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We can, at last, put a name to the child known for months as Baby P. His name is Peter Connelly and, thanks to the intervention of a High Court judge, his identity and that of the people who ended his short life have been made public.
Haringey council, whose social workers so conspicuously failed Peter, did their best to ensure that those identities would remain secret, in the interests of Peter's siblings. But the judge was right and the council wrong: we ought to have the facts and the faces.
Peter Connelly's background, of which we are now reminded, constitutes an unlovely picture of the British underclass. There was the mother who had successive children without regard for how they were to be provided for, other than from benefits, spending much of her time trawling internet chatroom and pornography sites, too preoccupied with them and with her boyfriend to feed her child or observe that he was being abused. There was the boyfriend, Steven Barker, and his brother Jason, who subjected the little boy to nothing less than torture, sometimes terrorising him with their Rottweiler, and having, in the case of Steven Barker, managed to conceal his own presence in the house from social workers.
The brothers had an ugly record. Jason was living with a runaway 15-year-old; Steven was found to have raped a two-year-old girl; both were alleged to have assaulted their grandmother. The house was covered in human and animal excrement, dead rats and chickens. Yet successive social workers allowed Peter and his siblings to remain in this taxpayer-funded hellhole, missing 78 opportunities to save him; a doctor failed to notice his broken back. Yet afterwards those responsible fought to save their jobs rather than acknowledge their failures.
The good thing to have come from Peter Connelly's death is that people are now more willing to report suspected child abuse. Yet the Care Quality Commission, reporting on child protection nationwide, last month said that social workers' poor training, inadequate monitoring and large workloads meant many children were still at risk.
But we must at least be able to expect that when protection workers examine a child, they do so without anyone else present, such as a lying mother.
It sticks in most people's craw that when Tracey Connelly and the two brothers leave prison they may be provided with new identities and secure accommodation. That may, unfortunately, be necessary. But we can only hope that the brothers stay in prison for a very long time.
Private schools at risk
Independent schools are considering whether to take legal action to contest the Charity Commission's ruling that charities must pass a “public benefit” test to qualify for their status and that private schools should do this by giving more bursaries to pupils who cannot afford fees.
The problem with the Commission's approach and that of the Government is that it is unnecessarily treating independent schools as enemies. Many have already tried hard to extend their facilities to neighbouring schools; many are giving more bursaries. When the last Tory government introduced the Assisted Places scheme to send bright state school pupils to independent schools, it was accused of creaming off talent from state schools. Yet surely bursaries do the same thing.
Our aim should be for state schools to replicate the things that make private schools attractive, as grammar schools did. The private sector has kept alive single sciences, classics and foreign languages; state schools have not. The sector deserves recognition for maintaining high educational standards. If people are paying for schools, we should be asking why.
Democracy's martyr
Aung San Suu Kyi has been sentenced by a Rangoon court to a year and a half house arrest for being visited, against her will, by an American supporter. Further proof of the oppressive and capricious nature of this odious regime.
