Shocking.

[IrnBruTheNoo]

Hard to believe that a couple who are doing a good job raising their DC are being slated like this...

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kerry-mcdougall-dumb-married-mum-2799857

There is this for starters.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2051320/MP-John-Hemming-admits-having-wife-mistress-challenge.html

I have noticed before that you place a lot of store by truth. So do I.

'I am sure some people with learning difficulties are capable of looking after their children'

Do you not think that New Labour's targets may have led to the increase in adoptions?

"Under New Labour policy, Tony Blair changed targets in 2000 to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent to 5,400 a year.

The annual tally has now reached almost 4,000 in England and Wales - four times higher than in France, which has a similar-sized population.

Blair promised millions of pounds to councils that achieved the targets and some have already received more than £2million each in rewards for successful adoptions."

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-511609/How-social-services-paid-bonuses-snatch-babies-adoption.html

Golddigger, I place a lot of store by truth but also by relevance.

What has John Hemming's marital relations got to do with him supporting parents who have had their children forcibly removed?

If anyone is interested in child protection in the UK , the website of the highly respected Dr Liz Davies , who has many years experience ,is essential reading.
Mr Hemming has my greatest respect .

Agree, Rockhopper1

Here is Dr Liz Davies' website

lizdavies.net/

Oh dear, Claig, you always have to bring everything back to your obsession with 'New Labour', don't you? 178 mentions in the past year, on topics varying from education and climate change to homeopathy and Mary Berry...

My personal opinion is that if a person cheats, then by definition they tell a lot of lies, and therefore what they say is to be examined very carefully.

And trust needs to be earned. I dont feel like he can be trusted.

Thanks, Golddigger. I have read some of the threads that are anti John Hemming on here. But the impression I got was that most of teh people who were anti him and his stance on the secretive closed family court system were either social workers or legal professsionals who are involved in some of these family court cases.

John Hemming is challenging the system, he is asking for more openness and accountability and that is why I think that he gets a lot of abuse from some people who work for the system.

I am sure he is not right on everything, but if he can help some parents obtain justice then he has done good, and I think doing good is what MPs should be all about.

Do Liberty, Amnesty, vicars, canons and reverends do as much as John Hemming to question the closed family court system and to support parents who have had theri children forcibly removed? Because I can't remember seeing them on Newsnight talking about it.

Learning difficulties has a huge spectrum, & off course some would not be able to look after a child. However this article states mild learning difficulty which would be classed as being able to live independently, manage a bank account & work.

Even trying very hard not to be reactionary, that article turned my stomach.

I hope there is more to it just because I cannot comprehend that this would go on. Many, many people have a mild learning difficulty & are fabulous parents.

'you always have to bring everything back to your obsession with 'New Labour''

Because I think the change has come about due to New Labour and their targets, just as I think their targets had a detrimental effect on our hospitals, and that is also why I think there are far fewer articles in the Guardian on these issues than there are in the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph.

Thank You Claig . ..

Eileen Fairweather is a freelance journalist who has covered child protection issues for over 20 years & had articles published in The Telegraph , Guardian & Mail which are all available on line .

'178 mentions in the past year, on topics varying from education and climate change to homeopathy and Mary Berry...'

As few as that? I should have mentioned 10 times more for what they are responsible for and that's before even talking about Iraq.

That is the trouble with the internet isnt it. It cant be discerned whether people have a vested interest.
fwiw, I am not a sw and know next to nothing about court systems.

On paper, family courts should be opened. If I remember correctly, they are not because of privacy?
I think I have only been on 1 John Hemmings thread, with a differnt mumsnet name. And he turned up on it!

Golddigger, he is a busy MP who has to deal with his constituents' problems and also devotes time to helping parents all across the country who feel that injustice has been done when their children were removed, and who speaks up about the child abuse that went on in Jersey and elsewhere, and he still has time to come on MN and discuss issues with ordinary MNers and he does so politely in the face of all kinds of abuse by those who are hostile to him.

I wish there were more MPs were like him, then the respect that the public has for politicians wouldn't be so low.

You wish there were more MPs like John Hemmings? Seriously?

"It was cost-effective, because the alternative was for me to sell my Covent Garden flat to free up capital to pay the Birmingham mortgage and move into rented accommodation in London, which would have cost the public more."

Sounds fair enough.

'The only other option was to sell up and buy another flat, which again would have cost the taxpayer more.

‘This wasn’t the best deal for me – either of the alternatives would have served me better – but I was acting with the public in mind.’

If only more of them acted with the public in mind.

Goldigger ..I too have always felt that people who cheat are not to be trusted . John Hemming however has never hidden his eccentric private life from anyone unlike many other politicians who deceive their spouses whilst hypocritically standing behind a facade of ' traditional family values .' He is thus a hard person to blackmail .

He would presumably have lied to his wife many times and hidden it from her!

This sounds like a modern day version of the "Philomena" story, Awful.

Who decides what the minimum IQ, is to bring up a child then.
What is the definition in regards to being not able to bring children up.

It is normal for children to be adopted in Scotland before the age of 5 or 6 years of age (according to a social worker I was recently speaking to). They try and get the whole process wrapped up before the child reaches school age.

Christopher Booker is nothing but a loon. His stories are bollocks. 'Adoption Targets' were scarpped years ago and were targets to get children who were already waiting for adoption, adopted, not to just blanket increase numbers of adoptions. Anyone who tries to claim that it is possible to get a child adopted because they "might be shouted at when they are older", is either extremely gullible because they'll believe that, or an out and out liar

John Hemming might say some things which i agree with, but I think his involvement is more unhelpful than anything else, and there's a very good reason why he gets repeatedly critised by high court judges for his actions. I hope he's stopped promoting that forced adoption conspiracy lunatic Ian Josephs who believes child molesters shouldn't be reported to the Police and mothers with depression should suffer alone and not go to their GP's for help, and tells everyone that all foster carers get paid 400 pounds a week!

Emotional abuse, includes things such as taking drugs in front a child, forcing a child to witness extreme violence, abandonnement, forcing a child to do humiliating and degrading things, constantly belittling a child and telling them they are worthless and shouldn't exist, favouring one child over another to an extreme extent, never showing a child any love at all ie. never hugging or saying nice things to them. Anyone who thinks emotional abuse is not serious and cannot cause massive long term irreperable psychological damage, is again deluding themselves.

On the Kerry Mcdougall case, I have no idea what the full story is, and so I'm not going to comment. I tend not to trust any newspapers when it comes to these social services, I don't care whether it's the Daily Mail (which I would never trust with any story on this subject matter) or the Guardian or The blah blah blah, none of them ever have anything near the full story. I tend only to trust court judgements, and yes, some judgements are public (in anonymised form).

Personally, I've never seen a single child avaialble for adoption where I read their profile/Form E and thought 'did they really need to be adopted'. I've read quite a lot where I cried for the child and their experiences. Ditto the many adopted children I know personally

" I don't care whether it's the Daily Mail (which I would never trust with any story on this subject matter) or the Guardian or The blah blah blah, none of them ever have anything near the full story"

It's no use shutting your eyes, you should read the newspapers and teh journalists who report on injustice and John Hemming helps people who have had their children removed by social services in what he believes may be injustices.

"In 2009, Rohan Wray and Chana Al-Alas sought medical advice when their baby son, Jayden, fell mysteriously ill. In two leading London hospitals he was found to be suffering from bone fractures. When these were diagnosed as indicating physical abuse, Islington social services were alerted, and when the boy died in Great Ormond Street hospital, his parents were charged with murder. A year later, when they had a baby girl, Jayda, social workers removed her from the delivery room.

Only at the trial, did it emerge, from the autopsy, that the doctors had failed to recognise that the boy’s injuries arose from rickets, resulting from the mother’s severe Vitamin D deficiency. The charges against the parents were dropped last December, yet they still had to endure a further four weeks in the family courts, where Islington stuck to its case that their daughter must remain in foster care. Finally, last Thursday, having criticised the two hospitals involved, Mrs Justice Theis ruled that, after more than a year in care, the child must be returned to her innocent parents."

www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/9218093/In-family-courts-experts-are-paid-to-get-it-horribly-wrong.html

"The case reported on Friday only emerged because the parents were charged with murder. The evidence against them was therefore examined according to the much stricter rules which apply in criminal courts."

The evidence required in family court should be less than is required in criminal court. It's still high, but the same standard of proof would lead to a lot more deaths and abuse. My own oldest childs case is a good example of that

I used to read the papers. Then I realised that they'd never stop bullshitting, especially the DM. So I stopped paying heed to the stories, unless there's a public court judgement about the case, which I will read and base my opinions on that