But the reason, above all, why our “child-protection” system has become so corrupted is that its workings are so fiercely hidden from public view by that wall of secrecy erected to protect them by our judges. At least Sir James Munby, the new head of our family courts, is now trying to chip away at that wall of secrecy, as he did again last week by calling in a speech to editors for our family courts to be “opened up to the world”. The press, he told them, must be “jealously vigilant” in watching for miscarriages of justice, where judges are exercising what, since the end of the death penalty, have become “the most drastic powers” they possess — “the power to take a baby away from a mother for life”.