"It can no longer be ignored by those who purport to be in charge of this country that something is deeply rotten at the core of Britain's social services", writes Sun columnist Jane Moore.

This is her lead-in to a commentary on the case of the three Eastern European children removed from a loving home because their foster parents were members of UKIP, but she should not only be addressing "those who purport to be in charge of this country".

Moore writes for a paper purported to have a senior member of staff whose wife has close connections with social work, a paper which, hitherto has been "quite resistant" to running stories hostile to social workers.

View full article here

Yeah ... the real baddies here are the MPs ... they have the power to deal with it, and have walked away.

I am no expert in this minefield, family law it seems to me operates out of all proper and right thinking jurisdiction.

The power of certain bodies to enact egregious diktat and to extricate children on the merest of pretexts also seems to me to resemble something I could read about in an Solzhenitsyn [or Dickens] novel. Which takes me into a world of cruel barbarity and barbarity for the sake of itself - how inhuman do we become when we behave with such oblivious callousness.

The most worrying aspect is that, there is no redress, nor means of questioning, even of stopping this relentless machine - our social services and the family courts act in an imperious manner and seemingly insensitive to the transparency of due process in common law practiced in this country.

Why do our MPs totally ignore this travesty? Is there no one to take on the might of the vested interest and tight knit claque of social services and council talibans? Why are they allowed carte blanche?

Something needs doing, the whole ramshackle process is corrupt, out of control, infested and run by vastly overpaid council granite-hearted Harpies and you know who I mean.

. . . not forgetting, of course, the role of the police

I take your point Dr. N, but don't forget of course, that should a social worker / Police officer / Doctor forget, miss, genuinely get wrong or make a bad call when it comes to abuse / care proceedings, then the self-same press will demand without any thought the heads of the social worker / Police officer / Doctor without even missing a beat.............so who can blame any social worker for making decisions that we might not agree with, when if they don't make a decision, the Press will give them a right kicking anyway.

It must be fantastic for the likes of Booker and Co. to have never made a wrong decision. If he is so confident in his abilities why doesn't he stand for election or even better talk to CAFCASS or even volunteer to spend some 'time on the ground reporting' to see if they can use his fantastic powers of hindsight.......

For your sake, I hope you're never on the wrong side of the family courts.

They get facts wrong?
May I please speak my Lord?
No you may not! In other words, sod off, I've made my mind up!
That's from personal experience so don't tell me that Booker's wrong.

Well, gunnerbear, their wrong decision should AT LEAST be subject to public scrutiny. And as far as I can tell, Booker's and Dr. N's complaints are that the "System" refuses to permit same.

I note that gunnerbear didn't challenge me.
What do you do in chambers gunnerbear when you can't challenge the evidence?

DE,

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you. I agree the system is wrong for a number of reasons (including the Catch-22 issue of the use of reports that the people involved aren't allowed to see) but I just felt that Booker was intent on 'giving a shoeing' to those at the coal-face when he really should be attacking the way that Parliament has framed the law and the statutory framework that has come into play.

I agree that social workers do make the most awful decisions but the vast majority don't and they also don't have the perfect hindsight that journalists all appear to have. There is also an interesting article on ConHome about this topic.

Again, apologies for the delay in getting back to you.