'In March, the number of applications by social workers to take children into care set a new record: 882 in a single month. Over the past year, my reports on how our highly secretive “child protection” system seems, too often, to collude in seizing children without proper justification have provoked considerable irritation in a number of judges – and last week the judiciary hit back. Mr Justice Bellamy, presiding over a case to which I have referred several times, took the unusual course of publishing a judgment in which he was highly critical of me for my “unbalanced” and “inaccurate” reporting.

Then the head of the family courts, Lord Justice Wall, in his ruling on another case, swiftly endorsed Bellamy’s attack on me (despite his own earlier criticisms of the “shocking” determination of some social workers to place children in “an unsatisfactory care system”).'

Read more: A Judge Attacks my 'One-Sided' Child Protection Stories - But it Cuts Both Ways