Britain is in dire need of more foster parents. Fostering has been in the news a lot lately, and much of it has been discouraging, but the Government's announcement a couple of weeks ago that there will be a new charter for fostering provided a glimmer of light among all the darkness. Tim Loughton, the minister for children, said: "This charter makes it clear that these foster parents should be able to play the role of any parent looking after his or her own children, and they should have the back up of the local authority to be able to do that."
Loughton mentioned things like haircuts and sleepovers - things that some local authorities make foster parents seek permission for - as "things that we would take for granted with our own children", that foster parents should also be able to do freely. The Department for Education also weighed in according to the BBC report on the matter, saying "the charter was designed to make it clear that a foster child should be treated as part of the family, and their views taken seriously".
Great stuff, especially when you consider that one of the things any parent has to do is to talk frankly with their kids, to answer their questions honestly. It's the role of the parent to let their children find their own way, but not without guidance and advice. Inevitably, children won't always do what the parents want them to do, and the parents don't love them any the less for that. Yet it would be completely wrong for those parents to say "I think what you're doing is fine" if they thought it was morally wrong.
Therefore if the fostering charter is to work, it should reverse the stupid decisions made around Eunice and Owen Johns. The Johns are an ordinary couple with ordinary mainstream views. They applied to be foster parents, willing to take on any children and love them as their own, accepting them as they are, nurturing them, protecting them... in a word, parenting them. The Johns are Christians but that doesn't mean they would be pushing their beliefs onto the foster children - it just means that if someone asked them about their beliefs, they would explain their views.
The mainstream Christian belief that sex belongs only inside a marital relationship does not stop those that hold that belief from loving those that have sex outside of marriage - from accepting them, protecting them, nurturing them, loving them. But the Johns were not allowed to be foster parents simply because they hold that belief. It's not something they would have ever raised with their foster children, unless the foster children asked them for advice or their opinions on sexuality. Whatever the children's beliefs and actions, the Johns would have treated them the same way. No discrimination, no lack of acceptance, no inequality, no undervaluing of diversity. Yet just because they held that view - even without the intention of ever expressing it unless explicitly asked - the Johns' application was rejected and a court disgracefully upheld that decision.
Somewhat bizarrely, the judges said "No one is asserting that Christians - or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims - are not fit and proper persons to foster or adopt. No-one is contending for a blanket ban." Yet Christianity, Judaism and Islam all teach that sex outside of marriage is morally incorrect. If that wasn't the reason for refusing the Johns' application, then what was?
There are lots of Christian parents in this country. Not all of us are good parents, but the vast majority are - and certainly being a Christian does not make you a bad parent. Yet, apparently, it does make you a bad foster parent. If the Government are genuine about making sure foster parents can treat their foster children the way they would treat their own children, they must be allowed to have, and to express, views on sexuality - including that they believe some practices to be morally wrong. Is that really so much to ask?
How many tories does it take to recognise a light bulb?
This morning it was widely reported that the Army was wasting huge amounts of money by buying ordinary 65p light bulbs for £22. This was all based on a story in the rarely accurate tabloid "news"-paper, The Sun, which cited an invoice leaked to them by a soldier working in the stores of an Army base. It was met by a reaction from the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, who described it as an inexcusable waste, saying "This is classic evidence of how Labour wasted taxpayers' money and shows a complete lack of common sense."
The invoice reads as follows:
The invoice reads as follows:
INTERNAL ISSUE VOUCHER
Basic price is 22.51 per DofQ as at 18-JUN-10
Item: 51WR 6240-99-9965601 LAMPFILAMENT
Well I'm no expert but that doesn't sound like your everyday run-of-the-mill light bulb to me, and indeed the Ministry of Defence confirmed that later this morning: "It was a precision-made lamp filament for the Watchman radar. The MoD purchases about five per year."
The Sun article says "The Sun launched a War On Waste campaign last year, calling on readers to report bunglers who throw around public money." Well, in my view it's high time the media launched an internal campaign of their own to stop the "bunglers" posing as journalists spewing out wildly innaccurate stories whose only purpose is attack those who strive to deliver excellent public services and defend our country.
Similarly, we need to stop the "bunglers" who somehow managed to find jobs as government ministers from taking more heed of tabloid newspaper stories than of the experts in their own departments. If Liam Fox had bothered to enquire within the MoD before blurting out his attack on his predecessors, he could have saved himself from demonstrating the idiotic incompetence we witnessed from him today.
Update:
The MoD have since responded again, this time saying (according to the BBC) that the "the thrust of the Sun's story was correct." In other words, there are some dodgy procurement practices in the armed forces that mean sometimes more money is spent on items than it should - but there's no mention of the specifics around the light filament invoice, which is central to the Sun's story and to Liam Fox's comments.
What has almost certainly happened here is that the ministers have realised how silly they looked and ordered the civil servants in the MoD to release a statement admitting to some unspecific, vague guilt around overspending - hence the assertion about "the thrust" - but that fails to address the fact that the example that was held aloft above all others - that of the £22 light filament -relates to a specialist piece of equipment and not a generic light bulb. If this government is to reduce the UK's deficit without doing undue harm to our services, they need to have much better attention to detail than that.
Update:
The MoD have since responded again, this time saying (according to the BBC) that the "the thrust of the Sun's story was correct." In other words, there are some dodgy procurement practices in the armed forces that mean sometimes more money is spent on items than it should - but there's no mention of the specifics around the light filament invoice, which is central to the Sun's story and to Liam Fox's comments.
What has almost certainly happened here is that the ministers have realised how silly they looked and ordered the civil servants in the MoD to release a statement admitting to some unspecific, vague guilt around overspending - hence the assertion about "the thrust" - but that fails to address the fact that the example that was held aloft above all others - that of the £22 light filament -relates to a specialist piece of equipment and not a generic light bulb. If this government is to reduce the UK's deficit without doing undue harm to our services, they need to have much better attention to detail than that.
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