“The Role of Government Edicts in False Accusations of Child Abuse”.

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On the 17th May my neighbour printed copies of the transcript of our “Home Truths” interview, I wrote a cover letter and my husband stuffed them into envelopes addressed to every relevant politician and public figure we could think of. This was the now infamous letter which Earl Howe spoke of here in 2002 and which John Ungoed Thomas in the Sunday Times of 25 January 2004 used to force the Government to admit that Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge and others had known about problems with the MSBP diagnosis since at least May 2000, and not just since the Sally Clark appeal as they seemed to want us to think. The Conservative MP Tim Loughton has since tabled a Parliamentary question about my “Home Truths” letter forcing, on 23 February 2004, a Government admission in Hansard as well as in the newspapers.

Going back to the summer of 2000. In the wake of the Griffiths report many significant opponents of the MSBP phenomenon entered into correspondence with John Hutton, the Health Minister responsible, about the expected post Griffith’s review of MSBP. Hutton had already made it clear in the Commons in December 1999 that he had been taken in by Meadow and Southall so he was hardly the person to exercise the balanced judgement called for in the Griffiths Report.

At about this time, Charles Pragnell, Lisa Blakemore Brown and I first met with Earl Howe and with the former Attorney General Sir Nicholas Lyell QC MP. I had known Nick Lyell when we were both concerned with after school and holiday provision. Following our meeting Nick Lyell also wrote to John Hutton to attempt to clarify the post Griffiths situation. This Hutton, not unlike the other later Hutton, was a master of clever words designed to allow the Government whatever rope it required. Hutton managed by sleight of hand to change the Griffiths suggestion of a multi disciplinary review of MSBP into a working party to write guidelines to enable social services departments and others to identify parents and carers supposedly suffering from MSBP, or as they had cleverly re-named it Fictitious and Induced Illness in Children. Anyone reading the Griffiths report and the various letters from John Hutton to Nick Lyell and others will recognise that spin was alive and well in Westminster in the year 2000.
{“The Government acknowledges the need for clear interagency guidelines for professionals to follow when MSPB is suspected. Therefore a multi-disciplinary working party is being convened to draw up such guidelines within the framework of Working Together to Safeguard Children - a guide to inter-agency working to safeguard and promote the welfare of children published by my Department in December 1999.”)

Sir Nicholas Lyell, who was an MP, a QC and a former Tory Attorney General, also shared his concerns with the office of the Lord Chancellor. I don’t think he even got a reply. The level of arrogance from this Government was extreme.

It appears that someone was seconded from one of the major children’s charities to write the FII guidelines and that all those invited to contribute were disciples of Meadow and Southall. The Children’s Minister at the time was Beverley Hughes who later resigned over immigration issues. I understand that Hughes, a former probation officer and social work lecturer, has been associated with promoting belief in the existence of organised ritual abuse. Maybe she was also receptive to the views of Meadow and Southall, possibly believing these to be in the best interests of children?

Draft guidelines on the identification of parents and carers supposedly guilty of inventing or inducing their children’s illnesses were released in 2001. They read like the gospel according to Saint Roy and Saint David. My husband likened them to the medieval Maleus Maleficarum which was used to hunt out and prosecute supposed witches.

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© Jan Loxley Blount 05 11 04 London

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