It’s Worse To Be In Council Care Than To Be Abused At Home

That is one of the statements in an official report into the care of children in council homes in Lambeth. That to be in one of the homes was worse than to remain at home and be abused:

Although most of the children had been taken into care after suffering violence and neglect at the hands of family members, the report noted that for some “the experience they had [in the residential homes] was worse than living at home with their birth families”.

As to why?

The report is scathing of what it calls the “progressive” leftwing culture of the council in the 1980s. “Many councillors and staff purported to hold principled and beliefs about tackling racism and promoting equality but in reality they failed to apply these principles to children in their care.”

A first rumination upon this would be that councils aren’t very good at running something as necessarily detailed as the bringing up of children. Possibly even institutions of any kind are not all that good at doing so.

But the actual lesson we should take from all of this is that politics isn’t good at dealing with humans in detail. Because as we can see it’s the politics that takes precedence, not the looking after the people.

That being a much larger lesson of course. Power is gained in politics – power being the ability to get things done – by playing politics. Therefore all things that get done – or don’t – will be determined by politics. And then when we allow the sort of people who go into politics to rule our lives in detail then this is what happens. Our lives are ruled by the sort of politics that gains power.

Some little kid getting their rectum wrecked is the physical example of what happens to us all metaphorically under such a system.