Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and the state eats your baby;
Social services’ recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met.
Hexham children’s services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself.
Under the plan, a doctor will hand the newborn to a social worker, provided there are no medical complications. Social services’ request for an emergency protection order – these are usually granted – will be heard in secret in the family court at Hexham magistrates on the same day.
From then on, anyone discussing the case, including Miss Lyon, will be deemed to be in contempt of the court.
[…]
The case adds to growing concern, highlighted in a series of articles in The Sunday Telegraph, over a huge rise in the number of babies under a year old being taken from parents. The figure was 2,000 last year, three times the number 10 years ago.
Critics say councils are taking more babies from parents to help them meet adoption “targets”.
Update – Fran Lyon responds in our comments, here.
And this is why, even as an Anglophile, I refuse to move there. Too much nuttery. I thought Germany was bad for arresting parents who home-taught their children, but this… it makes me sick.
“Adoption targets”… wow. And to think Orwell headlined yesterday in British papers.
“Adoption targets”… wow. And to think Orwell headlined yesterday in British papers.
Posted by: mark peters at September 5, 2007 6:45 AM
Exactley. What the hell are the targets? They think this makes them look good by taking babies/kids from parents to give to others? My God…Stalin would be proud!!Off to the state gulag for little Johnny/Sarah because Mommy is smart and works!
Surely you are making this up Kate! I thought Britain was civilized.
Into what state must a government fall to justify revolt?
Tax my tea? Or steal my child?
No mention of the baby’s father.
Taking people’s kids is the Labour thing. Wanna see the Tory’s thing?
How to tell when a Tory is not a Conservative:
“Failing to follow a healthy lifestyle could lead to free NHS treatment being denied under the Tory plans.
Patients would be handed “NHS Health Miles Cards” allowing them to earn reward points for losing weight, giving up smoking, receiving immunisations or attending regular health screenings…
But heavy smokers, the obese and binge drinkers who were a drain on the NHS could be denied some routine treatments such as hip replacements until they cleaned up their act.”
//www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23410977-details/’NHS+should+not+treat+those+with+unhealthy+lifestyles’+say+Tories/article.do
Phantom:
I assume of course, that the Tory plan will allow those denied services to retain the NHS portion of their taxes. Right?
Of the two nightmares, the Left’s is as usual the most hellish. Denying “free” healthcare to the poor is rude, but taking a woman’s baby AT BIRTH?
If the woman isn’t a Grade A, proven baby murderer there’s no moral defense for an action like that.
I guess now we know what all the gun control and cameras are for, eh? Harder to organize a revolt against the baby kidnapping government.
I can’t wait until one of the trolls tries to defend this. Come on boys, tell me what a paranoid delusional psycho racist/bigot/homophobe I am for objecting! I’m a waitin’!
The Blair / Orwell parallel is quite ironic given that Orwell’s actual name was Eric Blair.
Somewhere Auldus Huxley is saying: “I told you so”.
Somewhere Aldous Huxley is saying: “I told you so”.
Alan, surely you jest. This is meant to be a -serious- proposal. ~:)
The Brits still don’t see that their only option is an armed revolt. It’s gone too far, I’ve seen that before – it’s called socialism.
>> “Come on boys, tell me what a paranoid delusional psycho racist/bigot/homophobe”
OK. Phantom, you are Come a paranoid delusional psycho racist/bigot/homophobe.
However, on this point, you are right (at least based on the info in the article). Without any additional information, I agree with the mother-to-be that it is “barbaric and draconian”, and “scandalous”.
Interestingly, if the woman had tried to obtain an abortion just prior to the baby’s birth and the state prevented it, many who would have applaud the fascist custodial order would be outraged by the state’s outrageous violation of her right to an abortion.
Here’s a good quote from the article:
“Miss Lyon came under scrutiny because she had a mental health problem when she was 16 after being physically and emotionally abused by her father and raped by a stranger.”
“She suffered eating disorders and self-harm but, after therapy, graduated from Edinburgh University and now works for two mental health charities, Borderline and Personality Plus.”
Welcome, Britons! We have room for you over here, away from the brownshirts and bombers.
Thanks Ted. I can rest easy now. đ
But you know, “barbaric and draconian” doesn’t quite cover this. Secret court hearings? Contempt of court if you even tell anybody they took your newborn?
This rises to the level of “needs to be shot immediately” IMHO. I’m hoping the article is wrong.
Speaking of bombers Alan, I wonder how many Muslims had their babies snatched? Fingers of one hand, perhaps?
I doubt most Muslims would stand for that sort of thing.
The British used to be like that too.
So there you have it, clinical psychiatry versus the state’s social service minions, that empowered state payrolled cadre of nanny state pc enforcers, driven by ignorance and a contempt for individual rights. Pretty scary, isn’t it. That a committee of non-clinical persons, totally refuting the medical model of psychiatry could have that much power is horrifying. Be mindful, also, contrary to all good medical practice, that this committee has put this woman’s mental health, her pregnancy and fetus at risk by creating horrific stress for her.
For starters, Munchausen by Proxy is very very rare, it can only be diagnosed after the fact. This young woman could only be diagnosed as such if she met the criteria which could only be determined if she had endangered an older child with that specific behavior. Either you have behaved as such or you didn’t. There is no likely.
It certainly opens the door for the state to comb through medical histories, see who had a Bipolar or alcoholic parent, maybe a grandparent with an arrest record, determine unfitness based on some social services rating system and preemptively remove children at birth as in this case.
Tony Blair created this monster.
This is an egregious human right’s abuse. If this case doesn’t shock British sheeple out of their complacency, I can’t imagine what will.
It seems that in spite of many of the British being masters in their field of endeavor, there is this rotting underbelly that sets up committees for all kinds, of control freaks, to tell everyone else how to live and if they donât the justice industry sends them off to the institutions of forced rest. The action in the story is so preemptive that if you take it as a precedent, they can do anything to anybody, just because they think that in future a person is going to behave this way or that. This must be some kind of improvement a one up if you like, on 1984.
It is truly frightening that this happens in a free and democratic society, although democracy is prone to leave even the biggest idiots alone to go about their bussines.
Of course this is all done by and for people who went to school for a long time and need some, not job, but money source. There is a large difference between the people who went to school for a long time and those that actually derived real life benefits from going to school.
Here is the real reason for GW hysteria âTreasury ‘pockets extra ÂŁ10bn’ from green taxesâ,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=479514&in_page_id=1770
Britain would be a wonderful place, if only its citizens would get together and hang everyone who has ever been employed by the government there.
This is my fear of Canada if the NDP and Liberals have their way with us. The creeping nanny state and the death of society one little bit at a time.
What a shame to see what has happened to the British Empire.
enough
Any doubt at all that Britain is circling the toilet bowl for the final few rotations before the BIG flush is over???
Why doesn’t she just get the heck out of there and go to a free country, like Iraq or Afghanistan. They’d let her keep her baby.
She could seek refugee status in Canada, by the way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiDtghxoJdU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXV5IGieaP8&mode=related&search=
Hear it from a snatched baby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riuksKe5BbU&mode=related&search=
Apparently it never happens to Muslim babies because all their mothers are sane, modest, married, responsible and on the dole. There is no familial violence and care is lavished equally on all the 11 or 12 children.
There is also the question of whether Muslim babies are adoptable, since no amount of nurture can change their nature!
“All UK ‘must be on DNA database’
Lord Justice Sedley is a senior appeal court judge
Judge’s comments
The whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database, a senior judge has said.”
From National Newswatch. If it’s bad now, it’s about to get worse.
Geez, Ted, your tacit agreement that the state is bad in this case is a little narrowed, don’t you think? You’re kind of missing the point, that this egregious act had to have a whole pathological state infrastructure built up for it to have gotten this far. You seemed to have selectively missed the broader concerns in the article with all of its links:
The case adds to growing concern, highlighted in a series of articles in The Sunday Telegraph, over a huge rise in the number of babies under a year old being taken from parents. The figure was 2,000 last year, three times the number 10 years ago.
Or if you had followed the links in the article:
To most people, it will seem grotesquely unjust that any child could be removed on such a basis. Northumberland County Council is, however, far from unusual in acting in this way. The courts have endorsed the removal of hundreds of children from their natural parents on the basis that there is a possibility that they might “abuse their child emotionally”.
Or the other link:
Some 5,100 children were registered for physical abuse and 2,600 for sexual abuse. But while the numbers of children in these categories are falling, the number of those in the “emotional abuse” group, which covers children who have not been injured and have not complained, is growing steadily.
You are such a classic water carrier for socialism’s pathology. You missed your spot in history as a mindless apologist for the state. When Stalin was orchestrating famines in the Ukraine as political retribution, I’m sure you would have selected for our consideration one of the few carrot patches that escaped the wrath, nurtured with state fertilizer of course.
If you don’t think that all that big govt isn’t here or on its way, you are not paying attention. Thousands and thousands of Canadians have unfortunate contact with their govt everyday. It ain’t going to get better. Canadian sheeple are no brighter than British sheeple. And I have a Pierre, a Brian, a Jean, a Svend, a Carolyn etc… to prove it.
I agree with Penny. Munchausen’s by Proxy does occur. It’s exceedingly rare. And it absolutely cannot be diagnosed prospectively. It’s not hard to see why Blair tightened the gun control first. If the facts are as outlined in the article (always a big “if” with the MSM) then I would certainly advocate armed revolt to protect the child. If she were my neighbour, hell, I’d man the barricade. How’d that document go — “When in the course of human events . . .”?
Interesting to ponder that Tony Blair has been lauded by President Bush as a great leader and compared to Churchill (ha ha) because he supported the war in Iraq. Anyone who has studied Churchill in any depth will know how laughable such a comparison is. The sort of big-state government over which Blair presided, with its cavalier disregard for individual liberties, (as discussed above) is ominously similar to that which defined the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites during the Cold War. A year or so back a woman was arrested, charged and found guilty of something or other for peacefully standing at the Cenotaph War Memorial in London and reading out the names of Iraqi War casualties. Freedom of speech and protest anyone? It hasn’t got any better. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has always seemed to me to resemble a Soviet apparachik like Brezhnev or Andropov. He wouldn’t have looked out of place lined up with the rest of them in Red Square during a May Day Parade! You need only listen to his rote monotone machine-speak to understand what I mean. He is of course an exponent of the all powerful Big State. He has refused to allow a referendum on the new ‘European Treaty’ which his government promised prior to the last general election. This is because he knows he would lose that vote as opinion polls have consistantly indicated. Ever bigger, more remote and unaccountable government. In true Orwellian tradition there is now such a thing in Britain as a ‘Hate Crime!’ Its wonderful subjectivity has made it a very popular piece of legislation amongst the self-appointed guardians of the social conscience which increasingly includes (unelected) politically correct police chiefs. With violent crime on the increase and with fewer police on the streets I guess they need something to make them appear effective to protect their self-esteem. To be sure, real life will eventually trump fiction.
The article references a recording posted on YouTube that was removed. Anyone found that somewhere else online?
Guilty until proven innocent? With no chance of ever being proven innocent because the deed is done behind closed doors? Democracy, you gotta love it!
Found it. Just do a Google search for “social workers threatening to take a newborn”
To Jan; So great a leader was Churchill that at the first possible opportunity after 1945 the grateful British threw him out of office.
So take an historical perspective for what its worth. There have always been GREAT WAR LEADERS, whose track record in their HOME POLITICS has been miserable! And vice versa!
Rare indeed is the person who can be both, and that may be because, concentrated on war, such leaders leave the Home Front to inferior men!
You cannot blame Blair for the madness that has been building up in the British social polity for the last 30 years, and especially you cannot tie this case, and what it represents, to the war in Iraq, unless you too, like the majority of your cowardly compatriots, are suffering from BDS (Blair Derangement Syndrome!)
Jan, good comments, sadly the Tories aren’t much better. They ought to be organizing a well deserved comeback on conservative values, instead they are as bad as the liberals:
Millions of people could be offered NHS “health miles cards” under Tory plans to address Britain’s obesity crisis and other public health concerns.
They would gain points by losing weight, giving up smoking, receiving immunisations or attending health screening programmes. They could then use such rewards to pay for gym memberships, buy fresh vegetables or get priority access to other public services.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23410949-details/Tories'%20health%20miles%20plan%20for%20weight%20loss/article.do
Geez, penny, so full of spit and venom that you can’t resist the temptation to lash out. And when I come in here to agree with the comments, what to do but invent unstated positions so you can spew some more. Well done. A very impressive display of blind stupid partisanship.
In my comment agreeing with Phantom, I also didn’t condemn Hitler and the KKK so, by your illogic, I suppose I must also be a Nazi racist, is that it?
Time to go back to the doctor, penny. Your prescription has clearly run out.
In the U.S., several states, including Illinois, have a governor who is trying to force pharmacists to sell Plan B possibly abortifacient pills. Critics have noted the unprecedented refusal to have a conscience clause. One governor even threatened to fire the state board if they didn’t give in. Bloomberg is trying to force hospitals to provide abortion training and services, despite student and doctor resistance. Yet there is the proposal in England to refuse medical services for real diseases. Senator Edwards has made similar proposals. It’s the Hypocritical Loath.
Good night, UK. You had a great run, and bequeathed great liberal traditions to us in America. Thank you.
eliX-you unintentionally shortened Churchill’s history, I’m sure. The British soon threw out the Labour Party and re-elected Churchill. From 1951 to 1955, his record is honourable, so he was not just a Great War Leader. No Prime Minister after the war was the Supreme Commander.
One of the things that would make him unpopular with a large group today (endearing him to others) is that he told his cabinet, “Keep England white.”
Problem is, it’s the English themselves who are orchestrating their own demise, which he might have foreseen, recognizing the evils of socialism as he did.
Reading the wartime newspapers you will see that there was a great love affair with Stalin, Russia, and all things Communist during those years. So much so that in hindsight it seems it is possible to fool some of the people most of the time. With Churchill gone, and the nanny society lulling them to sleep, the British have proven that it is possible to fool most of the people most of the time.
This can all be traced back to the outsourcing of personal responsibility for health care (and security) to the state. Once the citizenry has opted for socialized medicine they are ultimately and logically no longer sentient adult beings but chattel to budget-conscious bureaucrats and social workers – no different than Indians on the reserve. Britain is no different than the other rotting welfare states, just ahead of the rest as it was with liberty a few centuries back.
Ted, I’m confused now. You like the Tory plan? All Penny did was repeat what I said.
Hey, Ted, you’ve established yourself over time here as a consistent useful idiot for the left. What more can I say.
Amazing how you guys jump all over a headline in the absence of any real information about the case. Muchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy is rare, but is a real threat to children’s lives where it does exist.
There are many instances when children need to be in the care of someone other than their biological parents. Just look at all the drug addicts, prostitutes, unwed teenage mothers, and yes, mentally unstable people having kids these days! The price society and indeed, those children, pay for leaving them with their rotten parents is extremely high.
More is required of dog owners than of child-breeders in this day and age. In my years as a social worker/probation officer, I saw more cases that left me scratching my head, “Why were these people allowed to have/keep their kids?”
Even though I am generally against state intervention unless absolutely necessary, you’ll have a hard time convincing me or anyone else with first-hand knowledge of the issue that, at least here in Canada, too many babies are being taken into care. Ludicrous!!
epw
Surprise, surprise. Scroll down to Mark Steyn’s post this morning at 8:31 at NRO and follow his link on this story……
http://corner.nationalreview.com/
Kate, kudos to you for obviously being on his blog list. A standing ovation is in order.
Hey, Ted, you’ve established yourself over time here as a consistent useful idiot for the left. What more can I say.
Jesus, what a harridan.
Loath as I am to defend the current government, I do believe this was a decision and policy made locally. Certainly it’s a result of the target driven culture that Labour’s created over the years, but it’s not a nationally mandated way of dealing with children. Look at it as you would a decision at state or city level in the USA.
And kindly stop talking nonsense about us needing an armed uprising.
“And kindly stop talking nonsense about us needing an armed uprising”
Harumpf!Ian, sorry old bean, no hard feelings, wot wot.
Of course your right. It’s only the pipsqueek local city council stealing babies based on a guess by a pedatrician who has never met the mother.
It’s not like it’s one of the other 6 or 7 really powerful layers of government doing anything remiss.
Guns are evil.
EPW,
I suggest you read the article. Your comments indicate you have not. Briefly for you:
Woman as 16 year old was traumatized and had some mental health issues. Was treated and now is fine. Obtained a good education. Volunteers at some mental health organizations
Woman is now pregnant. Her Psychiatrist says she is fine. Her GP says she is fine. Pediatrician who has never seen her says she might possibly have very rare MBP syndrome and so the baby should be taken away from mother upon birth. Court proceedings are to be private and any talking about them could end you up in jail.
The fact this is even an issue is scary as heck.
Does England now review each and every parent before birth? Else why was this woman singled out?