Alarm raised over problem debt
ONE in six people in the UK are “living with problem debt”, the Money Advice Service, an independent service, set up by the Government, said this week. Its annual report said that 8.3 million, or 15.9 per cent of, people were likely to find meeting monthly bills a “heavy burden” and/or miss more than three bill payments within a six-month period. The debt charity StepChange said that the average debt of the people it helped was £14,367 in the first half of the year.
Activist’s undercover year with the ‘Alt-Right’
AN UNDERCOVER investigation into the “Alt-Right”, in which Patrik Hermansson, a gay Swedish anti-racist activist, spent a year inside the movement, was announced this week by Hope Not Hate. It forms part of a new report, The International Alternative Right: From Charlottesville to the White House, which includes first-hand accounts of the violence in Charlottesville last month and details of key figures and networks both in the UK and USA. alternativeright.hopenothate.com
PUSEY HOUSE Treasure: Pusey House Library has acquired a mourning jewel containing a lock of hair from Edward Bouverie Pusey, one of the founders of the Oxford Movement
Abuse charges and sentences
A FORMER priest in the diocese of Chichester, Jonathan Graves, 60, of Eastbourne, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for torturing and sexually abusing two schoolboys in the 1980s and 1990s. The boys, aged between 12 and 14, were restrained, using belts and chains, and then beaten, Hove Crown Court heard. At the time, he was the Vicar of St Luke’s, Stone Cross (News, 24 April).
In Liverpool, the Revd Robert Peters, 62, Vicar of St Michael’s, Plas Newton, since 2010 until his resignation this year, has received a two-year custodial sentence after pleading guilty to multiple offences of indecent assault against four children from one family when he was aged between 14 and 21.
A former priest, Brian Macduff, 78, of Sutton Road, Shrewsbury, has pleaded not guilty to charges of indecent assault against a girl between 1978 and 1980, when his surname was Spence.
DIOCESE OF SOUTHWELL & NOTTINGHAMLong and winding: inspired by a cousin with anorexia, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, Erin Spray, has cycled the length of Britain to raise funds for Young Minds. Her cousin has been in a hospital in Glasgow, 400 miles from her parents, for more than a year; it was the only specialist psychiatric bed available