Vote for your children

If you would give up your life for them...

When my daughter was young she was bullied relentlessly at school. It took her some time to open up to us about it, but when we realised what was happening we contacted the headmaster.

A very long a troubled story short, it had transpired that the school had lost its pastoral teachers due to budget cuts and so we had to rely on one teacher who had to deal with issues within the school in only a couple of hours a day.

After multiple meetings with this teacher, my daughter getting excluded from classes to sit with other children who were bullied (work that one out?) and a threat of criminal sanction we had to take her out of school to be homeschooled.

You see, my wife works in the NHS and we were struggling to get our daughter into school. She was having full-on panic attacks and it was getting worse. I was off work one day and witnessed the sheer terror my daughter was going through- it was heartbreaking to see and I asked for an urgent meeting with the headmaster and part-time pastoral teacher.

It transpired that if we could not get her into school to sit alone most of the time away from the kids who bullied her, and then have to see them at break times, we would receive a citation. So, it was either put our daughter through huge anxiety every day or remove her from school. The citation would have meant my wife would lose her job and the consequences for my daughter would have been even worse.

During a very heated discussion it was admitted to me that-

The school had to protect its reputation

They had no budget left to deal with children who were targeted

The ring leader who caused all of the bullying had 176 marks against her for behaviour, but because she was classed as 'vulnerable' due to family circumstances they could not remove her, instead punishing her victims.

I explained that they were simply keeping her in school until she ended up in jail one day- they just sat there and nodded. I literally screamed at them and removed my daughter from school at that moment- this was what she wanted and more importantly, what she desperately needed.

So, we took up the challenge of homeschooling and were surprised by what was needed and what support we would get for saving the government approx. £6,000 a year by doing the educating ourselves.

We received one questionnaire and that was it. No response to the parts we ticked explaining what help we needed and no intention to check on how we were educating her. Literally nothing. She could be watching TV all day and no one in the government would give a damn.

Now, we are responsible parents and will do all we can for our kids, but that is almost certainly not the case for all parents which may explain the number of scooter gangs and knife violence in London and elsewhere.

With a lot of time spent and of course a lot of money on books (you don't even get help for books) we were able to educate her. We had to pay for tutors as well and spend a lot of time re-learning ourselves to help. Strangely, you do not need to spend all day educating a child; when you include breaks and calculate the amount of direct and indirect teaching they get in a normal school day it is well under 2 hours. The key is ensuring the child does the work they need to do on their own, and from an educational perspective she came out with decent grades in a range of subjects.

However, during this time she needed help for her mental health and that has never been available. She was registered with CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) who put her on a waiting list at the age of 12. A call was received 1 month before her 18th birthday to say they were releasing her from their service as she was about to become an adult. In those 6 years, they offered zero help or contact.

Multiple trips to accident and emergency, suicide attempts, GP appointments, paying for private psychologists, medication etc etc. We have tried everything with no help at all from the NHS. There is none available.

To this day I am dealing with seniors in the NHS as her current treatment, as an adult, is lacklustre and sporadic at best, and still the battle goes on to give her the kind of life she deserves.

My son is 3 years older than my daughter. He went to the same school and did fairly well at his exams with no bullying issues or problems. He was lucky because all of the government cuts had not hit by that point, but it is apparent that in those 3 years the government had degraded my daughter's opportunities significantly. There could be an element of the growing popularity of social media within this, but this is about much more than my children. Millions of children are suffering in a variety of ways because of this government.

He worked hard at his A Levels and then went to University to do law which resulted in a first class honours degree. We were so proud on graduation day and now the trick is to use that degree to get a decent career.

The problem is that he and so many of his friends are struggling to find decent jobs. He wants to work in London, but to be able to do that he has to pay massive rents and be able to see a career path. If he had passed his degree 10 years earlier he would already have a good job, his own home and potentially even kids, but in a country where the average first time buyer is 35 years old the obstacles are much higher now.

He is doing everything right and is working full time plus doing Amazon Flex for extra money to save up for a deposit, but everything is still a barrier and this government has done absolutely nothing to help younger people benefit the country they live in and to feel wanted.

I will always vote for my children and the past decade and a half has taught me that I will never vote Conservative again.

Seeing how my wife has had to work in the NHS for the past 15 years has been dispiriting; many extra hours done for free, no lunches or breaks (the NHS runs on goodwill), the stress of near misses and the grief of seeing people die when they shouldn't is hard. And yet we have more than 7.5 million people on waiting lists for care, a government that will not negotiate with junior doctors and the equivalent of working in a battlefield hospital every single day. These people are saints, many of them were not born here, and yet they face violence and derision every day from so many.

Losing my job to what was effectively fire and re-hire was eye-opening. My colleagues and I were paid well, had decent pensions and my employer decided to shut every building we were in and replace us with new hires on half the money, with no experience and with much reduced pension options. These people are offered no respect, limited training and a career path that has a massive dead end sign in it only a few yards up the road.

I can see how my previous employer is now working, but it goes wider than that. Zero hours contracts, low pay, the need to pay into private pensions, a lack of worker's rites and no attempt to grow the skills of employees to progress. They are becoming fodder again and are only there to improve the dividends for shareholders and the profits for the owners.

We have shit, literally shit, in so many of our waterways and no new reservoirs being built for many decades.

The justice system is in a mess and has a conviction rate for rape of less than 2%. It takes years to bring most cases to court and shoplifting is practically ignored if the stolen value is below £200.

This government removed 20,000 police and then many years later added roughly the same number of police, in a population that grew significantly during that time.

The list of failure is endless-

Local services (councils running out of money- potholes, rubbish collection etc etc)

PPE (billions lost to government cronies)

Partygate (parties in Downing Street while the Queen sat alone at her husband's funeral)

Housing (not enough houses for the population resulting in higher rents, prices)

Liz Truss crashing the economy and destroying the financial lives of so many

Thousands more food banks

Child poverty increasing

Letting prisoners out early due to lack of space

Cost of living crisis

Grenfell Tower - no lessons learned

Millions on Rwanda plan wasted

HS2 stopped after spending millions building it

Levelling Up was bullshit and never helped anyone

And of course BREXIT! I haven't time to go back into that one, but it feeds into a lot of the problems above.

I state that I vote for my children and that is of course true, but the reality is that this government is a disgrace in so many ways that they would never deserve my vote.

We need to move on, we need change of any kind, and while Labour are not as ambitious as many people want them to be, I think all of the above stops them from doing much apart from trying to keep us surviving. We can only hope there is then a way to improve the country for our younger generation.