New Integrity

Sharing responsibility for Rochdale

New Integrity is quoted in The Guardian today, responding to a BBC documentary about the satanic abuse case in Rochdale in the 1990s, in which several children were wrongly taken from their families.
We said: "There were at least four contributing factors to the Rochdale [case]: (1) the capacity and willingness of the social workers to discern reality; (2) the framework of social work practice, which suggested specific actions; (3) the broader culture within which these actions can be credible and supported by others, particularly the media; and (4) the legal system and structures which can uphold the actions of the social worker, in the face of absence of evidence and the families' persistent claims of innocence. Ever more thorough checking and conferring among social workers is constantly being legislated for, and accepted as an obligation, within the profession. However, stigmatising social work must be avoided. Distrust from the public and the media is a hugely inhibiting factor in a social workers' ability to care properly. The deaths from abuse of Victoria Climbié and other children were partly due to decisions not to interfere in clearly dysfunctional families. This points to the need to free social workers from huge caseloads and unreasonable pressures".

The full text of the quote  can be found here:

The grounds of friendliness

Pat Kane, New Integrity

I hadn’t watched Celebrity Big Brother as religiously as others, but I couldn’t help being completely struck by George Galloway’s final orations in the house. There he stood, in his “UK” overalls, delivering a jeremiad against the imperialist horror of the United States, while the massed ranks of his celebrity housemates looked on with a symphony of indifference and annoyance.

What was so tragic for me, as George prefaced his tub-thumping (most of which I politically agree with, it has to be said) with ‘brothers, sisters, comrades’, was the sense of the end of a certain brand of political rhetoric. His exaggeratedly precise language (“down the with be-heh-moth!”), his booming, arm-chopping delivery, was perfectly tailored for the striking crowd outside the factory games – a strong working-class voice to restore strength to the fragile and beleaguered. (I've witnessed him doing this on many political campaigns in Scotland, and others like him - Jim Sillars of the SNP was another classic exponent).

But for the watching, post-class millions, and certainly for the botoxed, hair-extended and deeply therapised celebritariat directly in front of him, this must have seemed like some cabaret act – perhaps one of Micheal Barrymore’s cheesier Saturday night routines.

Galloway's sojourn into reality tv has to be one of the greatest media miscalculations that any modern politician has ever made – precisely for the way that it unravels an older form of political “integrity”, in the face of the “new” integrity demanded by our omniscient media spectacles.