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

• Carbon capture is a fig leaf for fossil fuel expansion | Letters

  The predicted £264bn cost by 2050 could be even higher, plus renewables avoid a far higher total of emissions than can be captured, writes Andrew Boswell, while Simon Oldridge calls out vested interests

  Prof Myles Allen and colleagues, in their letter (12 July) on carbon capture and storage (CCS), propose licensing gasfields on condition that producers store an increasing proportion of “the carbon dioxide their products generate”. Their proposal only considers CO₂. Methane is excluded by choice although it leaks throughout global fossil-fuel supply chains, including during extraction, processing, liquefaction and shipping.

  A growing academic literature, supported by satellite observations of major methane plumes, shows that these emissions can be very substantial, and are the dominant near-term climate impact for gas supplied as liquefied natural gas.

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• Today was not perfect when John Humphrys was presenting | Letters

  Readers respond to the presenter’s assertion that the Radio 4 programme has become really annoying since he left

  I completely understand why John Humphrys should find the Today programme lacking since he left (The hill I will die on: Radio 4’s Today programme has become really annoying since I left, 11 July). How could it be otherwise? But I am not convinced by his critique. In the latter days of his pomp, Mr Humphrys would regularly make me feel uncomfortable by his haranguing of interviewees – not always politicians – as if they were hostile witnesses.

  I remember a particularly painful (for the listener) interview with a representative of a charity who was treated in that way, even though they were clearly on air to explain a problem, not to plead a cause. It wasn’t helpful. I like the mutual courtesies that Mr Humphrys derides. Of course, the interviewees are programme fodder, but someone had to be chosen, and it isn’t always easy to be heard in such a prestigious sphere. And why shouldn’t presenters and interviewees acknowledge this?

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• The Guardian view on Andy Burnham: political poetry must become governing prose | Editorial

  Larkin, Harrison and Shakespeare shaped Labour’s leader. Now comes the harder task: turning language into lasting change

  Andy Burnham is finally Labour leader. After trying – and failing – twice to be elected by party members, he took the top job on Friday without a contest. Sir Keir Starmer remains prime minister until Monday, when he will tender his resignation to King Charles, who will invite Mr Burnham to form a government. Then the future that Mr Burnham has long imagined will cease to be a promise and become a test.

  Much will be written about the man. But why does Mr Burnham believe what he believes? One clue lies in the Guardian’s letters page in 1991. Fresh from graduating in English at Cambridge, the 21-year-old Mr Burnham defended an “uncouth and uncultured” Philip Larkin from critics who dismissed him as “too parochial”. Larkin – a bigoted curmudgeon – is difficult to admire, but his poems are not.

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• Homer’s Odyssey transformed in film and in translation | Letters

  Alex Dickie on Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 film, Darryl Accone on differing translations of the Greek original, and Roberto Breña on the excitement around Christopher Nolan’s new version

  As Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey sails into view, epic both in scale and emotional heft (Editorial, 10 July), it is interesting to note that Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 film The Return strips the poem of gods and monsters to reveal Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) traumatised by war, emotionally and psychologically bewildered – an ancient precursor to post-traumatic stress disorder. Penelope (Juliette Binoche), as wife and mother, has her own inner demons to contend with in a male world immersed in physical prowess and killing. Both have been hollowed out by their experiences.

  Perhaps Homer set out to tell a good story, but in doing so revealed so much more, not least the futility of war and in the words of Robert Burns: “Man’s inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!”
  Alex Dickie
  Edinburgh

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• The Guardian view on The Lord of the Rings: not a weapon in the culture wars | Editorial

  The lack of diversity in the latest film is a backwards step. Adaptations of Tolkien’s epic must reflect our times

  There is trouble in Middle-earth – again. So far, all of the actors announced for the latest The Lord of the Rings film instalment, The Hunt for Gollum, to be released next year, are white. Kate Winslet, Jamie Dornan, Anya Taylor-Joy and Leo Woodall join a cast that has already been criticised for its lack of diversity. “Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology,” the film’s director, Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum, said. “The Shire feels very white.”

  Ironically, Serkis invokes fidelity to Tolkien to defend the casting, yet his “modern film version” of Animal Farm, which came out this week, plays fast and loose with Orwell by replacing the novel’s crushing conclusion with a hopeful one.

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