This story is, sadly, not unique. It is symptomatic of the extraordinary power that social services departments now wield over our lives.

Before Louise Mason’s trial in 2004, social workers apparently told her that they would be putting her children up for adoption irrespective of the outcome. That is precisely what they did, two weeks after her acquittal. They clung to their own “guilty” verdict despite the verdict of the jury.

In far too many cases social workers are putting themselves above the law. Doctors increasingly report that a child who is admitted to hospital has injuries that may be “nonaccidental”. This is translated by local authorities as proving guilt.

Many innocent lives have been destroyed by diagnoses of “shaken baby syndrome” and “metaphyseal fracture”, conditions that are believed to be diagnostic of abuse despite having been comprehensively demolished by medical experts in America, and overturned at appeal after appeal in Britain.

Louise Mason is very, very lucky that her children were not adopted. She would then have lost any rights to them, despite having been proved innocent.

We only know about this case because the High Court judge who heard the appeal ordered that Louise Mason be named, so that she could gain a “sense of justice”. That is how our secret state operates. There are many, many other cases that have never come out. Until the family courts open up to public scrutiny there can be no justice.

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