Booker's Lonely Furrow

Christopher Booker has been writing about the appalling family courts and its accompanying social workers for some time now.

His latest article is another extraordinary and heartbreaking tale of a child being taken away from her parent or parents for no good reason, by an entity (the family court) that is answerable to no-one. Subrosa has an eloquent post, under which there is an interesting debate about the idea of "the risk being too great" for social workers not to act, and for social workers to be damned if they do and damned if they don't.

There is some small merit to this attitude, although it grates heavily with me, in the sense that when they don't act and are wrong, they get slammed, and when they do act and are wrong, they get slammed.

However...

All this falls over for two reasons. The first is, if when they were wrong they reacted swiftly to rectify the situation, then their errors would perhaps be understood if not forgiven. However, this is not the case, see the despicable piece of victimhood pulled by that utter bitch Shoesmith following the Baby P fiasco for more details.

Secondly (and related to the first point), the family courts are shrouded in absolute secrecy. Booker's latest article is as always short on details, as he says:

"As usual, I am legally barred from identifying the mother at the centre of this case or giving many other details..."

As such, clearly this is a system with zero accountability, and as such inevitably overrun with cruel, illogical decisions that are virtually immutable without very deep pockets and boundless patience. For a really good illustration of the system, I am forced once again to link to Booker, as virtually no-one else writes about it. The idea of council "adoption targets" are hair-raising.

Read this.

If it bothers you, write about it. Maybe we can drive this issue screaming out of the shadows. Because the way the family court works now helps no-one except those in its pay, not those that it should protect and support.

The worst thing is, 98% of people don't give a shit

JuliaM got there first with the first bit of my post, which was Britain needing a reboot. Yes it does, and badly, although I'm not sure she quite expressed the reasons I see for this (although I agree entirely with hers).

The stories she catalogues are just a tiny slice of the things that occur daily in the UK, and the worst and most egregious is of course the extraordinary decision to find Paul Chambers guilty.

This has been covered by people that have more closely followed the story, see here and here.

But what really fucks me off is, no-one gives a shit. No-one. It's only had any coverage at all because of the sterling work of Jack of Kent (amongst others tbf), and I know if I mention this to anyone I'll get a blank look. Because people do not understand the wider implications.

Although I have no plans to, I do understand the motivations of those bloggers that have recently quit. I do see how shouting in what feels like a massive vacuum becomes tedious.

So, what to do? Getting people to care is not easy, but this seems to be a good start. The reviewer is a bit of a twat clearly, but getting a documentary about the real scale of wasted money and UK debt might kickstart something. If people can stop seeing the Government as a cross between nanny and all-knowing uncle, and instead as a thieving, parasitical waste of space and money, maybe it will all come tumbling down and we can have some sort of a reboot, even just a political one.

The pointlessness of judges

Fuck this.

With this decision, and the hundreds of other appallingly inadequate sentences and prosecutions that are doing all kinds of damage to parts of the UK, the judicial system has jumped the shark.

If this was my son, then very bad things would happen to these three savages. I don't say that lightly. I don't believe in vigilantism or an eye for an eye for its own sake. However, when an old lady needs the support of a brilliant, determined blogger and a journalist to avoid prosecution for dropping cigarette ash, and three thugs walk free with a suspended sentence for torturing an autistic boy for 3 days, something is badly broken.

"Judge Geake said he had taken into account the attackers’ ages, remorse and the fact they had pleaded guilty."

Remorse? You can't show remorse for something carried out over 3 days. Remorse is lashing out and wishing you hadn't. This was a sustained attack on someone who couldn't defend himself. And as for pleading guilty, they had footage on their own mobile phones of the attack. What were they going to do? Deny it?

Judge Geake, I would not usually wish ill on anyone, but I hope something similar befalls your family. Then we can see how important remorse and pleading guilty really are for sentencing.

Murky Waters

Sion Jenkins has been refused compensation for the time he spent in jail for his step-daughter's murder. The rationale that the Ministry of Justice has given is that "For the purposes of paying compensation, the applicant must be shown to be 'clearly innocent'."

I'm not sure that I'm very comfortable with this. Ultimately, guilt or innocence should be black and white. If you are guilty beyond reasonable doubt, then you are guilty. Otherwise you are innocent. It seems here that the Ministry of Justice are saying - "he's innocent, but we don't think he is so we're not going to compensate him for 6 lost years of his life".

I don't want to speculate on his guilt by the way, not my place as I haven't followed the case, but this to me seems like a slippery slope. It's the same logic of using ASBOs to jail people without trial - someone other than a jury finding people guilty or innocent. He may be a shit. He may have killed her. But since he has been acquitted, he should be compensated for his time spent in jail for something the court has decided he did not do.

The whole thing reminds me a bit of the civil case following the OJ Simpson trial. No doubt that if the police had done things differently, OJ would be in jail, if not already executed. But they didn't, and as such the court was obliged to acquit him. Subsequently, a civil court ruled against him and he paid a massive compensation claim to the victims' families. This again sits badly with me - if you're ruled innocent by a court of law, no other court should be able to dispute that verdict. It's not about whether he did it. It's about the principle of guilt and innocence being decided by a jury alone.