Resistance is futile

Anyone remember the old Commando war books? One of the favourite phrases of the Aryan Nazi master race was "resistance is futile". There would be good old Tommy Atkins surrounded by grinning stormtroopers, confident in their superiority and armed to the teeth, while all Tommy had was his trusty pocket knife and his stiff upper lip.

"Give up, tommy", the Gestapo officer would call, "Resistance is futile. If you surrender, you vill be treated vell - resist and u vill die!"

Tommy usually found some way out of these tricky situations - but then again, these books were usually fiction. Who would have thought, reading those books back in the sixties, that we would one day be hearing the same sort of words being mouthed by British state officials to British subjects?

In the Daily Mail today is the horrifying story of a family that came close to being torn apart by social workers - who may even have faked "evidence" against them.

Marianne Key, a former nurse, could only watch helplessly as the social workers, backed by the police, carted off her four children and threatened that she would never get them back.

Marianne was told that protest was useless. At every exit point of the hospital there was a police officer waiting to make sure that she did not try to stop them being taken.

Good grief! Hitler would be proud. Protest was useless, all exits blocked. Welcome to the new Stasiland, comrade. What a terrifying reflection of the country we now live in - but it gets worse. What were Marianne's "crimes"?

The litany of accusations against Marianne was lengthy: that she had hurt Alfred; that she sedated the children with an over-the-counter infant painkiller, Medised, so she could cope more easily; that they were given too much milk; that they did not have enough toys, and there was a lack of emotional warmth between Nickolas and his parents.

Too much milk? Not enough toys? Lack of emotional warmth? Even if it were true - what has this got to do with social workers? Is there some sort of "toy tsar" monitoring the number of Christmas presents our kids get? How much milk is too much? What if the kid likes milk? The other accusations - inflicting hurt, doping - are serious, but should there not be a requirement to produce evidence of these? What happened to the law of slander - defamation?

Marianne was said by one health worker to be suffering from Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP), a condition — unproved in science — where a mother is said to make up an illness in her child or even deliberately harm her own child to attract attention to herself.

Was this "health worker" qualified to make such a diagnosis - even if the condition exists?

The ailment is based on the discredited research of Professor Sir Roy Meadow, 73, the controversial paediatrician who was struck off the medical register two years ago for giving "misleading and incorrect" testimony as an expert witness in the case of Sally Clark, the mother wrongly jailed for killing her two infant sons.

It was Professor Meadow who coined the term MSBP

Well, we know how reliable he is, what does that tell us about the "health worker" who diagnosed Marianne? But the Gestapo - sorry, social workers - weren't finished yet.

Some of Marianne's records, and those of the children, were falsified to make the case against her, according to a report prepared on the family by their London medical negligence lawyers, Leigh Day & Co.

On dozens of pages, the dates were changed, with extra information written between lines or added which completely altered the sense of what was being said.

Some of Nickolas's development checks even had the letters P for Pass altered to F for Fail.

Significantly, the entire sense of a report saying that Marianne had comforted her eldest son after a fall was changed.

The word "not" was added in different writing at a later date so that it appeared she had ignored her son when he hurt himself.

A few weeks after Alexander's birth, a health visitor filled in a routine questionnaire to diagnose any signs of post-natal depression — which Marianne has never suffered from.

It is based on a points system and Marianne's score was low, showing that she was a happy mother.

Mysteriously, however, a second identical questionnaire — dated April 30, 2002, when Alexander was eight months old — was also filled in and discovered in Marianne's file.

It had a points tally so high that it made her appear mentally ill and likely to harm Alexander and his brother.

Wake up people! Our country is rapidly - very rapidly - turning into a totalitarian state in front of our very eyes. It's easy to turn away and say "I'm alright", but tomorrow it could be you. Behind it all is the nasty, pernicious ideology that lies behind all our main parties - progressive liberalism. New Labour may have blazed the trail, but they are all committed to this doctrine that seeks to turn the people of Britain into mere chattels of the state.