End of brave bid to clean up the family courts

In all my years covering what goes on behind the veil of secrecy with which the family courts and our horribly corrupted “child protection” system conceal their activities from public view, one rare glimmer of hope has been the man who since 2013 has presided over those courts, Lord Justice (Sir James) Munby.

In a succession of trenchant judgments, Munby has made it clear that he is only too well aware of how seriously off the rails this whole system has gone. He has sought to expose it to what he called “the glare of publicity”, as by allowing us to name the local authorities and the absurdly biased “expert witnesses” they use to take far too many children into “care” for wholly inadequate and poorly argued reasons.

But Munby now sadly admits that there has been “little to show” for his years of “hard pounding”. Next year he is to retire. And since the man widely tipped to succeed him is Lord Justice McFarlane, I read with interest the recent lecture in which he gave his own views on the “child protection” system.

Alas, the most revealing passage was where he warned “parents who are drawn into child protection proceedings” that it was a “very high-risk strategy” not “to co-operate with the professionals”, by refusing to be “assessed by independent experts” and by dispensing with “the expert lawyers freely provided by the State” to argue their case. Unlike Munby, he seems unaware that there are few reasons why such parents more often learn to distrust the system than their shocked discovery that these same supposedly “independent experts” and “expert lawyers” are working hand-in-glove with social workers to justify their children being removed.

McFarlane reserved his most caustic remarks for the “ill-informed and deliberately incorrect” press commentary which only encourages such distrust of the system. I don’t think I am being For a senior judge to claim that what one writes is not just ‘incorrect’ but ‘deliberately incorrect’ is a pretty strong charge over-sensitive in guessing that the kind of commentary he has in mind is that which has long featured in this column.

For a senior judge to claim that what one writes is not just “incorrect” but “deliberately incorrect” is a pretty strong charge. Alas, McFarlane emerges as just another “party line” defender of a system which has no more frequent and telltale excuse for removing children from their parents than that they “failed to co-operate with the professionals”. With Munby’s departure, I fear we shall not be seeing “glad confident morning again”.