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137/365: Teddy Gray's sweetshop, Bewdley
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Earlier this month, I posted a picture of a Teddy Gray's van. Today, I'm posting a picture of the sweetshop it was delivering to! This is Teddy Gray's in Bewdley, one of the town's most famous shops. It's right next to the river bridge (just out of shot on the left) and in Load Street, the town's main artery. I don't go in there much these days as sugary sweets aren't the ideal food for diabetics and their ice cream isn't quite the utter bargain it used to be, but I'm always pleased to see it. The shop was opened shortly after WW2 and barring modern hygiene standards and metrication it hasn't changed much, with a sympathetic restoration about 15 years ago. It remains a cash only business, so this is one town where the schoolkids passing by on their way home certainly do not rely entirely on their phones!

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The Casey Report, formally the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, is now available from the .gov.uk website in both PDF and HTML formats. Including notes and references it runs to nearly 200 pages, so I haven't yet read it all, but I shall when I have the time to do so properly. I have looked at the foreword, the executive summary, Baroness Casey's personal note and the bullet-point list of recommendations.

Inevitably the question of ethnicity will dominate the media, and that is addressed. Baroness Casey is very clear that ethnicity data on offenders must be collected, something which at the moment is widely not happening. "Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years" is a direct quote from her foreword (p. 4). Yes, this aspect absolutely will be (and has already been) extensively exploited by far-right racists, but it is not acceptable to use that as an excuse to avoid looking too hard. It's somewhat reminiscent of the reluctance in the past to investigate abuse by Roman Catholic priests in both Britain and Ireland on the grounds that doing so might stir up anti-Catholic sentiment. That was wrong. So has been this.

There are a frightening number of other phrases that jump out even in the portion of the report I have yet read. For example, from Baroness Casey's personal note: she mentions that when she conducted an inspection of Rotherham Council in 2016, Alexis Jay ensured that South Yorkshire Police were removed from oversight of the investigation as they had been "incompetent at best - sometimes turning a blind eye but often actively enabling abuse - and corrupt at worst" (p. 11). The large number of girls¹ who have been actively painted as complicit or even criminal accomplices to their own abuse is terrifying.
¹ And a significantly smaller but still far from zero number of boys.

The Baroness's recommendations will be challenging for politicians, and so they should be.¹ For example, she recommends that the current "two-stage" criminalisation of men having sex with under-16s should be replaced with making rape the standard offence. To avoid criminalising teenagers in relationships with each other, she says a "Romeo and Juliet" (close-in-age) clause should also be introduced. This is pretty much the legal situation in France, barring their age of consent being 15. People in Britain often bandy about the term "statutory rape", but the law at present in this country is not actually as clear as that phrase makes it sound. This recommendation would make it so.
¹ The Home Secretary has said the government will implement them all. I'll believe it when I see it.

Both the last UK government and the current one have behaved terribly on this issue. The Tories did nothing of note to investigate the scandals during their decade in power, yet now pretend it's all Keir Starmer's fault; Labour only recently insisted that those calling for a new statutory inquiry risked "amplifying the far right", yet the PM announced exactly that two days ago. A risk now is that this new inquiry will take so long to report that it will be a convenient way for politicians of all parties to kick any kind of justice for the abused children into the long grass yet again. Look at how compensation for subpostmasters is still being held up by probably deliberate delaying tactics for a recent precedent.

Finally, it is absolutely clear that the legal system in general in this country has been desperately underfunded for years, under governments of various colours. Even serious criminal cases can take ages to come to court, and this emboldens some to think that they can effectively get away with wrong-doing. As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied. The children who have lived with the abuse and its after-effects for years are absolutely reasonable to consider that they have been denied justice. Baroness Casey's report does, and one hopes the new inquiry will, at least acknowledge that -- but they do not remove that failure.

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135/365: Coopers Cottage, Bewdley
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I had a pretty quiet Sunday, which suited me fine. I didn't even get up until after nine, and after a leisurely breakfast I pottered down to Sainsbury's. As it's above the size limit, it doesn't open until ten,¹ so there was no point in rising too early. Nothing much to buy, but I made note of some current discounts for the future. Back home for a sandwich lunch, because I was lazy. In the afternoon the next-door neighbours had some kids around to play with their own two, so although I'm glad they had fun it did make it too noisy for me to sit out in the garden to read. I therefore went to a little-frequented grassy spot I know a reasonable but not excessive walk away. This house, which took years to restore not so long ago, is one of the best known sights along the way.
¹ In England and Wales, most shops over 280 m² can only open on Sundays for six hours, which must fall between 10am and 6pm.

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The widespread "No Kings" protests in the US today, objecting to (among many, many other things) the military parade for Trump's birthday, are happening on exactly the same day that our Actual King is attending... a military parade for his (official) birthday. :P

ETA: Americans, was that deliberate? The thought just occurred.

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Last night on BBC Question Time there was an exchange between Labour Cabinet minister Darren Jones and Reform's former chairman Zia Yusuf about migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. Jones started an answer with the words "the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women". Yusuf then claimed that "more than 90% of them are adult men".

As it happens, both were wrong. The UK government's own figures (section 1.1 there) show that "since January 2018, 71% of people detected arriving irregularly have been adult males aged 18 and over." Not all arrivals designated irregular are via small boats, but a large majority are; 86% is the figure given in the above-linked document.

But it's just such idiotically stupid politics by a government MP to insist on something that is so trivial to prove is wrong. Jones now looks as though he was either outright lying to the Question Time audience, which is unacceptable, or he wasn't in command of the facts on a subject that was near-certain to come up, which is incompetent.

And no, "Reform are full of racists" isn't remotely a good enough defence to this. It may very well be true, as Yusuf himself has quite possibly found in his own time in the party, but it still doesn't excuse a Cabinet minister baldly stating something that is utterly inaccurate, and that he should have known was utterly inaccurate.

It's a fundamental principle of politics, at least for me, that if you can't bring yourself to call out people on your own side of the fence, your comments cease to be debate and just become cheerleading. Jones should have done better.

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Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has died at the age of 82, and so today's music is chosen in his honour. I'm quite fond of the Beach Boys, so I had plenty of songs to choose from, but I've always really liked "God Only Knows" from the classic 1966 album Pet Sounds. Like the album it came from, the song did considerably better in the UK than in its native US. Over here it made it all the way to number two, kept off the top only by the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine"/"Eleanor Rigby" double A-side. The video here is obviously much more recent, but it is an official one from the Beach Boys' own YouTube account, so I'm more than happy to embed it.

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130/365: Brass foundry office, Bewdley Museum
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Today started out rather damp, but things eventually improved and the evening was warm and sunny, which weather is supposed to continue into tomorrow. We'll see! As it's June, the sun didn't set until well after 9 pm, and given my latitude (about 52 °N) the sky never really gets fully dark overnight. It's no midnight sun, but you can see slightly more light if you look north in the early hours, which is always a mildly strange feeling! I did a bit of top-up food shopping today, having to go to three different shops to find chives which was very slightly annoying. It's not as if they're a herb that's highly obscure!

My photo for today has nothing to do with that, other than being in Bewdley. This is part of a re-creation of the old brass foundry, which operated here on and off from the late 1600s until the 1960s. The building is now part of the town's small but interesting (and free!) museum. In fact brass-making was revived here for a little while in the earlier years of the museum's operation, but eventually modern safety standards caught up with it to the extent that it couldn't be sufficiently modernised at a sensible cost or without losing its historic character. Since then the foundry has made use of exhibits like this, multimedia presentations, etc.

I do actually remember seeing brass being made here before the museum foundry had to shut up shop in 1996. As a child I was brought here by my parents (I grew up only a few miles away) and it was quite an exciting sight. Cramped, noisy and -- what I'm sure sealed its fate -- very, very dusty! We visitors had to enter by a different door to the workers, and we were kept several metres away behind a perspex screen. Given that molten brass has a melting point of about 950 °C, it was sensible to keep us away from the furnaces! Sadly I can't find a video of Bewdley brass-making in those days, which is a pity.

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Today's U-turn on Winter Fuel Allowance payments is arguably fairly reasonable in its intent, in that it means truly wealthy pensioners will not receive WFA but those on average incomes will. Put like that, it sounds fine, and in principle I can get behind it. The snag is... well, the several snags are:

1) The government has insisted, loudly, since last year that on no account would they do this, and that anyone suggesting they'd U-turn was not telling the truth. The "anyones" were telling the truth; the government wasn't.
2) Rachel Reeves has acquired a reputation as an extremely poor Chancellor who neither sticks by her commitments nor acknowledges U-turns. This will make that reputation even worse.
3) The new limit will be £35,000 a year, per person. But a couple on a combined income of £69,000 with no mortgage is much wealthier than the large majority of working people, especially those with children to support.
4) We're told that whether someone reaches the £35,000 mark will be decided via income tax returns. But most pensioners who have no other income don't do tax returns in the first place.
5) The change will cost £1.2 billion. Where's that coming from? Almost nobody believes Reeves' comment that the economy is suddenly doing sufficiently better to afford this.
6) There's already a strong sense that wealthier pensioners are uniquely shielded from cuts while everyone else suffers -- the triple lock is another example. This looks like strengthening that feeling.
7) If previously announced public spending, eg the extra money for public transport outside London, is cut again to pay for this then there will be absolute carnage in Labour's support in the regions.
8) The UK's demographics mean that the pensioner:worker ratio is becoming ever more tilted towards pensioners. If current trends continue, this change will become less affordable, not more.
9) One way of ameliorating this is by allowing more immigration -- but this is becoming politically toxic. England (specifically) is the most densely populated non-tiny country in Europe.
10) Nigel Farage, who pushed for this change, now has a clear win. Everyone knows that Reform's economics are far more fantastical than Labour's, but it doesn't seem to affect its polling.

Other than that, it's absolutely fine...

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128/365: Colliers Country Stores
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I was treated to breakfast by someone today at the Colliers. This is a pub-restaurant a few miles west of Bewdley, near the small village of Clows (rhymes with "cows") Top. Their breakfast baps are truly excellent -- I went for sausage, bacon and tomato today. Then it was off to the next-door shop you see here. It sells some ordinary things, which are frankly expensive, but of more interest to me are the local pies and pasties, Bennetts ice cream (my favourite farmhouse brand) and cider. All of these were acquired today, so I think it counts as a successful mission! The shop also sells a few locally made ornaments and such -- you can just see some of the wooden animals (reindeer and rabbits) inside the outer door.