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.