Latest news with #ChristopherFurlong
Scotsman
31-05-2025
- Scotsman
SNP must act urgently to stem horrifying epidemic of violence in Scotland's schools
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It is becoming increasingly clear that the scandalous breakdown of law and order – for it is nothing less – in Scotland's schools is an issue that requires urgent and radical action. We cannot allow generations of children to learn all the wrong lessons about violence but, based on reports of increasing desperation from those on the frontline, that is exactly what is happening and the consequences for society as a whole will be very real. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad According to the GMB union, classroom assistants in primary schools are the most likely staff to suffer violence and abuse in schools. A snapshot survey of 30 in Edinburgh found every single one had either been a victim of violence or had witnessed it. Four out of five said incidents were taking place on a daily basis and 92 per cent said there are no consequences for pupils who used violence against assistants. Schools needs to be safe places where children are able to learn and neither they nor their teachers feel at risk of attack (Picture: Christopher Furlong) | Getty Images Violence cannot go unpunished Keir Greenaway, a senior union organiser, said: 'Until the true nature and extent of school violence is properly understood and acknowledged, it will never be properly addressed. We need an honest conversation about what is happening, where it is happening and how to address it.' The union added that the 'presumption of mainstreaming' – a Scottish Government policy that encourages pupils with behavioural problems and other 'additional needs' to attend ordinary schools – had to be properly funded or it would fail both children and staff. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It is past time for the Scottish Government to think again, given some children clearly need more help than it is possible for mainstream schools to provide. The risk is that children will take away the message that violence goes unpunished or can even get them what they want. Eventually, they will realise their mistake but this may only happen after some hideous tragedy. The Netflix drama Adolescence provided a chilling example of the consequences of allowing a culture of violence to develop among young people.
New Statesman
30-05-2025
- General
- New Statesman
Why is Birmingham leading Britain's child poverty spiral?
Photo by Christopher Furlong / Getty Images To truly understand the impact of child poverty in Birmingham, the best place to go is Ladywood. Sitting to the west of the city centre, research from 2008 identified this area as having the highest percentage of children who live in poverty of any parliamentary constituency. A newspaper report from the time depicts the situation on the ground for locals: 'I'd rather starve than let them go hungry,' a father who was out of work said of his girlfriend and their 12-month-old daughter. 'We might be short of money, but we're not short of love.' The headline of the piece, outlining the poverty the city's young people were growing up in, is simple and devastating: 'A poor start'. More than 16 years later, children living in Ladywood are still experiencing a poor start to life. It remains the constituency with the highest levels of child poverty in Britain: 55 per cent of its youth live in deprivation (after housing costs are accounted for), according to a 2025 report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). The situation in Ladywood is a microcosm of a wider crisis of child poverty across Birmingham. Ladywood and its neighbouring constituencies – Hall Green and Moseley, 55 per cent; Yardley, 53 per cent; Perry Barr, 53 per cent; and Hodge Hill and Solihull North, 51 per cent – account for five of the top ten areas affected by this issue. In excess of 100,000 children across the city are living in poverty. Birmingham itself is at the apex of a wider trend of rising child poverty across the country in recent years. According to the same research by the JRF, around three in ten children growing up in the UK live in poverty. As the scourge of child poverty has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, so has the need for third sector organisations to provide localised support. 'The pandemic hadn't helped the situation,' said Alice Bath, operational manager at the Family Action charity and a born-and-bred Brummie. Family Action runs an Early Help Programme for families in Ladywood and Perry Barr. 'Even though we're out of it, we're still facing the mop-up of the [underlying] issues that it presented,' Bath said. Children in Birmingham, Bath told me, are contending with 'exponential' increases of food insecurity, decaying dental health, respiratory conditions, obesity and housing instability. Despite the best efforts of Bath and her colleagues across the third sector, there is now a quiet acceptance of a deprived status quo among the city's youth: 'It's become a way of life and a way of being.' What isn't helping the fight against child poverty in Birmingham is the dire financial situation of its council. Birmingham City Council effectively declared itself bankrupt in September 2023. To claw back funding, government- appointed commissioners have pencilled in over £300m of cuts across the following two years in the Labour-controlled council. The cuts reportedly include up to £112m worth of spending reductions and savings in the council's early help and youth services. That includes axing £8m worth of funding that is paid by the Birmingham Voluntary Services Council to ten local charities – including Bath's Family Action – that put on vital services for children and families across the city. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'Birmingham was massively hit by the decline in the manufacturing base of the city,' Martin Brooks, who has served on Birmingham City Council for 20 years, told me. The region was once famous for its production of cars, metals and Cadbury's chocolates. Brooks added: 'We were losing jobs in the Thatcher years not by the hundreds or thousands, but by the tens of thousands. Those years [of deindustrialisation] had a massive effect on poverty within the city.' When accounting for the exponential levels of child poverty today, the blame is largely placed on the effects of the 2008 financial crash and Conservative-induced austerity of the 2010s. 'The poor governance of the city has [also] had some effect on where we are today,' said Brooks, who quit the Labour Party last December. (He now stands as an independent councillor.) Brooks resigned over the fresh cuts his former Labour council colleagues have approved, which will 'have a devastating effect on the life chances of our young people in this, the youngest of European cities,' he said at the time. Locals are desperately searching for answers from their council. Upon visiting the local authority's HQ – a grand, Victorian era Grade II-listed building – on a bright spring morning, looking for a council cabinet member to interview, I was told they were unavailable. They were 'busy dealing with the bin situation,' a member of staff told me. The strikes have ensured the city stays top of the headlines – albeit for the wrong reasons. The politicians representing Birmingham on a local and national level are all too aware of the challenges facing their younger constituents. 'We made good progress until austerity in addressing some of those issues,' Richard Parker, the Labour Mayor of the West Midlands, told me over tea when we met in the city. 'The Tory government took £1bn out of the spending power of the city council, and it's still living with the impact of those cuts. That £1bn is further damage to some of our poorest communities in the most vulnerable parts of the region.' Parker's Conservative predecessor, Andy Street, who I met in the city centre a few weeks later, acknowledged that he and other political leaders 'did not change [the] map of deprivation'. There is broad political alignment on how the issue can be tackled in the medium-to-long term: increased housebuilding (with a particular focus on social housing), inward investment for better jobs in the region and improved education and skills pathways to help locals capitalise on them. But in the immediate term, hordes of children in the city will remain impoverished. 'I think the two-child benefit cap limit has to change,' Liam Byrne, the MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North, and a former cabinet minister during the last Labour government, told me when we met in Westminster recently. Should the cap (which prevents parents from claiming Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit for a third, or any subsequent child, born after April 2017) be lifted, around 17,000 families in Birmingham would be able to receive additional financial support, which can currently cost a family household up to £3,455 a year. 'Family incomes need to go up,' Byrne added, 'that's why [lifting] the two-child limit is so important.' Birmingham is facing a 'child poverty emergency'. A 2024 campaign by local outlet Birmingham Live outlines the severity of the situation. No fewer than 46 per cent of the city's children are impoverished (up from 27 per cent in 2015); twice the national average. Two in three (66 per cent of) children living in poverty come from a working family. Over 10,000 children live in temporary accommodation – a record number. Healthwise, compared to the national average, children are: 1.8 times more likely to die in infancy, and as likely to be hospitalised for asthma; 1.3 times more likely to have a low birth weight, and as likely to die in childhood; and are 1.2 times more likely to be obese at ten years old. Child poverty in Birmingham is also being particularly felt on the city's large south Asian cohort: in all but one of the ten most afflicted wards, the largest demographic of residents come from Asian and Asian-British backgrounds. Although some feel optimistic about the government's upcoming Child Poverty Strategy– due to be outlined in the spring – the benefits it might bring to Birmingham remain unclear. The council cuts only exacerbate fears. As they were through austerity, the pandemic and now, those working in the third sector in Birmingham (and across the UK more widely) – largely made up of locals, many of whom are volunteers – will continue to be a vital safety net for society's most vulnerable. 'I could moan and groan, but it's not going to change things,' Family Action's Bath said of the council cuts, while looking towards the future of its service in Perry Barr and Ladywood. 'It's about having a positive mindset,' Bath added. 'It's about being solution-focused and saying, 'What can I control? And how can I make a difference to support children and families?' It's about keeping hold of why we come to work in the morning and what our core mission and values are about.' This article first appeared in our Spotlight on Child Poverty supplement, of 23 May 2025, guest edited by Gordon Brown. Related
Scotsman
20-05-2025
- Scotsman
Why it's time to decriminalise selling sex – and make buying it illegal instead
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Imagine we had a referendum tomorrow on this question: 'Do you believe that a Scottish citizen should have the right to buy the use of another person's body for their own sexual pleasure with legal impunity?' How would you answer? You may think this is some sort of joke – obviously every decent person would say no. That would be tantamount to slavery and utterly preposterous in terms of their human rights. Yet, for millions of women and girls across the world, including Scotland, that's exactly what prostitution is. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The situation reminds me of Leonard Cohen's iconic song, Everybody Knows. We can pretend prostitution is consensual between adults, and maybe for a very few it is, but 'everybody knows' the consent of a woman to have sex with an unknown man is often a choice of the Hobson variety. Women who sell sex on the streets or through pimping websites very rarely do so by choice (Picture: Christopher Furlong) | Getty Images Child sex abuse survivors For a homeless woman, her consent may be a matter of 'do I have paid sex with this man in a warm flat or risk being attacked in a doorway of a cold street?' Or, for a trafficked or pimped woman, 'do I have sex with this punter, or risk a beating and my family being harmed?' Research shows most women who end up in prostitution experienced child sexual abuse, where they learnt the skills of dissociation as a way of 'getting it over with'. The average age of entry to commercial sexual exploitation worldwide is 13. Reports of schoolgirls being bought and sold by grooming gangs have brought this to the light, but it has been around in various guises since time immemorial. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Cross-Party Group for Commercial Sexual Exploitation undertook a parliamentary inquiry into sexual exploitation advertising websites which clearly demonstrated how pimping websites facilitate trafficking for the indoor market of prostitution, making it much easier to give access and anonymity to the buyer and vast sums of money to the pimps. If you were particularly sceptical of the term 'legal impunity' in the referendum question, you only need to check the conviction rate for traffickers and pimps to realise the risk of being prosecuted is negligible and the reward is riches beyond belief. A woman can be sold repeatedly and the catalogue of physical injuries from repeated rape, strangulation and beatings from large numbers of men destroys women's bodies and minds. Research has shown that 70 per cent of women involved in prostitution suffer from PTSD comparable with Vietnam veterans. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Loving husband, doting father Last, but very much not least, it's time to consider the person who has been missing so far from the referendum question – the 'citizen' with the money to buy access to this market of women and girls. Who is this invisible man? When it comes to women locked up in flats and advertised on pimping websites as 'independent', the police never go looking for him. He has legal impunity because the women and girls will be too frightened to say they didn't consent. But surely, this is the man raping, strangling and beating the women's bodies that they've bought? Who is he? He is the loving husband, doting father, your lovely big brother, your son, grandfather, neighbour and colleague. He has turned hiding in plain sight into an art form, and his biggest fear is being found out. No consent We know from research undertaken on punter websites, where buyers rate their 'purchases', that they know full well that their prostituted woman was trafficked, drugged, ill, bruised, undernourished, frightened and not wanting to perform a sexual service, because they tell us. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad They describe how they have been cheated, and how they took out their frustration in a violent act on the vulnerable woman. They agree with the pro-prostitution lobby that prostitution is 'sex-work'. As one punter said: 'I don't ask how the girl got her job at Tesco's, so I don't ask how she ended up here, I've paid for a service, that's all there is to it.' They always use her, whatever the circumstances. They don't report the traffickers, they know full well there is no consent, they know these women and girls can't report them, because buying sex is legal in Scotland. To stop this appalling slave trade in human misery, we need to end the demand for prostitution and close the market down. By criminalising the men who buy, the police must go after him, the punter. This simple action brings the buyer out of hiding, which will stop most men from pursuing their activity, as the law on kerb crawling (when fully implemented) has shown. Buyers are otherwise law-abiding men, in respectable jobs, with wives, partners and families; they have a lot to lose. Making sex 'Unbuyable' For those concerned about the fiscal impact on the state of releasing vulnerable women from their pimps and traffickers, yes, there is likely to be an initial need to provide emergency financial support, which is the state's responsibility to anyone in dire straits. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad However, these costs will be recouped again and again over time. Research undertaken by NGO Nordic Model Now demonstrates, unequivocally, that the cost to the NHS, social services and other public services is far greater when women are prostituted, than it is in helping them to exit and flourish. Today, the Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Act Private Members' Bill will be launched by Ash Regan MSP. This bill is also aptly titled 'Unbuyable' and follows the principles of the Nordic or Equality Model, a ground-breaking, iconic law first passed in Sweden in 1999. As well as criminalising the purchase of sexual services, it also decriminalises selling, removes previous prostitution offences from women's records and provides support for women to exit. I began this article with an imaginary referendum question, but it will be the question your MSPs will have to vote on (even if phrased differently). If you answered no, please demand they vote Unbuyable for Scotland and set all our sisters free.
Scotsman
10-05-2025
- Business
- Scotsman
SNP and Labour need to take poverty more seriously – or malign actors will profit
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Next year's Scottish Parliament election will be a massive test of strength for Holyrood. In a time of global instability, with rising extremism at home and abroad, faith in politics is at a very low ebb. Last week's elections in England have thrown into sharp focus that politics across the UK, including in Scotland, feel like they are at a crossroads. Whether a long-serving government like the SNP's in Scotland or Labour's relatively new one at the UK level, our national governments face great jeopardy from ordinary people rather than their political opponents. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad People are tired of being told the same things, hearing the same platitudes and experiencing the same results. In the past, defending the status quo has been a half-decent political strategy – that doesn't work anymore. There is no more perfect example of this than poverty levels in Scotland. Poverty hasn't fallen significantly since the start of the 2000s. People leaving school now would not be any less likely to be in poverty today than they would've been the generation before. As poverty has deepened for many people, foodbanks have become commonplace across the UK (Picture: Christopher Furlong) | Getty Images Economic insecurity While headline poverty rates may have plateaued, the problem is deepening with more people now a long way from the poverty line. This is the catalyst for the explosion in foodbanks, multibanks, even 'babybanks'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Austerity has ground down people's standards of living. And what we have now is scarcity, both within our public services and our household finances. Economic insecurity is bleeding into many households. Those on the lowest incomes suffer the most. Yes, through a lack of fuel, food and basic comforts but also because they are more likely to be victims of crime or to have to use poor public services. The scarcity and darkness that this breeds also allows malign actors to drive wedges between people and communities. These negative influences pit people who want nothing more than to be treated fairly against each other. They blame the lack of housing on people seeking refuge from persecution. They never have solutions but know all the tropes about who is deserving and undeserving of support. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Eye-watering energy bills The political debate in Scotland has, to a large extent, managed to avoid some of the most aggressive forms of these arguments but they often bubble beneath the surface. Taken at their most benign, all they offer is more of the same – an unkinder narrative to accompany little change. At their worst, these approaches come with an explosion of misogyny, racism and discrimination against disabled people and ideas that would deepen inequality. But if we allow this darkness to proliferate, those who seek to divide us will continue to be disproportionately heard. High housing costs, eye-watering energy bills and creaking public services are blamed on people often at the hard end of these problems, rather than on the politicians who have presided over these failures. Like empty rhetoric that delivers little change, stoking these fires of discontent fixes nothing, The SNP government has maintained a more positive narrative about the need to drive down poverty in our society. They have also taken some action in this space – whether through the introduction of the Scottish Child Payment or a comparatively greater investment in social housing. But sometimes it can feel as if these measures are the summit of their ambition on poverty, when they should be the foothills. Cross-party agreement That is why the Scottish Parliament's stretching child poverty reduction targets are so important. The Bill setting those targets was passed unanimously. Every party is signed up to them. And they dictate the summit of those parties' ambitions – a Scotland where child poverty would be amongst the lowest rates in the world. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Right now, the parties' ambitions are not matching people's expectations. People are screaming out for a decent and affordable home, for a job that they get something out of and can live off of, and for services to be there when we need them. Where childcare, social care and social security is readily available and provides security – in contrast to the financial precarity experienced by many. We no longer live in a country where a tweak to the status quo will meet people's expectations. We can no longer accept that the only way for our people to prosper is to make small changes around the margins of how our economy works now. This problem requires big debates about the level of taxation and other ways in which people can contribute to public services. It requires a recognition that unleashing the entrepreneurial potential of our country is not about protecting the wealth of those who already have it, but providing security for everyone to live a life free from poverty. A lasting legacy By addressing these fundamental issues and delivering tangible improvements in people's lives, we can rebuild trust in our public services and democratic institutions. This requires strong and passionate leadership, with big debates confronted head on, in order to provide positive changes to people's lives. Leaders can't meekly complain about 'hard choices' that only wind up people who actually have to live with those choices. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The politicians who are celebrated in the UK, love them or loathe them, are the ones who made significant and lasting changes to our society. If, in the next parliament, a politician presides over the meeting of child poverty reduction targets, they will have left a lasting legacy on Scottish society and the doldrums of today will feel like a distant memory.
Scotsman
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
An unexpected solution to rise of far right in Scotland? Religious education
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... With the First Minister's recent anti far-right summit blasted as a 'waste of time', and research showing that young men are more likely to be right wing than young women, it's clear that something needs to be done – and we can't always look to politicians for help. Could the answer lie in lessons in religious education, traditionally the 'Cinderella' subject of the curriculum? Struggling with a lack of specialist teachers and dedicated teaching time in schools, and a variation in curriculum quality across the UK, religious education, or RE, cannot always get its value recognised. But with the challenges facing our young people from far-right extremism, it is better placed than most subjects to offer something unique to support the wider school curriculum. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Whilst religious beliefs are generally believed to be on the decline in the UK, church attendance in England and Wales has actually increased by 50 per cent over the past six years – with young people aged between 18 and 24 as the second largest demographic in attendance. And the popularity of papal thriller Conclave amongst younger audiences has shown that religion is still very much a talking point in 2025. Rioters attack a Holiday Inn Express Hotel where asylum seekers were staying In Rotherham in August last year (Picture: Christopher Furlong) | Getty Images Pupils want to learn about politics Despite RE often being given less care and attention than other subjects, arguably it's the perfect space for these important discussions to happen – and my research more than backs this up. My conversations with pupils and RE professionals in England show that many share the concerns around the influence of far-right extremism in schools, which could lead to potential radicalisation and violent extremism. Emerging from these discussions is a strong agreement that there is a need to integrate far-right extremism as a subject in the RE curriculum. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Contrary to what we may believe, pupils actually want to learn about political issues in school. They see RE as having a role in this, and recognise key areas of overlap between religion and politics. Pupils associate this learning with in-class debates and recognise that specialist RE teachers have the skills and confidence to manage discussions around controversial issues in the classroom. They can also help pupils come to moral conclusions. In line with the controversy around the political impartiality guidance issued to teachers, pupils also recognise that teachers are worried about staying neutral, and may hold back because of fears about what they can and can't say. This is something that research with RE professionals has flagged. It is vital that teachers feel supported and free to guide pupils toward positive values when addressing issues of intolerance and prejudice. What is real? The far right has been increasing its online presence as pupils are spending more time online post-Covid. However, my findings show that young people are not naive to the risks of online information; rather, they are just unsure about what is real and trustworthy. They can access information online about religions, but are not always sure how to interpret it. They want more support – and see teachers as having a role in this. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Pupils' identities are also being affected by online influencers, something the far right has exploited with the increase of extremist influencers. Using mainstream platforms, these influencers post videos designed to create a sense of authenticity. They also adopt an approach that is casual, informal and conversational, bringing a level of intimacy which can support far-right, extremist recruitment and radicalisation through community building and the creation of a sense of belonging. I asked pupils about what affects their identity, and influencers came out on top. They ranked ahead of people they grew up with, and older generations, including parents and grandparents. They recognised that influencers could be positive or negative, using beauty influencers as an example. Again, however, they mentioned that they didn't know who to trust and could be influenced in the wrong way. In response to this, pupils seem to have a yearning for real-life encounters away from their virtual life. They want to engage with reality in a more meaningful way. They want to go places, to meet people and to be able to gauge for themselves, in this way, who and what to trust. Experiencing different world views In RE, pupils are frequently given the opportunity to engage with real-life stories and living religion through meeting people of different religions and world views, and visiting places of worship. They can see things for themselves, ask questions and encounter beliefs and values in a way not achievable online. This can play a crucial role in countering the far-right narratives surrounding religion, including antisemitism and Islamophobic views. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Whilst many of their friends and family were religious, some pupils were missing out on opportunities to engage with religion and world views in their own communities, and there was an obvious curiosity around what others believe and practice. RE teachers are often the ones who illuminate children's lives by discussing the rich variety of cultures, communities and religions which are on their doorstep. This can help to counter localised, far-right, extremist narratives that feed on the vulnerabilities of certain areas and help build a stronger community. Ultimately, including far-right extremism in RE will help to build pupils' resilience against radicalisation and support informed decision-making. RE teachers can see the need to address far-right extremism in the classroom and can easily identify opportunities to do this. They just require support from their school leaders, engagement from parents and help from the local community to make this learning stick.
