I awoke this morning after a little nightmare of the type that makes you feel glad to wake up and realise that it was not real. My dream upon awakening combined two familiar elements in my present and past life. I was on a train and could not find my ticket amidst all of the other out-of-date tickets which I as carrying in my wallet. Then my travelling companion who was a colleague with whom I team taught a course enquired whether I had marked all of the student assignments ready to hand back to the students at the end of our journey – needless to say, he had done his quota but I had not marked mine which only added to my distress. Perhaps it was because I have a busy day in front of me that I had this sort of nightmare but when I do have dreams of this sort, it is nearly always looking frantically (and never finding!) something I had lost and badly needed.
A massive domestic political row is taking place over the ‘grooming gangs’ enquiry which is getting off to the trickiest of starts. All survivors who have resigned from the government’s grooming gangs inquiry panel will consider returning if safeguarding minister Jess Phillips resigns. The four women who have resigned this week have written to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, calling for Ms Phillips to step down and all survivors to be consulted on appointing a senior judge as chair with no major conflicts of interest. Ms Phillips told parliament on Tuesday suggestions the scope of the inquiry was to be expanded from just grooming gangs were ‘categorically untrue’. But leaked consultation documents and texts between the safeguarding minister and survivor Fiona Goddard show the survivors’ concerns that the scope would be expanded were valid. The survivors’ letter says: ‘Being publicly contradicted and dismissed by a government minister when you are a survivor telling the truth takes you right back to that feeling of not being believed all over again. It is a betrayal that has destroyed what little trust remained.’ The survivors have demanded the scope of the inquiry remain ‘laser-focused’ on grooming gangs and called for victims to be free to speak to support networks without fear of reprisal. An independent mental health professional should replace the current victim liaison lead, they also wrote. The letter to Ms Mahmood says: “Her [Ms Phillips’] conduct over the last week has shown she is unfit to oversee a process that requires survivors to trust the government. Her departure would signal you are serious about accountability and changing direction. The survivors describe their demands as ‘the absolute bare minimum for survivors to trust that this inquiry will be different from every other process that has let us down’. Now it very difficult to really know what is going on here because I have had, and still have, the highest regard for Jess Phillips, who has devoted practically the whole of her political life to highlighting the lot of abused women and children and for whom these accusations sound completely out of character. It could be that Jess Phillips has been ‘bounced’ by Home Office officials who want the whole affair to quietly go away or its impact to be minimised. Trying to get some background to this story, I eventually found a long account in the (right wing) ‘Spectator’ magazine which appeared, on the surface at least, to have a good handle on what was going on. The article starts off with the reaction of Jess Phillips when she was informing the House of Commons about the government’s view of the whole scandal. If Ms Phillips’s spoken words confirmed her government’s fundamental lack of interest in grappling with the ‘grooming gangs’ scourge, her noiseless irritation upon hearing other MPs speak candidly about those gangs exposed something darker. If the government cannot see how awful these optics are, how infuriating the sight of huffing ministers will be to the vast majority of Brits, then it must be even more lost than I thought. Finally Phillips responded to Lam. ‘I think it’s a shame that [Lam] only referred to one sort of child-abuse victim’, she said. Because when it comes to this vile crime, there ‘should be no hierarchy’ of victims. What incalculable gall. Jess, that is precisely the point Lam and others are making: that white working-class girls were not only savagely abused by gangs of men but also ruthlessly demoted down the ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ by a political class that cares virtually nothing for them and the Spectator concluded by saying ‘Don’t huff – it’s the truth.’
I was just getting to leave the house to do my Tai Chi class this morning when my Droitwich friend, recently returned from South Africa, phoned to ask she could drop by for a coffee. I knew that I was going to have a tight turn around after Tai Chi to be at home for.my chiropodist’s appointment so I decided to forego Tai Chi for one week so that I could have a snatched coffee with my friend. Afterwards, it was time to go shopping but next week promises to be a fairly light week as I am stocked up on a lot of the usual items and so decided to whizz around the local Aldi which might be quicker than the alternative. Once I returned home and unpacked the shopping, I made myself a light lunch and looked forward to my son calling around as he indicated in a text message that he would. We chatted over things domestic, family-related and political before he had to leave. In the evening there is going to be a special church service in which our new parish priest is due to be ‘inducted’ in his new role and afterwards there is to be a social event in a nearby pub to which all of the parish are invited. I imagine that tonight might be teeming so I intend to leave in plenty of time to ensure that I secure a parking place and the social event may prove to be interesting as well. It may be that there are people that I know vaguely by sight and knew Meg and myself as a couple. So I have prepared my little script for when people enquire as to the status of Meg’s health and how the news and circumstances of her death are communicated to the people that I may well meet.