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

• Trump and Musk have launched a new class war. In the UK, we must prepare to defend ourselves | George Monbiot

  Across the world, societies are reverting to oligarchies. How to resist? Fight for democracy with all we’ve got

  Seldom in recent history has class war been waged so blatantly. Generally, billionaires and hectomillionaires employ concierges to attack the poor on their behalf. But now, freed from shame and embarrassment, they no longer hide their involvement. In the US, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, will lead the federal assault on the middle and working classes: seeking to slash public spending and the public protections defending people from predatory capital.

  He shares responsibility for the Department of Government Efficiency with another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy. They have been recruiting further billionaires to oversee cuts across government. These plutocrats will not be paid. They will wage their class war pro bono, out of the goodness of their hearts.

  George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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• Cringing before the tech giants is no way to make Britain an AI superpower | John Naughton

  To realise his dream for economic growth, Keir Starmer must seize the reins of technological power

  Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t do visions. But last Monday he broke the habit of a lifetime in a speech delivered at University College London. It was about AI, which he sees as “the defining opportunity of our generation”. The UK, he declared “is the nation of Babbage, Lovelace and Turing”, not to mention the country “that gave birth to the modern computer and the world wide web. So mark my words – Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers.”

  Stirring stuff, eh. Within days of taking office, the PM had invited Matt Clifford, a smart tech bro from central casting, to think about “how we seize the opportunities of AI”. Clifford came up with a 50-point AI Opportunities Action Plan that Starmer accepted in its entirety, saying that he would “put the full weight of the British state” behind it. He also appointed Clifford as his AI Opportunities Adviser to oversee implementation of the plan and report directly to him. It’s only a matter of time before the Sun dubs him “the UK’s AI tsar”.

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• Burnout, shame, heartbreak: nurses are being crushed by our broken NHS | Sonia Sodha

  A shocking Royal College of Nursing report reveals the toll chronic underfunding has taken on staff, and rings alarm bells for the future

  I’ve never read a report quite like it. Last week the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) published accounts from the frontline of corridor care in NHS hospitals. There are next to no charts or statistics, no lists of recommendations or thematic analysis: just page after page – more than 400 – of testimony from nurses about patients being treated in appallingly undignified conditions in corridors, cupboards and storerooms across the NHS.

  Astonishingly, there is no official data on how many patients are affected nationwide. So the RCN has filled the gap, sending out a member survey at the end of December and collating this report in a matter of days. It presents the raw, unvarnished truth about standards of care that once, in normal times, would have raised all kinds of official red flags. Today, they have become routine in every corner of the country, with some NHS trusts even advertising roles in corridor nursing.

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• Despite the eulogies, the postwar order did little for peace – and fuelled the rise of populism | Kenan Malik

  Don’t rush to mourn the end of a liberal international order that too often put order before liberalism

  The historian Steven Shapin opened his account of The Scientific Revolution with the line: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” It is tempting to say much the same about the “liberal international order” (LIO), that “there is no such thing as the liberal international order and there are hundreds of books about it”. And this column, too.

  There was a Scientific Revolution. And there has been since the Second World War a global framework that has helped order international relations. But whether that framework can be described as “liberal” or embodies what champions of the LIO claim it does – “an open world connected by the free flow of people, goods, ideas and capital” that was, in the words of Antony Blinken, the outgoing US secretary of state, “America’s greatest contribution to peace and progress” – is questionable.

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• Keir Starmer will have to stick by Rachel Reeves – they’re lashed to the same mast | Andrew Rawnsley

  When you’re presiding over a flatlining economy, every error is magnified and there is little credit for the things you’re doing right

  Rachel Reeves was making her way to Prime Minister’s Questions when we bumped into each other last week. She is now routinely described as “embattled” or – even more dreaded label – “beleaguered”. So I thought it polite to ask how she was feeling. “I’m very well, actually,” she responded and hit me with a smile so wide and beaming that she could find alternative employment advertising toothpaste.

  Being chancellor is not just a numbers game. It is as much, if not more, a confidence game. The chief financial officer can never afford to look rattled about the balance sheet or fretful about the vultures circling their position. The more reason they have to feel anxious, the more imperative it is that they look nerveless. That she understands. “It’s a tough gig, but there’s no one tougher than Rachel,” says one of her admirers in the cabinet.

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