ver the coming weeks, I hope to explore some of the huge political issues that will scarcely be mentioned in this claustrophobically unreal election campaign. This week it is what I have often described here as one of the most disturbing scandals in Britain today, the catastrophic state of our highly secretive “child protection” system.
By any measure, this should be a political issue. Largely hidden from public view, it operates almost entirely under laws passed by Parliament. But we are given many horrific glimpses of just how badly it has broken down, in ways those laws never intended – not least in the horrific abuse of some 2,000 children in Rotherham, Oxford and elsewhere, many of whom were in the state “care” system.
In the past few years, record numbers of children have been taken into this system, currently almost 100,000 in the UK as a whole. Yet there is ever more evidence to show that far too many of them have not only been snatched from their families for wholly inadequate reasons (while the plight of others, such as Baby P, is ignored), but then suffer far more in “care” than they did before they were removed.
This system has become a major industry. With our 80,000 foster carers earning up to £500 a week or more for each child, the cost of “looked after children” alone has soared to nearly £4billion a year, and within five years, according to the Local Government Association, “children’s services” will account for a fifth of all the money raised in council tax.
Of late, thanks above all to the heroic efforts of Sir James Munby, the current head of our family courts, some senior judges have been questioning parts of this system more trenchantly than ever before. In one recent judgment, (2015) EWFC 11, Munby went out of his way to highlight some of the methods whereby local authorities and social workers routinely flout basic principles of the law by bringing cases for the removal of children that rely only on unsubstantiated allegations and hearsay, “sometimes at third and fourth hand”.
He has emphasised before how removing a child from its parents is one of the most serious decisions the courts and the state can ever take. Yet what may seem to a local authority an “impressive” case, as in the one he was hearing, too often turns out to be only a “tottering edifice based on inadequate foundations”.
One could cite a whole succession of recent judgments, by Munby and others, where local authorities, social workers and even other judges have been torn apart for their flagrant disregard of both the spirit and the letter of the law as laid down by Parliament. But with one or two shining exceptions, notably John Hemming (who deserves, regardless of his party, to be soon returned as Lib Dem MP for Yardley, Birmingham), our politicians never seem to question what is going on in their name, or even to show the slightest interest in it.
The only responses of successive
governments, both Labour and the Coalition, have been smugly to defend the system, claiming that if it goes wrong at all this is only in “a tiny minority” of cases, and to do all they can to drive up the mere 5 per cent of children in “care” who now go on to be permanently adopted.
One disastrous consequence of this has been merely to encourage the social workers to take even more loved and undamaged children into “care” because it is much easier to find parents to adopt them.
The scale of the unnecessary suffering all this is inflicting on tens of thousands of children is unimaginable. Despite the heroic efforts of a handful of judges, the only people who can ultimately do something to remedy this colossal scandal are the politicians. But in this election, as on so much else, they will remain oblivious and silent.
hat a humiliating shambles the West is making of its policy over the Middle East. In Iraq we are allied to the Shia mullahs of Iran, as their Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force leads the way in trying to crush the Sunni psychopaths of Isil. In Yemen, we are allied to the Sunnis, as we try to stop the same Quds Force trying to take over that country for Shia Iran. In Lausanne the West forlornly claims a “breakthrough” in trying to talk the Iranian regime out of its unshakeable resolve to build a nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, back in Iran itself, the same Revolutionary Guards are imposing a more ruthless reign of terror over its unhappy people than ever.
So desperate is the West to get that nuclear deal that there is no mention of human rights, or the finding of a recent UN report that more than 1,000 Iranians have been hanged or executed since the coming to power of President Rouhani, hailed in the West as a “moderate reformer”. It was the chief Iranian opposition movement, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), which first alerted the West to exactly how the Iranian regime was secretly using its civil nuclear research programme as a front for its bid to develop nuclear weapons. It still has every intention of doing so.
Right across the Middle East, it is Iran’s Quds Force that is keeping in power its puppet regimes in Syria and Iraq and is now on the verge of installing another in Yemen. Our naive Western politicians are being led by the nose in every direction.
So powerful is the position the monstrous Tehran regime is establishing across the region that, as the NCRI’s Shahin Gobadi put it to me last week, “this poses a danger to the world far greater than that of Iran one day acquiring nuclear weapons”. And the ineffable John Kerry and Co are too weak and confused to see it.