The semi-detached house in which Peter Connelly spent the last hours of his brief life is bland and unremarkable. A slightly shabby prewar slice of suburbia, with bay windows and a side door, it does not stand out in a nondescript street a few minutes from the Tottenham Hotspur football ground. You would walk past without taking a second look. Which is exactly what the locals did. Of the 12...
Six care workers at the Winterbourne View care home were given prison terms on Friday for “cruel, callous and degrading” abuse of disabled patients. The judge at Bristol crown court also condemned five other staff members at the private home in Hambrook, South Gloucestershire, who received suspended sentences. Judge Neil Ford told the defendants their behaviour triggered “widespread feelings of...
To the broader public, Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, has emerged as the calm voice of authority, the clear-headed expert at the helm of the nation’s strategy to fend off coronavirus. But in medical circles, Whitty has long been regarded as a legend. Those who work with him speak in glowing terms: amazing, extraordinary, fantastic, brilliant, though perhaps not so good...
On Thursday 26 March, Britons stood just inside their front doors, a little unsure if they would be the only ones taking part in a very unBritish ritual. It was three days since Boris Johnson had announced a draconian lockdown, and, in a horrifyingly fearful time, it was not difficult to feel immense gratitude to those health workers risking everything to save lives. But was anyone else really...
The government is launching a national review into the killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes to protect other children from harm and identify improvements needed in the agencies that came into contact with him before his death. Announcing the review on Sunday, the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, said the government would not rest until it had the answers it needed. Arthur was tortured...
Middle-class drug users are to be targeted as part of a 10-year strategy to be announced by Boris Johnson’s government with a heavy focus on war-on-drugs-era punishment. So-called “lifestyle” users of class A drugs face losing their passports or driving licences under proposals designed to target wealthy professionals who the government will argue are driving exploitative practices with their...
Sykes has previously spoken about her youngest son being diagnosed with autism at the age of three, and said it gave her the push she needed to leave her marriage. “I couldn’t be in a marriage that I wasn’t happy in, in order to help him,” she told The Hot Mess Mums Club podcast. The model and activist Christine McGuinness recently revealed she had been diagnosed as autistic. Appearing on ITV’s...
Frank Field, the former Labour MP for Birkenhead, has revealed that he is terminally ill as he backed a law that would allow assisted dying. Field, 79, represented the Merseyside constituency for almost 40 years – making him one of the longest-serving MPs in the Commons – before forming his own party and losing the seat in the 2019 general election. He was later made a crossbench peer. During a...
The wages of public sector workers including teachers, police officers and civil servants are to rise after Rishi Sunak announced that a pay freeze imposed last year would end in April 2022. The freeze affected almost half of public-sector workers, with exemptions for NHS workers and those earning less than £24,000. It will be some time before workers find out what their rise will be, and whether...
NHS staff have voted overwhelmingly to oppose the government’s 3% pay rise as Britain’s biggest health union warned thousands of workers are “fed up of being taken for granted”. Publishing the results of a consultation exercise that ran over the summer, Unison said the majority (80%) of health staff were not happy with the pay increase and want to challenge the government. Only one in five (20%)...