THE LAST DITCH

Is the state guilty of child kidnap? – Telegraph.

The gentleman in the linked story approached his child's school with a request based on a perceived risk (he is related to European royalty) of her being kidnapped;

He asked that he could be allowed to drive into the school grounds
when picking up his daughter, because he did not want to leave her
waiting, potentially vulnerable, in the road outside.

The
headmistress agreed to this, but, concerned about other children's
safety, contacted the local police, who in turn passed on their
concerns to social services. The result of this was that, on May 18,
when Mr and Mr Jones, accompanied by their younger son, arrived at
school to pick up their daughter, they were met by a group of
strangers, one as it turned out a female social worker. She asked,
without explaining why or who she was, whether he was Mr Jones. When
she three times refused to show him any ID, he was seized from behind
by two policemen, handcuffed and put under arrest.

He was driven
by a policeman to a nearby mental hospital where he was told that,
because of "a number of concerns", he was being detained under Section
136 of the Mental Health Act and "sectioned" under S.2 as of "unsound
mind". His wife, it turned out, had been similarly arrested, for loudly
protesting at the handcuffing of her husband and the forcible seizing
from her arms of her young son. The three children had been taken into
care by social services.

A mental health tribunal has ordered his release, but – far from apologising and preparing their defence on charges of false imprisonment – social services have kept his children. 

The only reason offered … for the abduction of the
children is Mr Jones's "delusional belief system" that special care
should be taken of his children because of their elevated family
connections.

As JuliaM acidly remarks, (with more humour than I can muster in the face of such horror);

Excellent! That gives us ground to lock up and remove the children of all those
MPs who voted for their children, and the children of celebrities, to
be exempt from the child database

I can't remember who said that Labour had not yet
turned Britain into a police state, but that it had
erected all the fence posts. All that remains is to affix the barbed
wire. In a society where the state can seize your child and have her adopted against your will (a risk this gentleman now faces, having innocently made official enemies) how likely are you to stand up to state power?

No child should be taken from its parents (except in case of a reasonably-grounded perception by a policeman of  immediate danger and then only for a maximum of a week, pending a hearing) without a court order. Neither should anyone who does not present an immediate danger of violence be "sectioned" without a court hearing in advance.

Social Services should have no more in common with the SS than their shared initials.

PS: A new blog to me (a well-established one with a weird WordPress users only comment policy) has pulled together some of the best blog posts on this story.

4 responses to “Adding the barbed wire”

  1. Martin Avatar

    I don’t think “evil” is too strong a word to describe this.

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  2. jmb Avatar

    This story is almost beyond belief. I’d like to think that it was individuals who ran amok, doing what they perceived as their duty. But I guess it really illustrates the current mentality in Britain, that these individuals felt secure enough to do these awful things.
    You know of all the posts you have made here, this is the one which had had the most impact on me. This story is one which should definitely make the people “man the barricades”.

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  3. Andrew Duffin Avatar
    Andrew Duffin

    “Without a court order” should imho read “without the order of an open, public, court sitting without secrecy or reporting restrictions.”
    Justice must be seen to be done.
    Secret closed courts are part of a police state apparatus and should be abolished forthwith.

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  4. Tom Paine Avatar

    I entirely agree.

    Like

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Tom is a retired international lawyer. He was a partner in a City of London law firm and spent almost twenty years abroad serving clients from all over the world.

Returning to London on retirement in 2011, he was dismayed to discover how much liberty had been lost in the UK while he was away.

He’s a classical liberal (libertarian, if you must) who, like his illustrious namesake, considers that

“…government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

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