Yesterday we crossbenchers elected a new crossbench convenor to replace Baroness d’Souza, who has decided to retire from the role. She has done a magnificent job. It’s a full time commitment with few resources. It’s a difficult role because all the crossbenchers are strongly independent and rarely share a common view on bills. So it’s not at all like being a party leader; more like a channel for the organisation of the practicalities of life in the Lords but also a source of advice, a listening ear for practical problems, a psychotherapist, a disciplinarian for discourteous behaviour and the crossbenchers ‘ambassador’ on the House Committee (that’s the main management committee in the Lords) and other major committees of the House.
We elected Lord Laming, well known outside the House for his chairing of many childcare inquiries including the Victoria Climbie Inquiry and the review of social services following the death of Baby P. Many of us in the health and social care field knew him as a director of social services in Hertfordshire and a highly effective Chief Inspector of Social Services. His manner is calm, his instincts good. Just the man for the job.
This write-up looks very well, of Lord Laming, supporting his House-election as new crossbench convenor replacing Baroness D’Souza;
however, as I now write, my TV hard-drive is recording the leading BBC1 News item on Disabities, about the Parliaments past and present laggardliness both in on-the-ground-perceiving, recording, & understanding the Needs & Hows of affected people, and in adequately budgeting Professional-Sector Care & Legislating thereto with all-round affordability.
The two Houses of Parliament, instead of increasing the amount of actual practical support (as distinct from mere or main monetary-“support”) for existing affordable healthy-habits of, and future better wellness-building for, individuals’ and groups’ classifiable from Permanent-Disability and Long-term-Impairment, right down to the Temporarily Short-term and Probably-Reversible or Curable Impairment,
have been denying these hands-on Needs & Hows and right now are re-legislating to completely cut many such Needs & Affordable Hows and, worse, to drastically and life-threateningly cut-back on the Needs & Hows of the most needy, the Permanently and Irreversibly Disabled group.
The so-called British “Taxpayers Alliance” is obviously ‘politically & socially blindfolded’, being completely subservient to the out-of-touch and deliberately-deceptive & life-undermining Cameron Conservative government’s desperately false Policy dictates.
The Disabilities Alliance has been repressed, and under Cameron’s Cuts many of its permanently-disabled members will now become life-suppressed.
So when Baroness Murphy claims Lord Laming as having been “a highly effective Chief Inspector of Social Services”, and for his other successes in the “health and social care field”,
one has cause to become renewedly anxious, scared and self-defensively prepared-to-attack,
is this not just one further slip down the increasingly steep slippery-slope that Britain’s Governance and thereby Britain’s Peoples are insidiously slithering ?
0955St020711.JSDM.
He also becomes a Privy Councillor by virtue of the post held.
Yes, I forgot that Senex. He’ll have to get used to standing up for meetings.
JSDM, A bit off topic this but welfare reform is an important matter and I’ll try and do a blog about it as the Welfare Reform Bill progresses.
I like your response, Baroness Murphy;
and I think It satisfies the three principles for good communication & honest argumentation
“Topic”-wise:
educate us further, please;
because in junior schooling the topic-sentence always came first in the paragraph, and did not have to be exhaustively ‘webbed’ or ‘mindmapped’ in relation to connected Issues nor to inseparable Needs & Affordable Hows;
but by year twelve the topic could appear anywhere, even sixth or seventh in a seven sentence paragraph, and ‘mindmapping’ had become a mandatory essential;
and another ‘discipline’ had also been driven into us, namely that essential of Debating “Always rebut whatever the Opposition says regardless of its Truth”.
——-
That understood, we come to the essentially Top-Down Political Directivism of the Lords-of-the-Blog E-Site;
because from the Peoples’ Viewpoint practically all of the Topics so far (three to four years worth ?) have not been addressing the real-down-to-Earth Needs & Hows, and the Problems therein, of all Peoples (or as some say, of every level of The People).
((In this, Baroness, your opening reply to JSDM “A bit off topic” could be taken as a debate-like rebuff)).
———–
So this my reply to your reply I fear might be instantly “censorable” as being “completely off topic”;
when it is intended to be a cooperative-style educational question.
——————-
So to show that I have identified your reply’s sub-topic, I of course welcome, with some feeling of great relief even, that you Baroness Murphy will be trying to open up to the public, via a blog, the important matter of welfare reform as the Welfare Reform Bill progresses.
===========
0859M040711.JSDM.
Did Lord Laming immediately take up the post? If not, when does he?