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Watch: "I Am a Ukrainian" viral video

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The American-made video has been criticised for oversimplifying the crisis in Ukraine - but its message, by an anonymous Ukrainian known only as "Yulia", is impassioned and compelling.


Most Romanians and Bulgarians already had full access to benefits before 2014

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Oxford researchers have now found that, last year, 59.1 per cent of working migrants from the two countries were self-employed, which gave them the same access to tax credits and housing benefits as any other self-employed EU migrant in the UK.

New research reveals most Romanians and Bulgarians working in the UK were unaffected by the “transitional controls” in place until the start of this year.

According to much of the media, these controls were the only thing holding back floods of migrants. Even now, nearly two months after Romanians and Bulgarians gained full access to the UK’s labour market, the controls are still in the news.

The Telegraph reports numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK reached a “record high” last year, even before controls were removed. The Mail meanwhile claims “one in ten new roles” created last year went to migrants from the two countries.

But what if it turns out most Romanian and Bulgarian migrants were already unaffected by the controls? That is the conclusion of research carried out by the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory which builds on an article previously published by The Conversation on the existence of benefits tourism.

When the two nations joined the EU in 2007, richer countries were worried about a possible influx of low skilled migrants. Temporary restrictions – “transitional controls” – were therefore put in place to limit Romanians and Bulgarians' access to certain jobs, primarily those in agriculture and food processing. Access to the benefits system was also limited.

However, these controls did not apply to self-employed workers. Oxford researchers have now found that, last year, 59.1 per cent of working migrants from the two countries were self-employed. That compares with just 13.9 per cent of UK nationals.

Self-employed status gave Romanian and Bulgarian migrants the same access to tax credits, housing benefits and so on as any other self-employed EU migrant in the UK, even while the transition controls were still in place. Unlike his or her fellow nationals with a single employer, a self-employed Romanian enjoyed the same status in the UK as a freelance worker from France or Italy.

But this doesn’t mean things were rosy, or that the “benefit tourism” stories were right all along. In fact, quite the opposite.

As the Migration Observatory report makes clear, the transition controls meant registration as self-employed was “less of a choice than a necessity” for Romanians and Bulgarians coming to work in the UK. Controls may have been easily evaded, but they seem to have simply pushed migrants into what the Romanian Embassy called last year a “grey area of the labour market”.

Liliana Harding, a lecturer in economics at the University of East Anglia, describes the creation of “a secondary labour market, where (self-employed) workers are deprived of various social and residence entitlements.” It may have also led to lower wages, as self-employed workers can avoid minimum wage rules.

This isn’t a great position to be in. “Migrants are easily exploitable”, points out Jon Fox of the University of Bristol, “but they work hard, and they pay in more than they take out.”

Carlos Vargas Silva, one of the author’s of the Migration Observatory’s analysis recognises public concern over what the end of transitional controls might bring. “But” he says, “these figures show that limits to welfare access included in the transitional controls did not affect the majority of Romanians and Bulgarians working in the UK since 2007.”

The Conversation

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Don't call the midwife: why we're obsessed with “natural” childbirth

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A new history of the Lamaze technique is balanced and impressive, but, like almost everything connected to childbirth, it is not entirely neutral or impassive.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

The typical birth narrative that you read online is a tale of harrowing disappointment. The mother had “spent months – if not years – dreaming” about her baby and her pain-medication-free birth. Often, it’s at home, where the mother fantasises that she will be “surrounded by my family, in an environment where I was free to walk around.” Ideally, the mother would even be able to reach down and pull her baby into the world herself. But, by dint of fate and unhappy circumstance, these moms are forced by medical professionals – sometimes even midwives or doulas – to have C-sections or epidurals. They are “treated disrespectfully or without compassion at that most vulnerable time.”

Read enough of these narratives and you’ll be convinced that the baby-industrial complex is a cold and harsh machine, where epidurals are pushed like marijuana from an aggressive street vendor and individual agency is dismissed.

But the reality is quite different. A new book, Lamaze: An International History by the historian Paula A Michaels, explains that the vast majority of modern American women are satisfied with their birth experiences. She doesn’t get into specifics on this particular matter, but she notes that according to a 2013 national survey of women’s childbearing experiences, “Mothers generally rated the quality of the United States maternity care system very positively.” 47 per cent said it was good, and 36 per cent said it was excellent.

Indeed, it’s my experience that even at big, impersonal city hospitals, the language and protocol surrounding maternity care is sensitive and catered to a woman’s desires. I recall the birthing plan that I was encouraged to fill out before I delivered at NYU Hospital. Would I like to move around during labour? Did I want pain medication offered to me immediately, or never? Did I want to delay umbilical cord clamping? (Studies show that this has benefits for the baby.) I remember looking at the crisp white sheet of paper with its cheerful check boxes and being mystified. Before receiving it, my “birth plan” consisted of going into the hospital when I started having contractions and leaving, at some point, with a baby in arms.

“We invite you to participate in the planning of your birth,” the NYU hospital’s website warmly announces. “We ask you to consider your preferences and beliefs that will make your birth experience meaningful to you and your family.” That’s a long way from the birthing gulag conjured up by disappointed new moms, and it’s a result, in part, of the adoption of Lamaze techniques in the US in the 1970s.

Michaels’s book offers a fascinating and detailed history of childbirth over the past century-plus and how what we refer to as Lamaze, but what is more technically known as “psychoprophylaxis,” fits into it. Michaels defines psychoprophylaxis as “a way of giving birth that attempts to manage labour pain primarily through psychological conditioning and without reliance on drugs.” The patterned “hee hee hoo hoo” breathing that is a staple of sitcom depictions of a Lamaze birth is intended to relax and distract a woman from the pain signals in her brain.

Though Lamaze was spread widely in the late ’60s and early ’70s by American feminists who were pushing back against a medical establishment that they saw as paternalistic, its roots go back to the 1930s, when a British physician named Grantly Dick-Read published a book called Natural Childbirth. Dick-Read’s Natural Childbirth was itself a kind of reaction to the established norms for middle- and upper-class birth. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, new state regulations about who could attend a woman during childbirth placed the majority of pregnant women in hospitals when they gave birth. Once birth became a formal, medical process, middle- and upper-middle-class women began asking for pharmacological pain relief. In 1915, Michaels notes, first-wave feminists were not agitating for a return to the home birth; they were arguing for twilight sleep during labour, because they thought it would liberate women from the discomforts of childbirth.

In Natural Childbirth, however, Dick-Read stated that childbirth is not inherently painful. “Women’s minds, not their bodies, were at the root of pain in childbirth and fear was ‘the greatest evil,’” Michaels writes of Dick-Read’s beliefs. The way to help women get out of their heads was through childbirth-education classes and greater support from husbands. Dick-Read promoted some insanely retrograde ideas – that birth pain is psychological; that women of the upper classes should be the ones having lots of babies – but other parts of his philosophy sound like they could have been cribbed from crunchy mommy blogs. Birth, Dick-Read wrote, is “an ecstasy of accomplishment that only women who have babies naturally [i.e., without anesthesia] appreciate.”

While Dick-Read’s methods were proliferating in the US and the UK in the ’40s and ’50s (though they never defined the dominant approach), a similar technique was devised in the Soviet Union. But there the impetus was different: a shortage of pain meds and a concomitant, statewide push for fecundity in devastated post-war Russia. There, psychoprophylaxis was developed and encouraged to improve the experience of the working classes. Like Dick-Read’s methods, psychoprophylaxis also relied on education for expectant mothers as a way to cut down on pain, which was, of course, all in their heads.

A French obstetrician named Ferdinand Lamaze picked up psychoprophylaxis when it was presented by Russian doctors at the 1951 International Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Lamaze promoted, on an international scale, the trained muscular relaxation and patterned breathing he learned from observing women giving birth in Russia.

When Lamaze was first imported to the US, it wasn’t synonymous with zero medication. In the mid-’60s, “a little Demerol or morphine to take the edge off pain and tension did not stand in the way of claiming success in achieving a ‘natural’ birth,” Michaels writes. It was only when countercultural ’60s values, which prized authentic experience above all else, took over Lamaze methods that pain medication was eschewed completely.

Also gone was the notion that childbirth pain was all in a woman’s head. Pharmacology-free childbirth was framed as empowering because the male medical establishment pushed drugs, and those drugs “desensitised women’s bodies and clouded their minds” during an experience that should be wholly natural. Despite the shift in framing, the language of Lamaze moms in the early ’70s was curiously similar to the language of Dick-Read. They wanted an experience that was “near ecstasy”.

Exclusive use of Lamaze without pharmacological pain relief fell out of fashion in the early ’80s as epidural anesthesia became widely available, and as scientific literature began showing that those complex breathing patterns didn’t really help mitigate pain. But Lamaze helped usher in a lot of birth practices that we now think of as commonplace, including childbirth-preparation classes, allowing the birthing mother to have a supportive partner of her choosing in the room with her, and the rise of hospital birthing centers, which provide things like hydrotherapy tubs and homey furnishings along with access to the regular maternity ward should anything go wrong.

Michaels's book is balanced and impressive, but, like almost everything connected to childbirth, it is not entirely neutral or impassive. Even as she admits that most women are happy with their childbirth experiences, she still pushes for systemic change in her conclusion. She believes that maternity coverage should be ordered by the “logic of care” instead of the “logic of choice”. Care is an open-ended process without boundaries, Michaels says, while choice is a matter of assessing the limited products on offer. The latter, she argues, gives women a false sense of empowerment. According to a “logic of care,” women would be able to have a doctor or midwife with whom they’d developed a rapport deliver their baby, instead of whoever is on call; doulas, a kind of birthing assistant, would also be available to whoever wanted them, instead of just to women wealthy enough to afford them. Doula rates vary depending on geographic location and level of experience, but range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

I don’t know that those measures are practical, or that they would even prevent the blogosphere from being “perennially abuzz with chatter of disappointing childbirth experiences,” as Michaels puts it. How do you guarantee that a certain obstetrician is available for every woman in labour? What if two women covered by the same doctor go into labour simultaneously at different hospitals? Isn’t a midwife allowed to have her own family emergencies that might supersede her job? What if your doula disagrees with your choices? Or the doula fights with the midwife? Will you still feel cared for and empowered?

I don’t mean to discount the bad experiences that women have during childbirth – those experiences are real and painful. But perhaps those are individual issues, rather than national ones, stemming, in part, from the unreasonably high expectations that we’ve put on the birth process. Our expectations are high because we choose to have children, and we have fewer of them. Before the pill and the sexual revolution, having children was socially expected and more difficult to prevent. As Jennifer Senior says in her new book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, “Adults often view children as one of life's crowning achievements, and they approach child-rearing with the same bold sense of independence and individuality that they would any other life project.”

But the other part of our high expectations may have to do with all of the new information we have about pregnancy and how our actions and environment could influence our fetuses. In her wonderful book, Origins, Annie Murphy Paul discusses the burgeoning scientific field of “fetal origins”. Paul writes that the discoveries of these researchers “have been cast as one long ringing alarm bell, one long line of doctors in white lab coats, shaking their fingers at pregnant women: No, Don't, Stop!” Your diet, your stress level, the air you breathe, and yes, how you give birth, can all affect your child. No wonder we are so concerned with how our children come into the world; we're told we could be screwing it all up just as they take their first breath.

As a result, we now emphasise our preparation in the run-up to the birth – all those birth classes to take and cord-clamping decisions to make – and yet, we leave the hospital almost entirely clueless about the mewling, fragile little bundles we’re spiriting home. Just like parenthood itself, birth is not always going to be something “ecstatic” or something that you can control, no matter how many boxes you’re allowed to check on your birth plan.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

Why it's time for football clubs to reintroduce standing areas

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The introduction of "safe-standing" at Premiership football grounds would allow clubs to reduce ticket prices and prove that clubs are prepared to listen to their fans.

The Fullwell End at Roker Park was where I first learned to love football. The football wasn’t great – despite glimmers of brilliance from the likes of Marco Gabbiadini, Sunderland spent most of their time before they left for the Stadium of Light in 1997 battling for survival in one division or another. I started watching Sunderland in our first, and thankfully only, season in the old third division and on the last game at Roker Park they were relegated from the Premiership. The bitter wind blowing in from the seafront made Roker Park one of the coldest sporting arenas of them all.

But the Fullwell End and Roker Park had an atmosphere all of its own. Sunderland players and fans spoke with pride and opposing fans spoke with trepidation about the famous "Roker Roar". When Sunderland moved on from Roker Park with a 3-0 win over Everton, I saw tears in the eyes of very tough men. There are no terraces at the Stadium of Light, nor are there terraces at any other Premier League ground. The reaction to Lord Justice Taylor’s report following the Hillsborough disaster signalled the end of standing in Premiership footballing grounds, with the famous old terraces being replaced by all-seater stadia.

Something was lost when we left Roker Park, with its history going back to 1897. And something was lost when football turned its back on the terraces. The atmosphere at some Premiership grounds borders on the sterile (obviously not when Sunderland are playing), with the shift away from any standing areas being a big cause in the changing atmosphere at football matches. All seater grounds are more expensive – as Crystal Palace fans pointed out recently, the cost of a ticket for away fans at Chelsea represents nine hours work for somebody paid the minimum wage. Since standing areas can accommodate a higher density of supporters, clubs will also be able to decrease ticket prices for hard-pressed fans.

As football has become increasingly corporatised and distant from its working class roots, fans have been left feeling disengaged from their clubs and their sport, with attendances falling in recent years. The issue of standing at football grounds is an area in which fans have expressed their views overwhelmingly and the clubs should show that they’re prepared to listen. Polls have shown that up to 90 per cent of football supporters support a return to standing at football grounds. It’s fans who turn up in the rain, wind and snow to make football the force it is today and the fans’ voice on this (and on many other issues) should be listened to. Football is a social game that is deeply rooted in communities and standing allows families and groups of friends to enjoy matches together without advance planning or dealing with seating charts.

The argument for allowing so-called "safe-standing" at Premiership football grounds is overwhelming. Safe-standing isn’t the same as old style terraces, but allows stands to be easily converted from seating to standing areas and back again at little cost. German grounds have safe-standing areas and we should be learning from their example. We were told that a move to all-seater stadia would help us win the bid to host the World Cup, only for Germany, with its standing areas to trump our bid and win the right to host the 2006 tournament.

Safe-standing is one example where German clubs are much more in touch with their fans than English clubs. A standing season ticket at Bayern Munich, the best team in Europe, cost £104. An Arsenal season ticket costs around ten times that. Bayern’s President, Uli Hoeness, said, "we do not think the fans are like cows, who you milk. Football has got to be for everybody."

Opponents of safe-standing often point towards the example of Hillsborough to argue that there should be no return to standing. And they’re right that we should do all that we can to make sure that there is never any repeat of that darkest day for British football. But even the Taylor Report suggested that Hillsborough was caused by poor policing, overcrowding and the disgraceful fences that were used to keep fans virtually caged. There’s no evidence that safe-standing is anything other than entirely safe.

It’s now 20 years since football grounds in the top division had to become all-seater. And, contrary to the predictions of football club chairmen and politicians at the time, many fans haven’t grown to love not standing at matches. Fans want to see a return to standing at football grounds and it’s clear that a return to standing wouldn’t pose any safety risks. Reintroducing standing areas would show that football clubs actually care about what fans think and there’s no reason for government to stand in the way of Premiership clubs who want to listen to their fans.

We need to end the childcare crunch on our families and the economy

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Families have been hit by a triple whammy in childcare: rising childcare costs, falling early years places and cuts to financial support.

Today's important report from the IPPR lays bare the difficulties David Cameron's childcare crunch is causing for parents and for our economy. The report shows that maternal employment rates in the UK are lower than the OECD average. It finds that if we had a childcare system that worked for working mothers, we'd be able to help an extra 150,000 women into work, benefiting the public finances by up to £1.5bn a year.

Yet families have been hit by a triple whammy in childcare under this government: rising childcare costs, up 30% since 2010, falling early years places and cuts to financial support. David Cameron's cost-of-living crisis has meant parents are struggling to make ends meet and it is even more difficult for work to pay. A recent survey for Mumsnet and Resolution Foundation recently found that a third of stay-at-home mums would like to work and a fifth of those in work wanted to work more hours but couldn't because of the soaring cost of childcare. Mothers working part-time earn about 22 per cent less per hour than women working full-time, with women reporting problems accessing before and after school care. The biggest employment gap is for mothers of three and four year olds.

Flexible and affordable high quality childcare can boost the economy and make a difference for mums and dads, helping them make choices about going back to work and to work the hours they choose. This not only helps grow the economy, but it helps tackle the unfair motherhood pay penalty women face when they return to work after having children. Labour is investing in childcare to grow our economy, help make work pay and give children the best start in life. Our plans to increase free childcare provision from 15 to 25 hours for three-and-four-year-olds with parents in work will make a real difference to families struggling under this government. It will give parents choice about increasing their hours or returning to work after caring for young children. Worth £1,500, parents will be able to work part-time without having to worry about childcare costs. Guaranteeing before and after school care in a local school will help parents with the logistical nightmare of before and after school care. This primary childcare guarantee will support parents balancing work and family life.

We know women who take career breaks face a pay and status penalty for the rest of their lives. Affordable, flexible high-quality childcare is part of the answer to ensuring that parents have choices to meet their aspirations for their families. There is a gap in support at the critical 0-2 years period and I'll continue to champion support for families at this crucial time when parents make choices about returning to work.

Labour understands this dilemma and is working to alleviate the childcare crunch families' face. As we move towards the election , childcare will be centre stage and this IPPR report shows just how high the stakes are for families and the economy if the government continues to get it wrong.

Lucy Powell MP is the shadow minister for childcare and children 

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