Another painful reality check for libertarians
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Dear libertarians,
Every so often a story comes along that beautifully clarifies why I will never support libertarianism. The death of Baby P was one such story, and a couple of days ago another of these pivotal stories reared its head, as a young mother who was judged too stupid to care for her own baby has accused social workers of ’stealing’ the child from her. While in this particular instance I think social services got it wrong, the incident brings to light why a government should never be reduced to merely enforcing the law and letting everyone do what they want in the meantime. The woman, known only as Rachel, is taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights in a last ditch attempt to halt the adoption of the child, now aged three.
Her daughter, referred to only as K, was born three months prematurely with severe medical complications. Social workers first raised doubts about Rachel’s parenting capabilities soon after her daughter was born with chronic lung disease and other complications. They were ‘concerned’ that she initially only visited the baby for one or two hours each day. K was discharged from hospital aged six months into the care of the foster parents. But although K’s health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day care, the child is due to be handed to adoptive parents within three months. Rachel will then be barred from further contact. The adoption is going ahead despite a recent psychiatrist’s report which declared that the 24-year-old has ‘good literacy and numeracy and that her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range’. It said the unemployed former cleaner had no previous history of learning disability or mental illness, and Rachel has said that she had been ‘totally let down’ by the system: “Social workers and the psychologist keep saying I have got learning difficulties but I do not. They go after the wrong people. There are people out there harming children. All I want to do is look after mine but they will not let me. That girl has been stolen from me. They might have stamped all the paperwork, but she has effectively been stolen from me.” After a hearing earlier this month, a family court judge reduced her contact visits with K from 90 minutes every fortnight to 5 minutes a month in preparation for the adoption. Rachel’s battle was compounded by the fact a psychologist concluded that her ‘learning difficulties’ would leave her unable to instruct her own solicitor. As a result, Alastair Pitblado, the Official Solicitor, who acts for those who cannot represent themselves, was called in. He declined to contest the council’s adoption application, despite Rachel’s wish to do so. She told appeal court judges last year that the Official Solicitor’s involvement had reduced her to a ’spectator’.
What an awful mess. Here we have a clash of two worlds: social services with their remit to protect children, and a mother’s claim to bring up her own child. The first question to ask is why are social services involved in the first place? Only visiting your sick child in hospital for a couple of hours a day hardly seems like bad parenting. What if both parents of a sick child worked full time – would they be in trouble too? The conflicting assessments of Rachel’s psychological capabilities are very bizarre. Even though a study last year found that Rachel’s IQ was rated at 71 (below average), surely the courts realise that IQ is a poor measure of general intelligence. If someone has basic literacy and numeracy skills and has no learning disabilities or mental illness, I don’t understand the grounds for complaint. The lack of a father in the picture clearly had some bearing on social services’ thinking. The child’s father, aged 66, has no contact with his daughter and he and Rachel are no longer together, but it’s not like single parents should be banned from taking their own children home from hospital. The way that social services have defended their actions is entirely predictable as well. In February 2008, Nottingham City Council conceded social workers had acted illegally in removing a baby boy two hours after his birth because no court order had been sought, but the council claimed that the mother’s troubled childhood and mental health problems threatened the baby’s welfare. Nottingham City Council said that adoption cases were ‘decided by the courts, taking into account all the information presented by all parties and putting the future welfare of the child as the priority’. Even so, I have no idea why a ‘troubled childhood’ should prevent a mother from raising her child and the issue of mental health problems again appears unsubstantiated.
So, there we have it – another fine mess for social services and another bad day for child protection. But is it really that simple? One of my main objections to libertarians is that they refuse to engage with the concepts of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘risk’. The fact is that many children find themselves in situations where no law is being broken yet the child, should they spend increasing amounts of a time there, is at risk of abnormal physical or mental development. Child neglect is a classic example of this, but the problem is always that the degree of ‘neglect’ is not a black/white scenario – it is a continuum from a superb environment down to a shocking environment for raising a child and everything in between. Deciding what point on the continuum represents a child being put in danger is extremely difficult but at least a Conservative would draw the line somewhere whereas libertarians wouldn’t bother to draw it at all. What if Rachel did have a serious mental handicap or a consistent history of mental illness? Would libertarians do or say anything? Ultimately the answer to that question depends on individual circumstances and medical evaluations, but at least a Conservative would ask the question in the first place. It is so so so hard to deal with situations such as this because no-one can ever make a definitive statement about what future awaits a child without the benefit of clairvoyancy. In the absence of such powers, it is left to social services to make a fair, evidence-based and objective judgement on whether a child is likely to receive at least a minimum standard of care.
As a Conservative, I believe that social services have an important role to play, which makes me even more angry that Labour have reduced them to a bunch of box-ticking mindless bureaucrats instead of giving them the professional freedom to make the right judgements without fear of losing their job because they didn’t fill in the right piece of paper. As far as I can see, libertarians do not deal in the currency of vulnerability and risk. Unless you beat your child or starve them, libertarians don’t appear to be that interested in child protection. The fact that social services make mistakes is not a reason to support libertarians; it is a reason to give social services a clearer remit and more control over their own work to ensure that they only take a child away from their family if an individual child is genuinely in danger, not because of some stupid assumptions that the government told them to watch out for.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
“They were ‘concerned’ that she initially only visited the baby for one or two hours each day.”
If the baby was that ill, is this so surprising?
When it comes to child protection issues there is always a difficult balance to be made. I’m not really a libertarian although I do hold with the basic principles of libertarianism as any decent conservative should do, but the big problem for me with social services and the whole child protection industry is that it is a self-perpetuating industry.
If it actually achieved its aims – ending child neglect, harm or vulnerability – it would cease to be necessary. We’re talking about people in jobs – and people in powerful positions of authority – and like all people they feel a need to justify their job and, if they are in a position of responsibility and have any ambition whatsoever, to increase the range and scope of their authority. So regardless of its intentions as an industry, the actions of its agents will be to find reasons to justify their employment, an increase in their budget or head count. The more “professional” you make that industry the more you are going to find this is the case.
False dichotomy, frankly, wrapped in a straw man. Don’t like libertarianism? Want to take the brutal edge off your nascent authoritarianism? Then invoke the sacred-cow of ‘The Children’!
I believe and will happily argue that the role of the state is to enforce the law. It is not the role of the state to play at Minority Report and play with ‘pre-crimes’. That way lies the thought police.
That the state, in this case, has chosen to use rubbish IQ tests, appoint a solicitor for the woman they felt was incapable of choosing her own brief, the solicitor who then completely ignored their clients wishes and seems potentially complicit in having her children removed, to me demonstrates precisely why we need more libertarianism and less servile acquiescence to the Leviathan.
Julia, not really.
Stan, people only feel like they have to justify their existence if you make their funding dependent on ‘performance’ or ‘targets’. If you give them control over their own budget, they can be much more effective.
Shaun, the system is obviously not working properly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean scrap the system – it means sort out the family courts and put much tougher guidelines / thresholds in place before a child is taken away from their mother.
Indeed LFAT, but on thinking about it, the libertarian argument could go further and would be more compassionate.
Why punish the woman and remove the child because they have some sort of minor disability? Surely the properly caring thing to do would be to support the woman, maybe use some of those Social Services to provide home-visits and assistance with whatever problems may arise? That would be the caring response that would guarantee the maximum liberty for all involved.
“a government should never be reduced to merely enforcing the law and letting everyone do what they want in the meantime”
Why not? There are marginal situations (this may or may not be one of them, what do I know) where the risk of child abuse is nigh-on 100% and so State intervention is appropriate, but it is pointless to generalise from marginal situations, it’s more important deciding what’s clearly on either side of “the law”.
Further, many of these situations arise because the government is financially encouraging such people to have children, whether they can care for them or not: accepting a financial burden rather than expecting a financial subsidy sends a clear signal that parents are committed to the job of being parents, which is easily fixed by scrapping Child Tax Credits (and, as I have said before, increasing Child Benefit to £30 per child per week for the first three-or-so children per family).
“As a Conservative, I believe that social services have an important role to play, which makes me even more angry that Labour have reduced them to a bunch of box-ticking mindless bureaucrats instead of giving them the professional freedom to make the right judgements without fear of losing their job because they didn’t fill in the right piece of paper.”
This is a gaping flaw in Labour policy and applies to every aspect of the state sector; all of which have suffered the same fate. Professionals are no longer allowed to exercise their professional judgement and are forced to act upon knee-jerk top-down decisions made people who are so out of touch with reality it’s frightening.
Just to play the complete bastard here, if the state hadn’t intervened to save the life of this child born three months premature with lung disease, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Shaun, in an ideal world that would be the way forward – but it would depend on individual circumstances as to whether this would be even remotely feasible.
Mark, the risk of child abuse, even if it’s 90%+ is irrelevant from a libertarian perspective, surely? Libertarians sit on their hands until a law is actually broken, as I understand it.
Tory Poppins, I wholeheartedly agree. When a bureaucrat in Whitehall decides which children get take into care and which do not on the basis of their own abitrary judgement, mistakes (and tragic ones at that) are inevitable.
RayD, interesting angle, although I think libertarians argue in favour of everyone organising their own healthcare so technically the child might still have been covered.
LFAT wrote:
Yes it would; I’m arguing that our so-called ‘caring’ state and its amazing rush to remove children from people the elites feel are unsuitable is more interventionist and (often) a first resort whereas I’d prefer the state find ways to keep parents and children together as a preference to maximise their individual freedom. That doesn’t appear to have been discussed at all in this case.
And as an aside, if they can take your kids away on the basis of a low IQ, surely they should make everyone take contraceptive implants and only license their removal if they pass some arbitrary bit of quackery which Einstein famously failed/
At least the birth mother has worked out that she needs to demonstrate that she wants the child. I hope she will also be able to prove that she can meet K’s needs. I agree the system is far too beaucratic and slow.
To expand upon my previous glib remark, I think the child’s illness is central to this particular case. Firstly, because the child was presumably placed in an incubator immediately after birth, thus preventing the normal mother/child bonding, and secondly because having produced a fragile child, the nanny system now feels the child requires better than average parenting. None of this is the mother’s fault. If the state is going to intervene at all, it should be to help the mother.
Using this case as an argument against Libertarianism doesn’t really work, because the argument falls into the trap of assuming that if there wasn’t state intervention there would be nothing. That is what the Statists would like you to believe, but before the Welfare State was created, there was social cohesion, the parish and a plethora of charities. Sixty years of state education ensures children now know only the state, and the passage of time means there are few left who remember before the state.
If you destroyed the state now of course there would be nothing, as the State has assiduously destroyed all competing Patrons.
Incidentally, I live in a country with no state provision, so I’m not talking completely out of my bottom.
“I’m arguing that our so-called ‘caring’ state and its amazing rush to remove children from people the elites feel are unsuitable is more interventionist and (often) a first resort whereas I’d prefer the state find ways to keep parents and children together as a preference to maximise their individual freedom. “
I guess there are plenty of targets for ‘removing child from possible/probable harm’ and none for ‘gave new mother support until she stood on her own two feet’….
Dear A Tory,
You are so erudite that I feel almost churlish to criticise anything you post. I have three points, however:
1. First, a declaration of interest. I am a Tory voter but well on the Libertarian end of the Party. But I am struggling a little to follow your logic. Sure, really hardline loony Libertarians think that all government should be abolished but I actually think that many of them just believe that ’some’ government should be abolished – as do I. I have yet to hear any of them, however, say that all child protection should be done away with.
2. I always think it is difficult to make authorative judgements on issues reported in the media where the whole story is never relayed. Child protection issues are classic examples, where most of the the detail of the case is never reported, for obvious privacy reasons, and if they were, the easy media outrage story may not look so balanced or even reasonable or fair. It would be very difficult for any of us, unless we had the case notes, to comment on this story authoratively.
3. Mrs C and I have just adopted two small girls. There is much wrong with the child protection system and the adoption process, much wrong with the tick box mentality of social services and all of that, but one thing that struck us about the system was how ludicrously overwhelming the evidence has to be for the State to act to protect a child. Thus we get the Baby P scenarios. Frankly, unless a social worker sees a parent abuse a child in front of them, the State almost goes to the nth degree not to intervene. It’s madness.
Melvin
LFAT, I wonder if you really understand what liberty is – you seem a bit mixed up about it.
The case you refer to is from the outside just another example of failure of government policy, and from the inside most probably a nightmare; and your link with the Baby P case is distasteful. What it seems to be most about is the abuse of process by unelected and unaccountable busybodies – or yet another example of the nanny state. And something which I think most conservatives would find abhorrent.
I think many people would agree that there is a balance between individual freedom and individual responsibility. Perhaps this is something you might give regard to before you set pen to paper.
Shaun, it certainly seems like this case was closed before it was even properly opened.
Measured, my wish is for the child’s interests to be put first but from the newspaper report it doesn’t sound like that is happening at the moment.
RayD, the issue of what would / could replace social services is a fascinating question that I might toy with on the blog at some point. There is an argument for social services being delivered by private providers but commissioned in by local authority to drive up quality and I’m sure there are many more permutations around.
Julia, the state overstepping the mark is always a concern (even moreso with socialists authoritarians in charge). I sincerely hope that trusting our professionals more with a clear ’small state’ remit will be a key theme of an incoming Conservative government.
Melvin, all valid points. Extreme libertarians are extremely rare in mainstream politics, and I’m sure that I don’t have 100% of the details for this case (and neither does the media). I’m trying to dig into the principles behind these sorts of decisions, rather than focusing solely on this particular case.
Alistair, yet again you seem to completely misunderstand my post and intentions. The balance between individual freedom and individual responsibility is precisely what this post is all about, as I think libertarian views are not easily reconciled with a social services department that takes vulnerable children away from their parents. Furthermore, to suggest that this entire case rests solely on the “abuse” of the process for removing children from their parents is far too simplistic.
On the other hand, if the baby is returned to the mother’s care and then something terrible happens (child abuse by her or a partner, or a freak accident), you can bet whatever you like that it will be the council who end up being blamed for it.
A huge part of the problem is the “trendy” idea, unfortunately all too common amongst those in charge nowadays, that managers do not actually need to know anything about the business they are managing; that as long as all the right boxes are being ticked, all is going well. This is ultimately doing everybody a disservice.
” as I think libertarian views are not easily reconciled with a social services department that takes vulnerable children away from their parents. ”
in the case you are referring to vulnerable would hardly seem to be an appropriate description. Most people would support the idea of a support system for vulnerable children (and perhaps even vulnerable adults!). But the villification of social services about Baby P was because that was an obvious case of a vulnerable baby. And this case of forcible adoption because the mother is judged too stupid does not reflect well on the people concerned – good example of abuse of process – if its a choice between that and libertarianism I know which one I would choose.
Good topic – but nothing to do with your subject!
I think the libertarian angle is an interesting one – but the principle is sound that unless somebody does something wrong, they shouldn’t be punished for it.
Apart from anything else, this means that we never end up in a situation where we’re truly unsure if punishment was the right option.
In case you missed it, I wrote some more on this subject. It makes me really really angry to hear what;s happened to this woman so far – I’m almost hoping that there’s some other side to this story, something that she genuinely did wrong, so that it doesn’t look so rotten and disgraceful.
Not sure how this, or indeed invoking Baby P, can in any way be used to bat against Libertarianism. For starters, this highlights the problems of state interference and how nanny state knows best. Baby P had the Nanny State involved – in fact one of the most rabidly privacy and individuality loathing states in British history – and that help bugger all.
Libertarianism accepts the one truism most people don’t want to hear:
The worlds not fair. The evil don’t all get cancer and die screaming in agony, begging an unlistening God for a sliver of mercy. The great and the good don’t get the immunity from the cornucopia of nastiness out there, nor are they guaranteed a painless death in the loving grasp of a caring partner. In short we live in a universe where fairy-dust farting unicorns are in short supply, but we do have a surplus of things that’ll give you a nasty death.
And really, we all have things we are ashamed of, things we have done we regret. I doubt many of us would really like to get what we deserve… No, a fair world might just highlight we’re still closer to tribal ape than heavenly angel, and our gestalt ego isn’t really equipped to handle that.
When you start saying the state should have a say in X because of people behaving a manner you disapprove of, you open that big can of worms that means anyone else can use the same justifications to browbeat others across the entire alphabet. Then you get a tyranny of the majority.
You want to save the Baby P’s of the future? Not going to happen, and regulated state activity certainly won’t do it. It takes close-knit communities to do that, and even then imperfectly. State apparatuses are by nature complex and generate greater work and complexity for themselves (Parkinsons Law) until they exist only for themselves, forgetting their original purpose.
The Tories offer a sweeter poison than Labour, it’s still poison though.
They were ‘concerned’ that she initially only visited the baby for one or two hours each day.
As an ex-neonatal ICU RN in the US, this is ridiculous. Visiting an hour or two a day when her baby is so sick, is pretty normal.
Obsidian, you said it better. The Libertarian understands shit happens and there’s nothing the state could or should do about it.
LFAT, is it just me or are your comment numbers restricted to a single digit? Were you not expecting more than nine?
AJS, many people don’t realise that Sharon Shoesmith, head of Haringey Social Services when Baby P died, was actually an education specialist who had been thrown into the job when local children and school services were combined by Labour – meaning that whoever was in charge would either be poorly versed in education or in social services.
Alistair, I know that this particular case appears to have been horribly distorted, but the principle is still important.
Stu, I know what you mean. It would be nice to think that social services had a reason to behave in such an extraordinary.
Ob, the case of Baby P is highly relevant because it demonstrates how compliant and bureaucratic the whole system has become. It also showed how Labour have replaced professionalism with box-ticking, because instead of looking after Baby P the social workers just did what their instructions told them to do (turn up at house, chat to mother, if no obvious signs of abuse then leave house). That is why after 60 visits no-one had spotted what was going on and it is not in itself an argument to use against the ‘nanny state’. A more effective and more accountable state would have dealt with the situation in a flash. I know that you always open a can of worms when you start dictating what people can and cannot do, but libertarians seem to resist the idea that there is a clear and crucial role for the state in some areas whereas I would say that the state has to be involved when it comes to these sorts of issues.
Sammy, my instincts told me the same thing.
Ray, it’s a problem with my Wordpress theme – the numbers are chopped off on the left hand side so you can only see the second digit! Very annoying.
“it demonstrates how compliant and bureaucratic the whole system has become.”
Can any system be created by a goverment, that doesnt become over time overerly bureaucratic, wastefull and prone to error?
Goverment departments always make mistakes, because they are run by people. And this is when some bright individual decides to “improve” the system, i’m sure labour though the box ticking would help.
Pilots have to perform a “box checking” exercise before take off, the pre-flight check, and that seems to work very well. Probably because planes are dumb machines and don’t learn to game the system.
I don’t see such a system will ever work with people because they will quickly figure out the “right” answers. See Winston Smith’s excellent blog on a similar subject.
Slightly off topic, but the thing that sticks in my throat about social workers is the refusal to accept that they should prove they improve overall outcomes. In my book, one taken in to care wrongly cancels out one taken in to care correctly and the money spent intervening is wasted.
RayD wrote:
Yes. Instead they pretend that they are anthropologists or sociologists, wary of passing comment on what could be construed as a ‘lifestyle’ lest it betray an overwheening paternalist character on their part. Relativism to the Nth degree, basically.
Whereas in reality simply having social workers suggest that certain behaviours promote more desirable outcomes than others. If you are rescued after a stroke by a social worker who arranges to have your bottom wiped, that promotes an outcome which is happier by dint of you not dying in your own poo. Cleanliness is a ‘good’. You see how this works? Even in relativism, I’d suggest that there are some things more ‘good’ than others!
@LFAT
I don’t disagree with what faults in the system baby P has highlighted, but it certainly has no place in a critique of Libertarianism.
I do disagree, however, with the view that Libertarians see no place for the state. One of libertarianisms biggest problems is that its very fractured about what points the state can have a say in.
It’s a surprisingly wide church from social libertarians to anarcho-capitalists, with just the overview that the state should have minimal impact on the individual.
Now just how minimal differs from person to person. It’s too easy to paint libertarians as little other than anarchists, both groups suffer from misconceptions about what they represent.
Although I recently joined LPUK I speak for myself here.
Libertarians may want the State out of people’s lives, but that doesn’t mean social services won’t be provided. As someone pointed out earlier, these services existed before the welfare state was created and the education system was co-opted into conditioning us that there was no welfare, health or pensions before Bevan’s creation. Indeed, Bevan wanted to model the welfare state on what he had seen provided, he just thought he could improve it – he couln’t.
In my world local communities and charities will be encouraged to provide these services free from the dead hand of the central state at levels appropriate to their needs. In these conditions it is more likely that time and money will be found to support the mother through the difficulties and allow her to keep the child from the start.
As someone who voted Tory since 1975, including 1997, I have more faith in this model than any that the state can provided, even one headed by a Tory.
LFAT,
The use of single extreme yet individual cases can always be used to make or score political points.
Labour have done this exceptionally well, using the individual cases of Victoria Climbie to warrant putting every child on a database, and the Hungerford murders to justify the setting up of an entire security industry to create and screen everyone against the paedophile bogeyman.
Your misrepresentative use of Libertarianism in your select argument is using the same big government tactics that have been used in the past, which says more of Tory thought process than Libertarian values.
Unfortunately, when you have a department that is driven by targets, any target will do in order to meet the numbers, and it is only the children and parents that suffer as a result. Social Services have become their own worst enemy by allowing themselves to be driven in this way, targets and process, with little or no accountability when poorly written and managed processes are followed.
The Libertarian Party has no intention of scrapping Social Services, and is disengenious of you to suggest otherwise.
We do intend however to humanise it, to remove the targets, allow those working within SS departments to use integrity, common sense and compassion rather than blindly following process and ticking boxes, and to shrink it down to a manageable and affordable size.
But most importantly we intend to remove the shroud of secrecy in which they operate. Protect the innocent yes, but expose the function. We believe that this would eliminate many of the abuses that we read about such as the one you highlighted in your post.
However, your straw man fails, falls over, and would submerge completely if laid against Tory administrations who have spectacularly failed and been discredited in this area in the past, with perhaps the Western Isles, Orkney and Lewis scandals as prime examples of unchecked state sponsored terror visited by Social Services.
Thanks to everyone for their comments on this, particularly libertarians of different shades.
IPJ, I am not seeking to exhonerate previous Conservative governments nor am I excusing the rash response of Labour to every similar situation. Seeing as LPUK doesn’t appear to have a policy on the website about social services and libertarianism in its strictest form rejects the role of the state in anything other than upholding the law, I think it’s reasonable to ask these questions. In such circumstances, social services would inevitably be reduced to waiting until abuse or neglect can be proven to have taken place. I too would like to see social services humanised and the target / box ticking culture is indeed what must be dismantled.
TGS, in my opinion your view of what would be provided by ‘communities’ and ‘local charities’ is far too optimistic. The most disadvantaged areas would suffer the most under this system.
Obsidian, I think that Baby P is indeed relevant because the Laming Report into the death of Baby P made it clear that a better trained police force (run by the state) and better trained medical professionals (run by the state) could have helped save this child, yet surely this immediately expands the role of the state? As I mentioned above, some libertarians do want a VERY minimal state, although I take your point about the variation with libertarianism.