For the overseas readers the BBC do a headline documentary called Panorama.
Last week they pulled a bit of a journalistic coup, they got inside a private care home and revealed some pretty terrible abuses by care staff who were running a reign of terror.
There has been a national outcry, media frenzy and general governmental tutting that they will make sure it never happens again. There have been arrests and promises that people will be charged.
Whether they mean using poorly trained, badly paid staff, to "care" for people, in usually understaffed places, to warehouse the vulnerable and economically sidelined in profit points for the private sector will not happen. Or will it mean they will stop anyone ever finding out what happens in those places, is not clear.
This week they did a programme about children living in poverty. It was truly grim, easily as grim as last week.
Trouble is this is about people being poor on benefits, somewhere where there are serious cuts in prospect.
Children living in misery and damp and spores and missing meals and lacking clothes and being bullied and driven to attempt suicide. A young man transformed by 9 pounds spent on his haircut. You could almost measure how that haircut changed his view of himself. That was a young man of 12 who anyone would be proud of. It broke my heart and drove me to despair too.
Humanity has been silent. The government is not up in arms. The previous government set itself a target of removing child poverty, but then carried on an economic system that guaranteed it's continuation.
We are the only ones who can change this, maybe the spring should not be limited to the Arab world.
R
Last week they pulled a bit of a journalistic coup, they got inside a private care home and revealed some pretty terrible abuses by care staff who were running a reign of terror.
There has been a national outcry, media frenzy and general governmental tutting that they will make sure it never happens again. There have been arrests and promises that people will be charged.
Whether they mean using poorly trained, badly paid staff, to "care" for people, in usually understaffed places, to warehouse the vulnerable and economically sidelined in profit points for the private sector will not happen. Or will it mean they will stop anyone ever finding out what happens in those places, is not clear.
This week they did a programme about children living in poverty. It was truly grim, easily as grim as last week.
Trouble is this is about people being poor on benefits, somewhere where there are serious cuts in prospect.
Children living in misery and damp and spores and missing meals and lacking clothes and being bullied and driven to attempt suicide. A young man transformed by 9 pounds spent on his haircut. You could almost measure how that haircut changed his view of himself. That was a young man of 12 who anyone would be proud of. It broke my heart and drove me to despair too.
Humanity has been silent. The government is not up in arms. The previous government set itself a target of removing child poverty, but then carried on an economic system that guaranteed it's continuation.
We are the only ones who can change this, maybe the spring should not be limited to the Arab world.
R
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