Baby P case review due tommorrow.

On August 3rd 2007 a child known only as Baby P was murdered in Haringey, London. Over the 17 months of his short life he was tortured and beaten by his mother mother and stepfather. At the time of his death Baby P had over 50 separate injuries including 8 broken ribs, severe bruising to his body and head. He had cuts to his eyes, lips and scalp. His ears had nearly been torn from his head. His fingernails had been torn from the nail beds, his spine had been broken, paralysing him from the waist down and he had been punched so hard in the face that it caused bruising to his neck so severe that it eventually choked him to death.

When the trial of the parents was completed and reporting restrictions on the case were finally lifted it emerged that Baby P had been on Haringey's child services "At risk register" since September 2006. This meant that for the 11 months in which the worst of the abuse had taken place Baby P's family were being visited on a weekly basis by social workers who noted that the child showed signs of multiple beatings and had been trained to lie, like a dog, on the floor of his filthy home whenever his stepfather clicked his fingers. Over this time social services twice tried to take Baby P in to protective care and the police twice tried to prosecute the mother for the abuse her son suffered. On both occasions these attempts were blocked by "Persons Unknown" within Haringey council. The last of these attempts was blocked just day's before Baby P's death. In response to this horrific failure of social services the children minister ordered an immediate review into the case.

This review is to be published tomorrow, December 1st but don't expect to be able to read it because it has been sealed, not just from members of the public but from the House of Commons itself. The only people who will be able to read it are members of the cabinet, select members of the opposition and civil servants in relevant government departments. Ostensibly this has been done to protect the identities of those involved in the case but this is of course nonsense because the names of many of those involved are already a matter of public record. We can name Baby P's social worker, Maria Ward. We can name the local head of child protection, Gillie Christou. We can name Sharon Shoesmith, the local head of child services and we can name Dr Sabah Al Zayyat, the doctor who failed to diagnose Baby P's broken ribs and back.

Hell if I wanted too I could even name Baby P's mother and step-father but I see no reason to keep them on a segregation wing. In fact the only person whose identify is left to be protected is that of the "Person Unknown" who ignored the advice of both the police and social services and ordered Baby P home to face his agonising death.

Normally this level of secrecy, where MP's are not even allowed to discuss the case using pseudonyms, is resevered for cases that involve members of the UK military on covert operations such as the SAS and the members of Military Intelligence that guide these operations. I can only assume that the Baby P case is being protected from even parliamentary oversight because the "Person Unknown" who overruled all those who were trying to protect Baby P did so while acting as an agent of the British Army. If this is the case then this person has forfeited all rights afforded to them by civilian law and must be punished under the military codes of practice. As no-one has reported seeing soliders marching through the corridors of Haringey town hall we can assume that this individual was not wearing appropriate military uniform at the time the offence was committed. This makes them a non-uniformed combatant and the UK has already made it clear what happens to non-uniformed combatants. They are shipped off to Guantanamo Bay where they are detained and tortured indefinitely.

With such a clear precedent of what is "appropriate punishment" I hope the minister understands that the individual involved cannot be considered as "held to account" until they have been stripped of their position, stripped of their pension and stripped of all assets the acquired with their salaries.

Well that'll teach me for trying to be clever.

Today the Chancellor of the UK Exchequer announced his pre-budget report in which he explained how his government intends to deal with the current recession. I'd prepared a long and comprehensive post complete with diagrams to explain what he done and why he's done with the idea that I would post up my analysis pretty much as soon as he'd finished his speech. Unfortunately I'd forgotten to install the correct image manipulation software on to my new PC and I can't really be bothered to do that tonight.

In the mean time though I will say that he has done pretty much exactly what everyone expected him to do. Use a lot of money the UK doesn't have to provide a stimulus package in the hope of providing the economy with enough of a bump in 2010 so the Labour party have a chance of winning the general election. He's done this in two main ways;

1. Cutting VAT by 2.5%. The hope is that this will boost high street sales enough to protect retail sector jobs and allow voters to buy enough consumer crap to bring back the feelgood factor by 2010.


2. £3bn in public spending to protect jobs in the construction and engineering industries.

In order to ally fears that government borrowing has gone horrifically out of control he's also announced that there will be a increase in National Insurance and a new 45% income tax band for people earning over £150,000. Both of these taxes have been deferred until 2011, after the next general election, which plays the Conservatives opposition into quite a difficult political position because at the next election because with money already spent they can either campaign on the platform of cutting taxes and bankrupting the nation or they can try and find a political advantage by agreeing exactly with Labour's economic policies.

So in summary politically it's been a very clever budget from the government but economically it's incredibly optimistic to say the least.

Watch as the Baby P case gets kicked into the long grass.

With a petition calling for all those involved in the Baby P case to sacked now attracting over half a million signatures Parliament has been forced to change it's tactics and try harder to cover the tracks of those involved.

For those of you still unfamiliar with the case Baby P was and infant who over the course of his short life was constantly beaten and tortured by his mother and step-father under the approving gaze of Haringey council's social services department. Haringey is a north London borough which probably most famous as the location of the infamous Finsbury Park Mosque where radical cleric Abu Hamza preached his extreme version of Islam and the massive MI5 surveillance operation that went along with it.

With Haringey council again becoming involved in yet another high profile scandal National Government appears to be unsure how to deal with the situation. Initially when the Baby P case went to trial they saw an opportunity for a jolly jape where the details of the horrific crime could be used to score points off political opponents and stimulate a wider discussion on social care. Then when it became clear that things weren't going to go according to their plan they changed their minds and the Minister for Children, under some pressure, called for a two week investigation into the case which would allow everybody to get the anger out of their system while Haringey council issues some empty apologises and everybody could carry on much the same as before without anyone being held accountable or anything actually changing.

Today the government has again changed it's mind with the minister announcing that he is going to pre-empt the findings of the investigation not due to report until December 1st and hold an investigation to be chaired by Lord Layman. The last time Lord Layman held an investigation into the death of a child under the care of Social Services it was into the death of Victoria Climbie in the London Borough of Haringey. This process took two years to complete and concluded that no individual should be held responsible for their but it did make 108 separate recommendations for improvement. According to their last inspection Haringey council have already implemented every one of those recommendations.

I think a lengthy public inquiry is very much the wrong approach for the government to take because Baby P's mother and step-father have already been tried and convicted for the criminal offence of causing or allowing his death. I can see no good reason that prevents every member of Haringey council who have played a part in the case, especially those who blocked attempts to have Baby P taken into care, being criminally investigated and tried for that same offence.

On a completely unrelated note the Disasters Emergency Committee have chosen today to launch their appeal to help all the children who have been beaten and tortured in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This nasty war has been going on for around 12 years now and has it's roots in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 which itself has it's roots in the cold war. The severity of the situation there and in other African nations means that I cannot in good conscience tell people not to donate to this appeal but I personally cannot support it because I have serious doubts over the integrity of two of the charities involved. Besides if Britain is serious about ending the suffering of children and preventing crimes against humanity it should perhaps get it's own house in order.

I've had the decoraters in.

Some of the more observant amongst you may have noticed that the background has changed from brilliant white to a sort of pale blue. There's no great political reason for this it's just of got one of those new LCD monitors which makes all the colours brighter and sharper. So bright in fact that it was making my eyes hurt while proof-reading. I tried a range of colours including various shades of yellow, green and pink before I settled on the blue because it seemed to be the least headache inducing. Of course the new background does make the text, the banners and the headers look a bit crap so there may be some more tweaking and fine tuning if I can be bothered.

In other inconsequential news the curse of St Valentine means that over the last couple of days I've seen my birthday, an aunts birthday and my father's birthday. Due to everybodies diary commitments and me being more then a little underwhelmed by the whole business it was planned to have a very small celebration next week. Sadly things didn't quite happen that way so I've been forced to pretend I'm massively enjoying myself and have to look forward to going through it all again next week. To make matter worse my dad's got a massive cold he's decided to treat by taking a cocktail of drugs making him even more detached from reality then usual. This has caused conversations along the lines of;

Q."Are we going to go shopping today?"

A."I've just washed the floor."

The big story of the day is that as all of last week's stories were coming to the public attention the Saudis decided to forgo the protection of the US Navy and sail one of their oil tankers through pirate infested waters off the coast of Somalia. Funnily enough the $100million of oil caught the pirates attention and they seized the ship causing statements like "Pirates hijack worlds largest tanker!" and "British Crew on hijacked ship safe!". All this shouldn't come as much of a surprise after the Saudis are certainly stakeholders in this whole Al-Qeda/ war on terror/Iraq/Afghanistan business but sadly it does mean MI6 are going to have to go and play with the big boys again. The story does warrant a special mention of this guy who way back in the 1990's noticed that there was a correlation between a decrease in the number of pirates and an increase in global temperature. Now with global temperatures falling and incidents of piracy increasing I think it's time he received a massive research grant because he's clearly light years ahead of his time.

Remember how I said the crimes of the Baby P case would all be forgotten after a two week news cycle.

Well the governments spin doctors have been out in force and that news cycle has begun in earnest. Firstly two reports were released about the quality of Social Care within the United Kingdom. One argued that to punish Haringey's child protection team would mean that more children would be put into care rather then be murdered in their homes as if somehow that is a bad thing. The second report argued that social service departments couldn't possibly be expected to do their job properly because what with the lavish salaries it's just far too expensive for them to go to court to get the orders necessary to take abused children away from their abusive parents. Both of these carefully prepared reports have been released in order to re-frame the debate over the Baby P case away from identifying those members of Haringey council who are fault and holding them to account and into a much wider debate over the provision of social care. This allows the government to blame the problem on "the system" while completely ignoring the fact that the faults of "the system" are nothing more then the faults of the people working in that system.

Next have come the sob stories and what heart wrenching sob stories they have been. First up the daughter of Sharon Shoesmith appeared on BBC Radio 4 to tell us how worried she was that the public anger over the case would mean that her mother would be made a scapegoat and sacked to appease the baying mob. I should re-assure her that I don't think anyone wants to see a token sacking come out of this case. Instead they want to see a full root and branch investigation into the case looking at everyone involved in the from the minister down to the lowest social worker who visited Baby P. If any of those people, Ms Shoesmith included, are found to have been at fault either through their action or inaction then they are immediately sacked and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Then 60 headteachers signed a letter in support of Ms Shoesmith saying that she shouldn't be investigated over the case and calling her and exceptional civil servant and the most effective champion of children and young people in the borough. I haven't read the full letter myself because for a group of people so keen to publicly show their support for Ms Shoesmith the headteachers seem to have made it very difficult to get hold of a copy. This is a shame because if they feel that they can justify Baby P's death I'd be fascinated to hear what that justification is. Until then I can only assume that they are so keen to support Ms Shoesmith because they've got their snouts in the same trough. After all if we start making Haringey's social services accountable for their failures we're going to have to do the same thing to Harigney's education services and that might not go so well for some of those headteachers.

Today the Labour Party showed just how far they are prepared to go to protect their highly paid cronies when the former minister for women Harriet Harman appeared on a daytime TV show aimed at housewives called Loose Women. Although she didn't refer to the Baby P case directly she did go to great pains to point out that we should all be prepared to make exceptions for working mother's who can't their jobs properly because it's really tough being a woman so they shouldn't be expected to be as good as their male counterparts and it's all men's fault anyway.

From what I've seen from the governments response to the case so far I think that the hope is that by the time the case review is finally published on December 1st all the anger over the case will have burnt itself with everyone becoming exhausted by the story and it will all be forgotten so Haringey social services won't have to punish anyone and can carry on in much the same way they did before.

By way of a side note on Saturday the court lifted and injunction allowing Baby P's photograph to be published. To me this was very shocking because Baby P is the absolute spitting image of a child I used to regularly babysit. This makes the story especially harrowing for anyone who knows me or knows that child's family. This is something that would have been made worse if they were working in the media and getting day-by-day accounts of the story as the trial happened but were unable to publish any details of it.

I am going to assume the striking similarities are nothing more then a massive co-incidence because if it's not then it means that Baby P was allowed to be tortured and killed on purpose.

Welcome to Britain Where the Child Abuse Never Stops.

The baby P case is still firmly in the news and I hope that nobody is treating it as some sort of political game because that child was really tortured for 17 months before finally being beaten to death and Haringey council did, at the very least, sit back and allow it to happen. To me that is a serious enough story in it's own right without having to confuse it with other issues. The latest detail to come out of this story is that a Social Worker in Haringey Councils Child Protection team repeatedly warned that the council was not following correct child protection procedures and they were creating a environment where child abuse was being tolerated. After her concerns were ignored by her superiors at the council she contacted four (all Labour) MP's including then Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt six months before the death of Baby P. Haringey Council has since responded by taking out an injunction against this whistleblower to prevent her giving further testimony.

I'm terribly sorry for rocking the boat but this revelation along with the two previous failed attempts to prosecute the mother for assault and Haringey's council's attempts to avoid giving evidence at her trial make the councils actions in the case look more and more like attempting to pervert the course of justice or even possibly conspiracy to commit assault. For that reason they should stop thinking in terms of sackings and suspensions a be prepared to be punished to the full extent of the law. Ms Shoesmith should at the very least be prepared to repay every penny of her £110,000 a year salary because that money has clearly been obtained under false pretences.

Wednesday also saw the latest instalment of Britain's almost bi-weekly horror story when yet another mother with mental health problems killed her two children one of whom was only three months old. I know I probably shouldn't go into too much detail about this incident but I will say that I don't think anyone is particularly to blame in the same way as they are in the Baby P case. The problem with situations like that is they can go from very healthy, where it is good for the mother to be caring for her children and good for the children to be cared for by their mother, to tragedy very, very quickly if the right triggers are in place. In hindsight if the local authorities had known the Baby P case was going to break the day before Channel 4 decided to run their documentary about Witch Children in Africa then an intervention could have been made. Sadly though both of those events were beyond their control so there was nothing more anybody could really have done other then to rely on the police to do the difficult job of picking up the pieces.

Completing the hat-trick of horrific stories about children the Shannon Matthews case has come to court in a timely fashion. You may remember this saga because it ran concurrently with Prince Harry's deployment to Afghanistan. It all started when Dewsberry schoolgirl Shannon Matthews failed to return home from school. This caused a £3.2million police hunt which generated pages and pages of newspaper coverage and hours and hours of news footage as Shannon's friends and neighbours posed in specially printed T-Shirts behind specially printed banners. After 24 days Shannon was found alive and well locked inside the house of her step-uncle Micheal Donovan. It later came to light that not only was Shannon's mother and Shane McGowan lookalike , Karen Matthews fully aware of her daughters whereabouts throughout the course of the search Shannon's step-father, Craig Meehan also happened to be in possession of a massive collection of Child Pornography.

Now the case has finally come to court the Crown Prosecution Service is seriously trying to argue that the whole thing was a massive conspiracy dreamt up by Matthews and Donovan in order to claim a £50,000 reward offered by The Sun group of newspapers who you may remember from the "Max Mosley Nazi Sex Orgy!" libel trial. This is of course absolute fucking nonsense because the newspaper group only offered the £50,000 reward three weeks after the girl had gone missing. As this means the Crown Prosecution appear to attempting to scupper their own case I can only assume they are either going for a mistrial or a not guilty verdict so the accused can either walk free or bring the case back to court on appeal. This should come as no surprise after all when Craig Meehan was found guilty of possessing the most serious category of child pornography he was allowed to walk free from court and go straight back to his council house.

Nobody Does Criminal Incompetence Quite Like Local Government

On Febuary 25th 2000, in the London Borough of Haringey Victoria Climbie was murdered by her great aunt. After enduring months of beatings and starvation Victoria finally died of hypothermia weighing just 3st 10lbs. She was 8 years old.

At the time the case caused understandable outrage not just because of the shock that one human being could behave in such an unspeakable way to another human being let alone a child but because at the time of her death Victoria was under the care of Haringey councils child protection team. The great aunt and her partner were jailed for life for their part in causing the death and a public inquiry was started chaired by Lord Layman. When the inquiry finally published it's findings it identified 12 separate and individual occasions when Haringey council could and should have intervened to save Victoria's life and blamed her death on an "Unexcusable failure of the [child protection] system". In spite of the fact a child had been allowed to die of starvation and the cold in what is supposedly a first world country and the fact that at least on member of Haringey's child protection team, Sylvia Henry, was found to have lied to the inquiry no member of staff was prosecuted or lost their job over the incident. The inquiry did however make 108 separate recommendations to improve child protection services. According to Haringey councils most recent internal review all 108 of these recommendations had been fully implemented.

I was then with something like surprise that it was announced on Tuesday that Haringey council's child protection team had once again featured in the prosecution of a couple who had murdered a child known only as Baby P. The details of this case are not well known because as one reporter put it "The reporting restrictions in this case are so tight we can't even tell you what those restrictions are." What we do know however is that Baby P was a 17 month old infant who was beaten to death after suffering intense physical abuse at the hands of his mother and her National Front supporting boyfriend throughout his tragically short life. At the time of his death Baby P had 50 separate injuries including; A broken spine, 8 broken ribs, Cuts and Bruises all over his head and body, All his fingernails had been torn from their nail beds. He had deep cuts to his lips, eyes and face. His ears had nearly been torn from his head. The injury that caused his death was a punch to the face delivered with such force it caused bruising to the neck that eventually suffocated him

Baby P first came to the attention of Haringey Social Services in September 2006 when his mother complained to a GP that he was "a headbanger" who "bruised easily". Over the next two years the child's home was visited by numerous social workers health visitors including Sylvia Henry. The child was hospitalised for his injuries on several occasions and the mother was twice arrested was assault but on both occasions charges were drop and the child was returned to her. In the course of their visits members of the Child Protection team noted that the house was very unhygienic with stale urine on the floor and several dogs including a Rottweiler allowed to run wild. They also noted that the child had a number of obvious cuts and bruises, was paralysed from a broken back and had been trained, like a dog, to lie on the floor when his step-father clicked his fingers. Despite this Haringey council saw no reason to intervene.

It has since bee revealed that Harigney Council, in an attempt to cover up their own failures, had repeatedly tried to avoid giving evidence in the murder trial. Initially they attempted to obtain a Public Interest Immunity (PII) certificate which are normally only granted in cases of national security such as a terrorism trial. It was only after the Judge in the case issued a court order did they finally release the evidence that was used to convict Baby P's mother and step-father. As the verdict was announced the head of Haringey Council, Sharon Shoesmith a woman who is clearly rarely troubled by reality issued a statement saying that there was no evidence of Council wrong doing in the case, none of her staff would be punished and she saw no reason to apologise over the incident.

Understandably this display of outstanding arrogance caused outrage and led to one of the angriest exchanges I've ever seen in Parliament. Conservative leader David Cameron called for a external investigation into the incident and that any council employee who is found to have failed in their job is sacked and criminally prosecuted. Initially the government tried to side step the issue by accusing the Conservatives of playing party politics but have since relented ordering a review which is due to report in two weeks time. I can only presume that they've done this in the hope that by the time the review reports and find Haringey council to be excellent at their job the news cycle will have moved on and the issue can be quietly be swept under the carpet and the council can continue to be paid £100million a year for a job they clearly cannot do.

Oh Crap someone's gone and emboldend the government again!

In an unparalleled act of political calculation the UK decided to hold a parliamentary by-election last week in the shadow of the US presidential election and yes I forgot all about it too.

With an unsurprisingly low voter turn out the incumbent Labour party saw a 5% swing in favour of the Scottish Nationalist Party but still managed to win and retain the seat. This makes it the first parliamentary seat that the Labour party have won since the General Election in 2005 and breaks a long run of defeats including the humiliating loss of the Glasgow East seat. Party supporters have heralded the result as evidence of the unfortunately named "Brown Bounce" and taken it as a vindication of their highly successful economic policy.

Have won a fight no-one else bothered to turn up too the government appear to have let it all go to their heads and started having policy ideas again. Chief and probably most dangerous amongst them is the announcement that they plan to cut taxes in order to deal with the recession. Being as populist as it is stupid the announcement appears to have forced the Conservatives to drop their much more sensible policy on the issue and join in some sort of tax-cutting beauty contest where all parties compete to see who can come up with the largest and most damaging tax cut.

The other classic they've come out with today is the announcement that they are planning to ban the sale of discounted alcohol from supermarkets and off-licenses and to end drinks promotions such as happy hours and Buy One Get One Free offers in pubs. This long standing policy idea has been rehashed to cut down on drunken violence and the gloriously vague notion of "Anti-Social Behaviour". As this is the policy of a very stupid government it is of course a very stupid idea but not one totally without merit. For example I think we should find out exactly what this governments been drinking over these last few years and ban it immediately because it's clearly having a corrosive and damaging effect on society.

Do you ever get that feeling that something really, really important is happening but you just can't remember what it is?

Barack Obama, President of the United States!!!

Well President designate but let's not quibble over details when we're about to see the first black president of any country outside of Africa and the first US president in nearly twenty years to not be named either Bush or Clinton.

To rain on the parade for just a moment and remind the sisterhood that certain hierarchies exist for a reason I think it's important to look at what the world could have won. Ideally I would have liked to see Mugabe step down as Zimbabwean president back in March. Then as the world moved to repair that broken country one of the themes of the election campaign could have been economic globalisation and international development rather then childish squabbles about Sarah Palin's clothes. When the economic crash hit and the price of gold shot up Zimbabwe would have been able to hit the ground running and with America's economy on the rocks there would have been no other choice then to elect the strong, stable, hard as nails hands of John McCain.

During his first term as president McCain would have continued the progressive, free trade policies of his four predecessors. Love them or hate them these policies have been in place for almost thirty years and are now part of our reality. Countries like Argentina, Vietnam and Kenya have all implemented their Economic Structural Adjustment Plans and opened up their markets to More Economically Developed Countries. For America, the worlds largest consumer economy, to move to a protectionist stance now would be to prove every anti-WTO protester right, make every nightmare a reality and make life incredibly difficult for heavily indebted second world countries like Great Britain. Plus the last time a Democratic president was elected during a global economic downturn with a mandate to put up trade barriers and "share the wealth" through increased public spending it was FDR during the Great Depression. That ended up going so badly that some have said America needed the Second World War to sort out that economic disaster.

McCain would also have used his first term to make sure that US troops stayed in Iraq until the job is done which is going to be 2011 at the earliest. Like free trade this war might not be popular but the sad fact of the matter is that the US did invade Iraq in 2003 so to pull out too soon would at best be an unforgivable insult to the Iraqi people. At worst it could totally destabilise the entire middle east region pitting Iranian back Shia factions against Sunni and Kurdish factions. This could well lead to Turkey and Europe being dragged into the mess, Israel being wiped off the map and America being attacked by Islamic terrorists again and again.

All the while McCain was leaning into the yoke of office and doing what needed to be done Obama would have had to take a loss back to his own party and face down rabid Hillary supporters. Spending the next four years having to fight for the nomination without the wind of invincibility at his back would certainly season Obama up a bit and allow them Democrats to finally bury the dead ideologies of Feminism and Marxism which have been holding the American left back for so long. Then if he was good enough and won the nomination again Obama would face up to a distinctly elderly McCain in 2012 and more then likely win a presidency facing far fewer problems then it is facing now. Plus it would mean that the inevitable 2014 Arab-Israeli peace talks would then happen in the middle of Obama's two terms rather then at the end. This could only make it more likely that those talks would be the success they've never quite managed.

None of that though is meant to spoil the celebrations because hey, America's just elected it's first black president with the largest voter turn out in history and that President looks like he could shape up into something very, very good so how can today be anything else but a great day!