"The most sense I've heard in months"

Rarely have I seen someone set a room alight in the way that Camila Batmanghelidjh did at today’s Fig lunch.

In a busy agency, it’s hard to get people to sit down for five minutes, let alone for a full hour. But sit down we did for Camila.

Her sobering assessment of August’s riots gave us all pause for thought.

In the aftermath of the turbulence that engulfed our capital earlier this month, we’ve all been guilty of finger-pointing, of knee-jerk reactions, and of snap judgments. It’s perhaps easier to vilify behaviour that seems alien to you than it is to try to understand it.

But Camila, whose charity Kids Company works with 14,000 of London’s most socially-deprived children, cut through all that middle-England moral outrage by giving the riots a human face.

She spoke passionately of the flaws in our welfare system; she shone a spotlight on the bureaucratic machinations that do Britain’s most vulnerable children a disservice; and she ruefully noted the lack of will in Whitehall to tackle these issues with the requisite scale or sensitivity.

One thing became clear very quickly: the system isn’t working. Our antiquated approach to social care dates back to Victorian times. And its problems are only exacerbated by a pervasive and pernicious discourse that pillories Britain’s underprivileged.

What can be done?

Looking at the magnitude of the problem, you’d be forgiven for feeling that it’s a losing battle: 1.6m victims of child abuse. More young people in prison than in any other European country. An 88% rate of recidivism. A public that is, at best, inert and, at worst, hostile. And a government more concerned with making crowd-pleasing punitive gestures than with getting to the root of the problem.

It’s a big task indeed. But Camila left us feeling galvanized and eager to act.

Who says one woman can’t change the world?

Matt Kissane