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10PAGE VOICES OF SCOTLAND: SNP HAS NO DESIRE TO LIFT KIDS OUT OF POVERTY
16PAGE RUGBY LEAGUE: PRICE ‘OVER THE MOON’ AFTER CASTLEFORD WIN
6PAGE
PALESTINE: ISRAEL REJECTS
UN CALL FOR PROBE OVER RIOT DEATHS
CHILDREN’S CARE SERVICES CUT BY
£1 BILLIONby Lamiat SabinParliamentary Reporter
COUNCILS are spending nearly £1 billion less in real terms on children’s services than they did six years ago, new analysis by Labour reveals today.
Labour leader Jeremy Cor-byn and shadow education secretary Angela Rayner are visiting Swindon where all Sur-eStart centres – set up under the last Labour government to reduce poverty among families with children under fi ve – have been closed down by the Tory-run council.
Total spending on children’s and young people’s services in the south west of England has fallen by £54 million since 2012, according to the party’s analysis of the government’s data.
In 2012, local authorities’
total planned net expenditure on these services was £7.922 bil-lion. Last year, the fi gure was £7.611bn.
The reduction in spending of
more than £300m represents a real-terms cut of £956.88m when taking infl ation into account, Labour said.
Ms Rayner is pledging that
Labour in government will halt the closure of SureStart centres, provide universal childcare for parents of children aged two to four and boost spending on children’s and young people’s services.
The party’s analysis follows a warning by the Local Gov-ernment Association (LGA) in January that many councils are struggling to provide support for vulnerable children and families.
In January this year, the LGA found that a child was referred to local authority children’s services every 49 seconds in 2017.
Richard Watts, chair of the LGA’s children and young people Board, had warned that councils must have the resources avail-able to deal with these referrals for services that include early intervention in cases of sus-pected neglect and abuse.
The government has already been warned that the funding gap could increase to £2 billion by 2020, he had also said.
It was revealed yesterday that Torbay Council’s children’s serv-ice – twice rated “inadequate” since 2010 – has been taken over by neighbouring authority Ply-mouth City Council.
It was reported in 2013 that the services’ funding was expected to be cut by £1.4 mil-lion as Torbay Council was under pressure by government to make general budget savings of £10m in 2014.
Meanwhile, in Swindon, Ms Rayner is launching the National Education Service (NES) Road-show – an England-wide con-sultation to last three months on Labour’s vision for cradle-to-grave learning that would be free at the point of use.
She said: “Children’s services provide a lifeline to thousands
of vulnerable children and fam-ilies across the country, so it is incredibly worrying to see funding has fallen so dramati-cally in the past six years.
“The contrast between our two parties could not be clearer: today, Labour is launch-ing a roadshow to help improve the lives of our youngest and most vulnerable children, while the Tories are presiding over damaging cuts, slashing support for those that need help the most.
“Only Labour can be trusted to give every child the best start in life. Through our National Education Service we will invest in our children, halting the closures of SureStart cen-tres, increasing the amount of money available for children’s services and providing univer-sal childcare for every two to four-year-old.”
Labour vows to invest in Britain’s kids as it reveals huge losses since 2012DOWN WITH THE KIDS: Jeremy Corbyn visits a SureStart centre in London
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The Plot So Far
NEU (NUT SECTION) CONFERENCE 2018
■ BOOKS
BOOKS are becoming a luxury that many families cannot aff ord, teachers have heard at the National Education Union conference.
In a debate at the NUT section of the conference, delegates said yesterday that libraries served as “armbands” for people who cannot aff ord books and internet access and need a warm refuge.
They are also “sanity-savers” for parents with bored children, said Jennifer Bhambri-Lyte, a delegate from North Somerset.
She added: “Kindles and iPads are wonderful things, but many of my friends talked about the smell of a book, fi nding tickets and receipts that someone had left as a bookmark, echoes of all the people that had been there before.
“In a world of food-banks, as my colleagues have previously talked about, books are a luxury that many families just cannot aff ord … I’ve taught both nursery and reception and I personally still fi nd it disturbing to see a child pick up a book and try to swipe left.”
Jonathan Reddiford, also from North Somerset, argued that the number of libraries has fallen by almost 900 in the last 10 years, with more expected to go.
“That is a shocking, shocking hammering of vital public services for many people,” he said.
Delegates call for vital libraries to be kept open
■ BURIAL FEES IN ENGLAND SCRAPPED
Scotland now pressed to scrap kids’ funeral costs by Conrad LandinScotland Editor
SCOTTISH ministers face calls to cover the cost of child buri-als today after Tories bowed to pressure and announced they would scrap the fees in England.
Labour MP Carolyn Harris has waged a heartfelt campaign to relieve parents of the fi nan-cial burden for those under the age of 18.
In a speech in Parliament last autumn, she recounted being forced to borrow £700 and get donations from neigh-bours when her son Martin was killed in a road accident 29 years ago.
The Welsh government subsequently announced that it had set aside £1.5 million to
eliminate council fees for bury-ing children.
And this weekend PM Theresa May announced a £10 million fund to cover the costs in England. This leaves the nine Scottish councils as the last areas where bereaved parents will be charged to bury their kids.
This morning, SNP Commu-nities Secretary Angela Con-stance will receive a letter call-ing for the government to inter-vene from her Labour opposite number Monica Lennon.
Ms Lennon told the Star: “Carolyn Harris has fought from the heart and won, ensuring parents in England and Wales, stricken by unim-aginable grief, will be spared the added worry of the cost of burying their child.
“It is good news for families
■ EQUALITY
Veteran anti-racist campaigner Hunte secures Blair Peach awardANTI-RACISM campaigner Lor-raine Hunte has been awarded the National Education Union’s Blair Peach Award for 2018.
The veteran anti-fascist and activist in the Croydon National Union of Teachers (NUT) was this year’s recipient of the award, which is awarded to members who have made signifi cant con-tributions to LGBT, anti-racism and disability causes. Ms Hunte was praised on Saturday for helping mobilise Croydon resi-dents against the mob attack on Kurdish refugee Reker Ahmed.
As a Croydon NUT leader, her contribution into the Croydon Education Department’s Action Plan, following the inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder, was also saluted.
Kevin Courtney, general secre-tary of the NUT section of the NEU, praised Ms Hunte for her enduring commitment to “tack-ling the scourge of racism.”
The award is named after Blair Peach, a former East London NUT leader, who was killed during an anti-fascist demonstration in Southall, London, in 1979.
■ LABOUR AFFILIATION
Teachers debate Labour’s National Education Serviceby Marcus Barnettin Brighton
A PACKED fringe meeting of around 100 teachers yesterday discussed how to encourage the formation of Labour’s plans for a cradle-to-grave national education service (NES).
The Socialist Educational Association (SEA) talked about bringing the National Educa-tion Union (NEU) closer to the Labour Party.
The teachers were joined by Labour MP Laura Pidcock, former National Union of Teachers (NUT) general sec-retary Christine Blower and current executive member Phil Clarke.
The meeting focused mostly on how best to support the NES, the educational pro-gramme outlined in Labour’s 2017 manifesto for which a three-month online consulta-tion is being launched today
by shadow education secretary Angela Rayner.
Praising Labour’s radical approach to education under leader Jeremy Corbyn, Ms Pidcock said that the imple-mentation of the NES will be “as ambitious, as radical and will face as much opposition as the foundation of the NHS by Nye Bevan.”
The meeting went on to discuss the union’s potential affi liation to Labour.
Currently, the SEA is Labour’s only education affi l-iate. A vote at the NUT con-ference last year to “review” affi liation to Labour was nar-rowly rejected.
Speaking from the fl oor, John Wiseman from St Hel-ens NUT pointed out that 70 per cent of teachers are Labour supporters.
He argued: “Though we may bargain over wages and conditions, if we do not affi liate to Labour we
will never have the infl uence we need.
“Our industrial union needs Labour as a political wing or we will never infl uence the political dynamic.”
Ms Blower and Mr Clarke expressed caution from the platform about any potential affi liation of the NEU to Labour.
But delegates were keen to discuss how best to win politi-cal arguments on affi liation in their local branches.
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across England that the UK gov-ernment will follow the lead of Wales in abolishing these charges and is an example of what committed, passionate campaigning can achieve.”
There are huge variations in burial charges across Scottish councils. Many waive fees for the families of dead children, but the age cut-off ranges from 14 to 18 between authorities.
The highest fees – up to £827 for children over 12 – are charged in Dundee.
Ms Lennon’s call was ech-oed by the Scottish Tories. The party’s communities spokes-man Alexander Stewart told the Scotsman that the SNP government “should follow the lead of the Conservatives at Westminster and explore the establishment of a similar fund north of the border.”
A Scottish government spokeswoman said it had “noted” the Westminster gov-ernment’s announcement and was “already actively consider-ing ways” to further support bereaved families in Scotland.
“We will introduce a new funeral expense assistance from summer 2019,” the spokeswoman said.
“We have engaged with local authorities, the funeral sector and other services to find ways to provide more affordable funerals and we will continue to support innovative measures to address the costs.”
n EMPLOYMENT
Millions of agency workers ‘deprived of rights’ by Peter Lazenby
MILLIONS of workers are at risk of missing out on rights such as holiday and sick pay because of loopholes in labour laws.
Profit-hungry companies are able to exploit workers by using agencies and “outsourc-ing” work to other companies.
Under this system the employer at the top of the chain
has no responsibility to ensure that workers from agencies and contracted companies have the basic rights they are entitled to in law.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) estimates that as many as five million workers are affected by the legal loopholes and is calling on the govern-ment to change the law.
Employers who commission other companies or use agency
workers should have responsi-bility for ensuring the workers have their rights and workers should have the right to chal-lenge bosses, the TUC says.
General secretary Frances O’Grady said yesterday: “This is an issue that affects millions, from fast-food workers to peo-ple working on building sites.
“Employers have a duty of care to workers in their sup-ply chains. They shouldn’t be
allowed to wash their hands of their responsibilities.
“Joint liability must be extended to parent employers. Without it they can shrug their shoulders over minimum wage and holiday pay abuses.
“Our labour enforcement laws urgently need beefing up.”
A spokesman for the govern-ment’s Business Department said it was “considering repealing laws allowing agencies to employ workers” on cut-price wages.
It said 1.2 million agency workers could “be able to request a more stable contract” and ask for “a clear breakdown of their pay.”
n POLLUTION
DIESEL TRAIN EMISSIONS ‘CONTRIBUTE TO DEATHS’DIESEL trains are pumping out pollution that contributes to tens of thousands of deaths a year – and the government has failed to account for how much these trains produce.
The Department for Trans-port also shares part of the blame for dumping plans for rail electrification in the Mid-lands and the north of England, environmental campaigners reveal today.
The government’s lack of concern about pollution from diesel trains has been high-lighted by the fact that it hasn’t a clue how much pollution the trains are pumping out.
Responding to a freedom of information request from the campaigners, the government said it could not supply anything.
Among pollutants from diesel
trains are nitrogen oxides, which contribute to air pollution that causes an estimated 40,000 pre-mature deaths a year in Britain.
Air pollution is also linked to childhood illnesses, heart disease and dementia.
Yet for eight years the gov-ernment has failed to meet legal targets to curb pollution in 37 geographic zones which are monitored for the problem.
Rail electrification reduces pollution, but the DfT reneged on promises to extend electrifi-cation to the network, mainly in the Midlands and the north of England.
ClientEarth, the environ-mental law charity which has
successfully sued the govern-ment over its air pollution plans, said the department was in a corner over clean air.
The charity’s head of public affairs Simon Alcock said: “The government’s failure to address this by fully electrifying rail-ways is another symptom of the lack of a coherent strategy to clean up the air.
“That it also doesn’t seem to have evidence on the levels of certain pollutants says it all.”
He added: “It’s about time [Transport Secretary] Chris Grayling and the DfT and ministers across government started treating this public health crisis with the serious-ness it deserves – and putting concrete solutions into action.”
Greenpeace campaigner Paul Morozzo said: “Electrifying
the rail network would help with both climate concerns and the very poor air quality experienced at rail stations by passengers and staff.
“The government’s plan on this lacks ambition and clearly needs further consid-eration.”
Rail unions have accused Mr Grayling of lying over the rea-son for his decision to cancel three electrification projects last year, which he said was because the Great Western Main Line in south Wales, the Midland Main Line and the Lakes Line could be improved by upgraded trains.
However, the National Audit Office concluded last week that the main reason for the cancel-lation was financial.
n MOJ CALL
VULNERABLE people who have been subjected to aggressive bailiffs will be called on by the Ministry of Justice to give evidence.
The government warned yesterday that despite a legal crack-down on bailiffs behav-ing badly four years ago, concerns were still being raised.
Reforms in 2014 included banning bail-iffs from entering homes at night and using physi-cal force against debtors.
They also include preventing them from entering properties where only children are at home and from taking essential appliances such as cookers, microwaves, fridges or washing machines.
A government review showed that progress had been made, with debtors being more aware of their rights and the complaints process.
But the MoJ said the review revealed “linger-ing concerns” about the behaviour of a minority of bailiffs.
Justice minister Lucy Frazer said: “The majority of bailiffs act profession-ally and within the rules, but we have been told by those working on the front line that this may not always be the case.
“Aggressive tactics will not be tolerated and we will identify where the problems are and, if neces-sary, take action to ensure all bailiffs operate profes-sionally and with proper respect and sensitivity.”
Victims of ‘aggressive’ bailiffs give evidence
ADVERTISE HERE(020) [email protected]
ANNIVERSARY: The husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British mother impris-oned in Iran, called on Theresa May yesterday to intervene after the failure of efforts by Boris Johnson two years on from her arrest.
Speaking at an event in Hampstead to mark the second anniversary of her detention where people tied ribbons and jokes to a tree, Richard Ratcliffe said: “Nazanin is still in prison, so in simple terms, the Foreign Secretary has not done enough.”
n WELFARE
Hundreds of millions cut from much-needed benefit fundsDISCRETIONARY wel-fare payments are being “hacked away,” said Labour MP and work and pensions committee chair Frank Field after more than £300 million was shown to have been axed from two benefit funds.
Fresh analysis revealed today by former shadow cabinet minister Lucy Powell shows the scale of cutbacks to the discretionary social fund and flexible support fund.
Ministers have confirmed that £419.5 million will be made available through the discretionary social fund next year, compared with £679.7m given out in the form of interest-free loans 2010/11.
Crisis loans to cover pay-ments associated with seri-
ous risks were also part of the discretionary fund but were abolished in 2013.
Money awarded through the flexible support fund by jobcentres to help with job-seeking expenses such as travel, training courses and interview clothes has been cut from £115m in 2012/13 to £51m in 2016/17.
Ms Powell said: “If min-isters really want to shift the dial on unemployment, they’ll ensure that there is adequate support for all those who need it.”
A government spokes-woman said: “Changes to discretionary benefits are part of our wider welfare reform which is restoring fairness to the system, sup-porting those who can into work and helping those who can’t.”
by Peter Lazenby Northern Reporter
ANALYSIS: Labour MP Lucy Powell
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NASUWT CONFERENCE 2018
■ HEALTH AND SAFETY
TEACHERS FACE MENTAL
HEALTH ‘PANDEMIC’A “PANDEMIC” of mental illness worsened by stress is affl icting teachers and push-ing them to the brink, union members warned over the weekend.
Delegates at NASUWT’s annual conference unani-mously supported a motion on teachers’ mental health and wellbeing, expressing concern and alarm at “the increased incidence of depression, anxi-ety and teacher suicide.”
Claire Taylor from Durham told delegates that she had taken an overdose at work almost fi ve years ago.
She said: “There is a pan-demic of mental health ill-ness within teaching. I’m a lucky one. Today I stand four years, eight months and 19
days since I took an overdose at my desk at work.
“I got help, I got the right medication, the correct dosage and a year of [cognitive behav-ioural therapy] … but we don’t have that across the country.
“We can’t provide that as a union – we need the NHS.”
She called for teachers to be able to “join up our think-ing” with the NHS and with the Department for Education.
“We can’t tackle this as a union on our own,” Ms Taylor added.
Russ Walters from NAS-UWT’s executive said: “The mental health and wellbeing
of teachers is being put at risk by many thoughtless, irrespon-sible, egotistical and, in some cases, downright bullying employers on a daily basis.
He referred to a recent NASUWT survey, which he said “came up with a whole host of disturbing statistics”, including the fact that “three-fi fths of teachers report their wellbeing is not considered important by [their] school”.
One in 10 teachers stated in the survey that they had started using anti-depressants in the last 12 months.
Mr Walters asked: “If one in 10 are reporting that, how many more are also taking depressants to cope with the everyday business of work?”
Shockingly, Mr Walters said
that between 2011 and 2015 there were 139 suicides among teaching and educational pro-fessionals.
Gwerfyl White, a teacher from Surrey, told confer-ence of a colleague who had recently died aged just 38 and demanded that “the exist-ing culture prevalent in our schools must change.”
She said: “Healthy teachers are healthy learners.
“Teachers, because we care, we are our own worst enemies. We could say no, but we don’t. We care.
“We put our children in our classrooms, their learning, before our own health. We need to change the culture in our schools.”
STRESS: Union members warn that teachers pushed to brink with depression on the rise
by Sam Tobinin Birmingham
■ IRAN
Tributes for jailed Iranian colleagueby Sam Tobin in Birmingham
INTERNATIONAL solidarity is needed to fi ght the assault on teachers’ pay and condi-tions around the world, union delegates heard while commending the bravery of a jailed Iranian teacher.
Teachers at the NASUWT conference yesterday paid tribute to Esmail Abdi, leader of the Iranian Teachers’ Trade Association (ITTA), for his work leading teachers’ demands for better pay and improved conditions for public servants.
Mr Abdi, who is currently serving a six-year prison sentence in Tehran for his activism, was awarded NAS-UWT’s international solidar-ity award for his eff orts to ensure Iranian teachers are treated fairly.
Recently he was allowed to leave the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, but he was rearrested after only 11 days and taken back into custody.
NASUWT president Dan McCarthy told delegates that
the union was working with ITTA, Amnesty International and Education International to press for his uncondi-tional release and to call on the Iranian authorities to respect human and trade union rights.
The Committee for the Defence of Iranian People’s Rights (Codir) welcomed the award and commended Mr Abdi for his “exceptional bravery.”
NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said: “Esmail Abdi is an inspiration to teachers and trade unionists across the world through his courage to stand up for trade union and human rights in the face of oppressive and harsh treatment.”
Also at conference, David Edwards, general secretary of Education International, told delegates “solidarity does not have a price.”
He said teachers were the “last, best hope on the planet” and warned of the “companies and corporations that would very much like to privatise what we do.”
■ EDUCATION EXPENDITURE
Academy CEOs ‘wasting money’by Sam Tobin in Birmingham
ACADEMIES are squander-ing public money on “vanity projects,” fi rst-class interna-tional travel, nights out and branded goods rather than educating children, teachers said over the weekend.
School bosses are wast-ing cash from government grants on award ceremonies and “branded biscuits” instead of much-needed resources, del-egates at NASUWT’s annual conference heard.
Wendy Exton, a member of the union’s executive, told delegates of one multiacademy trust (MAT) CEO who took col-leagues out on a Friday night to the cost of “£2,000, which was billed to the school. Appar-ently, this is not fi nancial mis-management,” she added.
She said that one headteacher and MAT CEO had recently gone to San Diego “fi rst-class travel, top hotels, no expense spared.”
Ms Exton added: “I’m still bemused by the vanity projects that are shoehorned into everyday school life.”
Children deserved “world-class education,” she said before demanding that funding given to academies not be diverted away from the classroom.
She said: “The fragmenta-tion of the education system has resulted in a lack of over-sight into the funding of acad-emies and free schools.”
On academy head teachers and CEOs being paid more than the PM, Ms Exton said: “Before academisation, this layer of expenditure did not exist.”
She accused academies of “using” the shortage of govern-ment funds as “a justifi cation to make redundancies or to deny cost-of-living pay rises” for teachers and school workers.
This was despite recent evi-dence which showed that acad-emies are holding £2.3 billion in unspent reserves and local authorities are holding £1.7bn in reserves, she added.
OWN WORST ENEMIES: Gwerfyl White is comforted by colleagues
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n PALESTINE
ISRAELI MILITARY
IGNORE UN OVER
BORDER MASSACREby Our Foreign Desk
ISRAELI Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman brazenly rejected EU and UN calls yester-day for an independent investi-gation into Friday’s massacre of unarmed Palestinian protesters during ongoing Land Day pro-tests in Gaza.
“From the standpoint of the soldiers, they did what had to be done. I think that all of our troops deserve a commenda-tion,” Mr Lieberman told Israeli radio on Sunday.
Although local eyewitnesses and medical personnel testi-fied to 18 people being shot dead and over 1,400 wounded, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) insisted that the wounded fig-ure is exaggerated.
The IDF accused Gaza’s ruling Hamas party of “cyni-cally exploiting women and children” by forcing them to
approach the border fence, which was described by Hamas as “lies aimed at justifying the massacres.”
Israeli politicians, includ-ing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have justified the slaughter by stressing that Tel
Aviv has designated the border area a closed military zone.
“People coming towards the fence, attempting to penetrate and break into the fence, dam-aging the infrastructure or using that area as a staging ground could potentially be
SLAUGHTER: Number of unarmed Palestinians butchered rises to 18
n ASIA
China and Vietnam agree to ‘manage’ maritime disputeby Our Foreign Desk
FOREIGN ministers from Viet-nam and China have agreed at talks in Hanoi that their coun-tries should manage existing maritime territorial disputes and not expand them.
“We propose that the two sides in the coming time should seriously implement the mutual understandings of leaders ... well manage dis-putes, do not have activities that complicate and expand disputes, respect the legiti-mate rights and interests of each other in accordance with international laws,” said Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh on Sunday.
Chinese Foreign Minister
Wang Yi added that “settling maritime disputes is very important for the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations.”
Beijing is ready to earnestly implement the consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries so as to lift the China-Vietnam comprehen-sive strategic co-operative partnership to a new level, he said.
Mr Wang, who is also a state councillor, urged alignment of China’s Belt and Road Ini-tiative with Vietnam’s Two Corridors and One Economic Circle plan and pragmatic co-operation in infrastructure, industrial capacity and cross-border co-operation zone.
Both states should boost
cultural and people-to-people exchanges and properly man-age differences, he said.
Mr Minh said that main-taining and strengthening mutual traditional friend-ship is in the interests of both countries and also con-tributes to regional peace and stability.
The Vietnamese side is will-ing to closely co-operate with China in actively implement-ing the consensus reached between the two countries’ leaders, he insisted.
Mr Minh signalled his agreement over integrating the strategic development pro-grammes of both countries, as outlined by Mr Wang.
n NUCLEAR
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin flies to Turkey again today to join his Turkish coun-terpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a symbolic ceremony for a Russian-made nuclear power plant being built on the Mediterranean coast at Akkuyu.
Moscow-Ankara rela-tions have flourished over the past two years as Mr Erdogan has complained of being let down by US and European Union allies, while Mr Putin has been isolated by the Western powers.
The Erdogan govern-ment announced last week that it would not follow Nato and EU allies in expelling Russian diplomats over allegations sur-rounding the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal.
Turkey is angry at a lack of progress over EU membership, its allies’ backing for Syrian Kurds and their failure to extradite alleged coup leader Fethullah Gulen.
He will respond by hosting three-way talks in Ankara tomor-row, bringing together himself, President Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
Putin arrives in Turkey for nuclear plant ceremony
n GUATEMALA
Convicted genocidal dictator Rios Montt diesGENOCIDAL military dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in Guatemala through a coup in March 1982, has died aged 91, his lawyer announced at the weekend.
He presided over one of Guatemala’s bloodiest periods when, backed by the adminis-tration of US president Ronald Reagan, he authorised troops to wage a brutal war to root out liberation movement fighters.
General Rios Montt, who was born into a conservative Catho-lic family, switched in the 1970s to a far-right California-based
Pentecostalist sect in which he became a minister.
With US support he pursued a “beans and guns” pacification campaign, offering indigenous Mayan peasants food to betray guerillas or face a scorched earth policy, mass murder and rape.
He was convicted in 2013 of genocide and crimes against humanity for the massacre of 1,771 Ixil Mayans by security forces under his command, but the conviction was set aside and he was never well enough to face a second trial.
NOT IN THEIR NAME: Left-wing Israelis rally against the deadly violence inflicted by Israeli troops in Gaza last weekend
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: The legacy of General Rios Montt
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Morning Star Tuesday
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shot,” said IDF spokesman Lt Col Peter Lerner.
He followed this up by tweeting yesterday: “More thoughts about the #GazaRe-turnRiot: 1. Israel warned of the consequences of approach-ing the border. 2. The world was silent before the events and didn’t call for restraint from either side. 3. Hamas took full advantage and ambushed Israel, by sacrificing opera-tives.”
UN secretary-general Anto-nio Guterres and EU foreign affairs head Federica Mogh-erini have called for independ-ent inquiries into the killing.
Former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams demanded that the Israeli ambassador be expelled from Ireland, declar-ing: “The time for excuses is over.”
He told the Belfast Tele-graph: “There can be no jus-tification or excuse by Israel for the calculated slaughter by Israeli military snipers of unarmed Palestinian protest-ers on the Gaza border with Israel.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Mr Netanyahu of being a “terror-ist” who is “present in those lands as an invader.”
The Israeli PM responded to his former close ally: “He who occupies Northern Cyprus and the Kurdish region and butch-ers civilians in Afrin should not lecture us about morality and values.”
Landslide victory for Quesada
INDIA: A security clamp-down and a separatist-called general strike closed down much of Kashmir yesterday after fierce fight-ing killed 16 combatants and four civilians.
Authorities imposed a curfew in parts of the Jammu & Kashmir state capital Srinagar, shut schools and colleges and cancelled university exams in an attempt to stop stu-dent protests.
They also stopped train services and cut mobile phone internet services in the most restive towns, reducing connection speeds in other parts of the Kash-mir Valley.
Kremlin dismisses corruption rumoursRUSSIA: Kremlin spokes-man Dmitry Peskov denied rumours yesterday that the weekend arrests of businessman Ziyavu-din Magomedov and his brother are a ruse to steal his energy and agricul-ture businesses.
Mr Peskov insisted that the arrests were “not a one-off” but part of government efforts to fight corruption.
The Magomedov brothers are alleged to have formed “a criminal group,” which carries a life sentence, and sus-pected of embezzling 2.5 billion roubles (£31 mil-lion) in state contracts, although formal charges have not yet been filed.
Kashmir curfew after 20 dead
COSTA RICA: Centre-left presidential candidate Car-los Alvarado Quesada from the Citizen Action Party declared victory yesterday with more than 60 per cent of the vote.
He defeated right-wing journalist and evangelical preacher Fabricio Alvarado Munoz from the National Restoration Party who lost an early poll lead after saddling his campaign with hostility to equal marriage legislation.
Vice-president-elect Epsy Campbell Barr, whose paternal grandmother migrated to Costa Rica from Jamaica, is the first woman of African descent elected to such high office in Latin America.
in briefn CHINA
Tariff war escalates as Beijing imposes US tax by Our Foreign Desk
BEIJING has suspended with immediate effect tariff conces-sions on 128 items of US prod-ucts, including pork and fruit, the Ministry of Finance declared yesterday.
The State Council Customs Tariff Commission imposed a tariff of 15 per cent on 120 items of products imported from the US, including fruit and related products, and a tariff of 25 per cent on eight items of imports, including pork, from the coun-try, a statement on the ministry website revealed.
It explained that this coun-termeasure was in response to
the US decision to slap tariffs on steel and aluminium imports.
Ignoring worldwide objections, President Donald Trump’s admin-istration slammed a 25 per cent tariff on steel imports and a 10 per cent tariff on aluminium imports from countries including China.
Despite being a violation of World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, the US measure went into effect on March 23, which has severely undermined China’s interests, according to the Cus-toms Tariff Commission state-ment.
The ministry insisted that China advocates a multilateral trade system, noting that sus-pension of tariff concessions on US imports is a just move to
safeguard China’s interests using WTO rules.
However, possibly greater trading dangers lie ahead, with the US president considering higher duties on a range of up to nearly $50 billion of Chinese goods in a separate argument over technology policy.
It reflects Washington’s dis-quiet over the scale of China’s multibillion-dollar trade surplus with the US and its policies on technology, industry develop-ment and access to its state-dominated economy.
Beijing faces complaints by Washington, the European Union and other trading part-ners that it hampers market access despite free-trade pledges
and is flooding global markets with improperly low-priced steel and aluminium.
Despite this, the EU, Japan and other governments have criticised President Trump’s unilateral move as disruptive.
Hitting pork and other agri-cultural exports, which were worth $20 billion to Trump-supporting US farming areas last year, appears to have been chosen deliberately.
Global Times, a newspaper published by China’s Commu-nist Party, said yesterday that US politicians should realise “sooner rather than later that China would never submit if the US launched a trade war.”
n SOUTH AFRICA
Anti-apartheid icon ‘Mama Winnie’ Mandela dies at 81by John Haylett
SOUTH AFRICAN libera-tion movement icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela died yester-day aged 81 after a long illness.
Dubbed “Mama Winnie” and “Mother of the Nation,” Winnie Nomzamo was work-ing as the first black woman social worker at Baragwanath Hospital when leading ANC activist Nelson Mandela was introduced to her by his close comrade Oliver Tambo.
She was just 21 and he, at 39, already had a life of struggle under his belt and was one of 156 accused at the mammoth Treason Trial which collapsed,
leading to all the accused being acquitted.
However, the subsequent Rivonia trial saw Nelson Man-dela sentenced to life impris-onment and his young wife, with two daughters, thrust into the limelight during decades of brutal apartheid dictatorship.
She was projected, with ANC leadership approval, as the voice of the movement, clad in ANC colours and challenging courts, police, imprisonment, internal exile and everything the regime could throw at her.
Winnie Mandela displayed the best and the worst of her-self as she became an implac-able opponent of apartheid
but also ran the movement with a rod of iron through the so-called Mandela United Football Club, including the killing of 14-year-old activist James “Stompie” Sepei.
She remained popular with ANC grassroots, was re-elected ANC Women’s League president and returned as an MP.
However, she also attacked her by then ex-husband as hav-ing “let blacks down” and, after his death, sought a share of his inheritance.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was both admired and reviled, but her role in confronting the apartheid regime assures her place in history.
n FRANCE
Weekly two-day strikes planned by rail workersFRENCH national train com-pany SNCF warned yesterday that a rail workers’ strike will disrupt train services within France and elsewhere in Europe today and tomorrow.
The company expects just 15 per cent of high-speed trains and 25 per cent of regional trains to run because of the strike.
Four trade union federa-tions have urged rail workers to strike for two days every week until the end of June in protest against the Macron government plans to slash ben-efits and open up the national network to European Union marketisation and compulsory tendering plans.
SNCF added that one in three trains between France and Ger-many and three-quarters of Eurostar trains between Paris and London will run.
A separate dispute at Air France could ground 30 per cent of the carrier’s long-haul flights out of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport.
HAVE A STORY?Email us: [email protected]
n VENEZUELA
Police held for jail fire CHIEF prosecutor Tarek Wil-liam Saab announced that five police officials have been held on suspicion of responsibility for a fire that killed 68 people in a Valencia police station jail.
He said that the officials were believed to be “responsible.”
POWER COUPLE: Winnie and Nelson Mandela
morningstaronline.co.uk morningstaronline
@m_star_online8Morning Star Tuesday April 3 2018 features
TEACHERS have voted to consider strike action if the gov-ernment refuses to offer a serious pay rise following years of real-terms cuts.
The fact that delegates at both teacher conferences that took place over the Easter weekend — the NASUWT’s in Birmingham and the National Education Union NUT sec-tion’s in Brighton — were prepared to risk taking this step demonstrates how widespread anger is among education professionals.
That’s hardly surprising. An OECD study last autumn found that teachers’ pay had shrunk 12 per cent in real terms between 2005 and 2015.
At the same time as wages have been forced down as part of the government’s “austerity” mantra, the working lives of teachers have become more difficult across the board.
Such is the pressure placed on them by bad employers and a mindless regime of endless pupil testing and inspections that we heard yesterday the profession faces a “mental health pandemic,” with rising rates of illness and even suicide.
At the same time, soaring child poverty — a direct result of Conservative cuts — has had tragic but entirely predict-able consequences, with teachers observing more kids than ever coming to school so hungry they cannot concentrate or wearing dirty uniforms as parents cannot afford spare clothes to wear while outfits are washed.
Heartbreaking reports from the front line of children steal-ing food at lunchtime just to survive, or of a school being kept open despite heavy snowfall simply because the head feared its pupils would not get a hot meal that day otherwise, show enough is enough.
Teachers are not alone in having seen pay fall — the rising poverty among the children they teach is ample evidence of that, and TUC studies have shown Britain’s workers have seen their real earnings reduce by an average of 10 per cent up to 2015.
Last year, when we went through the annual ritual of supposedly concerned experts musing on the reasons for the latest stats showing falling pay, PwC’s chief economist John Hawksworth described it as “striking” that low unemploy-ment was not leading to higher wages.
“In the 1970s or 1980s such low unemployment, combined with inflation rising towards 3 per cent, could have set off a wage-price spiral,” he pondered, as if the failure of wages to grow in line with inflation in modern Britain was some kind of odd meteorological phenomenon.
It is not. It is the direct result of government policy — and not simply in the public sector, where Chancellor Philip Ham-mond still seeks to pit workers against their private-sector comrades by implying their pay and pensions are to be envied.
Legislation shackling trade unions deprive workers of their most effective tool for winning higher wages — organising — or at least make it much more difficult, while a refusal to take action against employer abuses such as zero-hours contracts and bogus self-employment is forging a workforce dominated by insecurity and poverty.
Teachers who dare to walk out over pay will face the usual abuse from ministers claiming they are “letting pupils down,” as if that charge can possibly wash when we know the sacri-fices they now regularly make for the children in their care, from providing breakfast at their own expense to working for free over holidays to run summer camps.
But we have recently seen teachers in the United States win major pay rises, and significant additional funding for schools, by threatening school shutdowns in West Virginia and Oklahoma.
Teachers took a stand because years of tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for public services had left schools in crisis. The stand they took has won dividends for their profession and their pupils alike.
The situation is not so different here.Whether teachers will be forced onto the picket lines by a
government that refuses to listen is up to ministers. If they are, our whole movement should be with them.
Schools are at breaking point. Teachers are right to consider strike action
Star comment
LAST October half-term, I was one of 24 National Educa-tion Union (NEU) members to travel to Cuba for a del-
egation to learn more about Cuba’s world-leading achieve-ments in education, despite all the huge challenges from the US blockade.
On arrival in Havana, we were greeted with the warmth of the Caribbean and the rain October always brings.
We were exhausted from the journey but smiling from ear to ear, the array of 1950s classic cars lined up outside the ter-minal were a joyous welcome.
Our itinerary enabled us to visit a number of schools, trade unions and organisations and it was here that Cuba came to life.
Yes, the mojitos were deli-cious, the sunshine wonderful, but nothing could have ever prepared me for the emotions I would experience in a Cuban school.
Education in Cuba is nothing short of amazing. The educa-tional ethos of the Cuban gov-
ernment stems back to 1961 when Fidel Castro declared the Literacy Campaign.
On January 1, literacy bri-gades were sent across the country to ensure that every Cuban could read and write.
“You will teach, you will learn,” said Castro, knowing that education was the best weapon for the future of all Cubans and to defend the nas-cent Cuban revolution.
Almost 57 years on and this is evident in every school. Every student wearing the same uni-form, eating a nutritious meal and receiving an education the world should be envious of.
Social status and demograph-ics do not apply when it comes to the education of Cuba’s future generations.
Every school we visited took pride in showing us the Cuban way of education, their talents in abundance.
The assemblies we were pre-sented with, clearly and care-
fully planned, were breathtak-ing.
It was during these visits that I observed the clear effects that the blockade has on every school.
Resources are scarce, walls were bare and facilities extremely basic. There were no laptops or high-tech computer suites. Sports equipment was basic and cheaply made, musi-cal instruments were old with replacement parts sourced from China. These pieces of equipment are exceptionally expensive and often of poor quality.
After our delegation saw the poor quality and lack of instru-ments first-hand in Cuba, the NEU (NUT section), in asso-ciation with Cuba Solidarity Campaign and the Music Fund for Cuba, launched a Play for Cuba campaign, which is being launched at our conference in Brighton.
The Play for Cuba appeal will ship a container of new and second-hand instruments to young Cuban musicians.
Despite the huge economic
Why can’t we inject a bit of Cuban flavour into Britain’s education system?
by Kerry Goldsmith
“Despite the huge
economic
challenges from
the 56-year US
blockade, Cuban
schools get it
right every time
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Morning Star Tuesday
April 3 2018features
challenges from the 56-year US blockade, Cuban schools get it right every time. The Cuban government spends 13 per cent of its GDP on education, the highest level on Earth. The UK spends less than 6 per cent.
There were many occasions where I was moved to tears by the passion and talent of the students before me. Not because they had so little but because they had so much.
The care, nurture and love they receive from teachers clearly demonstrated that, when combined with a first-class education, material items such as wall displays, interac-tive whiteboards etc are not needed to inspire a child who is excited to learn.
The Cuban recipe for edu-cation, for each individual student, demonstrated this in abundance.
To see a music teacher lov-ingly wrap her arms around a student who had just per-formed for us, tell him how wonderful he was, how proud she was, left me questioning and envious, if not a little sad. Our society has taken that physical interaction away from education facilities. It is not deemed appropriate to hug a student.
The Cubans however, feel differently. While a child is in their care, they are the parents, they are teachers. It is their job to show love, affection and help shape the future adult.
This makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Students are in our care for the largest part of their educational life. Surely we are responsible for making sure that child feels cared for and nurtured? If my child was sad or in need of a hug, I would hope the teacher would put aside our social expectations and hug him or her.
A question was raised about mental health and wellbeing
in Cuban schools. Surely with the expectations of students so high, wouldn’t this lead to a rise in stress levels and associ-ated mental health issues?
Students have to pass rigor-ous tests in order to proceed through the educational sys-tem. Their progress is closely monitored by their place of education and monthly par-ent meetings are compulsory.
It stands to reason that stu-dent health may be compro-mised, doesn’t it? In England, we have seen Childline enquir-ies related to educational pres-sures increase by 35 per cent since 2016.
The teacher looked confused by this question. She responded by asking why the students would have mental health problems caused by educational pressures.
Students are taught that they can only do their best. The students and their families receive support and assistance throughout their educational life. The students are taught that education is the only way they can fight the blockade and support their communities as an adult. Students are genu-inely excited to learn.
We are one of the richest countries in the world and yet our students are hiding behind the shadows of tests and the worry of poor scores. We teach them to do their best, be the best that they can be, yet they are still filled with fear.
My visit left me questioning — if the Cubans can be so suc-cessful with so little, what is stopping us from implementing a little Cuban flavour over here? Even if we do just offer “that” child, the child that you know needs it most, a hug.
It was an honour to be a part of this delegation and I urge all NEU members to apply to attend the October 2018 half-term delegation to Cuba.
ct
’s
WE have often thought that one of the best things about an education conference is
the “after party” where you congregate with colleagues in a nearby pub to discuss the day’s proceedings over a well-deserved drink.
BrewEd started life as a lit-tle more than a wishful idea to bring educators together on a Saturday afternoon to discuss and debate policy, practice and pedagogy.
There have, to date, been two BrewEd events (Sheffield and Wakefield), with further events planned across the coun-try from Liverpool to Leicester and Oxford to Chester.
The format is fairly simple; book a nice pub with a good selection of beers, confirm a date, sell some tickets and put together a thought-provoking programme.
BrewEd is a grassroots move-ment in the truest sense of the word. It is for educators, organ-ised by educators and attended by educators. Anyone, any-where can organise their own BrewEd event, however we do have some guiding principles which we hope others will adopt too.
We believe that the pub is the broadest church, it really is what makes them so special. BrewEd hopes to be an agent to find commonality in the teach-ing profession, across sectors, subjects, age groups and peda-gogical groupings.
BrewEd events are also small and intimate with tickets being limited to approximately 50 per event. As wonderful as large conferences are, they can also be overwhelming for some people.
Attendees are often more inclined to contribute to dis-cussions when surrounded by fewer people. Also, as there are no breakout sessions con-nections can be made and networks grown as you spend the day with a relatively small group of people.
We would also like as many people as possible to be able to attend BrewEd events so, as such, tickets should be afford-able. Tickets should cost around £5 and include an arrival drink; tea, beer, wine or the equiva-lent tipple.
Most venues will let you hire
a room for free on a Saturday as the prospect of having 50 teachers drinking and eating makes very good business sense for anyone who knows the pro-fession.
Keeping costs low helps with inclusivity as educational con-ferences can be quite costly once you factor in travel, accommodation and such. The more local events that are organised, the more inclusive BrewEd will hopefully become.
BrewEd events should pro-vide a space to share and challenge ideas and promote robust debate in respectful and congenial terms. Yes, we often disagree with each other but we can do that with good manners and good grace and without casting aspersions on each other’s intelligence.
There is plenty to be unhappy about in the world of education and it is quite easy to get drawn into nega-tivity. While there is plenty of scope to critique the status quo, BrewEd events also provide a platform to present alternative narratives for systemic change.
BrewEd events are not for sharing teaching tips. These sorts of events are hugely important and much needed, however there are already plenty of them in existence.
Instead, BrewEd events should provide a space for deeper and wider philosophi-cal discussions, such as what is the purpose of education? How might education be reimag-ined? Do teachers have a sense
any autonomy? Should children and young people have more agency? Some CPD events give us ideas for what we could try on Monday morning, BrewEd events hopefully give us ideas for how we can transform our practice and profession.
There are no keynote speak-ers as such. Presentations are great (and are a part of BrewEd events) but it is conversation that brings us together.
BrewEd events provide lots of space for discussion which can be instigated through short presentations, panel discussions or debating where William the Conqueror was crowned during the Edu Pub Quiz.
Lots of time should be fac-tored in for talk. Ask people to move around so they have the chance to talk to as many people as possible. It’s a small group which can lead to a large network of practitioners. If it’s about anything, BrewEd is about debate. At the Wake-field event the panel (and other attendees) debated the motion: “The teaching profession needs to find a sense of collective ambition if it is to bring about real change.”
BrewEd events should have an engaging and varied programme. Examples from previous events include pres-entations and subsequent discussions around the age-appropriateness of picture books, the neoconservative war on the youth, challenging Bold Beginnings, developing whole school positive cultures, “flip-
ping” the education system and exploring teacher identity.
Events should be low-tech so people are not over-reliant on PowerPoint presentations. In fact, at Wakefield there was no computer or screen to use as a visual aid.
BrewEd events should be free from sponsorship. This is not a criticism of events which rely on sponsors to run as confer-ences can be costly, especially when you have to pay speakers or travel expenses. Everyone who presents at BrewEd events does so voluntarily. Thankfully, there are lots of generous peo-ple out there who are willing to offer their time without cost.
BrewEd is still in its infancy. It is growing as an idea, a con-cept and a real grassroots move-ment for educators. We want to continue to build on its success by bringing people together to share a beer, promote and challenge ideas, discuss and debate educational issues and make new friends from across phases, settings and pedagogi-cal persuasions.
For this to happen will take a collective effort so please join us at an event or, better still, collaborate with a group of col-leagues and organise your own.
■ All BrewEd events are promoted on Twitter (@BrewEd2017) and posted on the events page (brewed.pbworks.com). Alternatively, if you’d like to have a conversation about organising an event then please contact either @darynsimon and @MrEdFinch through Twitter.
BrewEd: bringing together
people, pints and pedagogyDARYN EGAN-SIMON and ED FINCH introduce a new
initiative for teachers to discuss the issues that matter in
education in a friendly setting over a drink or two
morningstaronline.co.uk morningstaronline
@m_star_online10Morning Star Tuesday April 3 2018 features
Chris Searle ...on jazz
Dee Byrne and Entropi
Moment Frozen(Whirlwind Recordings)
THE Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “entropy” as “a measure of the rate of transfer of infor-mation in a message,” while the great London bassist Barry Guy in the sleeve notes of his album Oort-Entropy adds that such a transfer is “imperative, chang-ing the body but keeping the characteristics intact.”
Does it sound like the proc-ess of jazz?
Perhaps the south London altosaxophonist Dee Byrne and her bandmates know best, since they call their band Entropi.
Certainly their music radi-ates deep thought as well as sonic delight: “If order eventu-ally always turns to chaos on micro or macro levels, how can we transfer that into something meaningful in our lives,” she says, as her music is born from “space-gazing, life-pondering and risk-taking.”
Perhaps Sun Ra, hot-winged from Saturn rather than Gravesend like Dee, would have thought something similar.
Entropi is a band of power-ful originality and skilled musi-cianship. Dee’s alto, despite doing what her impressive melody-creating and arranging tell her, is warm and powerful, and always seems on the cusp of breaking out free.
Her trumpet compadre Andre Canniere, born in Coud-ersport, Pennsylvania, but hav-ing lived in London since 2008, plays a strong, burnished horn; Rebecca Nash is the pianist, Matt Fisher the drummer and on bass is Olie Brice, who often plays in free formations with saxophonists Paul Dunmall, Nick Fletcher and drummer Mark Sanders.
The opening track of their album Moment Frozen is Stellif-erous Era, a sonic rendition of the present stage of the life of our universe and “a reminder of the fleeting experience of life on this planet.”
Brice’s bass is succulent all through the track, the horn harmonies of Byrne and Can-niere are persuasive and the trumpeter’s notes tell a discom-forting narrative before Fisher’s drums and cymbalism conjure galactic images.
Fish Whisperer imagines a palaver with a friend’s pet fish as the universe is sud-denly constricted to a domestic aquarium.
What is the subject of this discourse as first Canniere then a searching Byrne blow their arguments? The listener imagines: are they about plas-tics in the sea or the warming of global waters?
Brice’s ominous solo could be a warning, and prefaces the fol-lowing track, Interloper, which Byrne calls “a dark, aggres-sive tune about an unwanted intruder,” in which her free instincts are almost released.
The mystery of the comet/asteroid Elst Pizarro and its space trajectory discovered in 1979 would have fascinated Sun Ra, as it has captured the imagination of Byrne.
The album’s title tune is her prologue, with Nash’s piano as its spine, and the track Elst Pizarro itself features Fisher’s inventive drums and the sheer placidity of Brice’s heartbeat bass.
Canniere’s solo sounds like a pure-toned annunciation before Byrne weaves her own serpentine chorus as if she were beholding something
wondrous.After her London Jazz Festi-
val performance of November 2017 I asked Dee how much the power of thought provoked her music.
Does she write her works after her thoughts, or does the music she writes cause them?
She said she saw jazz as a genre of ideas, where for its creators and performers what they invent and play stimulates more ideas, building on those she started with — as if it were a musical, imaginative and con-ceptual dialectic at work.
She is also a musician of hope — even from the com-position of her very first tune, It’s Time, which is also on the album: “It aims to recreate the feeling of optimism that comes with new beginnings,” she writes in her sleeve notes. Nash turns to electric key-board while Fisher’s drums surge behind her, Byrne and Canniere forge waves of notes in their exchanges and Brice’s plunging beat sublimates it all.
The album ends with Leap of Faith which seeks “to convey a sense of innocent hope in the face of shifting socio-political and personal landscapes.”
The two horns coalesce over Nash’s stream of piano notes, making one fused chronicle: the dynamics of deep thought, the transformative power of jazz, unified in the intrigu-ing music of Dee Byrne and Entropi.
A band of powerful originality and skilled musicianship
SONIC DELIGHT: Dee Byrne
IN the three Scottish Par-liament elections that the Scottish National Party has won since 2007, including the outright majority victory of 2011
that the electoral system was designed specifically to pre-vent, SNP governments have put tackling poverty at the front and centre of its cam-paigns promoting itself as a party of social justice.
In fact in its 2011 election manifesto it went further than broad-brush commitments to focus on tackling poverty or treating it even as a priority. They said that an SNP govern-ment was “committed to eradi-cating child poverty.”
Following the recent publi-cation of data on poverty and income inequality in Scotland, that commitment reminded me of a quote from the TV series Blackadder Goes Forth, when Blackadder was describing the “one tiny flaw” in the plan to avoid war in Europe in 1914 by having two opposing super-armies. “It’s bollocks,” said Blackadder.
The new figures painted a drab and miserable picture of 180,000 children living in rela-tive poverty in Scotland before housing costs — a jump of 2 per cent from the previous year’s figure.
The picture got a lot worse after housing costs were taken into consideration, with
another 50,000 children being added to the numbers of those in relative poverty, raising the total ratio to almost one child in four.
While these figures present a bleak background to any por-trayal of Scotland as a country of fairness, justice and equality in 2018, analysis commissioned by the Scottish government forecasts a near future that will have us reminiscing over today as being a time of income equality.
The three main indicators of poverty are all predicting rises of 60 per cent and above in rates of child poverty between now and 2031.
Relative poverty, the gap between low and middle-income households, is expected to increase from 23 per cent to 38 per cent. Absolute poverty, the measure of whether the income of the poorest house-holds is simply keeping up with the pace of inflation, will rise from 20 per cent to 32 per cent. Finally, those in persistent pov-erty, children living in poverty for at least three of the preced-ing four years, will go up from 10 per cent to 16 per cent.
To put it bluntly, more and more children will live in households that are becom-ing poorer, that will see the gap between them and chil-dren living in middle-class households becoming wider, and will stay poorer for longer
and find it harder and harder to get themselves out of poverty.
These facts and demographic predictions all fly in the face of not only the SNP manifesto commitments but the statutory obligations that the Scottish Parliament placed upon itself last November, via an SNP Bill, to achieve targets of less than 10 per cent of children living in households experiencing rela-tive poverty by 2030 and less than 5 per cent in households with absolute and persistent poverty in the same timescale.
The Poverty and Inequality Commission reported to the Scottish government in Febru-ary that the biggest impact on child poverty could be made in three specific areas; work and earnings, housing and social security.
The SNP government, how-ever, appears to be, by what it has so far done, not only not having an impact on the causes of poverty in these areas but is actually consolidating and widening that poverty.
As regards earnings, with the retail price index rate of inflation running at 3.6 per cent, the Scottish government has set its public-sector pay policy at 3 per cent for those staff earning under £36,500 and even this had to be wrung out of it as the price it would be forced to pay by the six Green MSPs to get its Budget through Parliament. The SNP’s own
Voices of Scotland
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Morning Star Tuesday
April 3 2018features
desire was to cap the 3 per cent rise at £30,000.
The political and economic reality is that the SNP has com-mitted itself to another year of pay cuts and Tory austerity.
On housing, while Audit Scotland has intimated that there will likely be a require-ment for half a million new homes to be built in Scotland by 2038, the SNP has said that it is only committing to 35,000 new homes being built for social rent in the lifetime of this parliament.
Finally, it would only take the SNP government to use its new welfare powers, as pro-moted by Scottish Labour, to the extent of increasing child benefit by £5 a week to take 30,000 Scottish children out of poverty.
Last Thursday the SNP gov-ernment gave its response to Labour’s proposal which was to
announce that it would “work towards introducing a new income supplement by 2022.”
Four years to wait and not, one notices, a new income supplement, but only a work-ing towards one. Rather than protecting children it appears easier to use them as the friendly fire casualties in a constitutional argument.
The three Scottish govern-ment ministers who have the power to make children’s lives better — Nicola Sturgeon, Derek Mackay and Angela Constance — have a simple decision to make.
Is it their intention to take those political actions which will lift Scottish children out of the stultifying grip of poverty, or when the SNP talk of “his-toric milestones” in abolish-ing child poverty are they like Asquith, Grey and Kitchener in August 1914 simply talking “bollocks?”
Despite warm words, the SNP shows no sign of wanting to lift children out of poverty
with Gordon McKay
ONE hundred and thirty years ago in April 1888, Keir Hardie stood in the
Mid Lanarkshire by election. The Liberal Party did not sup-
port him and his defeat pro-pelled Hardie, along with Cun-ninghame Graham, towards the creation of an independ-ent party of labour intent on working-class representation.
The anniversary of the founding of the Scottish Labour Party should be celebrated with added enthusiasm this year by Scottish Labour members because for the first time in a long time, the Scottish Labour Party will reflect the radicalism of its founders.
In Richard Leonard it has a leader and increasingly a set of policies that are capable of winning working-class support that could lead to a majority of
both Holyrood and Westmin-ster seats.
This has earned him fierce opposition from both the Scottish Tories and the SNP. We should not be surprised at this unseemly alliance of Tories and SNP.
Jeremy Corbyn and Leonard represent a clear and present danger to the Tories and the nationalists and both parties were happy to collude to divert council cuts, the exposure of
outsourcing, the pensions cri-sis, unequal pay, the decline in oil and gas exploration, the continued betrayal of our fish-ing communities and any other semblance of class politics to “any other business” while Russia-bashing goes straight to the top of the agenda.
For make no mistake about it, the policies adopted by the Scottish Labour Party at this year’s conference, policies based on class, are capable
of building a movement for profound social and economic change in Scotland.
They were largely ignored by the “commentariat,” but you only need to consider the section of the policy covering the economy to get a sense of the challenge Scottish Labour is now posing to the apologists of the existing system: “The priva-tisation of our public services has been a national failure — it’s time to take back control.
Public ownership and control over our essential public goods and services can lead the fight for social and environmental progress.”
The policy document does not stop at generalities. Here are three specific commitments from the many that flow from the general espousal of public ownership: “Commit to signing no new private finance deals; explore how to bring existing contracts back in-house; and to develop alternative public-sec-tor models for funding … Pub-licly provide public services, such as health and social care
services, so ensuring quality and co-ordination; work proac-tively with councils to develop municipal ownership in policy areas like buses, social care, building, energy and land.”
These commitments are equally intolerable to the Tories, whose backers have benefited enormously from PFI contracts, and the SNP which has twice failed to even re-reg-ulate buses, never mind bring them into public ownership, and which has also enjoyed considerable financial support from Brian Souter — owner of the large private bus company, Stagecoach.
The SNP has also sought to build an alliance with third-sector organisations. Scot-tish Labour’s policy is clearly designed to address concerns about their use as a form of outsourcing — 34 per cent of third-sector activity is now in social care.
In local government too, the Tories and the SNP have a symbiotic relationship. At West-minster the Tories squeeze pub-lic expenditure; at Holyrood the SNP curates the cuts for the Scottish public in as accept-able way as they can, carefully avoiding any distress to their middle-class supporters.
Contrast this to Scottish Labour’s commitment in the conference policy document: “Local councils can also lead the way in the fight against poverty and inequality … More
resources for our services is not just about grants from the government. It’s also about real powers. Local services have to be released from their shackles. Scotland’s local councils must also be allowed to raise addi-tional revenue.”
Tory/SNP collusion must and will be exposed if the Scottish Labour Party, working with the wider movement, takes the political weapons it has now forged and challenges the Tories and the SNP in Scotland’s working-class heartlands: in the schemes of Dundee and Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the neglected mining villages of West Lothian and Fife, in the “beautiful wastelands” of the Highlands and islands and eve-rywhere else where neoliberal greed let whole communities go to rot.
One hundred and thirty years on since the creation of the Scottish Labour Party in April 1888, and we still encoun-ter the indifference of wealth faced with the human degra-dation caused by capitalism’s excesses.
But now we have a real chance to challenge that. Scottish Labour must use this opportunity to transform itself and the communities it was cre-ated to save and nothing and no-one should be allowed to get in the way.
■ Vince Mills is secretary of Scot-tish Labour Left.
by Vince Mills
Tory/SNP collusion must and will be exposed
BROKEN PROMISES: SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon visits a foodbank
SNOWY: A view of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood
morningstaronline.co.uk morningstaronline
@m_star_online12Morning Star TuesdayApril 3 2018 info | entertainment
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THERE’S a video doing the rounds on social media of various US local news reporters saying the exact same thing, word for word, across diff erent channels.
The Sinclair Broadcast Group forced its news anchors to read a script about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country.”
It’s, quite frankly, frighten-ing, hearing dozens of people sound like automated robots while saying: “Some members
of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’.”
Sound familiar? Britain has the same problem. The rest of the press is singing from the same hymn sheet, attacking Cor-byn and Labour whenever it can.
Depending on the day of the week, 2018 has already seen the right-wing press call Corbyn an IRA supporter, an Isis sympathiser, a Czech spy,
an anti-semite and we haven’t even reached the summer yet.
However, there is one paper that will continue to tell the truth as these other papers “pub-lish these same fake stories… sto-ries that just aren’t true, without checking facts fi rst.”
The Morning Star isn’t owned by a tax-dodging oligarch, it is owned by you, the reader. It is why with your help, we can con-tinue to tell the real stories that aff ect all of us on a daily basis.
As we enter April, I know that our readers and supporters will continue to remain fi rmly in our corner as we fi ght back against Tory government cuts and the continued lies spread about Corbyn.
It won’t be easy, especially in the build-up to the local elec-tions, but it is not an impossible task. Your ongoing generosity will never go unnoticed and we are grateful for every penny, long may it continue.
TODAY
Heavy rain and snow will continue to fall across Northern Ireland and Scotland, pushing further north. Elsewhere a mixture of sunshine and some heavy show-ers; becoming some-what milder.
NEXT FEW DAYS
Rain and snow will continue in the north tomorrow, scattered showers elsewhere. Thursday will be gener-ally dry and bright. Friday will turn wet and windy, particularly in the west.
MARCH TOTAL TO BE REVEALED ...
27 days left
APRIL’S TARGET:
£18,000
QUIZMASTER with William Sitwell
TODAY’S QUESTIONS
WEEKEND’S ANSWERS
1. In what year did the National Union of Elementary Teachers change its name to the National Union of Teachers? 1889
2. Which bird is also known as the sea swallow (pictured)? The tern
3. What would you fi nd on a map’s cartou-che? The scale andkey
1 From which song sung by the late Ken Dodd comes the line: “Let’s forgive and forget?”
2 Do margent sculptures show plants, animals or people?
3 What is General Agreement on Tariff s and Trade usually shortened to?
Solution tomorrow…
DAILY SUDOKU (expert)
PHILOMENA Cunk, the satiri-cal character who brightened Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, has only gone and got her own series. Cunk on Britain (10pm BBC2) is a sendup of those ego-driven historical docu-mentaries a la Simon Schama. She races through British His-tory, from dinosaurs right up to Brexit.
Cunk, played with total commitment by Diane Morgan, stumps guest experts with her historically inaccurate state-ments; she notes that The Tudors were the Kardashians of their time and that William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066 was simply Brexit back-wards. And when you think about it, is that so wrong?
Why do we feel compelled to snack while we watch fi lms? Presenter Peter Cur-
ran explores the link between consumption and cinema in Inconspicuous Consumption (9pm BBC Radio 4). Curran has strong family ties to cinema, his great grandfather Michael opened The Lyceum Picture House in Belfast in 1916, since destroyed by bombing in the 1970s, and what made this cinema special was the addition of a cafe attached to the screens.
He is joined by Game of Thrones actor Iain Glen and-chef Andi Oliver to investigate the psychology behind munch-ing at the movies and just how popcorn, a popular street food, became synonymous with the cinema experience.
Earlier in the day, honey-voiced comedian Josie Long presents the last short radio documentaries of her series
Short Cuts (3pm BBC Radio 4). Three people describe encoun-ters with trees, whether it involved hugging them, climb-ing them or simply enjoying that experience of standing within a dense forest.
The latest recording from the Free Thinking Festival (10pm BBC Radio 3) is a real mixed bag: ten academics who won the annual New Genera-tion Thinkers competition will introduce their specialities, which include 18th century masculinity and the medical history of George Orwell, early 20th-century vegetarianism in Britain, and the ethics of com-mercial surrogacy in India.
This show is just the taster for future radio programmes created on their research. The chances to learn something new are very, very high.
TV and radio preview with Amy Smith
Deadpan Cunk plays it for the laughs in new British history mockumentary
Saturday’s sudoku
Weekend crossword 1,232
Previous solutions
HES BEHIND YOU: Francis Drake hovers behind a confused Philomena Cunk
morningstaronline.co.uk morningstaronline @m_star_online 13
Morning Star
books Tuesday April 3 2018
“AS A novel-ist, you can’t educate and inform if you don’t enter-tain,” says
Edward Wilson. The most overtly socialist
author within the mainstream spy genre, every single one of his novels is set within the web of the “deep state,” from the Western-engineered Hun-garian counter-revolution of 1956 to the repeated attempts to destabilise Harold Wilson’s administrations.
Each book is a masterpiece of interwoven real events and realistically imagined sequences within and sur-rounding them.
Wilson is much more on the John le Carre rather than the Ian Fleming wing of the genre and the former is someone he admires. “Aside from myself he is the closest to being an anti-Establishment writer within the spy fiction genre. He is very good and, contrary to the cliches, he has gone to the left as he’s got older.”
Wilson’s latest book South Atlantic Requiem sees his pro-tagonist William Catesby, a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) operative, involved in efforts to bring the US and others to prevail upon both Argentina and Britain to support the Peruvian peace plan during the Falklands conflict.
This deal was scuppered by the sinking of the Argentin-ian battleship The General Belgrano as it was sailing way from the British exclusion zone around the islands.
“I can’t imagine a more bit-ter irony than that the brave soldiers who died and were maimed in the Falklands came from the same working-class communities that Thatcher later destroyed.
“I just think how many relatives of Falklands veter-ans were coshed at the police lines at Orgreave,” he says with real anger.
Wilson brings a vivid real-ity to his accounts of conflict, especially in The Whitehall Mandarin, and it comes from personal experience.
Born in Baltimore, he served as a special forces officer in Vietnam and received the Army Commendation Medal for his part in rescuing badly wounded soldiers from a mine-field.
His other decorations
included the Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
“The five rootless years after I left Vietnam were not particu-larly happy, although I did get an MA in English Literature and learnt how to speak Ger-man. “I was unsettled. I think in retrospect it was PTSD. It ticks all the boxes.”
He renounced his US citi-zenship, took up teaching and moved to Suffolk, where he still lives.
All of the Catesby novels are framed within class terms and their protagonist is certainly an impressively multidimen-sional character and, as a socialist working for the Brit-ish Establishment, a deeply conflicted one at that.
“I wanted a working-class character, that was absolutely essential, Wilson says.
“I sort of saw Catesby as an alternative me but he’s not me, he’s a totally different charac-ter who was born in a similar English socioeconomic back-ground to my own.”
What also makes Catesby such a fascinating and poign-ant character is the fact that he
doesn’t really fit in anywhere, either at work or at home.
“Remember, back in 1945 the mood music was differ-ent,” Wilson explains. “Some-one with Catesby’s background would have been swooped on by SIS.
“When the mood music turned he was still there. So in a way he is an Attlee social-ist relic.
“When he meets Harold Wil-
son — the Prime Minister who speaks with a broad Yorkshire accent — in A Very British End-ing, one of the first things he reprovingly says to Catesby is: ‘You’ve lost your accent.’
“It is this sense of personal alienation and betrayal that makes him feel guilty. He gets over the guilt by secretly becoming more and more left-wing.”
That book details the soft
coup launched against the Labour prime minister in 1976, with tanks stationed at Heath-row and other key locations. What might that mean for a future socialist Labour admin-istration led by Jeremy Corbyn?
“We’ve already seen how the deep state operates with the nonsense about him being a Czech agent,” Wilson responds.
“They’ve dusted off the LPs from the Wilson era and are
already replaying them. “Actually I think it’s going
to work differently this time because I don’t think it’ll be the security services out to get him, rather the financial insti-tutions and the press.
“Why use tanks when you’ve got banks? Tanks are as obso-lete as Trident. Banks can over-throw governments and you don’t have blood on the streets and the awful press photos.”
That said, he considers that the Soviet intervention in Budapest was the right thing to do.
In The Darkling Spy he shows that “it started as a genuine social revolution and was then hijacked by the far right and western interests.”
Wilson believes that the deep state is totally ruthless. “Look what happened to Clive Ponting. What did he do? He passed on information, not to a communist agent, but to a member of Parliament.
“It wasn’t nuclear secrets he’d shared, it was about the course the Belgrano was on when she was sunk.
“The judge actually sort of mimed a noose around his neck and instructed the jury to find him guilty. Had he been found guilty he could have done 40 years for that, twice as much as Klaus Fuchs who actu-ally sold secrets to the Soviets. “He was getting at the secret state, which was worse than selling secrets.”
Wilson finds research for the n o v e l s d e a l i n g w i t h
more recent events to be the most frustrating.
“I spend slightly more time researching than I do writing. For South Atlantic Requiem, I consulted over 200 books and articles.
“The most awful thing is wading through all those offi-cial lies. The lies around the Belgrano and the whole con-flict is just so thick, far more than for the others.”
But Wilson prevailed and has produced yet another entertaining novel that cer-tainly educates and informs.
■ South Atlantic Requiem is pub-lished by Arcadia Books at £14.99. For more information about Edward Wilson, visit edwardwil-son.info
Using entertainment to get at the secret state of affairs
■ INTERVIEW
EDWARD WILSON tells Paul Simon why as a spy novelist he aims to uncover what the Establishment would far rather we didn’t know about
Pic: www.edwardwilson.info
“I can’t imagine a
more bitter irony
than that the
brave soldiers
who died and
were maimed in
the Falklands
came from the
same working-
class communities
that Thatcher
later destroyed
OVERTLY SOCIALIST: Edward Wilson
morningstaronline.co.uk morningstaronline
@m_star_online14Morning Star TuesdayApril 3 2018 letters
SO IT seems that Labour’s still jumping on the anti-Russian bandwagon, accusing without actual evidence and without Russia having the right to investigate.
Once more, the crime is solely Russia’s doing, with a kangaroo court passing judgement before facts are known and shown of proof positive. Both Britain and the US have stockpiles of nerve gas, chemicals and who knows what else.
When it’s suggested that a Brit could have poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skirpal, the government becomes off ended by this, and now with Labour’s backing.
The question remains why would Putin so such a thing so near this election and the World Cup?
The burden of proof is one-sided, yet the Russian investigation is cold-shouldered, e v id e nc e is hidden or not
released by the government because it must keep up the “blame game.”
Boris Johnson says he knows that Russia has a stockpile of Novichok. Well, Britain is not perfect, no matter how much it likes to polish its halo.
For John McDonnell to jump on the bandwagon, without actual proof and only the nasty party’s say-so, isn’t proof at all.
An oligarch could have done it, a British agent or a US special agent.
We know the Tories lie and lie to cover up lies, Orgreave, Hillsbor-
ough — there’s no depth they would not sink to.
STEPHEN FRANCISSutton Democracy for all until
the votes are counted
■ LABOUR
LABOUR MP Mary Creagh, speaking on the Daily Poli-tics programme on March 29, indicated that we should ignore the result of the EU referendum.
I wonder what she would have said if, after the last general election, the candidate who came second in her con-stituency had been made MP.
All MPs would say they are democrats. If they are, then they should do what the majority of the British elec-torate wants. That’s called democracy.
Unfortunately, there are members of the Parliamen-tary Labour Party (PLP) who obviously do not believe in democracy. They are prob-ably doing this to attack the leadership.
It’s time that all Labour MPs backed the party’s leadership, but of course we are all aware that the Blairites in particu-lar will not bow to the will of most of the membership and accept the democratic election of Jeremy Corbyn.
Can’t these MPs, who I call fi fth columnists, realise that as long as they are fi ghting the leadership, the electorate will
be very dubious about voting for a divided party. Perhaps they would rather lose the next general election than have Corbyn as their leader.
Blairism has failed and it’s time that these MPs and other disruptive members of the PLP realise it.
People want an end to the rich and powerful exploiting the vast majority of the popu-lation.
I wish this disruptive lot in the PLP had the intelli-gence to see that a united party with policies that the majority of the electorate
agree with is more likely to get into power. Their fight should be against the huge majority of the media which support the Tories and who will dig up anything they can to discredit Jeremy Corbyn.
JACK MARTINSheffi eld
VOCAL: Mary Creagh addresses Parliament
Biblical comparisons
in council pay dispute
■ APRIL FOOLS
YOUR “pay dispute” item (Derbyshire council to stop paying living wage, March 16) mentions that it will take eff ect on April 1.
I write this on Easter Sun-day and can’t help wonder, is there a councillor — wash-ing his hands — like Pontius Pilate, on March 30, Good Friday?
JERRY STILESMitcham
Please don’t join the Tory ‘blame game’
■ MCDONNELL
WHILE it is wise to be scepti-cal of all news outlets, John McDonnell’s attack on Russia Today could have unfortunate repercussions. Is the BBC more reliable?
Democracy is dissent and contention, ideally, in the pur-suit of the truth. State censor-ship denies this. Most people, given the chance, are pretty savvy. John McDonnell’s actions could well feed into state cen-sorship and this would hit us fi rst and then democracy itself.
The Morning Star, I believe, is the most reliable national daily and I share it with my workmates. Yes, I have criti-cisms of it and it also has a right to criticise The Sun, The Daily Mail, Russia Today etc. but please do not encourage state censorship as an attack on one, is an attack on us all.
We need press freedom not censorship. Most of all we need the Morning Star.
PAUL BURNETTWest Mersea
Fight for the freedom of the press not censorship of Russia Today
■ JOURNALISM
I BOUGHT my Morning Star at a diff erent outlet this morning after getting fed up of being in a queue headed by someone buying £126 worth of National Lottery tickets.
I mean, why do we have such a thing as a state lot-tery after all? It was of course introduced by the Tories as were premium bonds and licensed betting shops.
The thinking behind this was that as long as people think they can make easy
money through gambling, they will be less inclined to take the more diffi cult part in fi ghting for better living conditions.
So now in the 2010s we have weaker trade unions than years ago, with indi-viduals being purposely deluded into thinking they can improve their lot by purchasing a scratch card rather than joining the class struggle.
TIM MICKLEBURGHGrimsby
Could lottery be unlucky for trade unions?■ BETTING
HAVE YOUR SAYWrite (up to 300 words) to 52 Beachy Rd, London E3 2NSor email [email protected]
ACCUSATIONS: John McDonnell
morningstaronline.co.uk morningstaronline @m_star_online 15
Morning Star Tuesday
April 3 2018sport
n CYCLING
HAMMER SERIES GEARS
UP FOR BRITISH STOPby Our Sports Desk
CyCling’s innovative Hammer series could be heading to Brit-ain in the future as it looks to expand its global reach.
The series, with an emphasis on competition between teams rather than individuals, is effec-tively cycling’s equivalent of Twenty20 cricket, packing the action into three short races — a climb, a sprint and a chase — to crown an overall winner over the course of a weekend.
it was devised by Velon, a company which is jointly owned by 10 WorldTour cycling teams.
Following a successful debut in limburg, Belgium last year, there will be three race week-ends in 2018 and an announce-
ment on the third venue this week will see the series go well outside the European heartlands of cycling and move into Asia.
Velon’s chief executive gra-ham Bartlett said the goal is to expand to up to 10 race week-ends a season, with a possible British event on their radar.
“it would be a fantastic experience to have one of the races in Britain,” Bartlett said. “We’ve had discussions and we would love to bring it here.”
last June a cumulative audi-ence which Velon say totalled 3.2 million watched Team sky win the first title in limburg.
This year, the series will head to stavanger, norway in the last weekend of May before returning to limburg a week later. The location of the third event will be announced today.
The Hammer series is one of a number of moves Velon has made to appeal to new fans, the most noticeable being the live data which has become a big part of the broadcasts of most of the top races.
All of the 10 teams who are shareholders in Velon, plus a growing number of partners, share live data on riders’ per-formance to help put fans “in the arena.”
“We believe Velon is the only company in the world showing live performance data of the athletes in action,” Bartlett said.
“if you watched Tirreno-Adriatico, you could see Chris Froome’s power data, his heart rate, his cadence and you can see how he performs.
“These guys are amazing ath-
letes and we can show you just how amazing the athletes are.”
For now, Velon has not made any moves to expand into wom-en’s cycling, despite the fact a number of its shareholders field their own women’s teams.
Bartlett said the door is open but the group will only expand into women’s cycling once the resources are there to do it properly.
“if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it right,” he said. “it has to be just as good as the men’s event. Otherwise why are you doing it? it will require investment. Many of our partners want us to do it but we have got to be able to do it in the right way or it would not be a good thing to do.
“There have been discussions but it is still early days.”
n ATHLETICS
Brestyan slams US gymnastics after abuse scandalby Our Sports Desk
MiHAi BrEsTyAn was shocked and angry when he discovered one of his star athletes was among the victims in a sexual abuse scandal that plunged UsA gymnastics into crisis.
Brestyan, a long-time coach of six-time Olympic medal-ist Aly raisman, is preparing Australia’s women’s team for the Commonwealth games on the gold Coast, where he spoke about the scandal.
UsA gymnastics is reeling
from the conviction of former national team doctor larry nas-sar, who will spend the rest of his life in prison on charges ranging from sexual molesta-tion to possession of child por-nography.
More than 200 women, including raisman and reign-ing Olympic champion simone Biles, have come forward over the last 18 months to reveal they were victims of nassar’s abuse.
UsA gymnastics removed its entire board of directors in Jan-uary under pressure by the Us
Olympic Committee. raisman filed a lawsuit against both organisations, contending they allowed nassar’s behaviour to run unchecked.
speaking at the athletes vil-lage of the Commonwealth games, which start tomorrow, Brestyan said he’s still upset because of the trauma the gym-nasts had been subjected to.
raisman never discussed nassar’s abuse with Brestyan or his wife sylvia, who together own and run Brestyan’s gym-nastics in Burlington, Massa-chusetts.
“it is incredible that no-one knew … or if they knew, they didn’t speak out,” Brestyan said. “it makes me so very angry … [this] has happened to one of my athletes,” Brestyan said. “We are so happy that [nassar] has been caught — but we are not happy that it took so long for him to be caught. He fooled all of us.”
Brestyan said there were lessons for people involved in sports.
“We need to keep work-ing with our parents and our athletes to help them protect
themselves and we need to pro-tect each other,” he said.
“But i also hope that we do not become paranoid … it is a sensitive subject but kids and parents, the coaches and administration, must keep working together and soon as there is a sign, we must check it out.”
gymnastics Australia chief executive Kitty Chiller has confirmed a full-time child safety coordinator would be appointed to allow allegations of abuse to be independently reported and investigated.
n MEN’S FOOTBALL
Pardew out as Baggies face dropby Our Sports Desk
AlAn PArdew left west Brom yesterday by mutual consent after winning just one Premier league game in his four-month spell as head coach — a run that has left the club facing relegation.
The Baggies lie bottom of the table, 10 points adrift of safety with only six games of the season left, and Saturday’s 2-1 defeat at home to Burnley was their eighth top-flight loss in a row.
A club statement confirmed Pardew and assistant head coach John Carver had departed the club, with first-team coach darren Moore placed in charge of the first team “until further notice.”
“The club would like to thank Alan and John for their efforts and wish them well in their future endeavours,” added the statement.
Pardew was appointed the successor to Tony Pulis on november 29 with the Midlands club one point above the drop zone but the former new-castle and Crystal Palace boss was unable to trans-form their fortunes.
It was not until his ninth game that he claimed his first win — in the FA Cup at exeter — while a 2-0 victory over Brighton on January 13 was the only league tri-umph of his tenure.
They edged out liverpool at Anfield 3-2 in the FA Cup towards the end of January but have lost every game since then — their cup aspi-rations ended by a home defeat to Southampton.
They had taken the lead against leicester and Bournemouth in recent weeks only to lose and the setback to Burnley, in his 18th league game in charge, appears to have been the final straw for both the club and Pardew.
TAKING PART: Team Sky
ABUSED: Simone Biles
Tuesday April 3 2018
Published by the People’s Press Printing Society Ltd, William Rust House, 52 Beachy Road, Bow, London E3 2NS. Telephone: (020) 8510-0815. Fax: (020) 8986-5694. Email: [email protected]. Registered with Companies House as Morning Star (in corporating the Daily Worker) No N5559. Printed by trade union labour at Trinity Mirror.
SPORT Tuesday April 3 2018 INSIDE: Hammer Series coming to Britain
9 770307 175220
1 4
MSTAR 2018-04-03 TUE 1.0
n MEN’S RUGBY LEAGUE
Wolves boss Price over the moon following Castleford winby Our Sports Desk
Warrington coach Steve Price praised his side’s resil-ience yesterday after they overcame atrocious conditions to beat Castleford 18-6 in a mud bath at the Jungle.
the Wolves scored tries at the end of each half through toby King and Daryl Clark but for most of the contest were indebted to the marksmanship of Stefan ratchford, whose three penalty goals were crucial.
“that was tough going con-sidering the conditions,” Price said. “i’ve just spoken to Hilly
[captain Chris Hill] and he’s never played in those condi-tions before.
“i was always keen to play the game and it’s credit to Cas for going above and beyond to get the game to go ahead.
“overall i thought it was a good spectacle. We had to play well against a good quality foot-ball team and our completion rate was 83 per cent. Sometimes you don’t need to look fancy.
“it was a tough battle and it’s good to get away with the two points.”
Warrington, who lost goal-kicking centre Bryson goodwin to illness before the game, have
now secured four straight wins to consolidate their place in the top four of the Super League.
“We’ve definitely started to turn the corner,” Price added. “i said it was always going to take a bit of time with new systems but we are starting to grow some trust in the organisation.”
trailing 10-0 at half-time, Castleford struck back with a try from oliver Holmes 12 min-utes into the second half and thought they had drawn level when Jake Webster touched down in the 66th minute after ratchford lost the ball near his own line only to have it disal-lowed.
“i spoke to Stef and it got kicked out of his hands,” Price said.
Castleford coach Daryl Pow-ell had another view of the dis-allowed try but praised War-rington for their ability to play the conditions.
“i thought we had some tough calls today,” Powell said.
“i’m not sure he had it fully in his hands, i need to see it back. But i’m not blaming anybody but ourselves and a good performance by War-rington.”
n MEN’S CRICKET
BAIRSTOW CONFIDENT OF A BRIGHTER SUMMERAfter a difficult winter campaign, England’s wicketkeeper feels the side will grow stronger under Root’s leadershipby Our Sports Desk
Jonny BairStoW said yes-terday that Joe root’s England are already stronger for all the travails which have come their way this winter.
Bairstow predicts, irrespec-tive of the outcome of the final test against new Zealand in Christchurch, that his fellow yorkshireman’s team will begin the home summer on an upward curve.
England closed the penulti-mate day of a winter campaign which began more than five months ago still searching for a first test win in seven — and set to lose a second successive series, after their 4-0 ashes trouncing, unless they can take 10 new Zealand wickets in three sessions.
they managed none in 23 overs before bad light forced an early close at Hagley Park, where England declared on 352 for nine to leave their hosts a national record chase of 382 — or alternatively to bat out the match for a 1-0 series win.
after new Zealand reached 42 without loss, Bairstow said: “this winter hasn’t necessarily gone too well but there are so many reasons for that.”
England encountered a myriad of unforeseen issues during their ashes defeat, including the absence of key all-rounder Ben Stokes while he waited to discover if he would be charged over an altercation
outside a Bristol nightclub last September.
asked how root has fared on his first tours as captain, Bairstow said: “i think he’ll have learned a lot.
“it’s obviously been a tough winter [but] it’s not anything that’s down to him.
“there’s been things that will have cropped up that he won’t have expected.
“yes, he’s the captain, but there’s 10 other guys out on the field that have an opportunity to influence the game. it’s not just down to one bloke — and i think [he’s] only going to get stronger.”
Bairstow senses an increas-ing cohesion in the ranks.
He added: “going from someone in the dressing-room scoring runs, to being the leader of the team, it is very different — leading team meet-ings, selection, having tough conversations with people to leave them out, having confi-dence to stand up to people at times.
“it’s a learning process and i think he’s done really well.
“the way we came out in this test was a lot better than we have throughout the winter and that’s no coincidence — after having a couple of chats — and i think we’re in a decent [situation] to lead into the sum-mer.”
as a batsman, root has devel-oped an unwelcome knack of failing to turn 50s into hun-dreds — and did so for the
ninth successive time after reaching 54 here.
But Bairstow said: “i don’t think it’s a problem at all.
“Having someone that aver-ages 52-53, there’s no-one else in our team that does that.
“We’re very fortunate to have our leader doing that and it’s only a matter of time before he converts the 50s into hundreds.”
He is also optimistic England can force an overdue victory.
their task is made no easier by playing conditions, pre-agreed under the tour’s offi-cial memoran-dum of under-standing, that play cannot start earlier to make up lost overs on the final day — with time instead added on to the evening session, despite the probability of bad light.
“We don’t know how long it’s going to be, if the light comes in,” said Bairstow. But there’s definitely enough in the pitch for us to take the wickets.”
new Zealand batting coach Craig McMillan congratulated openers Jeet raval and tom Latham on survival so far against James anderson and Stuart Broad.
“it was really impressive,” he said.
“it was obviously a tough period, against two world-class new-ball bowlers — so they had to work really hard to get through.”
PLEASED: Steve Price
TOPAMICHILingfield 3:25 (nap)
WIDNESLingfield 5:30
Farringdon’s Doubles
KAWASIRLingfield 3:55
Houseman’s Choice
TODAY’S TIPS
ChampionshipBristol City 0 1 BrentfordBurton 1 1 MiddlesbroughIpswich 2 2 MillwallPreston 0 1 DerbyQPR 4 1 NorwichSunderland 1 3 Sheff Wednesday
League OneCharlton 3 1 RotherhamFleetwood 2 0 Bristol RoversMK Dons 1 2 BlackburnOldham 2 1 BlackpoolPeterborough 2 0 NorthamptonShrewsbury 3 2 Oxford UnitedSouthend 4 0 Gillingham
League TwoAccrington Stanley 1 0 Notts CountyCarlisle United 0 1 Lincoln CityCoventry 2 6 YeovilCrawley 1 1 SwindonCrewe 2 2 Port ValeExeter 2 1 Cheltenham TownForest Green Rovers 1 2 ColchesterLuton 2 1 MansfieldStevenage 4 1 BarnetWycombe 2 1 Grimsby
MONDAY’S RESULTS
Champions LeagueJuventus Real MadridSevilla Bayern Munich
ChampionshipAston Villa ReadingFulham Leeds UnitedWolverhampton HullBolton Birmingham, 8pm
League OneBury Rochdale
Scottish PremiershipHibernian Hamilton AcademicalMotherwell AberdeenRoss County Partick Thistle
Scottish ChampDundee United DumbartonDunfermline Athletic LivingstonInverness CT Brechin CityQueen Of The South Falkirk
Scottish League TwoBerwick Rangers StenhousemuirCowdenbeath Montrose
All kickoffs 7.45pm unless noted
TONIGHT’S FOOTBALL
BEING POSITIVE: Jonny Bairstow
