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;
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.
