Richard Ingrams' Week: Barbarians in our midst – or are they vigilantes?

The people of Liverpool seem to have something in common with the people of Belfast, ie they have little or no confidence in the police. This is said to be the reason why in Liverpool witnesses are reluctant to come forward to tell what they know about the shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones.

In Belfast they are concerned about a slightly different problem: dealers selling drugs on the streets. But here again they have given up hoping that the police will do something about it. They have been given information, it is claimed, that the police failed to intervene.

Hence the pictures this week of a drug dealer tied to a lamp post, tarred and feathered with a crude placard inscribed "I'm a drug dealing scumbag". Shock horror. The revelation was treated with predictable cries of "barbarism" in our media. A chilling reminder of Irish savagery and the dark days of the Troubles.

A chilling reminder, more likely, of what can happen when the forces of law and order fail to provide the community with the protection it expects. For however barbaric the methods used, they may well be rather effective in discouraging the drug dealers.

It is unlikely that we will see tarring and feathering on the streets of Liverpool. What we could well see in the absence of any effective policing is the growth of vigilante groups that take over the job of providing security.

They may even look for guidance to terrorists like the IRA and Hamas who have shown they are rather good at this sort of thing. After all, even Saddam Hussein, for all his faults, ensured that people could at least walk the streets of Baghdad in perfect safety.

So much for the welfare of the child

If your child is taken away for adoption as a result of your failings, and if you can later show that you were totally innocent of any of the offences alleged, you won't be able to get your child back. This astonishing situation was news to me when it was included last week in Radio 4's Face the Facts. This pointed out that the number of babies annually taken into care had risen from 1,600 in 1995 to 2,800 10 years later.

As the numbers have risen so have the claims of miscarriage of justice by the courts. The programme quoted one example of a mother who was actually giving birth when social workers arrived to take her baby away.

But as usual reporters investigating such stories were hampered by the secrecy of the family courts which make decisions about adoption. Parents whose children have been taken away are forbidden to talk to the media. And always the mantra is repeated about the welfare of the child being all-important.

Another argument you can expect to hear is that these secrecy arrangements have the approval of organisations like the NSPCC which, because of its charitable status, tends to be viewed uncritically as a voluntary agency.

In fact, in the field of child abuse, the record of the NSPCC is by no means a distinguished one. In the early 1990s the NSPCC played an active role in promoting concerns about so-called satanic abuse which was later proved to be a myth. NSPCC officials were accused of supporting wild stories, notably in the Orkneys where several children were forcibly removed from their parents. In view of its rather chequered record, it is perhaps not surprising that the NSPCC should be in favour of preserving the status quo and the secrecy of the family courts.

* Used by now to seeing red kites circling menacingly over my house, I was pleased to see a picture of a dead one in yesterday's Independent. The unfortunate kite was one of 30 introduced into Ireland where until recently the bird was extinct. Some people, it seems, were keen to keep it that way.

Earlier this week there was yet another report about the alarming decrease in this country of a number of familiar small birds such as the house sparrow. There were, however, no corresponding figures about the growing numbers of large birds. Had there been, the kite would have featured high on the list. Introduced into Britain some years ago on the late Paul Getty's Chilterns estate they are spreading very rapidly all over the country. And the same sort of thing is happening with other even larger birds of prey such as buzzards.

You don't have to be an ornithologist to work out that the decline of the small bird might have something to do with the increase in the numbers of the large ones, especially when one of them is actually called a sparrowhawk, an indication of its predatory habits.

Yet all these birds of prey are not only protected by EU regulations but they also have the active support of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The kites, buzzards and sparrowhawks are the ones who are going to get the protection of this powerful and influential charity. Perhaps in future they should make it the RSPBB – the BB standing for big birds.

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