Grapevine

Social Care Network | The Guardian

• 'Don’t expect a survivor to tell you her experience of undergoing FGM'

  Specialist social workers explain how they support women and girls affected by the practice
  

  When social worker Sam Khalid [not her real name] first began working with women affected by female genital mutilation (FGM), she found there wasn’t much awareness of the brutal practice in the UK.

  She was in her first year at university, in 2011, on a placement with a Women’s Aid team. “The service I was placed in was just starting its FGM unit, and I learned about the practice and met and spoke to many survivors,” she says.

  This article was amended on 12 December 2018. An earlier version referenced statistics from a recent Guardian article which was taken down after the Guardian was notified of a fundamental error in the official data on which it was based.

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• We want to attract the right people with the right values to social care | Caroline Dinenage

  New government recruitment campaign will raise the image and profile of the sector

  This year we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of our amazing NHS, but we must not forget that adult social care is also marking 70 years. The National Assistance Act 1948 that created many of the core elements of the modern social care system came into effect on the same day as the NHS act.

  In the NHS’s birthday month we have heard many stories of the dedicated nurses, doctors and support staff who have been saving and transforming lives across its seven decades. While these staff are rightly seen as the backbone of the NHS, hardworking care workers, nurses, social workers, managers and occupational therapists are, likewise, the foundation of the adult social care sector – and they have been on the same 70-year journey as colleagues in health. They are two sides of the same coin – inseparable and essential to each other.

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• The UK project giving refugees another chance at childhood

  Young refugees face unspeakable trauma to get here. But a cross-charity initiative is helping them to rebuild their lives
  

  It is hard to be an adult when you feel like you haven’t had the chance to be a child.

  This simple statement has stayed with me over the last 12 months of working with young refugees and asylum seekers. Among them, a 17-year-old boy forced to sleep in a railway station for months; and another who witnessed the killing of his brother and father and escaped from his home country in fear of his life.

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• UN: spend an extra £5tn by 2030 to tackle global 'care crisis'

  Report highlights risk of rising inequality against women worldwide

  The world economy faces a looming “care crisis” risking further division between men and women across the planet, according to a UN report calling for governments and companies worldwide to spend at least an extra $7tn (£5.3tn) on care by 2030.

  Making the case for spending on support for children, old people and the neediest in society to double by the end of the next decade, the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned demographic changes alone mean the current path for care funding falls far short of requirements.
  

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• Theresa May got it wrong with her cash boost for the NHS. Here's why

  Assessing what the health service needs is essential before giving it more money to meet demand

  Four key things were missing from Theresa May’s announcement of extra money for the NHS.

  There was no admission that there is an NHS crisis that needs tackling. Or that money is needed now for both the the health service and social care. Without this emergency cash injection, there will be insufficient time and resource to make the necessary preparations to avoid a repeat – or indeed worsening – of last year’s winter crisis in the NHS and social care with the trail of waits, delays, suffering and extra deaths that accompanied it.

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Opinion | The Guardian

• The Observer view on JD Vance: spurned in Greenland and humiliated at home, the vice-president should resign

  His foolish foreign trip and the response to the Signal chat leak reflect the irresponsibility of White House team

  Not for the first time, JD Vance, America’s outspoken vice-president, has made a public fool of himself. He insisted on visiting Greenland despite unequivocal statements by the territory’s leaders and Denmark’s government that he was not invited and not welcome. Vance’s trip was confined to a remote Arctic base, where he briefly spoke to a few Americans. Plans to make a wider tour and speak to Greenlanders were cancelled – because Greenlanders did not want to speak to him.

  Such hostility is entirely understandable, given the repeated, provocative and disrespectful declarations by Vance’s boss, Donald Trump, that the US plans to annex Greenland and may do so illegally and by force. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. Election results this month showed the vast majority of local people back expanded self-rule or outright independence. They do not want to be Americans.

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• It’s time to end the toxic and divisive debate on sex and gender

  Human rights, respect and dignity have been forgotten about

  Your editorial does not recognise that for a number of years the government, Department of Health and others have shied away from providing clear guidance on sex and gender identity (“The failure to accurately record biological sex harms us all”, last week).

  In 2021, the LGBT Foundation published a report, “If we’re not counted, we don’t count”, which included a recommendation that organisations asked people if their gender identity was the same as the sex they were assigned at birth. If this was recorded, organisations such as the NHS could still identify the sex of individuals, regardless of the gender they identify as. If people did not want that information shared they could elect to opt out, understanding it may put them at risk of missing out on screening programmes etc.

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• The Observer view on the spring statement: Rachel Reeves balanced the books – but at whose expense? | Observer editorial

  Here was a successful economic strategy in the making, marred by its abdication of responsibility to some of society’s weakest

  Steering the British economy out of the mess Labour inherited is a slow and painful process, beset by economic and political hazards. Four Labour governments since the Second World War were derailed by financial crises – in 1949, 1967, 1976 and 2008 – and two Tory governments by crises in 1992 and 2022. Yet, in 2025, Britain is arguably economically more vulnerable than in any of those years. The task for the chancellor is to climb out of this deep pit with as much determination as possible while not risking a sterling or bond sell-off that would derail the government, party and country at least as severely as any of those earlier crises.

  Thus the much-criticised fiscal rules. These are not a self-imposed straitjacket to be abandoned at will but an attempted firewall to sustain financial market confidence while allowing scope to maintain and increase public investment. The promise to balance day-to-day public spending five years hence with day-to-day tax receipts is a minimum guarantor of fiscal credibility. But meeting this permits a second rule: to allow the state to borrow to maintain and increase capital spending, so protecting public investment from being raided as the soft option when the public budget comes under pressure – as every chancellor has done for more than 50 years, with results we live with daily.

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• Chris Riddell on King Trump: all that he touches turns to… – cartoon

  In the US, everything is going down the pan, while the global economy glistens with growth
  

  • You can buy a copy of this cartoon

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• A tip for JD Vance: Greenland doesn’t care about your frail human ego | Sarah Ditum

  My own trip to Nuuk showed me you can’t just rock up and attempt to bend all that bleak, rugged terrain to your will

  In August 2018, I did something that JD Vance and his wife, Usha, can only dream of: I went to Greenland, and I didn’t cause a national outcry against my presence. The not-causing-a-national-outcry part of that was easy. All I had to do was show up and not be a thinly veiled agent of Trumpian expansionism while pretending to care about dog sled races.

  The other part – going to Greenland in the first place – is harder to explain. I’m not an explorer, a sailor or a climate scientist. I don’t belong to any of the vanishingly few occupations with legitimate reasons to visit the Arctic Circle. I was there, inexplicably, as a literary journalist.

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