DHA, more danger than strangers to kids

If I haven't blogged for a while, it's because I'm trying hard to stick to my post-holiday policy of only spreading positive vibes - poking fun at a few local windbags and drains on the rates along the way but in general trying to cheer up decent folk just trying to get by on the Rock rather than add to their woes.
But this (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_170178.html) is worrying news.
It isn’t just that a government department is wasting public time, money and resources indulging the prejudices of some of the island’s least responsible, self-pitying bigots. It is also the bigots who government will use or employ to ‘look into’ the matter.
Given that the Manx government already wastes far too many public facilities to tittle-tattle about the rest of us and screw up our personal and family lives, I would also be surprised if they choose to share their toys with any unskilled, tabloid-reading (and believing) inappropriate morons who don’t already draw a government salary.
I definitely don’t think the government wants anyone with an ounce of sense knowing the ill-informed ‘intelligence’ they share freely about the rest of us, and I doubt if the worst offenders are on their radar anyway, given that Manx ‘childcare professionals’ never look at unpleasant stuff involving fellow fundamentalists when reported by concerned relatives and neighbours.
But what really worries me is that if it has got as far as this, then someone in either Social Services or the DHA has already formulated a policy and a way of pushing it through a bogus ‘public consultation’, just as they did with homelessness.
Having once wasted an extremely unpleasant evening with some civil servants from the DHA, DSS and various puppet charities, I’ve been through something similar to what is (in theory) supposed to happen here but (in practice) will not.
The official agenda at that meeting was to decide the format for an information-gathering exercise into the scale, nature and causes of Manx homelessness, in order to help government develop strategies to need it. Amongst the things I quickly discovered were:
(1) It doesn’t matter what it says on the agenda of such a meeting or who drew it up in theory. In practice both the agenda and the decisions the meeting will rubberstamp are set in advance by a DSS executive on a £100K+ salary, who will not actually bother to turn up to the meeting.
(2) I, the token ‘member of the public’, had more facts and figures at my fingertips, and knew more about the issue in general, than a group of people who, collectively, cost the public about £500,000 in salaries each year.
(3) Government employees don’t bother researching for meetings like this, and may even turn up not knowing what the meeting topic is, but happily put in claims for overtime anyway.
(4) Slum landlords and the DSS get along just fine, and the DSS are not about to allow any evidence to appear in a government document which would break up that cosy relationship.
(5) Nobody with dark skin or a foreign accent is safe in the care of the DHA, but if the DHA can find a way to blame all Manx social problems on such folk they will.
(6) Some key government staff not only go to the same fundamentalist churches which produce the homophobia, sexism, racism, physical, mental (and in some cases sexual) abuse which in turn is the primary cause of Manx teenage kids leaving home, they are also involved in the fundamentalist bogus charities which the DHA and DSS proposes to use to counsel and rehouse them.
So, in brief, nothing will emerge from this mess but more trouble for ordinary parents. If you really want a list of people who are a danger to children, you should start with the staff lists of any government department, bogus charity or government advisory body which gets involved in such a pointless exercise.