Give a Labour Party run council some taxpayers money and it’s almost certain that they will do something a bit dodgy with it. A good example is this questionable behaviour from Barnsley council.
Barnsley Council’s Public Health Team have put out a survey trying to find out what are the ‘well-being needs’ of the town’s LGBTQWERTYOP residents. The odd thing about what would normally be a run of the mill waste of public money was that the Barnsley’s health department was asking for responses from those aged 0 to 28. That’s rather a broad age range and at least 16 years of that range would be under the age of consent. Here’s the digital poster that they put out.
As can be imagined Barnsley Council got a LOT of pushback on this. Before the council nuked the thread containing the dubious survey poster, there were a lot of people asking awkward questions about this council’s attitude to safeguarding. There was also a comment from a local LGBT organisation who were alluding to the fact that they were not consulted on this survey nor were their services asked for in relation to the survey. Therefore if this comment from the local LGBT group is correct then this abomination of a poster that completely disregards safeguarding was possibly cooked up from within Barnsley Council’s Public Health Team itself.
Even being charitable and assuming that the age range starting at ‘0’ is some sort of ‘production error’, something that can happen to anyone in any organisation* and the lower age was meant to be 16, the age of consent, to allow this document to fly in the wild without it being properly checked, represents a massive and worrying degree of incompetence. With written material errors can always creep in which is why publicity material of any kind should be checked, rechecked and double checked before it goes out. If not there can be organisational embarrassment at best or, as in this case, justifiable criticism of the document and what it appeared to represent.
As I said earlier the council’s Public Health Department deleted the original Twitter thread (dead link above) and tried to make the best of their own self-inflicted mess. Barnsley Council came out fighting, or rather whining, and put out this statement.
Let’s examine the statement from Barnsley Council. It’s Pravda level bullshit I’m afraid.
First of all I bet they’ve had loads of comments and rightly so. Even if this was a ‘production error’ it’s still pretty bad and should have been responded to better than the council has done. This digital poster was not merely ‘badly worded’ the, very prominent age range, given in this poster explicitly aimed the LGBT survey at babies and toddlers amongst other ages who cannot legally consent to sex. It could have been quite possible to include those teenagers who are of a minority sexuality and not get accused of being groomers by having the lower age as 16, the legal age of consent. I really don’t buy the council’s excuse of not wanting to exclude younger people as there were ways and means for them to do so without making the council look like some sort of Nonce Harbour.
The second paragraph is breathtaking in its stench of bullshit. The original thread, as far as I could see before the council nuked it, was not a ‘platform for hate speech’ but merely the justifiable anger of ordinary people who see in this poster Barnsley Council flushing any concept of safeguarding down the toilet. I did have to laugh at the council’s whine about ‘thinking about what we say online’ when it was the council’s original dodgy poster that has stirred up this furore. If the council had not sent this disastrous image out then they would not have got the justified criticism that they have got. Maybe Barnsley Council should have had someone look over this poster before it went out and say ‘hang on a minute’ and ask why the council wanted to know about the sexuality and gender identity of newborns and toddlers? Maybe there was no such person available in the Public Health Department who was able to do this? Or it could be the case that safeguarding barriers and policies in Barnsley Council are so lax and have broken down so thoroughly that nobody in any position to say no to this poster thought there was anything wrong with it. This council has royally screwed up and are now using accusations of ‘hate speech’ to cover their arses. Shameful behaviour all round in my view.
Moving on to the final paragraph which is characterised by bluster such as ‘we carried out the survey and it was a success’ with boilerplate bollocks statements about ‘inclusivity’, virtue signalling about their services for ‘LGBT’ and the usual empty phrases such as ‘stronger together’. Unfortunately the whining statement that Barnsley Council has put out, a statement that dishonestly claims that genuine complaints about the appropriateness of the original digital poster, has not calmed things down. If they’d said ‘Sorry we screwed up in a really bad way and forgot to proof read’ then some slack might have been cut for Barnsley Council. Sadly the council did not do this. They used weasel phrases such as ‘badly worded’ and tried to smear critics as being purveyors of ‘hate speech’. The comment by the council cannot hide the fact that this image could ever have been sent to press/pixel without anyone in the council noticing that it was more than a little ‘off’ and I don’t think that the council’s statement is going to make this issue go away. There will be many people who will still be unconvinced about the probity of the poster and those behind it and who might be wondering if there are a number of hard drives of Barnsley Council employees which might need to be checked.
*I am still haunted by a near miss many years ago, thankfully caught by double checking the document before it was despatched, of writing a letter, a quite important one, in which I spelled the name of the country ‘Libya’ as ‘Labia’.
