Melanie Phillips: The liberals who did so much to destroy the family must share the blame for Baby P

Daily Mail: "The more we learn about the behaviour of Haringey Council, which failed so grossly in the horrific case of Baby P, the more apparent it becomes that our so-called welfare state has turned into something truly monstrous.

First, we heard from its children's department head Sharon Shoesmith that neither she nor any of her staff accepted any responsibility for what had happened. This was despite the fact that it seems not one of them had noticed that, over a period of several months, this baby was being systematically neglected, attacked, tortured, mutilated and finally left to die - all on their watch.

Then we read that during this very period the department was receiving a glowing accolade by Ofsted inspectors, who awarded it top marks for its general performance.

And then we learned of the treatment meted out to former Haringey social worker Nevres Kemal, who sent seven letters to government departments and the Commission for Social Care Inspection warning that Haringey's child protection department was out of control.

The result was that she herself became the target of a witch-hunt, subjected to entirely trumped up allegations of child abuse - for having warned that the department was failing in its duty to protect children from abuse.
Sickening

Ms Kemal called this behaviour fascism. It is actually more akin to the Kafka-esque abuses of power under Stalinism. It is certainly the kind of behaviour one associates with totalitarian regimes.

Of course, we must not lose sight of the fact that the people who actually caused the suffering and death of Baby P were his mother, her boyfriend and their lodger. But what this whole sickening story tells us is something much bigger and profoundly disturbing about the state of our society.

Baby P's mother herself has shown no signs of remorse or shame. Instead, all three of these child-killers displayed a chilling absence of the most basic humanity. They treated this baby as a kind of inanimate object to be literally pulled apart and broken - an attitude which can be described only as psychopathic.

Nor is this a one-off. Last week, we also read of the case of two babies killed by their mentally ill mother.

These cases are not aberrations. They are the outcome of a process that has been going on for the past three decades and more, in which the fundamental values of civilised society have been systematically trashed and up-ended.

They are the result of the doctrine that all lifestyles must be considered equal and that no one has right to pass judgment on anyone else. Thus, women had a God-given right to bear babies out of wedlock. Stigma and shame were considered an affront to individual rights; disapproval of adultery or elective lone parenthood were dismissed as 'Old Testament fundamentalism'.

Government policy, egged on by activist judges who deliberately voided family law of 'moral judgments' on the basis that there was no right or wrong in family life because it was always just too complicated to untangle, accordingly penalised marriage, rewarded adultery, further incentivised lone parenthood and systematically normalised irregular relationships.

The outcome is a shattered social landscape of lost and abandoned children, raised in households of gross emotional chaos and physical and moral squalor. Such is the breakdown of the basics of civilised life that some of these children have never used a knife and fork by the time they enrol at school; their earliest words are obscenities, and aggression and violence are their instinctive response whenever they are thwarted.

Neglect is routine; love, responsibility and discipline wholly absent; under-age sex or sex with relatives or step-relatives commonplace; drug abuse, crime and systematic dishonesty a way of life. And these massively damaged children grow up into massively damaged parents.

Baby P's household lifts a curtain on this underworld - a home reportedly littered with dead animals, where another child was regularly savaged by a Rottweiler as part of the dog's 'training', and one of those convicted of Baby P's death had previously tortured his own grandmother to make her change her will to his benefit.

Ignoring the fact that this underclass has become detached from the most basic values of civilised life, the so-called progressive intelligentsia declares that its only problem is 'poverty'. Accordingly, it has supplied lone mothers with benefits on the basis that they were most in need.

The result has been financial incentives for unmarried women to have multiple children - whose primary need was to have a committed father and stable family life, the very need government policy ensured would never be met.

Those who warned of the individual harm and social catastrophe that would result were vilified as bigots. The only judgment to be permitted was that judgment of anyone's lifestyle was wrong.

Under this monumental pressure, academic research into family life was systematically corrupted to claim falsely that no serious harm was done to children from the fracturing of the family.

The truth about family life was deliberately concealed. Research shows a vastly greater risk of violence and abuse by boyfriends or stepfathers than biological parents or married spouses. A recent American study says a child is 50 times more likely to be abused by a non-biological parent.

In Britain, however, official statistics years ago stopped distinguishing between married and unmarried households, so it became impossible to identify the risks from unmarried relationships. Instead, 'progressives' claimed falsely that husbands and fathers posed the greatest risk to women and children.
Fearsome

This was part of the attempt to destroy marriage and all norms of sexual behaviour by the Left-wing intelligentsia: self-regarding social commentators and corrupted academics, feminist zealots and spineless male child psychologists and psychiatrists and sociologists who all connived at the Big Lie.

Not only that, they refused to publish research that told the truth or hounded out those few brave and honest researchers who managed to do so. This fearsome political correctness not only silenced informed debate but also made it impossible for social workers to apply basic common sense to situations crying out for action.

And while bending over backwards not to pass judgments on those who were demonstrably incapable of looking after a child, that same social work establishment refused to place children for adoption with ordinary middle-class families.

Since the death of Maria Colwell in 1973, inquiry has followed inquiry into social work failings - only to be followed by one shocking case of abuse after another.

Social work is plagued by low-calibre recruits, whose training is more akin to indoctrination in political correctness, working in a culture which intimidates any dissent and turns morality and common sense inside out.

Of course, the book should be thrown at Haringey Council, Ofsted, the Social Care Inspectorate and the assorted professionals who displayed incompetence and worse that led to the death of Baby P.

But the people who really have blood on their hands are the progressive intelligentsia who have simply written orderly, married, normative family life out of the script, enforced the doctrines of multi-culturalism and nonjudgmentalism with the zealotry of the fanatic, and caused Britain to descend into an age of barbarism"