When, last week, I was asked by my editor “how can we hope to see this mess cleared up?”, I could only reply pessimistically that the whole culture of our “child protection” system has become so corrupted that it is hard to see how it can ever be returned to some semblance of decency and humanity. The “good” social workers of old have largely been driven out, to be replaced by heartless, jargon-spouting zealots who are the last people who should be involved in the life of any family. Few things have shocked me more than the way the police have become such unquestioning accomplices of this cruel system. There may be a glimmer of hope in the realisation by Lord Justice Munby, our top family court judge, that some start can be made on clearing out the Augean stables by exposing more of the work of those ultra-secretive courts to public scrutiny.