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.