See how the state is abusing children now

My heart sank to see the first of the countless inquiries to be held by that ludicrously chaotic investigation of sexual abuse now under its fourth “chair”, the social worker Alexis Jay. They are looking yet again at the tragic story of those 60,000-odd children deported to Australia and other Commonwealth countries between the Forties and the Sixties.

It is an easy shot, because this horrifying scandal, initially unearthed in the Eighties, after decades of secrecy, by the efforts of an admirable former social worker, Margaret Humphreys, took place so long ago that all those responsible are dead. It has long been so well known that, in 2010, it was even apologised for in Parliament by Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Brown expressed regret at how this ghastly story had been shrouded in secrecy; how children were horribly abused and lied to and how their parents had no idea what had happened to them. Cameron said we must ensure than the lessons of these “appalling events are learnt, so that such terrible mistakes will never be made again”.

I have noted before how ironic it was that, at the very time these words were being uttered, to unanimous murmurs of approval from MPs, a vast and not entirely dissimilar scandal was taking place in Britain itself under their very noses.

As I had already begun reporting here in 2009, what is daily going on behind the veil of secrecy erected around our present “child protection” system, has far too many parallels with what was being done to those children more than half a century ago.

Still the numbers of children being removed from their families are hurtling upwards. The latest January figures show that applications to take children into care were up a further 9 per cent on January 2016. Those for the last complete financial year, 12,791, were up 15 per cent on the year before. And this is now nearly four times the rate recorded nine years ago, before the furore over the death of “Baby P” led to that explosion in the taking of children into “care” which has continued ever since.

Although this reflected the desire not to see any repeat of the Baby P debacle, social workers, supported by the courts, as I have reported on countless times, have become so trigger-happy that far too many children have been seized from loving homes for no good reason. And for them and their parents this has led to individual tragedies in their own way just as horrendous as what happened to those children deported 60 years ago.

Far too many children today are still being held against their wishes, miserable and utterly bewildered, in a fostering system which has become a multi-billion-pound industry. Too many are being subjected to emotional, physical, even sexual abuse much worse than anything alleged against their parents as the excuse for removing them in the first place.

Instead of looking into events long ago, it would be far more useful to hold an inquiry into what is being done to children in Britain today.

No one after all should be better aware of how corrupted our “care” system has become than Ms Jay, herself best known for her report on the appalling abuse of 1,400 children in Rotherham, most of whom were in state “care”.

But ultimately the only people with the power to end this scandal, as shocking as anything now happening in this country, are those members of the Parliament under whose laws it is taking place.