The trauma of Ashya King and the enthusiasm with which public authorities we trust have demonised his parents without any real cause is shocking, but it is also a symptom of something which has crept like an evening mist over the integrity of our country. What would once have happened and what should now happen is this:
FIRST
The Secretary of State for Health should start the process to put the Paediatric Department of Southampton General Hospital into Special Measures while inspectors discover why it appears that:
1 The hospital created a general alarm when it must or ought to have known very well that, as turned out to be the case, Ashya’s parents would never have put him at risk
2 Were complicit in allowing the police to invoke a criminal statute of child neglect and cruelty, when it knew this to be untrue
3 Issued generally misleading information to other public officials as to the true facts of the case
SECOND
The IPCC should investigate the Hampshire Constabulary for invoking the issue of an International Arrest Warrant for a crime which it knew, and has admitted to knowing, had not taken place.
None of this will happen because until there is a major scandal nobody cares about the smaller stuff. The Kings are just one family in focus but soon the focus will shift and none will answer for their ordeal. Every official organ involved, all part of and paid for by, the State will close ranks and cover backs.
It took over one thousand deaths of frail patients at Stafford to trigger any sort of enquiry; it took Jimmy Saville’s industrial scale abuse to trigger even an awareness that something was going on and then too late; Rotherham, Rochdale, phone hacking, food banks (food banks in Britain??), the list is long and will grow longer. But something is stirring within the beating heart of a nation which can do better. How that will manifest itself politically is hard yet to define. We will know more after Scotland votes, because until then we cannot be sure what the shape of the nation will be.