Heres my full statement on Ashya King: The case of Ashya King seems to be the worst type of officialdom getting it wrong and then digging itself into an even bigger hole. We do not yet know the full details and clearly the clinicians responsible for Ashya’s care in Southampton must be listened to but there has been a lot of misinformation flying around which has tried to paint a derogatory picture of a family that by all accounts is trying to do its best for a very sick son. What I find particularly offensive is how this has now become a child protection case and loving parents have not only been put in jail but initially the whole family was barred from seeing Ashya. A very ill and no doubt frightened little boy is deprived of familiar family members and surrounded by Spanish speaking strangers. I was relieved to see that his oldest brother was at last allowed back into the hospital last night. What is the parent’s crime to merit their arrest and Ashya being made a ward of court? It is not an offence to take your child out of hospital if you disagree with the doctors treating him. It surely cannot be ‘child neglect’ if you seek alternative treatment elsewhere and are prepared to put your house up for sale to fund it privately. To any reasonable person these are not the actions of irresponsible childnappers but the action of a family desperate to find treatment for a much loved child faced with a fatal illness. We should be doing everything to help them and not throwing the book at them particularly through using the highly questionable European Arrest warrant. By the end of today the CPS needs to have dropped the case. Hampshire Police need to apologise and work out how they ever got in this mess in the first place and the NHS needs to offer to fly back the family and provide the proton treatment at the one clinic in the UK that offers it or else facilitate the treatment at the specialist hospital in the Czech Republic. And then the Health Secretary and the Home Secretary need to bang some bureaucratic heads together.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 08:57:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015