Pass the bucket

I’ve now read two reports of the recent overblown and underpowered ‘conference’ which was supposed to find out if we have poverty and neglect here on Moaner’s Isle.
Facts and truth are as remarkable for their absence as they would be anywhere else except a collection of government-run puppet charities and their klingons. As I said last month when it was first publicised (see Poverty of Theory, Neglect by Government ) : “If these overpaid parasites have to ask they are more useless than we already knew, and we really need to ask in return why they have claimed so much public money for decades.”
Because, make no mistake, all that is going on – as ever – is the usual suspects whipping up more moral panic over inequality THEY perpetuate, in order to beg more public funds, in order to carry on whipping up moral panics, in order to beg more public funds, in order to perpetuate their useless existence. Maybe they have to, because nobody with an ounce of common sense would employ them for a real job.
The first version of several impartial reports (handily written by a Children’s Centre PR dogsbody then copied slavishly by ‘proper’ hacks) appeared at http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=41577 , where it was noted that: “It was organised by The Children's Centre whose chief executive John Knight hopes it will now lead to united efforts to tackle the issue."
It won’t.
For some clues as to why not, you could pick up the story as it eventually appeared in a newspaper now not only owned and controlled off-island but soon to be printed elsewhere too. See http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/health/poverty_in_the_isle_of_man_1_4041528 for a few clues as to who got paid just to turn up, who got paid to not only turn up but pose as ‘experts’, and who got paid to do both and then had the cheek to beg for more cash.
The non-academic with no peer-reviewed research on the topic to his name (from the Sunday kick-around league non-university with no track record in social sciences) must have felt right at home.
I also noted a social services bigwig who once spent an hour arguing that collecting accurate information on the precise numbers of and circumstances for women needing places of local refuge from violence was counter-productive, because she already ‘knew’ instinctively and didn’t think either the government or the public needed hard facts. Their role was just to hand her a blank cheque every time she demanded one.
She got her way because, as a highly overpaid and under-qualified Home Affairs executive pointed out at the same inter-departmental pow-wow, it was so much easier to blame all Manx social problems on people with dark skin, and also costs nothing in time, resources or research.
Then there’s the public sector key worker who, a decade ago, spent two hours listening to clueless Ulster godbotherers give a lecture on ‘drug education’ in which they couldn’t list (never mind actually give the correct chemical name of) several widely available illegal substances of the era, or the signs of their abuse, or cite one academic source which had identified either a medical danger or a social cause for concern for the drugs (no longer in circulation) of two decades before which their talk actually centred on. After this highly professional presentation both they and the faith barn they proposed to work from were also offered public money.
Or the authority on youth work whose bogus ‘youth club’ closed after no more public money was wasted on it: because as passing police officers kept reporting, the kids outside were just standing there, not members. Because they would rather stand in the winter street than enter a premises where staff, after nicking the sound equipment, had tried to frame innocent kids for it, not to mention assaults on girls under the age of consent who were ‘advised’ by police that allegations against ‘decent’ church leaders by anyone with a petty crime record would not reach court. Which they did not.
So, nothing to see, nothing to report. Just more begging bowl business from the usual recidivists.
Ho hum.