We have long been familiar with the way the BBC ignores, with impunity, its statutory obligation “to ensure that all controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality”. There is an ever-growing list of issues, from the EU to climate change, on which its coverage follows a clear “party line”, so partisan that it amounts to little more than propaganda. A recent instance is its campaign on behalf of social workers engaged in removing children from their families – as exemplified by a three-part series that started last Monday, entitled

Protecting Our Children.

Interviewing some of the people involved in this series, a Woman’s

Hour presenter hailed the social workers as “astonishingly brave”, saying that “if anyone has ever felt tempted to criticise” their “muchmaligned profession”, she doubted that they would after watching these programmes.

The first of them followed Bristol social workers as they dealt with a family that could not have been more carefully chosen to illustrate the need for their intervention. A hapless, overweight couple with learning difficulties were struggling to bring up a three-year-old son, who didn’t yet talk, in a small, scantily furnished flat with dog faeces on the floor. There was no bed for the boy, and no toothbrush (dad saw no reason for one).

A 21-year-old social worker, for whom this was her “first case”, eventually had to be supervised by her attractive blonde team manager. We saw their efforts culminating in the boy being taken into foster care, and his newborn baby sister sent for adoption. The parents separated under the strain, leaving the mother robbed of the children she loved, alone in a state of total depression.

We were clearly meant to think how tough it must be to be a social worker confronted by cases like this. But it was hard to miss the impersonal combination of officious menace and sentimentality (towards the children) with which it was handled: no human warmth, no real effort made to help the couple to cope better. The inexperienced young social worker seemed no better fitted to her role than the parents. The father read it right when, at the start of the film, he told her: “You’re here to split the family, you’re out to wreck us” – which was just what followed.

If the BBC thought that this showed our “child protection” system in an “honest and open” light (and I doubt that Bristol council would have allowed them to film for two years if they had been less sympathetic to the cause), any independent observer with knowledge of the system’s workings might have watched with mounting frustration at how selectively one-sided the programme was, omitting any evidence as to how grievously the system has gone off the rails.

Over the past two years, I have followed in detail scores of stories of individual families torn apart by this system. In important respects they could not have differed more from the one told by the BBC. I have been just as careful as the BBC, in my own way, to choose which stories I have reported, because they are ones which show just how dysfunctional the system has become, when social workers seize children from loving and capable parents for infinitely less reason than that depicted in Monday’s programme.

The obvious reason why the taking of children into care has more than doubled since 2007 is the social workers’ fear of a repetition of the Baby P scandal – which broke that year – where they were caught failing to intervene as a child was fatally maltreated.

But there is much evidence now to show that they are often going to the other extreme, abusing their power to seize children for no good reason, and then being supported by the courts as they lie and manufacture evidence to justify their mistakes. This is the real dark side of our family protection system, and one of the most shocking scandals in Britain today. But it is ruthlessly hidden from public view behind a wall of legally enforced secrecy.

Within 24 hours of watching Monday’s programme, I was introduced to four more horrific examples which show just how bereft of all compassion and common sense this system has become, turns upside down our most basic principles of justice. I hope soon to be able to report something of each of them – aware that none would have a chance of being reported by the self-regarding propaganda machine that the modern BBC has become.