Bring them to book - by Richard... Sunday, March 18, 2012

Bring them to book - by Richard... Sunday, March 18, 2012

After ploughing a lonely furrow for so long, Booker has finally gained some high profile support on the "stolen kids" issue – not from his own newspaper, which keeps him firmly locked away in the "ghetto", but from The Daily Mail. Much of what this newspaper does is toe-curlingly bad, but just occasionally, it rises to the occasion with a superb piece of journalism which only the Mail can do with such style (headline below).

Furthermore, this is but one of two pieces, The Mail has run, the first dealing with how the family court system is relying on a closed circle of incompetent experts, who are perverting the system in a terrifying way. Thus – at last – is Booker able to remark in today's column that "a long overdue scandal hit the headlines last week".

He is referring to a "semi-official report" which has exposed one of the murkiest corners of our child protection system – the way that supposed professional "experts" help social workers to remove children from their parents.

The author is professor Jane Ireland, a forensic psychologist. For the Family Justice Council, she has examined 126 psychological reports trawled at random from family court documents. She found that two thirds of them were "poor" or "very poor" in quality and that 20 percent of their authors had no proper qualifications.

Alarmingly, no fewer than 90 percent of the report authors were not practising psychologists but appeared to earn their livings, wholly or partly, from writing reports for social workers. And, featured in the second Mail piece, one psychologist, whose company has made nearly half a million pounds a year from such reports, is under investigation by the General Medical Council.

The picture prof Ireland conveys, writes Booker, is one with which he is only too familiar. He has seen (and reported) how families can be torn apart largely on the basis of highly dubious psychological evidence.

This is designed, as John Hemming MP puts it, to " suit the demands of local authorities". One mother lost her children, for instance, on the basis of a 235-page report, costing £14,000, which found that she was "likely to have a borderline personality disorder" – without the author ever having met her.

Such seems almost unbelievable – so much so that one is inclined to dismiss it, or mark it down as a tragic exception. This is what children's minister, Tim Loughton, sought to do, when Booker told him what was going on, face-to-face. And, despite the steady trickle of cases that Booker has reported on – only a fraction of those he has seen – the flatulent Loughton has maintained his stance.

Another example, for instance, was a woman found by a psychologist to be a competent mother” – so the social workers went to a second witness, who found the same. They then found one of these "rent-a-psychos" who came up with what they wanted: that the mother had, again, a "borderline personality disorder". On that basis, her three children were sent for adoption.

Then a married couple lost their daughter because the father, who had had four "psychological assessments" from these psycho-frauds, saw no reason to submit himself to a fifth. The Court of Appeal found that he seemed to be putting his "emotional needs before those of his child” " and ordered that the child be adopted.

Damning as Prof Ireland's report is, her remit was only to look at psychological assessments. An equally disturbing picture might emerge from examining other groups of medical "experts" who earn thousands of pounds from evidence which parents may not be allowed to challenge or even read.

One contentious area, for instance, is where parents are accused of having injured infants who are found to have small fractures to their bones. A fashionable theory, pioneered by a Dr Kleinman in the US, holds that such fractures are a sure indicator of "non-accidental injury", i.e., the child must have been abused.

In one case (which Booker was able to report last year because the judge, unusually, published his judgement) it was clear that all the four medical witnesses had supported this "Kleinman theory", unquestioningly accepted by the judge.

But other experts strongly disagree, citing studies which suggest that such fractures may quite often arise naturally from a deficiency of vitamin D (as tests had shown was the case with this particular mother). When Booker showed the judgement to a doctor expert in this field, he immediately recognised three of the witnesses as doctors who "go round from one court to another to support the Kleinman theory".

Sadly, since no one was in court to challenge them, the heartbroken mother – like many before her – lost her son.

What we are going through, of course, is wearyingly familiar. Several scandals have hit the headlines in recent years involving doctors struck off after making a reputation as witnesses, pushing some theory about "brittle bones", "shaken baby syndrome" or "Munchausen syndrome by proxy" which was eventually exposed as fallacious.

But these causes célèbres have centred on criminal courts, where evidence can be put more rigorously to the test than is required by the much laxer procedures of family courts, which allow the incompetence, dishonesty and self-interest to be obscured by a wall of secrecy.

And as Booker has observed before, once a court system is allowed to hide itself away behind that wall of secrecy, the chances are high that it will become corrupted. A perfect example is the role played in our family courts by many of these professional "experts".

Thus, the good work prof Ireland has begun cannot be allowed to stop there, Booker concludes. Perforce though, he is being too gentle. These faux experts can only exist in a system where the judges allow them to operate, where the lawyers support them, and the local authorities pay for them, with our money.

In Booker's conclusion, the hint is there. The whole system is corrupt, from the judges downwards. It needs to be stripped down, taken apart and rebuilt from the ground upwards. And although too much to hope for in a society that is also corrupt, those responsible should also be brought to book.

That, though, is not going to happen, a fact that should be remembered the next time the supposed protector of children, Tim Loughton, seeks re-election. He had the power to challenge the abuse, but sat on his hands and did nothing.

Filtering through - by Richard... Saturday, March 17, 2012

Slowly, hesitantly, and with some diffidence, the hacks, high and low, are beginning to realise that something is wrong. First, there is Quentin Letts in The Spectator, charting the rise and rise of Jeremy Heywood, "the man who really runs the country".

Then there is the Great Charles Moore, who declares that the "civil servants are the masters now", complaining that "our democracy suffers" as a result.

Actually, they are both wrong. How can Heywood, or anyone in this administration be "in charge" when so much of government has been outsourced to Brussels? In truth, no one is actually in charge – and that is the problem. Government has become so amorphous, so diffuse, spread between so many different agencies – local, regional, national, and international – that there is no discernible chain of command. And, without that, there is no accountability and no one assumes responsibility when things go wrong, as they so often do.

It is a bit rich, however, for the likes of Moore, to complain about the loss of democracy. We have never really had one in this country.

The real complaint from these "above the liners" – one higher than the other – therefore, is that the old order (of which they are part) has been degraded. The previous structures no longer exist. Thus, the politicians of old, who held some semblance of power, are no more, and the old "establishment" no longer calls the shots.

But none of these people, neither Moore nor Letts, nor the rest of the bubble, have any real idea of what is going on. All they can understand is that they and their ilk no longer have it, and thus assume that it must have gone to the next in line, the civil servants. While Witterings from Witneycan see what is happening, these great sages are struggling.

As reality nevertheless begins to filter through, Letts does make one very pertinent observation: "Much though we mock the Greeks and Italians for being run by unelected technocrats", he writes, "can we truthfully say that we are any better?"

The answer, as they say, is in the negative. Not better … different, perhaps, but not better.

The making of a myth - by Richard...

What should have been a quick job this morning, to check a few facts about the Battle of Britain, turned out to be a marathon which has leached into the afternoon and involved much labour – hence keeping me away from the blog. Such are the fruits, however, that I thought I would share some of them with you.

What makes it worthwhile is the unexpected outcome, the finding of a review of a book published in 1945 by Guy Eden called a "Portrait of Churchill". The source of the review is the Worker, published in Brisbane on 29 October 1945, describing the book as "the latest and most fulsome of these panegyrics" that "purports to be a biography". "For far-fetched flights of fantasy", it adds, "it beats superman".

Although Winston Churchill is now out of office, the review continues, his barrackers are still busily engaged in building up legends of "Winnie the War-Winner". "Alone he did it", they cry. "He won the war single handed". Not since Bill Adams won the Battle of Waterloo all on his own, has so much been claimed for one man.

Most interestingly, deep within the review we are then told that the most impudent claim in Eden's book is that Churchill and his wife "worked out a plan" for giving Londoners safe and fairly comfortable air raid shelters in the railway tube stations.

This is entirely false, it says – as Douglas Reed (who was there at the time) points out in his book, "A Prophet at Home". The Chamberlain-Churchill Tory Government did nothing for the bombed Londoners beyond providing flimsy surface shelters.

We are then told that it was not until Labour Ministers entered the Government that "a plan was worked out" for providing two million bunks, and a system of booking them, in the tube stations. Two Labour Ministers — Herbert Morrison (Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security) and Miss Ellen Wilkinson — were responsible for the plan. All that Churchill had to do with the plan was approve it.

Still, in spite of the facts, the review concludes, the Churchill myths are being fostered and elaborated by interested parties of the Tory persuasion.

It will, it says, be Miss Wilkinson's duty to see that the true story of the war, and not the Tory fiction, is told in the British school text books; otherwise the rising generation will grow up in the belief that "Winnie the War-Winner" was a kind of demigod instead of a well-meaning old gentleman, rather self -conceited, and with a gift of bombast.

Clearly, Miss Wilkinson, who had been appointed education minister in the Attlee government, failed in her duty. The "Tory fiction" has become the received wisdom.

Remarkably though, Douglas Reed (latterly expunged from history for his "anti-Semitism") has his book, referred to in the review, published in its entirety on the internet and we have but have to go to pages 197 to 199 for the antidote to the Eden hagiography. Having explored the failure to furnish suitable shelters, and the "insuperable difficulties" in providing them, Reed tells us:

But nothing ever betrayed more vividly the total lack of understanding of the people's mind that prevailed in the haunts of officialdom. First and foremost, these harassed East Enders wanted to be quite safe, and they knew they could only find complete safety deep underground.

But apart from that, they wanted, if they were to take shelter at nights for months and years, to be able to sleep, and in those surface shelters the noise would not let you sleep. Apart from that again, they wanted, and had a right to, some minimum degree of comfort, and in these dark and narrow surface-dungeons, which the devil himself might have invented, there was no hope of any.

So, that day, we saw appalling sights. Though it was early morning, long queues of miserable people, clutching shapeless bundles, shivering in the rain, stood at the entrances to the underground stations, waiting for nightfall, when they would stream down into them.

The police, the world-famed London police ('Your police are marvellous!'), had been given no better task to do, in this, London's greatest ordeal since the Plague and the Great Fire, than to stop them from entering. But that was vain.

When night came the people bought the cheapest ticket they could and just stormed the stations. Nothing could have stopped them. Good, that the attempt was never more than half-heartedly made. The "insuperable difficulties" were quickly overcome.

Nothing survives in any of the official records that I have seen. But here again, we have confirmation of the accounts I record in The Many Not The Few that in the early days of the Blitz, police prevented people taking shelter in the Underground.

But what is also glossed over is that, when people were forced to make their own provision, in the absence of government planning, the conditions were appalling. Writes Reed, his book published in 1941:

For long enough, the scenes in these underground dens were beyond description by pen or portrayal by brush. A man might have put his hand over his eyes, rather than contemplate them. People lay huddled together, tiny children in their midst, on the platforms, under the railway arches, in the vaults. There was no food for them, unless some local priest militant foraged and found some and brought it to them. There was no heat or water. There was no place for them to relieve themselves in decency. There was no care for their health. Pestilence immediately began to crawl about and breed.

After the War, Churchill wrote in his own book, "Their Finest Hour", that he had been "deeply anxious about the life of the people in London". But not only do the War Cabinet minutes not support his claims, this review and the Reed book add to the already substantial evidence that the people of London were initially left to fend for themselves. "True, we were 'all in the front line' in this war", said Reed, "but the English front line had its first, second and third class compartments, like the English railways".

So it was then – and to a very great extent, so it is now. And government is not and never has been an organisation on which you can safely rely, any more than you can rely on the record telling you the truth of what happened, or is currently going on.