EQUITY demo against culture cuts

DEMO – TODAY – Tuesday 3 October at 12.00
Assemble – outside Scottish Parliament building

After abandoning plans for swingeing cuts to Scotland’s arts & culture industries in February this year, Culture Secretary Angus Robertson has suddenly announced the Scottish Government will reimpose a 10% funding cut just weeks before the next round of funding awards.

The Scottish Government is putting thousands of jobs at risk with this cut of millions of pounds into the sector.

Fair work in the culture sector will be impossible in the face of this cut, and it is trade union members who will suffer the consequences of job losses, lower pay, and precarious work.

Join our demo to demand Deputy First Minister Shona Robison and Culture Secretary Angus Robertson reverse these cuts immediately.

Step Up and Speak Out For Children plan Father’s Day protest

A newly-formed campaign group is to hold a protest outside the Scottish Parliament tomorrow to highlight their campaign for equal parental custody.

The Step Up & Speak Out for Children event at Holyrood will take place from 10am – 1pm:

Dear Editor

We are a new campaign group aiming to change the Children Act 1989. We have recently discovered that non-residing parents are being consistently let down by the current family law system.

Parents are still using their children as a way of revenge for the breakdown of their relationship and are getting away with it. I, myself was a child victim of the system 30 years ago. And not one thing has improved.

60% of women have admitted to obstructing contact between a child and their father.

Over 1 million children in the UK have zero contact with their father.

Only 21% of child arrangement court orders award joint custody.

Women fight every day for equal rights and opportunities, me being one of them.

However, they still want to hold power over men using dirty tactics and playing God with their children’s lives. We can’t have it all ways.

There has been a significant rise in mothers and fathers violating court orders since the lockdown began. Even though government legislation states that contact can be maintained. By the time the family courts get around to enforcing these orders, lockdown will be over. That is months of love and support lost for a child who needs both parents in their lives.

Women are being encouraged by lawyers to lie in court about domestic abuse so they receive legal aid. This in turn, is preventing the child access to their loving parent for months, sometimes years before the matter is resolved by a judge.

We are fighting to make shared custody mandatory in the breakdown of a relationship, proving that the non-residing parent has parental responsibility to said child.

We are holding a protest this Fathers Day outside the Scottish Parliament Building in unison for all the fathers who are being held hostage by the system and cannot be with their children on Sunday.

It is time that this issue is brought back into the forefront of peoples minds. We need to stand up for our children.

Thank you for reading.

Kindest Regards

Stacey Menelaws,

Step Up & Speak Out For Children