Ed vows: I’ll be leader on election day
ED MILIBAND last night vowed to lead Labour into the election, despite the clamour of criticism against him.
In a Facebook message marking six months until the election, he said Labour will fight ‘street by street, house by house’ to win. He said he was proud to lead the party and would still be in charge on election day – May 7.
It also emerged yesterday that Mr Miliband is being urged by Labour MPs to give up hopes of securing a decent Commons majority and focus resources on ‘limping’ into No 10.
Senior Labour figures warn the leadership must slash the number of target seats from 106 to as few as 70. A shadow minister told Mail Online: ‘We are not going to win 106 more seats. Somebody needs to have a difficult conversation with the people in 30 or 40 of those seats and say “look, we can’t justify giving you extra money when you’re not going to win”.’
On Facebook, Mr Miliband said: ‘There are exactly six months to go before a General Election which will decide the future direction of our country. Labour will fight and win this election street by street, house by house, taking our case to the people on every issue. That is how I am going to be spending the next six months.’
CARRYING two bulging supermarket bags, a 14-year-old Roma gypsy girl walks home from the shopping centre, where she has been chatting with friends. By law, children of her age should be at school — but Rebeca State spends her days begging on the streets of Manchester. The youngster’s feral existence came to national attention last week when Labour leader Ed Miliband was photographed rather sheepishly handing Rebeca money as she sat on the pavement as he walked past on his way to a conference. The hapless Mr Miliband was accused of colluding with criminality, because street begging is illegal under the Vagrancy Act. It is also linked with child prostitution, drug-taking and other anti-social behaviour.
Indeed, the founder of Big Issue, the magazine sold by the homeless, expressed deep concern. Writing in the Mail, John Bird said that giving to a beggar does nothing to alleviate the plight of the recipient in the longer term.
‘On the contrary,’ he warned, ‘it locks the beggar in a downward spiral of abject dependency.’
He pointed out that the girl — who makes £5 a day by holding out a plastic cup to passers- by — was also vulnerable to possible sexual exploitation.
No wonder that Romania’s child protection authorities, alerted to Rebeca’s begging by the Mail, are now investigating why she is in Britain; why she is no longer with her mother or father; and if, as a minor abroad living without an apparent guardian, she is at risk.
They are particularly keen to establish that she has not been trafficked to Manchester.
This swift action will put pressure on Greater Manchester’s police and social services, who are already under intense scrutiny after an ‘alarming’ report ten days ago suggested that close to 650 of the 3,242 under-18s reported missing in Greater Manchester in the first three months of 2014 are at risk of sexual exploitation or serious harm.
Social services have a duty of care to any child in their area, regardless
Traffickers force children to beg or pick pockets
of whether they are migrants or not.
Certainly, the police force has a lot of explaining to do about why it did not try to stop the dangerous lifestyle of the Romanian girl before she was photographed with Mr Miliband.
Questions that it faces include: why is a girl so young not at school? Why is she allowed to beg daily on streets where police officers regularly patrol? If the police knew about her, why did no one in authority do anything to help her?
A police spokesman said: ‘This individual has not gone under the radar and multi-agency plans are in place.’
A spokesperson for Manchester City Council said: ‘Rebeca has been known to us for a while and we have offered support, including making sure she has a school place. Beyond this it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to comment further.’
The Mail has pieced together the unfortunate girl’s story and how she came to be here begging.
She was brought up with ten siblings in Tandarei, a town 100 miles from Romania’s capital Bucharest which has a notorious reputation for trafficking children into Britain.
Tandarei has a Roma gipsy quarter with 2,000 residents. Over the past decade, its run-down and pot-holed streets have partly been transformed, and grand new houses built — the Tandarei palaces, as they have been dubbed. Many have marble floors and ostentatious pillars. There are BMWs or other smart cars on the driveways.
Scotland Yard believes that more than 100 of these houses have been built with the illicit proceeds of the Roma working illegally in Britain and milking our welfare system. Huge sums have been made from the trafficking of children to beg and thieve.
The scale of the criminality was exposed three years ago when a gang of Romanian gypsies, some of whom owned Tandarei ‘palaces’, were jailed for what a London judge described as a ‘flagrant’ abuse of our benefits’ system — netting them a total of £800,000.
Gang members commuted on regular budget flights to Britain. They used forged Home Office documents and birth certificates to claim
Her parents are living in Germany, relatives say
child benefits, housing handouts, tax credits and income support. They also brought children to Britain, forcing them to beg on the streets or become pickpockets.
Police in Britain and Romania estimated in 2011 that at least 160 of these child beggars and thieves had been trafficked to the UK from Romania in a very sophisticated operation.
Nicolas, an undercover police agent who infiltrated the Tandarei gypsy gangs, says legal contracts are drawn up between the trafficker and the impoverished families who ‘sell’ a child to them.
He says: ‘It’s a formal business arrangement. A trafficker will pay up to £20,000 for each child because of the huge sums he can get back. They are smuggled into England as a visitor and stay in the homes of trafficking gangs in Slough, London, Manchester and other cities.’
The child will normally be given a new name and a false birth certificate. Many are moved around the country, using bogus identity papers to make multiple claims for child benefit. Nicolas says the money is then sent back to Romania via High Street money transfer offices.
There is no evidence that Rebeca is a victim of trafficking, but there are worrying signs.
This week, in Tandarei, we found two adjoining houses on a dishevelled plot of land where she once lived with her parents and her brothers and sisters, who are now aged between three and 24.
From here, her parents, Ion and Marioara, regularly travelled with their brood between Romania and Britain.
The couple rented properties in Slough, Berkshire, and then Ilford in East London. Birth records show that two of their sons, now aged 11 and 13, were born in British hospitals.
The same official records show that Rebeca’s parents did not have jobs in the UK. (It is believed they were Big Issue sellers). Unable even to write her own name, Rebeca’s mother had to sign the birth register with a fingerprint.
This week, the State family’s houses in Romania are empty and locked up. Relatives told us that Ion and Marioara have settled in Germany and visit Tandarei only
rarely, just to check that there have been no break-ins.
Rebeca’s aunt, Ramona, who lives in Tandarei, says: ‘I last saw her father here two years ago. When he lived here, Ion received some small state payments in exchange for being the local street cleaner.’
Her husband David (Ion’s brother) said he had no idea that Rebeca was in Manchester on her own.
‘My brother has lots of children, but I only know two of their names because the family spent so much time in your country,’ he said.
Meanwhile, at the local Spiru Haret primary school, the headmistress remembers Rebeca and was shocked when someone showed her a photo on the internet of her former pupil begging from Mr Miliband.
‘It broke my heart,’ says Nicoleta Toma. ‘That is no life at all. I am desperately sad for her. It is not nice to see one of my pupils begging on the street like that.
‘She was a bright girl, and quite talented at music. She was clever in class and could have made something of her life if her parents had kept her in school here.
‘But Roma families don’t tend to keep their children in education for many years because they go travelling and, yes, use the children to beg abroad.
‘Rebeca’s family had times when they would go off to England for several months. She would come back and had learned more English, so that was a good thing for her.’
School records confirm that Rebeca stopped attending the school in 2012, when she disappeared from Tandarei with her parents. Her seven-year-old sister was due to start classes that same year but did not turn up for registration.
And so the story switches to Manchester, where Rebeca now lives in a four- bedroom house rented by Livia Stoica, a 34-year-old Romanian who says she is the girl’s aunt and has nine children of her own living at the house.
However, Rebeca’s relatives in Romania say they have never heard of Mrs Stoica and have doubts that she is related to her. Whatever the truth, Mrs Stoica says she has been in Britain for seven years and pays £720 a month in rent. To cover the upkeep of such a large family, she receives £550 in state benefits each week, which are believed to include child benefits
‘She was a bright girl at school, quite talented’
and tax credits as a self-employed Big Issue seller. Mrs Stoica denies getting housing benefit.
Romanians have legally been able to settle in Britain since 2007, when their country joined the EU.
At that time, the British government applied transitional restrictions on their ability to work, but these were lifted in January. Yet many, like Mrs Stoica, have used a legal loophole which let the self-employed (including Big Issue sellers) obtain residency status — entitling them a panoply of state benefits and services, such as child benefits, housing handouts and tax credits.
Mrs Stoica told us this week that she was looking after Rebeca because her parents live in Tandarei. However, she appeared completely unaware of the fact — confirmed by the girl’s relatives — that the couple have now settled in Germany.
Previously, Mrs Stoica had lived at another address in Manchester. Neighbours there told us that the landlord had asked her and her family to leave at the end of last year following complaints about noise.
One neighbour recalled the time she’d lived there because there was a large number of expensive cars parked outside, including a new black BMW 5 series, although it is not confirmed that these cars belonged to the Stoica family.
Romanian court papers seen by the Mail this week have revealed that Rebeca’s older sister, 22-yearold Carmen, was banned from entering Belgium after ‘creating public disorder’ by aggressively begging and carrying out what the courts called ‘street scams’ on unsuspecting people.
The Belgian authorities applied to a Romanian court for the banning order, asking for it to last three years. After more evidence was obtained, in July 2010, the judge barred Carmen from Belgium for just one year. It is not known where Carmen now lives, although she has not returned to Tandarei.
As for Rebeca, what the future holds for her is anyone’s guess. Earlier this week, she was still living at the house in Manchester with Mrs Stoica and preparing, no doubt, to go out begging this weekend.
Meanwhile, the authorities in Romania are investigating whether she should be returned there.
Cristina Cuculas, director of the Labour, Family and Social Protection Ministry in Bucharest, says: ‘We will ask the authorities in the Tandarei area to see on what legal grounds this Romanian girl was taken to the UK.’
She said they would also look ‘into any trafficking aspects of the case’.
‘If it is discovered that she is at risk in a foreign country, the authorities might ask for her return. We will take all the necessary measures (to protect her)’.
Let’s hope that the police, social workers and education officials in Manchester take the same sense of responsibility. But the prospects, sadly, do not look at all good.
Only last week, Rebeca told us that officers regularly took her to the police station after they found her begging in street. They questioned her, asked her age … and then drove her home.