please be careful, Carol:- exhibiting such common sense will have you
reported to an “expert”.

This is not a good thing, usually.

rabbitaway June 18, 2013 at 16:10

Any excuse to share this again – no matter how many time I watch this I
always laugh out loud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdDtwc9HA7s

Saul June 18, 2013 at 13:53

An interesting read for your summer hols….

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Slap-Christos-Tsiolkas/dp/1848873565

Kingbingo June 18, 2013 at 13:25

I have a mate who is a serving police officer. Interesting a very high
proportion of daytime violent incidents in our towns and public places follow
this format:
1) Child is acting like a total shit.
2) An adult stranger
(quite rightly) tells off child for acting like such a shit.
3) Parent
comes steaming up to stranger yelling and waiving fists around shouting
something like “how dare you tell my kid what to do, he/she can do whatever
they want”
4) Violence ensues.

Now I’m not as old as most of you on here, I’m guessing that’s not the way
things used to work.

Bob
Bird June 18, 2013 at 13:32

You are so right about the past. I grew up in a post-war London suburb
when things were very different, it would not be the first time that I had a
clip around the ear for some infraction of the social code of that time by a
virtual stranger whether in public or not. That, of course, is apart from a
couple of clumps with a bobby’s cape for scrumping, believe me that hurt!
The world has changed significantly thanks to do-gooders, namy-pambys, all
manner of Hattie Harperson wannabes and definitely not for the better.

Mudplugger
June 18, 2013 at 21:23

The 1950s industrial, working-class Yorkshire was similar.
However,
there was an unspoken concept of ‘neighbourhood parenting’, whereby every
adult acted ‘in loco parentis’ for every local child, both supporting them
or admonishing them, as appropriate. Kids were told that, if they needed
help, just speak to any adult and they would help you – and they did.
Equally, kids had to be careful that their various playtime mischiefs were
not seen by any adult, as that was tantamount to your own parents seeing
you do it, with painful consequences. Those hundreds of alert and caring
eyes & ears kept all the local kids both safe and moderately
well-behaved.
And it never cost the State a penny – no arse-covering
social workers, no multi-agency co-ordinating groups, no diversity
counsellors, no interference, just shared local responsibility as an
automatic, unwritten part of the culture. And it worked.

Elena ‘andcart
June 18, 2013 at 13:06

We had The Cruelty Man sent round to our house, but so petrified was I of
the consequence after he had left that I said, nay, insisted that everything
in the garden was lovely. So that was the end of him. Until my sister and I
nicked a box of cough sweets due to never getting any sugar, and got caught.
At which point the full might of the law descended. I was nine at the time,
and spent the next twenty years convinced that I was evil because my step
mother said I was. But my sister and I were sent away to a very, very nice
Children’s Home. The problems only began again when we were sent back home
some three years later, after which we never so much as set eyes on anything
resembling The Cruelty Man, despite turning up at school with black eyes and
such. Things don’t seem to have improved much since then.

Kingbingo June 18, 2013 at 12:42

In business you have the profit motive, keeps you focus, or you go bust.

In altruism you’re motivated to do some actual good, otherwise what’s the
point.

But in the public sector your motivation is to spend money on yourself. If
you work for it your invent new ways to spend money, and what better way than
to create new highly paid jobs for, the right sort of people.

Seems to me the problem as ever is the growth of government. The waste,
inefficiency and pointless job creation is not a ‘bug’, it’s a ‘feature’, as a
software engineer might say.

Ancient + Tattered
Airman June 18, 2013 at 19:08

What Kingbingo said!

Ted Treen June 18, 2013 at 21:46

All I could add to this is to repeat Pournelle’s Iron Law of
Bureaucracy:-

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic
organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further
the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the
organization itself.
Examples in education would be teachers who work and
sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect
any teacher including the most incompetent.
The Iron Law states that in
all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the
organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization
functions.

Sums up our public sector bureaucracies succinctly, I think.

Jerry Pournelle:- writer of excellent science fiction but this law is
most definitely not fiction.

rdc June 18, 2013
at 11:37

we have come no where, that’s how far we have come

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-22760991

not in my life time, and I don’t think in any ones life time will we travel
far on this subject, whilst the authorities persist in their greater pursuit
of experts-vs-public inquiries.

I work in a profession full of so called experts in their field, I have
lived a professional life listening to so called experts of all sorts of
subjects….. erm erm …yeah let me think now….

Remember the court expert in the Sally Clark case – Sir Samuel Fooking Roy
Meadow, he was the expert in that case….. very expert it seems…..Sally Clark
died of broken heart in my opinion [and by the way I am not an expert in
hearts, broken or otherwise] but were it not for that so called expert, would
Sally Clark still be alive ? an untarnished reputation ? grieving yes, but
alive most likely.

Some say Micheal Gove is a knob…. well I say he sure is a knob, if he
thinks his dream team of experts are going to resolve this nugget.

Is Daniel Pelka the first or the last ? Don’t need to be an expert to work
that one out…… now where did I leave that rope ?

Joe Public June 18, 2013 at 11:25

I guess you might practice a lot in the ManCave, but this blog does seem to
hit the nail on the head with unsurprising regularity.

As Mahatma Gandhi said:-

“The expert knows more and more about less and less, until he knows
everything about nothing.”

Moor
Larkin June 18, 2013 at 11:14

Whatever happened to the women who used to pick out the nits?

“Andrew Flanagan, who takes over from Mary Marsh in January, was chief
executive of Scotland’s biggest media firm, STV (previously SMG), for 10 years
until he resigned in 2006.He brings serious media pedigree.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/oct/22/nspcc-andrew-flanagan
Flanagan’s
progress will be watched carefully in the light of questions raised in recent
years about the charity’s strategy. Last year, a report from New Philanthropy
Capital argued there was no evidence that the charity’s Full Stop campaign,
aimed at raising public awareness of child abuse, and which raised around
£250m in donations, would make any real dent in child cruelty statistics. Its
television adverts have also been criticised for allegedly stoking public
fears about the risks posed to children.”

Saul June 18, 2013 at 11:40

“Nitty Nora, The Head Explorer”

charlotte
June 18, 2013 at 22:23

Yep good old Nora. She would shave a head and delouse it at the same
time with not so much as a by your leave or permission from the parent!
Nothing was said and no objection made by mum – all best forgotten until
the next infestation.

Saul June 18, 2013 at 23:02

Errm, not quite. I don’t remember any head shaving. As everyone knows
a simple soloution removed the infestation. Removal of hair was never
required. Not to my recollection anyway.

SagaxSenex June
19, 2013 at 08:42

Gentian Blue in alcohol, wasn’t it? I remember R…H… at primary
school being dowsed with a very blue rinse.

rabbitaway
June 19, 2013 at 09:25

@Moor – anyone who was anyone in the 70′s had nits – Great you got a trip
out in a mini bus with several other chums to meet your fate in the form of
some bird with a steel comb. Remember how they (the nits) ‘cracked’ under
yer nail …… ?? Now, how could I turn that ‘memory’ around into something
else ? Erm, a school, a camper van, a white haired old geezer from the telly
– forget the nits – I could make money with this !!

Dioclese June 18,
2013 at 11:06

Expert : ‘Ex’ = has been ‘Spurt’ = a drip under pressure

Bob
Bird June 18, 2013 at 10:45

A superbly observed and incisive blog as ever. I’m just surprised that
another much feared figure of authority from my childhood does not figure,
that of the ‘School Board Man’, out on his bicycle in all weathers in his long
macintosh and bowler hat trawling the streets for those hopping the wag, ever
ready to return them to their seat of learning by a sensitive earlobe. Having
returned the errant little blighter to his alma mater a little further
education would have then invariably applied to a more personal seat of
learning. Whilst having suffered this indignity and temporary affront to ones
dignity there seems to be remarkably little residual harm done!

JimS June 18, 2013 at 22:43

My thought too.

Recently we had people bleating about the need for classroom assistants
to help those overworked teachers with classes of 20. One of their roles
apparently was to help manage class attendance.

My primary school had class sizes of 42 and the only non-teaching staff
were the head, secretary, caretaker and the cooks. Class attendance was
managed by the teacher filling in a red printed form which was collected by
a ‘school monitor’, (I was once that person!), who delivered them to the
secretary for action by the ‘attendance’ man. I remember he used to call if
you were off sick with measles etc. and he would give you a friendly nod if
you were on the way to school (on foot of course!).