Progress Is In Danger With Boris Johnson’s Cabinet By Kelly Grehan

Born in 1980, I came of age not long after the 1997 Labour government swept to power. Clause 28 was quickly abolished, civil partnerships, adoption by gay people, The Good Friday Agreement, the introduction of the Equality and Human Rights Commission,giving all full time workers the right to 24 days paid holiday and the introduction of 2 weeks paternity leave quickly followed. It seemed it was just a matter of waiting for all these changes to become the norm and the more equal society we craved would follow.

Sadly, the naivety of such a time now seems wistful. After a decade of cuts we have seen a decline in our quality of life for the overwhelming majority of us and divisions between people are at the highest I’ve ever seen. Now with Boris Johnson and his morally bankrupt cabinet in charge I”m genuinely fearful that the rights we thought we had taken for granted are under threat.

I simply haven’t the space or time to list all the things Boris Johnson has done to demonstrate he is unfit for public office, but suffice to say a man who described homosexuals as ‘tank top wearing bum boys’ and compared Muslim women to ‘letter boxes’ is very unlikely to stand up for the rights of either group.

I’ve heard people defend Johnson, saying it’s ‘just banter,’ or ‘his sense of humour.’ In my opinion these Johnson apologists need to takea look at themselves – an extremely privileged straight, white man mocking members of groups known to suffer from massive discrimination and who are recipients of high amounts of hate crime can not be defended.

It’s logical to assume that, if the person leading our country engages in such nasty rhetoric without consequence then others will follow. This is devastating.

As if it’s not bad enough our children are growing up with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister their education is under the control of Gavin Williamson, named Education Secretary just 85 days after his sacking over a National Security Council leak (which he denied). Can anyone imagine a situation where you would be welcomed back into a job in these circumstances?

Then we have Priti Patel as Home Secretary.

She was forced to resign from Theresa May’s government after revelations she had conducted secret meetings with the Israeli government. She is also a supporter of the death penalty. She was slammed in December for suggesting the government could use possible Brexit food shortages in Ireland as “leverage”.

New Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab appeared to have spent most of his period as Brexit Secretary in a state of confusion; famously admitting he had not “understood the significance of the Dover-Calais crossing.” he also admitted to not having read the The Good Friday Agreement.

In 2011 Mr Raab said “feminists are now amongst the most obnoxious bigots” and said it was time for men to start “burning their briefs”.

In 2017 he said most food bank users were not “languishing in poverty” but were instead had “cash flow” problems and has branded Brits “the worst idlers in the world”.

Chief Whip Mark Spencer is best known for comments he made in 2015 when he suggesting a “dying” benefit claimant, sanctioned after he turned up four minutes late, should “learn the discipline of timekeeping”.

Although ,surely an improvement on Chris Grayling, new Transport Minister Grant Shapps is another appointment to the cabinet with a dubious history. He was demoted by David Cameron from his job as party co-chairman and Minister without Portfolio after revelations about his second job and use of the assumed names “Michael Green” and “Sebastian Fox.”

Esther McVey, is the tories 9th Housing Minister in as many years. Ms McVey told the House of Commons in December 2013: “In the UK it is right that, you know, more people are visiting – which you’d expect – going to foodbanks.’

She also claimed reports of cuts to benefits were fake news.

I read the profiles of these “characters” Boris Johnson has seen fit to appoint and I feel genuinely afraid as to what policies they may pursue. The lack of compassion, adherence to facts and history of defence of rights and libraries is chilling.

I wish us all luck.

Happiness: A Basic Human Right? Not According To The Tories By Eddie Luigi

By Eddie Luigi 

Let me make this clear from the start. Generally I am happy and content. 

I view happiness as a three legged stool, with happiness as the seat and the three legs of home, health and an honest wage for an honest job.
Any of you who have studied psychology will be aware of Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. 

Which in a nutshell means until you have achieved the basic needs you cannot go on to achieve any of the more humanistic needs. 

The basic needs at the bottom of the hierarchy are food, water, warmth, rest security and safety. Without these essentials it is impossible to proceed up the hierarchy and achieve happiness and fulfil ones potential.

It’s like a game of ‘snakes and ladders’ sometimes you’re going up and sometimes you go down and have to start the climb again.

So, my view is that, until you have the basics of home, health and an honest wage, you can’t even begin to think about happiness. Then if one of those three legs of the stool is missing, happiness comes tumbling down.

But since the tories came to power in 2010, millions of people in England are struggling to gain the basic needs. Hard to believe but the figures do not lie:

4,134 sleeping rough ( up 134% since tories got in 2010) in England.
Almost 1.2 million needed emergency three day food parcels.

250,000 as registered homeless in England.

Around 4 million private renting in England. Most of these will have yearly or month to month contracts, with no basic security. 

That is a lot of people that can’t reach a happy state, or fulfil their potential.

Many self help books advise you to simplify and find happiness in the little everyday things.
This does not seem good advice if you have no home and your day is taken up by wondering where you can sleep safely tonight. 

Nor does it help if your physical or mental health means that your day is taken up wondering if you can be cured, or taken up trying to overcome the splinter in your mind that feeds the self doubts about your looks, your weight, your usefulness or your worth. 

That advice must surely be ignored if after you honest day’s work your ‘honest’ day’s wage, topped up by social welfare, is still not enough to meet your budgetary needs for housing, feeding and clothing your family.

I fear that in our current political situation not everyone will have the three stool legs necessary to think about happiness.

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The Fight for Equality is Everyone’s Fight By Nathen Amin

By Nathan Amin

We appear to be living in a peculiar period here in the UK where a bitter divide has opened between opposing sections of the populace over a topic that should, in truth, be a unifying force – equality.

What one person proclaims should be a natural right for all is often vociferously condemned by another as a threat to their culture’s established way of life. It is a bizarre time indeed, and this is one ideological conflict I am not quite sure I understand. Surely, the battle for equality is a battle ALL of us should be fighting, regardless of our genealogical background, which we have no control over incidentally, or political outlook.

I can’t be the only person exasperated by witnessing protests by those seeking to establish equal rights for minority sections of the British public; reduced to nothing more than violent clashes between the right and left. Both sides often degraded by the other with unhelpful monikers such as fascist and Anti-FA, Nazi and snowflake, and so on.

How the hell a term like ‘liberal’, incidentally, became an insult, I’ll never know, and truth be told, I’ll never comprehend how anyone can protest against equality in the first place.

Let me expand a little bit. Whether we appreciate the fact or not, and it appears that many in modern-day Britain are wilfully preferring to remain ignorant, we are all affected by issues surrounding gender, health, sexuality, race, religion or creed. The fight for equality for those who are dreadfully affected by prejudice on a daily basis is a fight we should all be partaking in, as a united society, and not one that divides us into separate battalions headed for an inevitable clash every time our divergent paths cross, literally and figuratively. And yet, here we are.

Now, admittedly, I may be in an unusual place where I am affected by the fight for equality on several fronts, courtesy of my immediate family unit. I am affected on racial and religious grounds because of my own mixed-race ethnicity, my non-white father being a Muslim. I am affected on grounds of disability and mental health because of conditions which affect my sister and wife, whilst I also strive for equality based on sexual orientation because another sibling is LGBT. Naturally, some of these relations are women in the workplace, which opens up another front on which I want to see them receive parity they wholeheartedly deserve. It is absolutely in my interest that those people get every inch of support needed to, at the very least, ensure they are receiving equality in and out of the workplace.

If support is lacking in their life, if the women aren’t being paid fairly for a job a man does, or if a gay woman is discriminated against on account of her sexuality, or whether another family member gets overlooked for a role based on their colour, then you best believe that affects my own life. So I am a supporter of gay marriage, rights for migrants, support for mental health services, and yes, I am a male advocate of feminism.

Not everyone is in my situation, however, so I want to speak directly to those who openly criticise folk for espousing the desire to see equality given in all areas of life. I’m speaking to those who post bitter, obscenity-laden, diatribes online decrying another ‘lefty’ attempt to destroy our ‘native’ culture by pushing for gay marriage, defending immigration, giving too much credence to mental health issues, or even supposedly pandering to other faiths such as Judaism and Islam to the detriment of ‘our Christian way of life’. How dare those women call for equal pay in work!

Well, have you guys ever considered the fact that any fight for equality might just be a fight you will someday appreciate, and even be grateful for?

Allow me to be a bit blunt, hereon in. The majority of those who loudly decry ‘pandering’ to minorities, whether based on racial grounds, on sexual orientation, or any other basis, are largely drawn from a straight, white British-born male demographic. Not all, of course, as some within that background are as left and inclusive as the next person, but it’s not incorrect to suggest that the make-up of most EDL, Britain First or other Far-Right or conservative movements tend to be from those drawn from such a background. It is these counter-activists who claim to stand up for their endangered culture, to be the defenders of perverse notions such as embracing multi-culturalism or freedom of sexuality. And you can, on one hand, understand why. After all, those men, you know the types, often snarling with indignation whether in person or on the internet, don’t care about being foreign, gay or a woman, and who often implore those with mental health issues to simply ‘suck it up’. They’re white, British, straight, male. This, it seems, is not their fight, and they don’t see why concessions should be made.

And yet, I can’t help but wonder. In time, these men will have wives, they will have daughters and sons, and they will perhaps even have a brood of grandchildren.

Have they never considered the fact that equality in the workplace between men and womencould mean the difference between their wives being paid the same amount of money to do a job another man does? 

Or the fact that one of their children, or grandchildren, may be homosexual and want to marry, or perhaps are even straight but have wed into a family of an immigrant background with different faith. Perhaps they will have a child who suffers from mental illness that prohibits them from leading a full and active lifestyle. Maybe even THEY will suffer from a depressive episode in their life. Having a ‘stiff upper lip’ won’t fend off the ravages of depression, regardless of their boasts of ‘manning up’. The very ideas these, I hesitate to call them men, persons stand against are the very things that could, one day, be imperative in protecting their own families. And that’s, after all, what it means to be a man, surely – to protect your loved ones, and ensure they have every opportunity to become the very best versions of themselves?

Would these people be satisfied to learn their child didn’t get that job because they were a lesbian, or their wife couldn’t get that promotion because she was a woman?

No-one in their right mind in today’s British society should sincerely consider equality to be a negative thing. 

Freeing everyone of any shackles, mentally, physically, legally, will only benefit everyone. I want the best for my family and friends, be they white, brown, male, female, straight, gay, disabled or otherwise. I want everyone to be free to reach whatever goal they have set for themselves, and not to be barred by their race, gender, sexuality or health. That’s not a bad thing to stand for.

Equality affects us all. Let me repeat that, Equality affects us ALL.

**

Nathen Amin grew up in the heart of Carmarthenshire, West Wales, and is the author of non-fiction books Tudor Wales (2014), York Pubs (2016) and House of Beaufort (2017), an Amazon #1 Bestseller for Wars of the Roses. He is currently working on his fourth book, Pretenders to the Tudor Crown, for release in 2019. He has also featured discussing the Tudors on BBC radio and television, as well as in print and online media across the UK. He has a degree in Business and Journalism and now lives in York, where he works as a Technical Writer.

Family Court Decisions Are Breaking My Child By The Masked Avenger

Author Anonymous 

Children in the UK are struggling with emotions and left voiceless whilst their parents fight it out in front of a judge in family court. 

My experience is children’s wishes and wellbeing are actually ignored in favour of the child having a relationship with both parents. 

Don’t get me wrong I am all for children having a relationship with both parents but when it distresses, upsets and harms our children where do we turn to?

Until they reach age 10 a child is practically voiceless in a family court. 

The court will and does disregard the child and discredit any emotions the child shows just because the judge feels they know best. They do not. 

In my experience the child was left needing a lot of therapy,  very withdrawn and distressed. The child spoke to me time and time again begging, crying, saying “why won’t they listen to me?”

That’s a good question. We are all human and we all are supposed to have ‘human rights ‘ yet a court is willing to destroy a child because they believe it is best for a child to have the contact which they grant everyday. They go home to their comfortable lives and what about the child? They are left crying, with questions that the parent cannot answer, they are left emotionally harmed with nightmares and being packed off to the other parent . 

The suffering that a child goes through is immense. We are in a world where we are dictated to enough without our children being forced to have contact. I have had a child crying on the floor, sobbing because they do not want to leave and all I can do is say  ” I know you don’t want to go, I know this is upsetting you but you must go”.

I fought for a few years in family court for my child to have their voice heard. Nobody heard them and I am the one who picks them up everyday when their emotions are all over the place. I am the one who comforts and tries to make the best of a bad situation.
I feel that the courts need to ‘judge’ each case individually and actually listen to the children. I’m all for a balanced view and equal relationship with both parents if the child is happy with that. 

Why are we breaking the children of the UK?

Why do we dismiss them?

Childhood is a precious time meant for building up a child not breaking them down.

Children’s mental health is so important and I’m not saying let a child have their own way but when a child tells you time and time again they do not want to have contact; we the parent are pretty powerless because the court does not listen.

We are at risk of having a lot of children with self esteem issues and anxiety because the one who holds the power is a judge who despite reports by many will disregard them in an instant. 

We need to listen to the children because they grow up and we don’t need any more damaged adults on the hands of an already stretched mental health services.

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