

# Home Free

## How the Misery Makers of Social Services twice obstructed Mums home-coming with a live-in carer.

Copyright © december 2019, second edition; further up-dates to 6; 27 january; 15 february; 3; 31 march; 27 July 2020: Richard Lung.

Cover foto taken by my mother, Ella.  
The bearded guy with the goofy Jack Lemmon grin is my middle-aged self.   
The framed portrait on the book-case is of my mother in her teens.

* * *
We used to have freedom. We used to do as we like.  
_Ella Lung._

Why is it that the ideal of social service and self-devotion to the progress of humanity is a false ideal? Well! In the first place because it is a nonsensical ideal. If we say that goodness consists in serving the community, then everybody must serve. If I want to serve other people, I can't do it unless they are willing to be served....

Humanity is a vague, indefinite word that means very little. In practice it means the people you live amongst. If you must serve, or use the word service, then I will not object to your serving the people you know – your friends and acquaintances. But serving people in general usually means serving nobody in particular. You can't be human if you live by statistics. That is why I insist that morality means friendship.....

If, however, you say, "We can do a great deal for masses of people whom we don't know personally, and that that is what is meant by social service, getting rid of unemployment, providing hospitals and recreation grounds and better schools for the poor and so on – what of that?" Then I reply that all that is very necessary but it is no substitute for personal morality. It is a matter of bare justice, and it has got to be done. But to erect it into a moral ideal is another matter. To do that is to wash your hands of the business and to get some organisation to do it for you.....

If we make a morality of social service, in practice, we hand ourselves over to organisation; and in the long run that means handing ourselves over to the state. The vast increase of state organisation in recent years has not made human life better. It has only made a large number of people wealthier; and it has done it at the expense of human freedom and human goodness.....

All organisation is a means to an end, and it is to be judged by its results. It is good so far as it makes human life freer and richer. It is an evil thing when it makes life more of a slavery and emptier. And it seems to me that it has in fact done that for us.

Freedom In The Modern World.  
Broadcast talks on modern problems

_John MacMurray. 1932._

* * *

## Table of Contents

Foreword: Preface to first edition.

Preface to second edition.

Letters to an MP.

Letters to a social worker and live-in care manager.

Lack of due process.   
Social Services as Social Masteries; Recap.

Made miserable by order of state.  
Ella deprived of liberty.

Address of grievances before Best Interests meeting.

Best interests meeting (6 February 2020) at care home.

Prolapse

Emergency meeting.

Ellas Groundhog Day.

The spiritual and materialist Ella.

Formal complaint to the Ombudsman.

Dissent from depriving liberty to my mother  
as recorded in the so-called "minutes" of the Best Interest meeting.

To Deprivation of Liberties Supervisor

Please free Mrs Ella Lung to come home with her son.

"the bigger picture".

Private health-care.

Helping.

Detention time-line of Mrs Ella Lung.

Winston S Churchill (Liberty At Home) broadcast, 4 june, 1945 general election.

References.

* * *

### Foreword: Preface to first edition.

Table of Contents.

I was driven to go public with these letters to my Member of Parliament, because the only prompt result, of my asking for a live-in carer for my hospitalised mother, was that she was removed from my practical reach to a hospital in another town. I said this was "totally unacceptable." Authority eventually admitted that she was "struggling" there, for lack of seeing me. But they were in no hurry to bring us together again, despite my continued insistence. Indeed, they had been pursuing a safeguarding enquiry, suspecting me of mother abuse! This fact is hardly consistent with her wanting to see me so badly. (What does it take to wake up the brains of these rules robots?) I was not charged with any actual abuse. This is a not unfamiliar story of our times.

The real (and chargable!) abuse was prolonged separating a mother from her son.

For obvious legal reasons, I have omitted names of people and places. The Hospital Discharge Assessment official is simply called HDA. (This does not stand for Heady Dictatorial Ass.)

If this script is a critique, it is of the presumption-of-guilt persecution mania that has afflicted this country over recent years. The traditional English respect for personal freedom seems to have been sneaked past, by certain politicians love of bureaucracy. The fashion goes back to Imperial Germany (and beyond) where the petty officials word is law.

While it may be control freak politicians who have laid the rails, it is the train or car of Juggernaut, sitting on them, that does the crushing of the man by the state.

These letters are not to be regarded as polished literature. They are more like journalism, literally rushed for the day, before events over-take them. They were composed in the heat of the moment (the more so, some of my foned comments to the MPs office, not recorded here). Things said in anger can sound like melodrama, tho they may not all entirely miss the point.

* * *

### Preface to second edition

Table of Contents.

At the end of the first edition, I personally faced what, at the time, was a terrifying prospect of guardianship over our lives. A hospital safeguarding warning, which is pretty much at the drop of a hat, sought "deprivation of liberties" no less. This suspicion, as baseless as it was base, and without exhoneration or apology, against an old man, they knew nothing of, who had no history or record of any offenses.   
And in subjugating me it would also subjugate my mother to state control. We would become wards of state without citizens rights.

I know how the young mother must feel, seeking to retain at least one of her two children, all on her own against The Power, with the lawyers not helping her.

I admit I don't know the justice of the appeal of such as her. And that is the problem for lone protesters, like myself. It takes a lot of believing, especially in a country like England, with its deference to authority, for anyone to put any faith in the word of a nobody.

This second edition continues my own diary of a nobody.

Dilatory and doubting social services pressured me into giving-in to put Mum in a care home. She languished over one hundred days in hospitals. I had to commute by train to see her. The social worker said, from the start she was looking for a "placement," doubting my ability to cope at home, and not pursuing the live-in carer option, even when the answers to her questions were satisfactory. Then saying she would have to look for care homes further afield. That is to say out of my reach, against which I protested. So I found a care home on the outskirts of town, for which "understanding" the social worker thanked me.

But it was essentially another hospital environment, leaving Ella stuck in a chair from morning till night, day after day. (Private care home even shared, with public hospital, the tactic of harassing a visiting relative to supply their promiscuous laundry.)

The story took another grievous turn, when social services again blocked my mother from coming home with another live-in care agency. The social worker responsible was replaced by someone, who appeared to be her cognitive twin. The social worker visited Ella to ascertain the wishes of the social worker.

I was manipulated. But when manipulation failed before the reality of Mums misery, compulsion followed, with misepresentation and manipulation of the reality of Mums wishes.

I am not criticising the undoubted inadequacies of care homes but the determination of social services to prevent my mother having live-in care, instead.  
Economics reduces care homes to patient parking zones. The staff may try to engage with their paying guests but are continually faced with attending to their basic needs. There have to be a lot of inmates to make the business pay, or wages are likely to be driven down. The care home manager (doing a real job) was on a different level to the social workers I had the misfortune to encounter.

Care homes are really on the hotel model, for active, not chair-bound, people. (I visited a brand new care home, and it reminded me of nothing so much as a plush hotel.) The chair is still the care homes basic utility. For many still active old people it is adequate. For the disabled, it can be a prehistoric instrument of torture, that needs replacing, in this scientific age, by more versatile equipment, fitted for the immobile, to prevent becoming living dummies, and able to exercise their restlessness, so they will not get seat sores.

Until very recently I thought, in the old way, that people could check themselves out of hospital. Not so, with the care home, Ella was locked-in, like a safe deposit. It appears to be under-pinned by a sinister-sounding legality called "deprivation of liberties best interests", just another brick in the wall of the New Feudalism.

My mother told me, on 19 december 2019, she had no faith in them, speaking to the same effect, the day before, after social services visited.   
A live-in care agency says that 97% of people would prefer to stay at home, when needing care. A fact, towards which, social services have been strangely obtuse, in pursuing "(we know) best interests". This is not a reason, it is just social services asserting its dictatorship, thanks to politicians passion for autocratic administrative law.

On 20 december, while keeping a smile, Ella asked eloquently, amongst other things, why was she not allowed to go home? She was not a criminal. She hadn't done anything wrong. What are they doing this for? They do it because they can get away with it - Give themselves a job, I suppose.

The visiting masseur, she addressed, said Ella had compos mentis. And that we shouldn't give up.  
But Ella was bound to become too weak, physically and mentally, to defend herself. The social services sinecure was depriving her of all faith, hope and care.

* * *

### Letters to an MP.

Table of Contents.

4 sept. 2019.

Dear MP,

I have lived with my mother nearly all my life, seventy years, and looked after her in her decline. She caught pneumonia as a child in a snowdrift. The doctor said she would always feel the cold. When I was a little boy, my father probably saved her life by covering her in blankets until only her nostrils were visible, for her labored breathing!

So I have always assumed that she would have to sweat out a cold. But she appears to have had the complication of something like a fever and the result was that by warming her up, I only made her worse. In the night she'd fallen out of bed, by the door, and I had to call the ambulance to help her. They saw, at once, what this medically unskilled person didn't, that she was much too hot and dehydrated ["with a black tongue"]. And took her to hospital where she has been nursed to recovery. My thanks to them. (She has now been moved to a second ward in hospital.)

What I only just found out, is that the ambulance women, who did a great job, in their concern also slapped a safeguard warning on me, which takes away my legal rights, with regard to my mother.

To get things going, I applied to [a private] live-in care company, because the NHS does not do [live-in] night care. And it is in the evening and the early hours that I have had most problems with looking after my mother. She would seek warmth, then perspire and have to take off her clothes, put more on, dampen them and repeat the cycle to her utter exhaustion, and mine, attempting to keep up with her.

She was also off her food, which was making her too weak to do anything.   
The hospital put this right, apart from monitoring and medications, essentially by not allowing her to get in a perspiring damp condition, tho she constantly complains of the cold. (As far as I know, she is still very faddy with her food.)

This is why I want a live-in carer, with the authority and skill to restrain her from returning to that exhausting cycle.

Unfortunately, the County Council [rather, the HDA] has blocked [a named live-in care agency], a fully managed company, because they don't happen to be on their approved list of carers. I asked Hospital Discharge Assessment [HDA fone number]: What is the point of your having a government agency to approve a care agency as "good", if you are going to ignore it?

The reply: I can see where you're coming from...

I asked: Does anyone, on your approved list, give live-in care?

HDA did not know but said would find out.   
I'm still waiting.

I also asked what would be the response of County Council, if I said that I required a live-in carer, if they didn't have an approved one?

HDA asked me what kind of a power of attorney I had. I said it was a general power of attorney. I had been told by a woman in the discharge liaison unit, that people generally go for the general power, because it gives control of finance, as distinct from the lasting power which gives control of health. But she had said to me I needn't worry about it.

When I told HDA this, (s)he said that her colleague had been wrong to say this.

Naturally, I am concerned that administration is tying me up in red tape. I told HDA that I didn't want my mother taken over.

Yesterday, as HDA requested, I showed round my mothers house, and explained the things I had done for her. [See below section: Helping.]

At the moment, Mum is in a sort of legal limbo in hospital. This is why I am writing urgently to you my MP to try and extricate her from it, without further delay.

The reason for my urgency is that she is stuck indefinitely in a hospital chair by a bed, stiff and uncomfortable and bored and very tired and stressed. I can see it being cruelly etched in her face. This situation would be intolerable for a normal healthy person. (I wish the administrators would have to put up with it, then it would soon come to a stop.) But my mother is 94.

Until recent months, she was reasonably active, tho disabled, and mentally alert. In recent months, her memory has come adrift. To save space, I just give one example: I asked her why did she answer the hospital staff that I was her nephew. She smiled and said: I don't know what I'm saying.

She's very old and tired and memory recall takes energy.

But she still reacted yesterday to a social services woman, in a warm and friendly and considerate manner, which is much more important. That was inbred politeness. Towards myself, her feelings about her surroundings are very different. It was a warm and sunny day yesterday and she wanted to know why she couldn't even go out and get some sunshine. Even prisoners are treated better.

[Note: not all nurses offered, but later, a nurse did offer to wheel Mum outside. It never happened, weather, by now, not permitting.]

Every day she asks me, when am I getting out of here? Am I coming with you?   
And I have to tell her that the hospital will bring her home when they get their act together. She must be despondent.

Before leaving the ward yesterday, I mentioned to the nurses my concern about how much longer my mother could endure her privatation. One of the nurses said that patients were given a colouring book with pencils.

I've seen it. It is the sort of thing a kindergarten teacher might give to a three-year-old, to occupy them.

The nurse at the desk said that she was occupied with paperwork all the time. And it is fair to say, that I have never surprised their hospital ward, without a nurse, at the desk, scribbling away on top of a mound of papers.

I am one of your constituents, who has met you before,...

With good wishes,

* * *
8 sept. 2019.

Dear MP,

Following my previous message, I've had some very bad news, that hospital is moving my mother this sunday to another town, where it would be very inconvenient and difficult for me to see her, certainly not as regularly every afternoon, as I have been doing.

It appears to be the handiwork of the HDA, already mentioned. I phoned on friday morning to remind HDAs promise to let me know if there were any live-in carers on the County Council approved list, since this approval list blocked my hiring [a named private company]. This mean removal of my confused mother to another town has been the response.

I am told this HDA is going to talk to me tomorrow. And I have told them that I am going to complain to my MP. My previous letter [above] was not a complaint. I was merely asking you, in an unaggressive manner, to intercede, so my mother could be home with a live-in carer, without further delay. This is still essentially what I ask of you. And please will you get Mum back right away? This is of the utmost importance to the both of us.

The nurse said this removal was while they were sorting out her return home, mentioning two weeks. That to my mother would be like an eternity. [It has turned out longer.] She is already thoro'ly demoralised by her captivity. They are testing her to destruction.

I am absolutely furious. My mother depends on my visits for support. Every day I promise to see her. She wants to know when is she going home. She asks: Am I going with you?

She is being kept against her will by walking rule books and petty bureaucrats.

The ward woman on the phone, today, who I only succeeded in making obstinate, by my anger, eventually made the excuse that the reason for my mothers removal was to protect her against infections. I said it was a poor job if the best they could do to keep her from infections was to remove her to another town.   
And she kept saying, intimidately, that everything I said was being logged.

[28/09/2019 note: The loggers are now logged!  
The logging warning was provoked by my angry referal to the HDA as a kid who knows nothing of life. In normal polite conversation, I would not say anything so dismissive, whatever private thoughts crossed my mind.]

P.S.

A detail, I forgot to mention, when I replied to the nurse or person at the ward, on the fone, that moving my mother to another town was totally unacceptable.

She said: You haven't got power of attorney, anyway.

I told her that I have general power of attorney and that it was scanned on their system.

She said that the discharge laison unit had said nothing about it. (That is [a named woman] and a woman who did not give me her name but who she knew by my description. She actually did the scan.)

The nurse was intractable because the evidence of POA wasn't in front of her.

Only one more unpleasant aspect of this devious business.

* * *
12 sept. 2019.

Dear MP,

Thank you and your wife for doing your best to help get my mother back to me. I am really grateful to you both. If we don't hear anything about this, today Thursday, 12th September, then our separation, to another town, is most likely to be prolonged for well over a week. This is because the NHS stands down over the weekend and by Friday it is impossible to get anything done till next week (in my experience).

My main worry is how to get back with Mum as soon and as fully as possible, before she is irrepairably harmed by her prolonged hospital imprisonment.

It seems likely that my fragile mother is the victim of an irresponsible administrative abduction, precisely to prevent me from apprising her of the situation we are in, which is to have the standard NHS options dictated to us, namely daytime care at home or a retirement home.

While the sun is out, "Doctor Daytime" does most of the caring. Indeed, it is too hard for the skills of the NHS to do night-time care, so it has to be left to an unskilled old man, who then is "warned" against, when it is too much for him.

[28/09/2019 Note: Much later, HDA came up with the possibility of visits also by two night-time carers. With four carers coming and going, it would be like trying to set up home in the middle of a railway station platform. The provision was also in the context of the safeguarding warning, which smells of being put under state tutelage. It also would be far more expensive than one live-in carer, paid by myself, so not be a burden on the public purse, for the sake of the ideological purity of a public health-care "solution".]

Live-in care is the answer but is being ignored, perhaps by NHS administrators opposed to private healthcare. In my opinion, the county council approved list does not ban a fully managed company, with government agency approval, but is just being used as an excuse to do so, possibly from ideological or other questionable motivations.

Private healthcare is bloody expensive, but that is what savings are for. And our home is situated in an ideal holiday venue to let our front bedroom, and defray expenses.

With kind regards,...

* * *
22 september 2019.

Dear MP,

Thank you for your letter of 18 September 2019, about interceding with the health authority on behalf of my mother in [another town] hospital.

The safeguarding enquiry, prompted by how the ambulance women found my mother, might be compared to someone judging a motion picture on the basis of a snapshot, while ignoring the makers explanation of the plot. (It is frankly presumption of guilt until proved innocent, characteristic of continental autocracies.)

In fact it is incomparably worse than that analogy, because Mum and me have been together in a "motion picture" lasting nearly all my seventy years. And both of us desperately want to be together again at home.

This "safeguarding enquiry" seems just purposeless bureaucracy. Meanwhile, my mother has been bewildered and demoralised, as if she is a piece of lost luggage, with her imprisonment in hospital. She asked me, why can't she go home, she is not a criminal. She really felt as if she was at a station, from which the train was never leaving.

I have acknowledged that I cannot look after my mother, alone, especially during the night time, when the ambulance women were called. But my attempts to indeed safeguard my mother, by securing fully managed government approved live-in care, were blocked, by HDA, who would not reveal my mothers medication needs to [private health care].

When I asked, HDA promised to let me know if there is a county council approved live-in carer. When I reminded on the answer phone, (s)he did not answer. The immediate response was to send my mother away to [another town] hospital.

(Someone at the ward informed me by fone of the decision to move my mother to another town hospital that Sunday, at a time after I usually had left for [my home town] hospital, except that I happened to miss my usual bus that day.)

I have been told nothing about mother for over a fortnight, apart from the occasion I was put thru to [a named] ward, [in "Othertown" hospital], where a nurse told me that they do not do that.

Thank you Mr [MP] for your fone call of Friday the 13th September 2019. That day, I found out that HDA was on leave. Nor have I heard from HDAs [named] manager . But I followed your advice in a foned message to Social Services [number given] on Tuesday, 17 September at about 11:30. The response was that a team would look into it.

I enclose a transcript of the message, so that you know that I strictly followed what you advised me to say:

Hello,

I rang on Friday about my mother, who is in ["Othertown"] hospital, needing, from my experience, 24-hour care at home. I approached a [named] fully managed government approved live-in care agency. I put them in touch with Hospital Discharge Assessment staff. HDA blocked their request for my mothers medication needs.

I told our local Member of Parliament this. And he gave his independent judgment or advice that I should make clear to HDA that I was willing and able to pay for [named] private care, because most people are not. ([Words to the effect:] This may have caused a misunderstanding.)

On Friday, social services staff told me that HDA is on leave till wednesday and her manager was sent an email. I have not heard from her yet as of 11:15 this morning.

My concern is that Mum will be released home any day now with only daytime NHS care, when I believe she needs live-in care, which [the private agency] say they can readily provide at short notice. So please will you allow them to see my mothers medication needs.

I will pay [for private care], as our MP told me to confirm.

(End of message.)

I will get back to you, Mr [MP], if I have any response, but the problem so far is, that I've had none. I fear that my mother is being adversely affected by being in [to quote a health authority reply to the MP] a "due course" hospital limbo, from 11 august and counting. It's already turning into an exile, especially as she is 94, with macular degeneration and other failing powers of great age. I fear, that, for any appreciable time, I may never have my mother home again (with the round the clock care I believe she needs). Consideration of my concerns for her have not got beyond unkept promises.

Regards....

* * *
26 sept. 2019

Dear MP,

Hospital Discharge Assessment, rang me, wednesday morning, in a long conversation. I found it disturbing and alarming enough to yet again intrude on your valuable time.

To start with what's most important, I asked how my mother is doing.

HDA replied that she is "struggling" for want of seeing me.

I, of course, retorted that I told them that I didn't want her to be moved away.

HDA got on a high horse and admonished me that I had the choice to go.

I retorted that I went to see my mother every day at [home town] hospital, till (s)he made it so bloody difficult by moving her to "Othertown". Healthcare is more than about shuffling beds. Families need to be kept together.

The significance of this exchange is how discounted is the need of mother for son. If nothing more, it is strong contrary evidence to the safeguarding enquiry, which HDA now openly states is about abuse.

There is another obvious contrary evidence which has been ignored or over-looked. When I visited her in hospital, Mum would bitterly complain about being too cold: Where is the heater? and so forth. Couldn't these medical professionals perceive that was the reason why the ambulance women found my mother in such hot conditions?

Likewise, it was completely obvious, if they took the slightest notice, that Mum was off her food, as much with the hospital as she had been with me. No doubt their medicine would eventually correct for that. That doesn't affect the point that it was not my fault that she wasn't eating.

Whereas, HDA seriously held against me, that I complimented them, on a visit, that NHS food was better than mine!

Another allegation, dredged up from staff, was that I couldn't account for my mother's "bowel movements!"

(Those are what are known in police states as informers. They failed to read me my rights that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you – no prejudice is too petty. In the joys of the chase, every hound gets its yelp.)

I explained about my mother getting into an ever more frequent and exhausting round of warming herself, perspiring, taking off damp clothes, putting on dry clothes, I had to air for her, exhausting me as well as herself, in the more advanced stage of her dis-ease.

That was why Mum was by now so weak, until eventually she had not the strength to drink and would dribble when I put the glass to her lips. Hence the severe dehydration that the ambulance women made the basis of their safeguarding warning.

When I explained Mums constantly replacing damp clothes, HDA said: But you haven't explained, Richard, why she was dehydrated.

I retorted: She was perspiring!

The bed was littered with damp clothes. There was an electric clothes heater and a dimplex heater, just thru the door, which I was using to help dry all the damp clothes. But that was objected-to as "cluttered."

Then there was the hospital objection that I brought Mum dirty clothes. Before I did seven full loads in the washing machine, all I had to bring, at first, was some unwashed trousers.

The hospital authorities appear to be trying so hard to make an unbalanced case against me and ignoring contrary evidence, that I have no confidence in how they will conduct this forthcoming safeguarding enquiry.

In the first place, they have made no charge of abuse against me. They have just tainted me as a suspected abuser. It is like saying: we suspect you are a criminal and will knock you down to a crime somehow, with anything we can throw at you.

This in contrast to the traditional English way, by which you are formally charged with something, which you are then able to defend yourself against.

HDA said that, in the context of safeguarding, it was possible to have a pair of night carers, as well as day carers, coming day and night. And was I alright with that?

I said not, and neither was my mother.

I suspect that the authorities concerned are trying to railroad me down their NHS path, with the help of an adverse safeguarding enquiry ruling, instead of the [named] private care option.

For the enquiry, the sacrificial lamb is to be given a social worker or advocate.

I asked: isn't an advocate a lawyer?

HDA said no.

(In Scotland, a lawyer is called an advocate.)

Meanwhile, HDA said that she would have to ask her manager about what reply to make to you the Member of Parliament, and it would not be for a couple of days.

So, pending that, I just send this letter to you, our MP. Tho, I have no objection to you forwarding this letter, at your own discretion.

Yours sincerely,...

[This ended the letters part of the first edition, essentially about social services first obstruction of Mums home-coming with a live-in carer. This second edition was provoked by social services second obstruction of Mum coming home with a live-in carer.]

* * *

Ella the pensioner (taken from her bus pass foto, over thirty years ago.)

### Further unpleasant developments.

(1 october 2019.  
Essentially the document subsequently copied to our MP.)

Table of Contents.

I would like to pull together, into four main points, my issues with health officials. Then recapitulate (but not "capitulate") before explaining the following legal assault on family, by the state:

I had to call an ambulance for Mum, who was taken to hospital. A safeguarding warning was issued against me because Mum was severely dehydrated.

1. The safeguarding enquiry, tho probably not "proving" abuse, may be used as innuendo to sway a state guardianship replacing my general power of attorney.

2. A government approved live-in care agency had its request for Mums medication blocked by hospital discharge assessment official on grounds it was not on the county council approved list. But that is a non sequitur.

3. My persistence in seeking to know of an approved live-in carer only resulted in my mother being moved from the home town hospital to another town hospital which made it much more difficult for me, her only relative and friend to see her. Eventually it was admitted she was "struggling" for want of seeing me (the person treated as a suspect of abuse).

The real abuse was this separation of mother from son. Mother is a working woman always used to doing things. The enforced inactivity of hospital wards was a torment to her.

4. 1st october 2019, I was told that if Mum was incapable of financial decisions, my general power of attorney no longer held and she would be taken under state guardianship.

On those grounds the state could take over nearly everyones finances, at the end of peoples lives.

#### Here follows a review:

Hospital and social services workers -- I call them officials, as distinct from the workers who do the actual nursing and doctoring -- would ask me information of my mothers past. I explained to one of them, that they could not hope to know a person -- such as theirself -- for instance, by such an emaciated sketch (not the phrase I used).   
They readily admitted that family knew much more than any stranger. But it was just a token admission. I would describe their attitude as of wanting to take up the reins, for their own destination, rather than relate to us as a family.  
In the light of their future course of action towards my mother and myself, I regret having told them anything personal enough for them to use to gain my mothers confidence. Frankly, they simply are not to be trusted.

I seek defense against the placing of a guardianship on my very aged (94) and very poorly mother in hospital.

I wanted her home with a live-in carer, because I thought she needed round-the-clock care, that I couldn't manage to give her. The NHS don't do that. But when the fully managed live-in care company asked for my mothers hospital medication records, they were blocked by the Hospital discharge assessment officer. The agency are government approved as "good". But because they are not on the county council recommended list, that was the excuse for blocking them. The blocking official promised to answer my request for a county council approved live-in carer but never did.

When I reminded of the promise, the only tangible result was a prompt removal of my mother to a hospital in another town. I had been visiting my mother every day, and furiously objected to this removal.

When it was decreed, by fone, that Mum be moved to another town, I was told preparations were being made to move her home in a fortnight, or maybe sooner.  
It has been four weeks since, and counting. They have just parked her. Liars? The thought did cross my mind.

[I thought] our MP told me it was two bus rides and a taxi away to the other hospital.   
There was some misunderstanding here. Two bus rides would do it, taking me three hours or more, on the journey there and back, excluding preparations and relaxations. Time is money. Time-tables need to be sorted. What you gain on the roundabouts you lose on the swings. It takes-up the day.

It was eventually admitted that my mother was "struggling" for want of seeing me.

At first, I thought I had to take taxis to see her, to the tune of £50 or £60 a day. Later, a mate told me the train service is much cheaper. The cost still adds-up day after day. A bus and a walk also required.

After three weeks, of not seeing mother, it broke my heart to see how feeble she had become.

My mother has always been a working woman. One time, her hands worked at some imaginary sewing job, getting frustrated. She has always been doing things. The boredom of hospital is intolerable to her. She says to me: What do we do next?

I said I was sorry for all the suffering she has been thru lately. It shows in the drawn lines of her face. I asked her if she wanted to see me tomorrow, and she replied: More than anything in the world.

The nurses said she had been asking for me all morning.

I told her: I love you so much.

She replied: I know that.

A consolation is good-hearted nurses. They said Mum is always complaining about the cold. I explained she had a history of pneumonia and the doctor said at the time that she would always feel the cold. And I told them that because it was too hot when the ambulance women came to collect her, that they put a safeguarding warning against me as a suspect of abuse.

After a week of journeys, one wet and miserable sunday dawn, I realised that a seventy year old, having trouble keep awake during the day; feeling too tired to work out, without error, the sunday time-tables for bus and train; and at a low ebb for resisting illness, was going to have to take a rest. I would be of no use to anyone, if a seven day a week commute made me poorly. The break probably would not have been necessary in our home town.

In my opinion, the real "abuse", as I repeated, on 1st october, to the visiting official, was this separation of a mother from her son, who was her only relative and friend to see her.

I've continually had to explain the reasons for my mothers hospital reception condition in detail. I did so, on that visit from the discharge assessment person. I only realised afterwards that the visit didn't discuss hospital discharge. The official was wearing some other hat, to do with county council social services. Even when I expressed my misery that I might never have Mum home again, it received no comment.

What the official did tell me was of visiting, to assess Mums capacity to understand financial matters, and to give me to understand that my general power of attorney would be replaced by a state guardianship, under a "best interests" provision.

I said it was "we know best interests". And the state should keep its nose out of it. I also said something to the effect that this guardianship was about greed and power.

Naturally, that was denied!

I said of Mum, in my opinion, they should leave her alone. She is too poorly to undergo a [capacity] questionnaire. She is not a form to be filled. (Another official denial.)

The official also talked about a meeting of officials which enabled certain state benefits, over incontinence and so forth.

I replied we would not qualify.

The official asked if we could manage.

And I replied that we could manage fairly well if the state did not rob us.

The visiting official departed in silence, not broken by myself.

When I stated the bleedin' obvious, that no family in the land would want their assets taken-over by the state, it was received like some passing debating point. Damning with faint praise seeks to appear fair-minded. (Perhaps a highwayman regards himself as judicious.)   
I mentioned, in the interview, such cases of the state taking over a familys assets were not much reported. As a matter of fact, I only remember one report (in The Mail on Sunday). And they may have said this practise was not much known or not well reported. It is insidious, without a well-known antidote as yet.

Had it not been for the forewarning of that report, I might well have been shocked and stupefied into impotent fury, as a prey before the sudden appearance of a predator, as impudent as it is terrible.

I objected that state guardianship was reducing us to the role of minors and taking away our citizens rights.  
The official didn't deny it.

I think society needs to have another look at the status of so-called dementia. No doubt it covers as wide a range of conditions as the possible impairments of the human brain. Much the same can be said about physical disabilities. But we no longer imply that the invalid is "not valid." Indeed physically handicapped people insist that they are "valid."

The stereotype of dementia is of some confused old person muttering unintelligible nonsense, plainly not able to look after themselves, and confined to some institution.

Physically handicapped people had to fight for their place in society at large, against being institutionalised.   
In my case, family, myself, has to fight against state control of my mentally handicapped mother. She is mentally handicapped but she is still a valid human being with citizens rights.

To the bureaucrat, she can't answer a questionnaire: Where do you live now?

I interrupt: it doesn't matter if you don't know where I am. I'm still there.   
She smiles over her uncertainty, and doesn't have to answer.

Another occasion, she is asked: Where are you now?   
She cleverly avoids answering by saying: With a lot of twits.   
The staff nurse ("the lowest of the low") retorts: You aren't far wrong.

My mother may be "living in a world of dreams" that strangers cannot enter. Her son knows she remembers events sixty years ago, better than I did. Comparatively speaking, I was the one with "dementia"!  
I told that as a boy I used to be sick on the bus to this other town, she was moved to. She replied that so was she.   
I had forgotten that she was sick the first bus ride. I was sick for two or three rides.

Generally speaking, just as everyone deserves to be presumed innocent, until proven guilty, so everyone deserves to be presumed a citizen with rights, unless proven otherwise. Least of all should anyone be put on trial by superficial bureaucrats after their assets.

* * *
8 october 2019

#### Your farewell letter of 4 October 2019.

Dear MP,

Indeed, the strain of my daily journeys are sapping my delicate health. I soon found that I could not do seven days a week. Whereas I managed every day to the local hospital. . The worsening weather and winter infections, with Mum still in hospital, are a worry, while their stupid enquiry goes heedlessly on. They will be the death of her yet. (My father died of a hospital-acquired infection, pneumonia. My mother has had a hard time of surviving the pneumonia of her childhood.)

Your farewell letter came when there was still no answer from the relevant health official, as to what they had to say to my stating explicitly that I would pay the private health company for a live-in carer. It seems they do not like the idea, after all. (I told you so!)

Because of my mothers further decline in strength, I think now that a live-in carer should be a private-public combination with a pair of daytime carers, as more suited to deal with my mothers mobility and toilet difficulties.

I have asked the private company if they would be willing to move from their maximum to their minimum weekly care charge. Of course, the overall charge, even when the daytime carers are on NHS rates, may be more expensive still.

I never claimed that I could look after my mother. I did my best for her while I could. Mentally, Mum seemed normal till only a few months ago, when she had a sudden memory lapse. Even so, she seemed still just an old lady beginning to lose her memory. Her physical decline was slow and long-term, and thereby long manageable, but took on a sudden acceleration that left me floundering. Having to call in help does not amount to surrendering to a bureaucratic dictatorship.

I don't know whether you have yet received my post that the health authorities want to push aside my general power of attorney and seize control of my mothers financial assets, under a state guardianship.

When a person is robbed, the fact, that they are too weak to put up a fight, does not justify the assault. This attempted state guardianship of our family is just such a predatory scavenging.

I would have hoped that many MPs would be willing to defend the family from this hypocritical state confiscation.

I know, you have to look at both sides: the giant against the fly.

Regards,..

* * *

### Letters to a social worker and live-in care manager.

Table of Contents.

8 october 2019.

Hello [social worker]

I visited Mum today and her determination and frustration to go home were unbearable for her. That is a main driving force behind her trying to walk and then falling, in her weakened state. She has been nearly two months in hospital, stiff and uncomfortable shifting from chair to bed, and back, all day and night. Mum was a working woman who cannot bear to be doing nothing, even if she is no longer capable. I just want to emphasise the torment she has been thru.

Today she was at her most confused and distressed. (Possibly medication accentuated it, on this occasion.) She was understandably dismissive of my own efforts to get her home. As I was going, she held fast onto me and begged me to take her home with me. (I think that memory will follow me to my death.)

I am prepared to pay for Mums comprehensive care at home. As Mum has become more fragile, I recently realised Mum was going to need more than a live-in carer. Tho, I imagine she would be needed, at least, as a night-time back-up. I recently wrote [to live-in carers] of this and asked would they be alright with this role, and accordingly accept a minimum fee, rather than a maximum fee.

The sister at [the] ward seemed to be talking about relays of carer pairs. In any case, I hope to be in accord with whatever carers, from public or private health sources, are needed for Mum to be treated properly at home, which is where she yearns to be.

At present, the plumber is on schedule to complete the upstairs central heating, this week. I have hired him, in some weeks time, to do some en suite work (actually a shower and wash-basin) in the front bedroom and the loft, where I also have an appointment with a joiner, to get some stairs put in, so that the loft can legally become "a room". This is in case we need the extra money from holiday-makers, to pay for the comprehensive care. This may help keep us independent, above the capital limit.

As you know, I already have Mums general power of attorney. If necessary I will apply for a deputyship to manage Mums finances. Please explain how I am to do this......

[from...]

11 october 2019.

[Hello social worker]

Thankyou for your reply.   
As I'm sure you are aware, parents and children find it heart-breaking, if they are separated. I am doing my utmost to ensure that Mum can be kept at home, where she desperately wants to be.

I imagined a public-private care co-operation which would maximise a sustainable care schedule for Mum. I don't know what sort of arrangement Mum will have when she gets home. I hope it will be soon, for Mum has had to be in hospital two months today.

I did receive a letter from County Council saying the Safeguarding Warning was "declined."

Regards,...

12 october 2019.

Hello [social worker]

Thankyou for the trouble you are taking. Yes, I am seeking to be a Property and Financial Affairs Deputy, which appears to over-lap with my present general power of attorney. That is, it appears to be something extra that has to be done on Mums behalf.

18 october 2019.

Hello [social worker]

Found [a specialist live-in carers] in that useful County Council book you provided. [The general live-in carers] are in there, too, but make no specialist claims,.... From what you say, I gather they meet your requirements. They are, however, over one third more expensive, as advertised on the web. This is no small matter but if that is what it takes to get Mum home with adequate care, then we will have to try. Funds would last for a while. I've mentioned house alteration plans for paying guests, which would be a realistic prospect in our situation.

I think you remarked how peaceful it is. And [an OT nurse] remarked how quiet it is. Which reminds me of my request to her for Mum to have Occupational Therapy and/or physiotherapy. I think they might calm her restlessness. And improve her circulation against her persistent feeling the cold (which the doctor said she would always feel after nearly catching her death of pneumonia [as a child]).

I fully agree that it would be bad for Mum to be moved about too much. But the opposite has been the problem. She has been stuck in hospitals too long, and it is making her frustrated and less amenable to treatment, I believe. I know you acknowledge this but her hospital stay, more than two months, has been too much of an ordeal for her, which, I believe, she should never have been put thru. For her sake, I believe, she needs to move ASAP.

There is no place like home. To emphasise this I would like to mention my own intentions. Tho I have been advised to downsize accommodation, I intend to stay, because all my old associations are here. Moving into a bungalow would be like a memory wipe of who I am. I suspect that the importance of this is greatly under-estimated.

Holiday letting would help with carers for Mum, and perhaps a house-keeper for myself in the future.

Also, with Mum home, I can be on the spot for her, whenever she wants me. It is so much more flexible and (just as important) relaxing, which is not possible in a formal environment of strangers. Even with a residential home round the corner, and [this town] has plenty, I would never know when best to be with her.

And should home care become impractical, it might not be too much of a jolt to move on to one of several very local residential care homes, where I can pop-in regularly.

I am not sure of the meaning of your last question. I only know I am applying to be a financial deputy, which I have mentioned [to your colleague], whose automatic reply says: away till monday. (I am awaiting a required address of my cousin [abroad], who moved recently.)

Regards,...

21 october 2019.

Hello [social worker]

I am worried about my mother's continued ability to sustain hospital routine, she has endured since 11th august.  
[An Othertown] Physio said Mum was antagonistic to them. As mentioned previously, I fear her unwillingness to stay in hospital is making her less amenable to treatment. It seems that consideration for Mums convenience and contentment is the last rather than the first consideration! I am desperately sorry for what she has, and is being made to, put up with. And I doubt she can stand much or any more of it. And if she does, what will be left of her?...

from...

21 october 2019.

Hello [Live-in care manager],

Both hour and day are inauspicious!

Most mornings, I have to catch the 11 a.m. bus into town. Then I catch the 12.20 train to Bridlington station. There is a 25 to 20 minute walk (up or down hill) to the hospital.

The joiners are coming on 28 or 29 october to fit the new bay window with door, and also the new front door. So, I have to be there. (Injury prevented them being on schedule.)

IMCA (I have to look-up the initials) are not visiting the ward till 31 october.

My mother has been in hospital since 11 august, and is not flourishing there. I am desperately sorry for her but have so far been unable to alleviate her condition. You are my latest attempt!

Regards,

22 october 2019.

"When the facts change, I change my mind.   
What do you do, sir?"

John Maynard Keynes.

I now agree that the suggested 24-hour placement is the only safe option for Mum. But let it be in the [locality], where there are several care homes, within easy walking distance, so I can regularly visit her.

By informing you quickly of this change of mind, I hope it may expedite matters for Mum, who is plainly at the end of her tether.

We always said that she would stay at home and I would look after her. No retirement home. Failing that, I was determined to seek help to keep her in her home. But we did not reckon on her becoming a danger to herself. She has fallen several times, when she could still walk, [in Thistown and Othertown hospitals]. If she came home, it would probably not be for long, as I think you intimated.

Yesterday, she was continually trying to get out of her seat. She was worried that there were things she had to do. It is ingrained in her. Today, I learned that a nurse had to keep a constant watch on her.

Her dementia seems to be getting more incoherent and regressive. It's a sad close on a brave life.

I thought maybe a live-in carer plus a pair of day-time carers might do it. But really a care home with someone on night duty would be more adequate, I think, to keep a proper eye on Mum.

(I've had to cancel my approach [to the specialist agency], as it appears to me that a live-in carer is no longer a safe enough option for Mum. Not to mention it takes three nurses plus [hoist] equipment for her toilet.

{This temporary change of mind also expresses our true wishes, for home care, which did turn out to be possible. As an Othertown nurse, Sue said: All elderly people are a falls risk. Don't worry about that.

Mum could walk before she went to hospital. She did not need the hoist for toilet trips, used at the Othertown hospital. (Mum said: Such a going-on they have.) She had been kept off her feet too long. At the care home, two slight females and a wheelchair would suffice. She later managed with a walking frame.  
Also, in this message, I was ignorant of the safety and monitoring equipment available. bed sensor and baby alarm. The care home used a bed sensor without the constant attendance, that no institution would provide, anyway, another care home manager told me.}

Thankyou for permission to attach the COP3-eng form.

Just to clarify your directions: I send, to the C[ourt]. o[f]. P[rotection]., 2 print-outs of COP1-eng and one print-out each of the other three forms. (Plus the cheque.)  
[Without wishing to be ungracious, I had managed independently from the relevant web-site.]

Regards,...

23 october 2019.

Thankyou for all your helpful and hard work.

When I receive the valuation of Mums personal effects, I should have just about all the information needed for the four COP forms. Tho I may be undeceived about that, when attempting, in detail, to fill out the rest of them! [Care expenses would be required.]

[A certain nursing home] does look to be the best reviewed of your EMI [Elderly Mentally Impaired] care selection. And you've already got them on the job! I will need to know the fees. [They turned down Ella.]

I used to know that area long ago. It has its gardens if the residents are taken to them. There are not many warm days left this year. The address itself is congested with traffic.

For my visits, it's three-quarters of an hour walk. Two bus rides. I hoped to find a [more] suitable vacancy in the neighborhood.

Mum had a good day today, after a bad day, yesterday. I don't know how I will find her tomorrow. If I can, I would like to discuss this nursing home with Mum, if [the approached nursing home] can do with her. She might be reconciled or not too happy. I don't know. But I shall keep in touch with Mum, as best I can.

Thankyou again

from...

29 october 2019.

Hello [social worker]

The answer to both your emails is: As near as possible please.  
I want to keep as close to Mum as possible, and it is evidently what she still wants.  
Perhaps, we could be notified when a local place becomes available?

Regards,

30 october 2019.

Hello [social worker]

When I send an "again" message, it reminds me of Teletubbies: "Again, again..." [A popular childrens tv program, liked as much by adults.]

I've just enquired [of another local care home]. They do have vacancies (they only opened this summer) and they do cover dementia and physical disability. The clerk also made the point that no home will stay by a patient 24 hours a day.

Anyway, someone.... is going to assess Mum.

Thought I better keep you informed, in case it comes to aught. [It didn't.]

Regards,..

4 november 2019.

Hello [social worker]

Thankyou for telling me [that the ward is closed by the norovirus]. Then I cannot go. Perhaps the nurses may reassure Mum.

My father died of hospital-acquired infection. I hope Mum is spared.

I regret to tell you that [another local care home] turned down Mum, because they don't do "one-to-one" care. I never saw ..., the assessor, tho the manager took down when I would be there.

As mentioned to you previously, they said that no home does 24 hour care.

I believe it is the hospital opinion that Mum needs better care than she could receive at her own home. [The social worker corrected me that I was not dealing with the NHS but county council social care....I think.]

So far, Ella has been sentenced, to nearly three months and counting, to the rack of moving from bed to seat, and back, for the crime of helpless old age. She herself complained she is not a criminal. The more desperate she is to leave, the greater she is deemed a threat to being safely cared for in a home. It is a vicious circle.

Where does this leave Mum for some quality of life, in her last days? I was going to meet ... your opposite number in [Othertown] hospital to discuss this for Mums health and happiness.

from...

5 november 2019.

Hello [social worker]

That is why I mentioned the [rejecting local care home] comment that no home will do 24 hour care. I suspect looking for out-of-area homes is beating our heads against a brick wall. And crucially Mum said to me yesterday, that she could not do without me coming to see her. I am her only son and visitor. If I cannot see her more conveniently than [at present], I fear that I cannot be with her as much as she needs me. At least not without running myself into the ground in the process.

Frankly, something more creative or inspired than putting Mum out of reach is required. With respect, you don't seem to know it -- any more than I do. Can you not consult with your hierarchy?

What about NHS carers doing home visits and say [a live-in care agency] doing a night-duty -- or something?

from...

5 november 2019.

Hello [social worker]

Thankyou for taking the trouble to explain all that. It passed me by previously. This divided authority is unclear to me. I am not very good at all the inter-connections of office or things like family trees, for that matter - perhaps because I don't have one.

I think Mum is too well-to-do, to claim funding from any of the confusing criss-crossing branches of the tree of administration.

Anyway, I have approached [yet another care home], who do do 24 hour care (despite an authoritative denial [of such]). When [the infected] ward gives the all-clear, they will let us know for the manager to do an assessment. (I fear this is a euphemism for cherry-picking. And my poor Mum is no cherry, tho to me the sweetest thing I know.)

You are no doubt right about home care being too much for me (and one live-in carer). It is going to be a dilemma, tho, if Mum is only tolerated for a place in the back of beyond. It might also be too much of a strain on me to maintain a good contact, as important for her, if not more, than anything else, according to her own words, as recently as yesterday.

Regards,...

9 november 2019

[To care home owner]

I have phoned your manager, who says she will visit Mum in Othertown hospital. I asked the ward, closed to visiters because of the norovirus, to let [your care home] know, when Mum can be visited to be assessed. Mum is a falls risk. On a night, they check on her every 15 minutes. During the day, she has a nurse by her side. I visit her 3 hours a day (usually, except sundays).

[In town], the visits would not be so draining of a 70 year old son and I could do more for her. It is very hard for Mum, a working woman, expected to lie on a bed or sit in a chair like a dummy all day, for months on end. She needs to be able to move about within her limitations. Only recently has she been unable to walk steadily. She has been in hospital since 11 august and is still there, quarantined by an infection. There may be worse this winter.

Her husband died of a hospital-acquired infection. What I am chiefly worried about is that few homes do 24 hour care. And if [you, in town] do not take her, the social worker is already looking out of town, where I cannot easily reach her. I asked Mum if she wanted me to come. She replied: More than anything in the world. I feel much the same about her, regardless of the fact she is very poorly physically and mentally, as I told your manager. I am sorry to press you, in this way, and fear your reacting against it. But if I didn't say much, you might think, I was just making a routine application that didn't matter much.

[It is true that local visits are less draining of ones energy. Actually, the task is like having to carry only a moderate weight. For quite a long time, it is managable. Unalleviated, it saps your strength.]

23 november 2019

Dear [Live-in care manager, abbreviated to: Care],

Mum, Mrs Ella Lung was in hospitals for more than one hundred days. At last, she moved to [a] care home [on the far side of town] yesterday. She was in the lounge with other patients parked there. Some showing no signs of activity, for hours on end, others more disturbed. There was no society there. Other visitors than myself came but only added to the noise, making it hard to hear Mum. It was worse than an open ward at [Hometown] hospital.

As usual, Mum wanted to be going. I cannot blame her, being stuck in a chair all day.

I asked [staff] what other options had she in the [care] home. Twice I was promised to be got back to, and twice, the promise was not kept. They made excuses. In short, even on the first day, they would do nothing for her, not so much as putting her in a wheel-chair and moving her to a quieter spot.

I am not criticising the staff of a thankless task, but I feel that this is no sort of life for Mum. Frankly, I fear it would finish her off.

If your live-in care agency is willing and able to offer something better, please let me know ASAP (for Mums sake). The care home ties customers into a four weeks notice, if you want to leave the care home. So, the sooner the better to give them notice, always provided you can reasonably explain how you could do better for Mum.

She needs the toil of toilet care. It took 3 plastic-gloved, engine-hauling nurses often to do the job in hospital. The social workers thought live-in care would be just too hard for me. And I think they are probably right.

Today, Mum said I didn't know what hard is. She told me what she had to do (when young). She asked with consternation, when I left: You are not going to leave me here.

She is in a twilight existence not knowing where her father is or where she is; very confused, but also with glimmers of understanding, like those mentioned. I want to do my best for her, while I can, not leave her frustrated in a soul-destroying limbo.

Regards,

23 november 2019

Hello [Care]

Yes, I would like to see you on thursday. As the time approaches, please give me an idea of time of day, if you can. I am willing to learn to assist the carer.

One good thing I learned from the Care home. They are getting-in a bed sensor on Monday. It alerts night staff of restlessness in bed. This is a must-have for Mum, as well as the hospital bed side barriers, against her falling out of bed again.

Mum had pneumonia as a child from being found in a snowdrift. In [Othertown] hospital, the last day I saw her there, she only had a jumper on, nothing underneath the thermal sheet. She was snoring [liqueously], as if full of cold.

When she awoke, she said she was not well. I called the doctor, a most urbane and humane young man, who said her lungs were clear.

Afterwards, tho, she went thru a most extraordinary performance, trembling both arms, throwing her head back and making repeated sharp coughs. Also calling for her Mammy. I do believe she was reliving her traumatic childhood illness [found in a ditch in a snow-storm, resulting in pneumonia of the left lung].

Over the early months of this year, at home, Mum was gradually getting into an ever-worsening habit of wanting to be both warm and dry. The two conflicted, because she was perspiring with warmth and continually taking off damp clothes to heat on the radiator.

(The clay core heaters were a fire menace, in this respect. I got rid of them, after installing the gas central heating, a real blessing.)

This cycle got so bad that she was doing it all evening and night, exhausting herself and me in the process. (Then, I thought it was a latent pneumonia effect. Since then, I suspect it was a sort of disguised dementia behavior. She was not just continually drying herself. She was indulging a demented obsession - like when we were playing cards, she kept repeating: What's trumps? (a memory anxiety). I was happy to keep reassuring her. (She was still winning.)

The result of all my good but medically unskilled intentions was that the ambulance women secretly slapped a safeguarding warning against me (for "deprivation of liberties"), when they saw my mothers tongue was "black" (by then too weak to drink) and all the "clutter" of discarded clothes and heaters all around.

I was suspected of abuse. Hospital staff, unknown to me, picked up anything I said that might conceivably incriminate myself. I was faced with the terrifying prospect of being deprived of my power of attorney for Mum, and our being made wards of state, without rights.

Luckily the County Council "declined" the hospital safeguarding warning.

And this brings me to a fear I have that sooner or later, it may be necessary to call the ambulance again. And what if they condemn me again? (The ancient law preventing double jeopardy has been abolished!) I don't want to go thru that again or Mum to go thru the ordeal of hospital confinement that has already caused her months of suffering.

Kind regards,

24 november 2019.

Dear [Care],

Before you've had chance to reply to my second message, this sunday morning, in the early hours, it came to me that I should give the care home their required four weeks notice of leaving, on monday, when I see them tomorrow.

Rather that than prolong the agony for Mum. I would just say to them that I have found a live-in carer for Mum and thank them for giving me a breather, as carer for my mother.

Of course I need your confirmation that you would be ready and willing to move in a carer to our house, within that time period. (Mum might want to come out before the four weeks are up, for instance.) And you won't see our house till thursday. If I give you a description, maybe it will be enough for you to give me the nod on giving notice to the care home tomorrow, Monday.

The house has seven gas central heating radiators. Two are in the living room, with triple glazing. I would offer the live-in carer this room. It has a bunk bed, like a snug canopy bed, you can seat yourself under, with a proper bed sprung mattress. A double bed-convertible couch, and a set of drawers, and the plasma tv (nearly three and a half feet wide by nearly two feet high).

The dining room would belong to Mum with a Welsh dresser and two bookcases, with storage in them for Mums things. A widened bed couch Mum used to sleep on. Space for that vital hospital bed with side barriers and bed sensor. The room has a bay window onto a conservatory. The joiners have been postponing a new bay window for half a year. I shall have to write to them, now: please, the last time.

There will be a couple of deep shelves in the kitchen for the carer. The fridge-freezer has gone bust but I cannot wait for a new delivery and take time off from seeing Mum on afternoons. Vital, I think, for her morale.

The joiners also are going to put, within the front bedroom, stairs up to the loft. After that, and it will be months rather than weeks, the plumber returns to put in a wash basin and a shower cubicle, in both the front bedroom and the loft. Your £1200 a week is very expensive, and I have to think more than a few months ahead, about earning from holiday visitors.

There is a bathroom with a bath, seat plank and shower. The toilet has wall hand grips. There are 2 wheelchairs up and down stairs. There is a stair lift. There is a push chair in the foyer. Round the house side, from the front, will wheel you into the more secluded south-facing back garden. There is a walking frame, arm-support stick and walking stick.

(We are well equipped because my late father was also disabled.)

The south facing bedroom would be Mums. I have a little bedroom on the west side and a little library.

Please let me know if I can give the care home notice tomorrow, in the knowledge that your agency will supply timely replacement care.

Kind regards,

24 november 2019.

Hello [Care],

Thankyou kindly. I shall go ahead with my tactful withdrawal tomorrow, monday 25th november. You are cordially welcome to come on thursday 28 november.

Kind regards,

25 november 2019.

Hello again [Care],

Tactful withdrawal under-gone without upset: Have given required 4 weeks notice.  
When met Mum in the lounge, she asked: Is this my new home?  
(Mum is capable of asking an innocent question, before unmasking her guns.)  
I replied: Not if you don't want to.

Had her moved to her room. She made passionately clear she wanted to be with me.  
Over time tho, the determination weakens and becomes confused.  
She did say she wanted "freedom" and not to live in a "regime."  
I thought that was very plain and articulate for an old lady of badly impaired mentality.

The staff left the hoist in her room. I asked if we should get one of those, and was surprised that she seemed quite positive to the idea. They are sprawling clumsy things for a house. But what do you think?

I am most concerned how one live-in carer is going to manage Mum's toilet. (I am always shown the door.) I worry how we will manage.  
Mum wanted to go three times in less hours, while I was with her. The third time, she was told they were just doing dinner, and she had a pad on, so she wouldn't leak. They would come afterwards.

I already regard, as vital, a bed sensor on a hospital bed, which she has in her room 25.

Kind regards,

26 november 2019.

Hello Care,

I think we will need all the flexibility we can get, which would mean including a hoist, if we are to assuage the restlessness of Mum. And she is going to get weaker and more helpless. We have to think of what she is going to be like. You seem reluctant about the hoist.

[Later, I agreed with the home care manager that the hoist made her too passive, and something called a soar steady would give her a bit of muscle tone.]

And how is Mum to be taken home? Will she be brought in the hospital bed with bed sensor, she has in her room (25)? Or how do we obtain a hospital bed with a sensor? We are under-manned, as one live-in carer with failing 70 year old. The gadgets, hoist, bed-sensor etc are not luxuries for us.

Today, I remarked to the care home carers that Mum was restless today. I was told she is always restless. They have been reduced to having someone always watch Mum, as at [Othertown] hospital. (I said, they could leave it to me, while I was there. But she was always wanting to be off.)

Did I tell you that Mum was an amateur champion runner? She fell asleep towards the end of my stay, and I noticed again a habit she has in her sleep of raising a poised right leg forward. And it occured to me, for the first time, that maybe this was the runner who knew (as she told me) you have to get a good start to win.

That is also what we have to do.

Good wishes,

27 novmber 2019.

Hello Care,

The hospital bed (with side barriers) and a bed sensor and a hoist (I could assist with) would need to be in place for Mum when she came. It will not do to under-estimate Mums restlessness, already indicated.

I emailed our plumber this morning to see if he could put a cubicle toilet, en suite, in the dining room. Then, the commode might not be a permanent option. I don't have answer yet.

I don't know how you expect Mum to arrive home. It appears I have to ask hospital to supply hospital bed, bed sensor and hoist. (The people who put a safeguarding warning for deprivation of liberties against me.) Then probably I have to run after social services. My assigned social worker is away in America. Her replacement was nowhere to be found, when it came to transfering Mum from [Othertown] hospital to care home. I had to chase them up and they eventually had me trek there to sign the contract.

Getting some carer in our home is the easy bit. The hard part is bringing Mum properly equipped as described, which, it now seems, you do nothing about.

Kind regards,

27 november 2019

[To Care]

As you say, we can go thru things tomorrow at 10:15. [A motorway accident delayed her an hour.]

It seems to me that the cart is being put before the horse. I think we need the tools to do the job, before sending someone in to do it.

Thanks for advice to contact an Occupational Therapist.

Our plumber is a clever man! [This refers to the Carers doubts that he could install the toilet, to be accessible to a hoist.

Kind regards,

6 december 2019.

[To Care]

This is different to what you told me. It's there somewhere in your emails. Now you are leaving all the arrangements for Mums home-coming to me. This is not what I was led to believe. Not what you said before. You are just saying it now. Not good.

So, what are you saying?

I have to ask the manager, of the care home, how to get Mum home? She asked me: had I everything arranged!   
I assured her yes.   
But you are doing nothing for Mum till she gets home.   
I might as well ask any live-in care agency, for all that you are doing for Mum. I expect people to keep their word, now and in the future. I doubt you really want to do this job for Ella.

from...

6 december 2019.

[To Care]

Alright, thankyou for that. It has given me a little oxygen of hope in my frustration, over the months. As explained, I am not the hospitals star customer. I have to visit Mum every day, so my time is limited. I just had the plumber in this morning to see about fitting the ground floor toilet in the dining room.

I will ask the care home manager about policy.

Regards,

6 december 2019.

Hello [social (services) worker],

I heard you were away in America. I only met your replacement or substitute, one Monday at Othertown. Ella was meant to leave the Ward on the Wednesday, so I was told not to come that day.   
But it didn't happen. I had to chase after them. The substitute couldn't be found. And eventually a third social worker told me to go to the care home to sign the contract before Mum would be sent there.

The care home is rather like a hospital. And like in hospital, Ella wants to leave it. When I end my visit, she is still asking can she come with me?

It would be wrong for me to leave her there against her wishes. Tho I fully appreciate your reservations (and mine) about live-in care being too hard for this 70 year-old, even as a support to a trained live-in carer from an agency, I previously intended to employ (and whose answers to your questions seemed to satisfy you). [But she stalled on the live-in care and pursued her intention of finding a "placement".]

Ella is in room 25 at the care home, with a hospital bed and bed sensor. I shall have to ask the care home manager about these, because she is a known falls risk, and will need them, when she's brought home. I don't know what her answer will be or who will provide the transport.

The live-in care manager [name and email address] is "struggling" to contact the Occupational Therapist, to assess Ellas home needs, since she became a known falls risk. Since her visit, and yours, I've had central heating installed and got rid of the gas fires. (The Energy officials visit kickstarted me to that resort.)

This morning, the plumber returned and agreed that the dining room corner was the best place for a ground floor toilet installation.

Regards,

9 december 2019

Hello Care,  
The care home manager gave me the phone number of the District Nurse team to arrange for Ella Lung to come home with a profile (hospital) bed. But they only deal with professionals, so it is over to you to phone them...

You mentioned other rather vital equipment, as well: a bed sensor, baby alarm, soar steady, (not to mention a bed pan - we did have one. We have a supply of diapers.)

The deadline for Mum to leave the care home is 16 december, so there is not much time.

Regards,

10 december 2019.

Hello [social worker],

So what you seem to be saying is that Mum is not allowed to come home. Mum wants to come home. I have promised her she can come. I have arranged for a profile bed on friday. The deadline is 16 december. You are making me break my promise, you gave no indication I could not keep. Rather you said the NYCC could not block my decision, if we had more than £24000 savings.

You were wrong before in blocking a live-in care agency. Are you now forcing me to apply to the Court of Protection to allow Mum home?

This is bureaucracy. It is the We know "best interests". Stop playing God. Your decision is either wicked or a case of: forgive them for they know not what they do.

You do not know or care how your decision will affect Mums morale. It is like a life sentence on her.

If I had no conscience, it would be easy for me to wash my hands of the difficult job of caring for Mum at home, which I take on with trepidation, and in the hope and expectation of help, not sabotage, from social services.

You did turn me from my constant intention to bring Mum home from the beginning. But I saw how patients are just left to sit in a chair all day, intolerable for Mum. And that it was my responsibility to look after her with the help of a live-in carer, in the relative freedom of her home.

From...

10 december 2019.

Hello Care,

The District nurses have arranged for a profile bed to come, scheduled for Friday 13 december 2019.

I have just received a dreadful blocking e-mail from my assigned social worker. I forward it and my reply, which I have just sent, in a separate email.

Is there anything can be done about this, as well as applying to the Court of Protection? I recently applied to them to be a financial Deputy for Mum.

Regards,

11 december 2019.

To [social worker] and Social Services,

To bring to a conclusion my initial response to so-called social services (social masters would be a better name for you) refusing to allow my mother, Ella Lung, to return to her home, with a live-in carer.

There are no easy options for Mum. She is a very poorly elderly lady, who does not know how ill she is. As I've repeatedly informed you, she has already suffered months of martyrdom, moving from hospital chair to hospital bed and back again. The care home is no more than a private hospital (without the public sector technology and expertise) that is just piling on the bed-and-chair-all-day agony.

Mum has swollen feet and legs. A doctor advised that they should be raised (but they never were while I was there). A group of carers came round, a big beefy bloke among them, holding her down, in order to take her to her room, to look at the scab on her bum, to see if it needed dressing, another symptom of her immobile condition.

Ella fought them off, till later this morning. I had to shout till they would listen to my telling them that Mum is antagonistic to male carers.

As ill luck would have it, dilatory joiners are only coming to put in the new bay window, in the dining room, on 16 to 17 December, the very deadline of Mums homecoming. In due course, I've arranged for an en suite toilet in the corner. That will also be very disruptive for a day.

The dining room has Mums former bed couch, with a proper sprung mattress. The profile bed could be put alongside it, to give Mum a big sitting-up and lying down playspace, she could roll about in.

The up-stairs bedroom is airy and sunny, especially pleasant with the new central heating. It has a double bed that can be raised at either end, alongside a lower bed, which also has like a step down at the end. That would give her another big playspace. I have a windshield on the side of the lower bed, kept firm by a long chest of drawers, to stop her falling off the side.

It's not by any means completely safe. I know, home caring could go horribly wrong, as it did, when I was on my own, and did not realise Mum was already suffering from incipient dementia. And had not then, as now, even basic medical understanding and skills. It is a terrible risk and responsibility, for which an uncomprehending hospital has already persecuted me.

At care home, staff told me, on Monday, that Mum was getting on well with other patients. I joined her, it was one of her good days. She was gentle and smiling and stroking the back of a still mobile patient, who could no longer talk but only mutter gibberish, and explore erratically with her hands.

The story, that Mum told me on Tuesday, was very different. She said she hates this place, and that it wasn't worth living. Eventually, I said to her, that I only seem to be a vent for her frustration.

Now you have thrown this latest obstruction on me.

My plans for Mum might not be very impressive but they might have a sporting chance if social services gave as much help as they have given hindrance. Please help with equipment, and visit regularly with district nurse, occupational therapist, or what have you. It would do her good. I have been in conversation with three elderly lady neighbors. One, long ago, offered to visit, and I'm sure the other two would. I think they would be a real help.

At home, I might give Mum a bit of quality of life, she is not getting at care home, by her own decided admission. You are imprisoning her. Even prisoners don't have to pay for their involuntary residence, which by the way, terminates on 16 december, when four weeks notice will be nearly up. And she has committed no crime, unless ill old age is a crime in our modern society. In hospital, she said the very thing herself, when asking why can't she go home.

Social services are condemning Ella to a living death. I would be not only a coward, but a cruel coward to condone your precautionary imprisonment of Ella, knowing what I do, and am telling you, about how she feels about it.

You may cherry-pick the occasion when I gave-in to your Safety First determinations, but since I have seen what Mum still has to endure, still sat like a dummy all day, I withhold my consent to this latest blocking of my Mothers freedom. And condemn your condemnation of her. More important, you are holding my Mother against her will. That is clear, despite her impaired condition, or any unscrupulous attempts to cajole her, otherwise, in her weak and confused state.

All this does not preclude the possibility (inevitability?) that the live-in carer and myself might have to admit defeat, at some stage, and give-up Mum to a care home, preferably on the north side, not at the other end of town, with its problematic winter bus journeys. But at least we would have tried. The obvious after-thought is that the Health and Safety empire haven't.

From...

11 december 2019.

Hello Care,

I am forwarding the reply to my two e-mails on Ella, to keep you in the light, so to speak.

Thankyou for challenging the best interests decision.

Regards,

13 december 2019.

To [social worker] and social services.  
(Copy sent to Care.)

I've just learned, by phoning district nurses number, that when they phoned the care home, that the manager told them that Ella was being kept there for safety reasons, and the bed delivery by medical equippers was canceled.   
[Later, the care home manager, a credible person, denied she had said the word, safety, and made clear that she was only passing on what social services told her. The message was only four or so short simple words. They were unmemorable.]

Nobody told me this. I had to find it out for myself, lest I wait all day for a delivery that never came, and missed the opportunity to visit, which Mum depends upon, heart and mind, I believe.

There is no sure safety in this life, in a care home or anywhere else. A patient or inmate, a slight woman with a stoop, came up to me and asked me to take my hand away from her (my mothers) wrist. Being an obliging person, I did so. And I noticed (for instance) a nasty injury round her right eye, a line like a clotted cut, swollen upper cheek, and evident impact to the bridge of her nose.

Moreover, two of the more aggressive carers have confronted me about bringing clothes for Ella, their prisoner. When Mum was in Othertown hospital, the social worker herself selected various items of clothing with duplicates needed for Ella. (That was when she made an extremely unpleasant visit to our home, threatening us with impending state guardianship robbing us of our finances, put under state control.)

One of the care home carers said that the underwear had holes and had to be thrown away (a misappropriation of others property). The other carer said that they never came from Othertown hospital.

Mum said to me of another inmate, that woman has on my jumper. And I agreed with her: it was a distinctive pastel green woollen jumper.

I cannot keep throwing away my mothers wardrobe down [their] bottomless communal laundry pit. Especially as she is being held there by social services arbitrary diktat of "best interests", a provision worthy of the meanest autocracy.

No reason given, no attempt to justify this throwing a spanner in the works of supposedly free citizens.

I have to say again to social services that Mum tells me, the person she trusts, in confidence, she wishes to leave. Social services have taken it upon yourselves to over-ride the four weeks notice I gave the care home for Mum to leave.

From

13 december 2019.

To [social worker] and/or social services.

I gave the care home four weeks notice for Ella Lung to leave for her own home. Instead of fulfilling their role of assisting by providing transport, social services have blocked and delayed my mothers move, till it is almost the deadline of 16 december, as previously mentioned by e-mail. Ella arrived at the care home on a friday, so she is fully paid-up only till thursday (19 december).

If social services persist in their latest blocking tactic, they should incur the costs of doing so. Even prisoners do not have to pay for their involuntary accommodation. Neither should my mother, who once asked: why can't she leave? she is not a criminal.

From the start, I have continually questioned Mum in confidence about her wishes, and she has recoiled from further stay at the care home, with all the energy she could muster at the time. I am convinced that she is set in her wish to leave -- especially so as to live with me.   
Because of her loss of short term memory, she has repeatedly gone thru the misery of asking why can't I go with you?   
Of course I cannot predict the future but I have no doubt that she will never be reconciled to the care home -- short of giving up her wish to live. And that would be a crime against her.

I ask you to respect Ellas wishes and let her leave for home, without prevarication, as indeed you are legally supposed to do, with regard to the mentally impaired, rather than misrepresenting and taking advantage of their helplessness.

[Named firm] are a trained and willing live-in care agency. Her home is well equipped. And things would be better - and safer - still, if we received practical assistance instead of dead-weight obstruction from social services.

from

14 december 2019.

To [social worker] and/or social services

I forward the formal complaint I am making to the County Council.

I have complained now for months, as to my MP, for instance on the blocking of [a] live-in care agency [I first approached], which was later admitted to be wrong.

Yet the same thing has happened again with the blocking of [named] live-in care agency, and social services detention of my mother at [named] care home.

from...

\-------- Forwarded Message --------

I gave the [named] care home manager the required four weeks notice, with the deadline for 16 December 2019. Mrs Ella Lung arrived on a Friday from [Othertown] hospital, so we are paid up till Thursday, 19 December. It turned out to be another hospital environment of bed to chair boredom and discomfort. Mum, now immobile and despite her dementia, kept asking the quite proper question: why can't we leave?

It appears that social services, in their detention of Ella against her will at the care home, will use the [care home] company to force my continued payment of £800 a week, no doubt on pain of financial penalties and legal sanctions. This is not the way of consultation and consent. It is bureaucratic bullying.

My complaint asks for compensation against such extortion by social services. That is if social services continue in delaying and obstructing instead of assisting my mothers return home. Yesterday, Friday 13th December, I had to find out for myself that social services cancelled the hospital profile bed that the district nurses ordered from [medic equippers]. They were told that [the care home] manager said that Ella was being kept there for safety reasons.

As the [named] live-in care manager said to social services, their carers are highly trained and give the safe environment of one-to-one care.

This is a long and tiresome story, which has severely tried my very poorly 94-year-old mother (to say nothing of some extremely unpleasant side-effects partly on myself). I have always been completely answerable and remain so. (Tho, a post-box form does not require long answers.)

15 december 2019.

To social services, c/o [social worker],

Ella is in pain and discomfort.  
I visited her yesterday on Saturday, 14 December 2019.  
She was too sore to stay in seated position. She reached under her pants. I told her not to scratch, and she did not seem to. She tried to sit on her side or flanks but the armchair left her in a wedge.

To a passing carer, who happened to be the one we are most on personal terms with, I pointed out my mothers obviously twisted position.   
I was blithely answered that they were getting her on her feet to go to the toilet.

On my last two visits, the care home repaired the omission of the footstool for her swollen feet.

At home, when ordering a sprung mattress for Mums bed couch, I chose extra width to give her more room to roll over. And indeed there is enough room on a hospital bed. But I never saw her lying face down.

I realise now that the one place, where she could get belly flop relief, was in her bedroom, lying, spread-out, across the double bed and the lower single bed. (She has a lock-knee and one of her legs was bent, the other straight.) Apparently, with her curved spine and hurt in it, not to mention various rheumatic pains, she cannot lie down face forward on a flat surface. But those two different level beds offered her just the purchase of comfort she needed.

This convenience could be repeated in the living room, by adjoining, at a slightly different level, to her couch bed, the hospital bed, that the live-in care manager requested from the district nurses. But which social services, in their inscrutable wisdom, decided to cancel, without consultation or consent (behind our backs).

Both my parents falling out of bed was partly the reason they were taken to hospital. Both incidents, I now suspect, were associated with the onset of dementia, which I knew nothing about. Both parents displayed compulsive behavior. My late father felt compelled to urinate repeatedly, even when there was nothing left to urinate.

Dad had a bed bar, by the side of his bed, but he worked his way down and out. Bed bars are items we could do with, at the foot of our beds, but so-called social services (social sabotages?) even took the profile bed delivery away from us!

In counter-part compulsive behavior to my father, mother kept putting on and taking off clothes all evening and thru the early hours. I was trying to help her sweat out the vulnerability to flu of a historic pneumonia patient. It was exhausting to her, and me too.

Another thing I got wrong was the home heating arrangements. I have told Ella that I got rid of the clay core heaters that blasted out heat, in intervals of cold, and the gas fires that sputtered and smelled and took away your oxygen. I told, for the first time in my life, I have had rooms with warm air in them, like a mild summers day, in the middle of winter. Mum asked if they were dearer, and I said, no they're cheaper.

Ellas exhausted, dehydrated state got me into trouble with [Hometown] Hospital, who found it easier to persecute than comprehend. Continuing in this vein, social services currently obstruct rather than assist.

The unwisdom of flouting historic English law, in the Safeguarding warning, as a presumption of guilt, is that I have been left under a cloud. There was no exoneration or apology, for their base and baseless suspicion of mother abuse!

The social worker merely said that the enquiry was inconclusive and had been put by, as if it were a sword of Damocles. (I only learned directly from the County Council that the terrifying safeguarding warning for deprivation of liberties was "declined.")   
That kind of perpetual distrust from social services might explain why they still consider Mums homecoming a safety risk.

Their worse than useless canceling our homecoming preparations are prolonging the agony of her pain and discomfort at the care home.

Yesterday, mother was saying again: I hate this place. When are we going?

I explained the blocking actions of social services, and she tells me she doesn't like what this country has become.   
Her lack of short-term memory means that she is repeatedly bewildered by her involuntary stay. It keeps me, and it should keep you, focused on her need to come home, above all to be with me, which is what she wants. That is what any free person wants, to be with those they love.

from...

[The social worker was replaced by another as unhelpful. My first response was forwarded to someone with the fearful title of: deprivation of liberties best interests assessor. (dolbia]

To M/s [dolbia]

I was very disappointed with the replacement social worker to Ella, judging by her first e-mail to me, which I have also responded to, below, because it is so topsy-turvy to the wishes which Ella has made so abundantly plain to me, and which I do not believe should go without correcting, on my mothers behalf. I do not expect any justice from such lack of objectivity.

from:...

\-------- Forwarded Message --------

Dear M/s social worker 2,

You would have to visit me on a morning, before 12 o'clock, because my afternoons are necessarily for Ella. [Subsequently, she put-off her requested home visit, postponing indefinitely any pretence of Ellas return, in the process. This was amended later, with a date made for 8 january 2020. But no prospect of Mums return home before 17 april 2020.]

I would like to say straight away that your description of Ella's attitude to the care home was seen thru rose-tinted spectacles. (You don't have to endure it. You would soon change your tune, if you did, sat in a chair all day every day from morning till night.)

She said she told you it straight. But my mothers frankness seems to have been lost in transcription.

I saw Ella today and she said two young girls (probably an apt characterisation) visited her earlier on. They asked her did she like the care home.

She replied: What is there to like about it? There is nothing to do, all day.

As for drawing, reading, she had no inclination to do so. (Something to the effect her drawing days were over.)

She told me she had not talked to anyone for days since my coming. (I had to stay at home while the joiners put in a much belated double-glazed bay window with sealed door, because Ella could not stand the draughts of the dining room.)

I've been there day after day and seen that the opportunity for conversation was practically non-existent. The poor patients, in the lounge generally being somnolent or unintelligible.

An employee says she has "settled well." What else would she say.

"Homes activities": a suitably vague phrase. I have never seen a sign of them.

Her message to me has been consistent. On saturday: "I hate this place. When are we leaving?"

I keep saying I am trying to get them to let her leave. But she says it won't do any good. They will just do what they like. Your travesty of Mums wishes seems to confirm her opinion.

I fear that Ella - as she said - has simply given up hope of anything but life imprisonment. That is the real disgrace of your grinding her down with your misrepresentations: "good spirits" -- she is in despair of ever getting out of your trap. I notice you never let me listen in to your fantasies.

I enjoy my mothers company, impaired tho it is. But she misses me and wants to be with me, where I can be with her any time she likes; for much longer than the care home makes practical.

There are three elderly ladies, near neighbors, I have talked to about Ella \-- they can talk intelligently and helpfully. The next door neighbor would also help. (Her mother told her: Whatever you do, don't put me in a care home.)

I didn't realise Mum had an "advocate." What do you think I have been trying to do for Mum but advocate her desire to be with her son and her son to be with his mother. The state presumes it has something superior than family to offer. Its reputation goes before it.

from:...

Dear [social worker 2]

Is it so hard for you in authority to understand that what a mother and son most want is to be at home together?

My mother is able to attend her home as soon as dog in the manger social services will let her leave her morning till night chair-bound state, at the care home.

10 january [a suggested appointment date, typo: 9 january] -- that's outrageous. Mum was going to leave when the live-in care manager arranged with district nurses to send a profile bed on friday 13 december, when your predecessor put her under arbitrary arrest. You are grinding Ella into the grave. It's unforgivable.

My mother is right to have no faith in you (as she repeated yesterday).

from:...

Dear M/s [dolbia],

An e-mail from [social worker 2], which I forwarded to you, is talking of making an appointment [at the care home] on 10 [typo: 9] january 2020.

Please remember you in authority are dealing with a frail and bewildered old lady who has suffered hospital and, as it turned out, as exhausting chair-bound confinement at care home, since the 11 august 2019. Dragging it on, as you are doing, is not a tolerable state of affairs. She (and I) have had much more than enough of social disservices.

from:...

[This ends the second edition of my correspondence with social services, which finally forced me a second time to go public against a second obstruction of Mum going home with a live-in carer.

Because events took a serious turn for the worse, I add more recent posts.]

30 december 2019.

To social services...,

(copies to Social Complaints and ...MP and [live-in care manager].)

On a daily visit to my mother, I received a bill today from [owners], for the accommodation of Mrs Ella Lung in care home. Since this was of the nature of a detention, I am accordingly passing the bill on to the detainers, at social services. (Please see attachment.)

My complaint against social services is reference no......

I gave care home four weeks notice and paid accordingly. (We were paid to Thursday 19 December 2019. Ella arrived on a friday.) The [named] live-in care manager arranged with the district nurses for medical equippers to deliver a profile bed to my mothers home, on Friday, 13 December, when I found out that it had been cancelled by social services.

The then assigned social worker had apologised for wrongly blocking [the first approached] live-in care agency from receiving medication information for Ella going home. It turned out to be an empty apology, making me break my promise to my mother that she would be coming home.

Ella has always deplored her confinement [at care home] and makes equally clear that she loves me and wants to be with me. (And I love her and want her back home with me.) In the past few days, she has been more inconsolable than ever and I would urge you to let Ella home without further delay. She has been hospital or care home institutionalised since 11 August 2019, with brutish indifference to her suffering and hating the physical and mental privations, which would be intolerable to a young and healthy person, never mind a 94-year-old. I have explained this many times. You cannot do that to a person without inviting ill consequences, for which you are responsible.

I received, via my MP, a promise from the Health Authority, that my mother would be allowed home after a Safeguarding enquiry (which warning the County Council "declined"). But nothing happened. I was told from [home-town] hospital that Ella would be allowed home from [Other-town] rehabilitation after two weeks, maybe less. Nothing happened.

The care home manager raised the point that social services would have to assess our home, before Ella could return. The procrastinators of social services have had getting on for half a year to do that. In fact, three of them came some time ago: social worker..., Occupational Therapist..., and [young woman] from energy efficiency.

As promised, the gas fires have been removed, central heating has been put in; also an insulated new bay window with sealed door. An en suite ground floor toilet will also be fitted.

We have most of the required accessories, in our house, because my late father also was disabled. (We could do with three or four bed bars. And I previously asked [Occupational Therapist], if her department could arrange physiotherapy for Ella.)

from....

31 december 2019.

[To:] Customer Response Assistant [to complaint to County Council against Social Services]

(copies also sent),

Following yesterdays e-mail (care home detention bill) I send you the link to my journal of my poor mothers ordeal in hospitals and care home, since 11 August 2019. [Which was the second edition of this book]

When my mother was hospitalised, I had no help and no awareness of her incipient dementia. From the start, I wanted her to have round-the-clock care, with a live-in carer. From the start, social services, who are supposed to help, only obstructed and diverted me from that intention.

It is painfully obvious that my mentally impaired mother feels her "deprivation of liberties" as acutely as any young and healthy person. Moreover, it is a legal requirement that the mentally impaired person is given full and proper regard for her personal wishes. That has been much too far from the case.

Something which it is rather too keen on, the state imposes in its own words "deprivation of liberties" on an incapable and deluded old lady. But one who still feels that deprivation and is heart-broken by it. Her understanding of how to escape her confinement is childishly inadequate (calling out: Are you a policeman?). She appears to be just some pathetic nutcase, best left where she is.

Her desperation to be away was rather too evident on 27 December 2019, after approaching half a year in an increasingly intolerable hospital or hospital type institutionalisation.

It is a vicious circle: the more she is maddened by her captivity, the less inclined her captors to free her. However poor Ella acts, it is held against her wishes. If she is tolerant, she is held to be accepting of her imprisonment. If she gets mad, she is held to be unfit to leave.

I say to her, words to the effect: Well, if I can get you home, you won't have to act up like this.

She replies: Have I ever been like this, at home?

I have to admit that she has not.

She dismisses the notion, with: Well, there you are then.

What I saw that day was a tragedy. Being her son, I happen to be the only person, who has followed her, bed to chair and back, confinement all these months, an ordeal that would have tried beyond endurance a young and healthy person – as I've said many times to the cloth-eared rhinoceros that calls itself social services.

Besides the marathon physical privations, more injustice done to Ella is that cohabiting, with the mentally damaged "invalid", is someone with much the same reactions to her situation as any other sane person. She bitterly says how long and hard she has worked all her life, and this is what the country does to her, and she wishes she were away from it.

It was real work as well, of which only I remain as witness or informant. She complains: I am a human being like anyone else. Why am I being kept here? I've not done anything wrong. Why can't I leave? She is grief stricken and in tears.

That bounces off the insensitivity and expedience of the young and healthy, and the paper-work reality of so-called "social workers".

The care home staff said she needs to be there for her "safety". When Ella had falls at the hospitals, usually trying to get away from them, the nurses always had to inform me. At the care home, only Ella told me that she was taken to hospital, immediately after a fall, the night before. It was evident from the hospital dog tag round her wrist.

When I told the care home staff, that they had taken Ella to hospital, they didn't deny it. They just modified their argument to Ella being "safer" at care home. That, of course, over-looks the fact that Ella wouldn't be trying to escape from her own home.

[Two of the care home staff took to blaming me for telling Ella that she couls go home. But I only said: If I could. That is since the social worker unexpectedly blocked Ellas return and made me break my promise to bring her home.]

It is true, she is still restless. And Sue, the nurse at [Othertown] hospital told me not to worry about Ella being "a falls risk". She said that all elderly people are a falls risk.

Yesterday, 30 December 2019, in less strident tones, Ella was complaining to me personally all afternoon, about not being allowed to leave. She considers how she can "escape", which is a threat to her own safety. She needs to be allowed to settle at home. With loss of short-term memory, she keeps asking if she can leave with me.

It is absolutely essential that I visit her every day I can, to keep her mentally and emotionally alive. She says as much herself, that she can't live without me, and she is not exaggerating.

I am not criticising the staff. Caught between economics and red tape, the care home can give no more than a token personal attention of strangers. Day after day, I have seen this for a fact. A group of inmates are sat silently round the television screen. A few wander around looking lost. They have minimal or no powers of communication. After I had to be away from Ella two days, (plus Sunday, when the buses don't run into town from our home) to get the joiners in to make her room livable for her, she complained that she had no one to talk to all day.

Even healthy people lose the power of speech, if long kept away from company. As with everything else, it is a case of use it or lose it.

It takes the heart out of my day, every day (except Sundays and bank holidays). I willingly do it for Ella. The fact is I am doing the work of care that, in theory, a care home should be doing. What they are doing is still important, seeing to basic needs, but that can also be done at home, and there is no substitute, whatever the overweening state might think, for a day-long care that is also family care, born of life-long association and affection.

And if the resources of the state were brought to help at home, instead of obstructing from home, it would be that much better.

from...

6 january 2020.

To Social complaints.

On behalf of Mrs Ella Lung, by her son, Richard.

[To: Town] Services Manager

You say that "the Local Authority received a safeguarding referral". You do not say that the Safeguarding warning for deprivation of liberties was "declined". That is a fact which you unacceptably fail to mention. {Document copies were attached: [County Council]-DoLS-letter and standard-authorisation-not-granted.

You say "Your Mother is not being detained unlawfully at .... care home, she is on a Deprivation of Liberty Safeguard." But that was not granted.   
[I was not informed till 15 january 2020 that, having failed to deprive me of liberty, my mother was formally deprived of liberty!]

So, your review is wrong. And I will take the matter to the ombudsman, and whoever is prepared to listen to this unjust family splitting of mother from son.

The prime fact is that mother and son love each other and want to be at home together – a natural state of affairs, which is, or should be, a basic human right. And in this case no compelling evidence was produced why my mother and myself her son should be any exception.

"You were involved in all of this and aware of the allegations."

This Services Manager review over-looks my journal [this book before up-dates]. I criticised, for example, the secretive gathering of inadmissable hear-say against me, without my knowing.

There were no "allegations." I was not charged with any offense, that would have permitted me to defend myself.

In a phone call, the social worker once mentioned "abuse" but that is scarcely more specific than suspecting me of being a criminal. What kind of abuse? It was left to the imagination! I repeat: No charge was made. That is not acceptable in this country with its ancient civil liberties.

As said before: I have no history or record of offenses. Yet at the drop of a hat, you persecute me on a vague suspicion, you are unable to substantiate yet unwilling to drop, without exhoneration or apology. You know nothing about me or my life-long relation with my mother, which you are bent on ruining in her last years, to our mutual heart-break, with your paper-work misrepresentations, too numerous to mention.

I would have defended myself before the board of enquiry, if given the opportunity. Fortunately, it was not necessary.

Apart from that unacceptable ommission of the "declined" warning, there were other inaccurate and misleading statements.

"Mrs Lung was transferred to [Othertown] hospital where she remained until the safeguarding concern was investigated and concluded."

(I don't know where you get the date, 4 December 2019 for Mum arriving at care home.)

The County Council letter I received, showed that the safeguarding concern was concluded by 3 October 2019. Ella my mother was kept at [Othertown] hospital till 22 November 2019. By that time, the norovirus had broken out in [the] Ward and I was desperate to get Mum out of hospital. My father died from a hospital acquired infection. I was having to commute by train to [Othertown] daily for Mums morale. She wanted me to come: "More than anything in the world." That's not quite the same as:

"On the 22/10/2019 there was a Best Interest Meeting and you agreed that it was in your Mothers best interest to move from hospital into 24-hour care."

That sentence gives a misleading impression that I was at such a meeting but I was not.

That sentence also ignores the fact that from the start I wanted my mother to have 24-hour care with a live-in carer. But the social worker blocked [named] live-in care agency from obtaining Mums medication from the hospital, on confidentiality grounds.

Was Mums medication a state secret? Was some firms right to commercial security being violated?

Later, this social worker admitted that she had been wrong to block the live-in care agency, and apologised. She explained that the county council didn't have the authority to stop us, if we had savings of over about £24,000.

So, I had no suspicion that this social worker was going to cancel the arrangements of [a subsequent] live-in care agency for Mum to come home from care home.

The social worker stalled on [the second approached care agency] and said she was looking "further afield" (out of my reach) for a care home. So I found a care home at the edge of town. I was worried about Mum being a falls risk. But I never wanted to dispense with our companionship, in the way that I found a care home does. Mum is sat in a chair all day from morning till night. The patients there are sat round the television in a comatose state. They have lost or almost lost the power of speech. I struggle to come every day during the worst weather of the year, hazarding travel infections, catching a gastric infection from the care home, that made me vomit, on three occasions, last night (6 January 2020), till I could not heave up any more half digested food.

Like in some totalitarian state, I have been reduced to a prison visitor of my mother to try against the odds to keep her in mental and emotional life, despite the heartless obstruction of social services.

All this grinding Mum down and grinding me down, with the latest postponement till 17 April 2020, with a bogus safeguard, that has been declined, before Mum could come home.

"In terms of cancelling the delivery of the profiling bed to your home address, I can confirm that the Local Authority did not cancel this."

The [live-in] care agency manager arranged with district nurses for medical equippers to deliver a profile bed. The district nurses said this was cancelled for safety reasons. The care home manager denied that she had used the word safety, but that it had come thru to her from social services, and she was not responsible for the cancellation.

Care home staff said she was kept from home for her safety. But they did not inform me, as hospitals are obliged to, when Mum fell in their premises and was taken to hospital. Nor did they deny it. Mum told me. It was evident from the hospital dog tag.

"I understand that you have applied to be Deputy for your Mothers finances and, that a financial assessment has been requested ... from our Benefits and Assessments team. I hope that you will cooperate with that. You will be responsible for paying this invoice if you are appointed as Deputy for your Mother's finances."

The invoice, refered to, is the bill social services are demanding for forcing Mum to stay in a care home against our wishes.

As for Ella being given a legal advocate, by someone who knows nothing about her, it is nothing more than a take-over. Myself, her son is her human advocate bound by a lifetimes affection and care for her, and her for me. [To take control of our finances, the social services are still trying to stigmatise me with the safeguarding warning, even tho it has been declined. It is perpetual presumption of guilt for perpetual persecution and subjugation.]

On a previous occasion, under the safeguarding warning, which was subsequently declined, the social worker visited the house to try and reduce us to wards of state taking over control of our finances and stripping me of my general power of attorney. [The above quotation sounds like a re-run of that ambition to rob us of our finances.]

In short, these unscrupulous people are tyrants.

I hope that whatever decency is left in authority that it will allow Mum and me to live and love together at home with a live-in carer. I believe this is a public interest issue, of official power crushing the life and love out of us.

* * *
8 january 2020.

### Lack of due process.

Table of Contents.

This morning, I worked up a lack of due process case against social services, to try and make our desperate situation less unfamiliar. (Absence of due process is also a public issue.)

In response to the town services managers rejection of my social complaint:

I only realised that a Safeguarding warning was specifically for "deprivation of liberties," when the county council "declined" it, on 3 October 2019. But I find that I am still being stigmatised, as a basis for taking away freedom and independence, from Mrs Ella Lung, my mother and myself.

The ambulance women did not tell me that they were passing judgment on me, with a Safeguarding warning. So I had no opportunity to explain or defend myself against

"what they perceived as her poor living conditions and care."

They do not know that I was doing my best to care for my mother. They were not there. My mother has a history of pneumonia. My father saved her life by swaddling her in blankets right up to her nose.

In 2019, she was perpetually putting on clothes, damping them with perspiration, and taking them off again. I thought she was trying to sweat out a cold, which she always feels (as the doctor at the time said she would). She was exhausting herself and exhausting me in the process of helping her.

What I didn't realise was that Mum was probably suffering from compulsive repetitive behavior that seems to characterise dementia. I was not aware of the problem and not trained to cope with it. I had no help, and realised from the start of her hospitalisation that Mum would need a 24-hour live-in carer.

Mum was getting increasingly abstemious, and the day she had no solid food, I called in the doctor. It was bad luck that Mum fell out of bed against the door and two secretly judgmental ambulance women had to be called in.

Mum was always very slim in her athletic youth. But in middle age she was stuck standing in a shop and put on weight. I have a feeling that the body may react in old age against carrying too much weight for it to easily bear, especially if remembering its youth, less handicapped by weight. However, this drastic diet was making her weak, at last too weak even to do more than dribble a drink.

These briefly were the real and complex medical circumstances of Mums condition, already written in my journal, and brushed aside by a rush to condemn myself, who is not medically trained and makes innocent mistakes like anyone else.

Nor have the health authorities protected a vulnerable person, as they like to make out. By institutionally depriving her of liberty, they have caused her the utmost distress, frustration and anger.

I got the heating arrangements wrong. I thought some clay core heaters would give sustained warmth. But they just blasted out burning heat, before switching themselves off and making the room feel chilly again. They were an expensive mistake. I have got rid of them and the gas fires also. For the first time in my life, with central heating, the air in a room, in winter, can feel like a mildly warm summers day.

The secretiveness of the investigation against me was continued in [local] Hospital. I only found out later that any remarks I happened to make were being contrived to incriminate me. It was the one-sided procedure of a totalitarian informer state. It was not conducted in an open court of law, so it was not a fair trial. It was hearsay and, so, inadmissible evidence. It was not even evidence. A doctor, who called me on the phone, I recognised as the source of a complaint that I could not account for my mothers bowel movements!

It was gratuitously infered that I was not feeding my mother well, because I complimented "NHS food" as better than my own. (I only found out later that this was an undeserved compliment, because [Othertown hospital] cuisine, was deprived of its liberty, by being transfered to local hospital, with the transfer of authority [to this locality].)

Social services spurious evidence collecting was conducted during the weeks that Ella was in [her first local] Ward. I was not read my rights that evidence was being collected against me, and I had the right to remain silent. I was not charged with any offense that I could defend myself against. Therefore, I was not given any means to clear my name. Instead I have been put under a perpetual presumption of guilt, in flat contradiction to presumption of innocence.

It is summed up, in the complaint Response, by no more than innuendo:

"You were involved in all of this and aware of the allegations."

This sentence does not come with any allegations or charges, much less establishes them.   
Of course I was "involved" but I didn't know a case was being made against me. Had I known, I could have made a defense note of the nurses realisation that mother and son are close. I didn't find out about the Safeguarding warning until social worker told me in an interview [monday, 2 september 2019], which took place after secret but empty evidence gathering.

Also social services slyly did not put in writing their attacks on my integrity and liberty. As described above, only by phone did social worker mention "abuse" and question me, so I could not make a written response to an existing document. Only on a visit did she prepare to subjugate us to wards of state, taking away our citizens rights, without freedom or ownership of our own life, taking away my general power of attorney.

The Safeguarding warning for deprivation of liberties was subsequently declined. This was ignored by the Response to my social complaint. This does not seem to have quenched social services determination to rob us of our personal freedom and financial independence.

I was not given any opportunity by the board of enquiry to defend myself before them, and consequently clear my name, in a proper procedural judgment, with a verdict.

Social services have broken every rule in the book of due process, whose real safeguard is ancient English liberties, hard-won over the centuries, valued no less by people with dementia like Ella, but thrown out of the window by people like these so-called social services. They don't care, for the liberty-depriving torments they inflict on those they are supposed to be safeguarding. It is precisely because Ella is so "vulnerable" that she has been taken such unforgivable advantage of, by the hypocrits and tyrants of social services.

* * *
13 january 2020.

### Social Services as Social Masteries

I have been separated half a year from Mum, who I did not realise was developing dementia) who I've been with all 70 years of my life (apart from college)....

A secret Safeguarding warning against me by ambulance women based on a few minutes at our home was used to discredit all 70 years, tho I have no history of offenses. The enquiry was completed in a couple of months and "declined" the warning, but social worker kept Mum in hospital, despite health authority promise to our MP, that she would be allowed home. Social worker twice obstructed Mum going home with a live-in carer. The first time was later admitted to be wrong (refusing to disclose, to the first approached live-in care agency, hospital medication for Mum, with more than £24,000 savings).

Yet social worker took it upon herself to cancel my bringing back home Mum from care home, which she hates. Social worker made plain her intention to find such a "placement" until I gave in to her resolve. She was going to look further afield for a care home out of my reach. She stalled on my asking a further, dementia specialist live-in care agency, and then blocked it when I returned for their help.

At the beginning of this week, I picked up a stomach infection from the care home, and was vomiting all my half digested food. By the end of that week, I was coughing up phlegm (coffing up flem), a reaction from having to visit Mum daily in another town and at the other end of home town, in all winter wind and rain, like some soviet prison visitor. I won't have the robust health to visit Mum even as much as I did. It is like denying her a lifeline.

I could have done something for Mum this last half year, if only social services had not been so dedicated to obstruction and dead set against helping us in any way we might need or request. I could have been with Mum any and all times of the day. (We live together or rather we used to until social services abduction.) I could fill in the holes of her dementia for her. And was happy to answer all her questions from memory loss.

I have come to the realisation that the prime facts of the matter are: statistics show 97% people prefer live-in care. This follows from the fact that the family bond is closest. A family member will conduct care for nothing that a stranger would not do without being paid about £1000 a week [and then can scarcely bear to stay in the same room]. Yet social services ignore what the public overwhelmingly wants and ruin the best agent of healing, the family bond.

In short, social services have set their faces against democracy and love.

They march to a different drum, which is to say autocratic administrative law, which has been set against the law and liberty of England, hard-won over the centuries. The conduct of the safeguarding warning for deprivation of liberties broke every rule in the book of due process for the safequarding of liberties of citizens. Rather than protecting the vulnerable, social services resemble the predatory principle of attacking the weakest, least able to defend themselves or escape.

Like many other people, it would appear, I don't know how we can defend ourselves against the subjugations by social services.

* * *
13/01/2020.

### Recap.

(Mainly repetition.)

....I was treated like some pariah unfit for my mother to live with.

We have chosen to be together. But social services has kept us apart half a year with no change soon. My mother is as distressed as you or I or anyone would be by her deprivation of liberty. She complains she has not done anything wrong. Why are you keeping me here? Her grief is tearful and tragic. The fact that she is mentally impaired does not make this detention any more right than if she was physically impaired, say. It is state cruelty to an individual. It is a form of torment and negligence.

But to social workers and care home staff, everything is fine.

It is a great waste of time. I cannot do anything for her but boost her morale with visits. All winter I have train traveled to another town hospital or to the care home at other end of this town. At start of this week I picked up the stomach infection from the care home, where social worker detained her. From vomiting up all loose digestions, I went onto coughing up phlegm (did it just now) till I was too sore chested to speak and bloodily stuffed-up. I cannot now even sustain regular winter visits to Mum. At home, I could be with her all day whenever she wants, talking to her, repairing the memory confusions and omissions. I'm sure I could make progress, to brighten her mental and emotional life.

The safeguarding enquiry process broke every rule in the book of due process. Inadmissable Hear-say was collected against me. But no evidence was collected in my defense. I was not charged with anything I could defend myself against and refute. So, in effect I was in some totalitarian secret informer state perpetually condemned to presumption of guilt, and under the thumb of social services.

Social worker told over the phone of "abuse" suspicions and questioned. No actual abuse alleged, that I could refute. There was a board of enquiry which I was never given the chance to defend myself before. It "declined" the safeguarding warning for "deprivation of liberties." I was informed directly by mail but the social worker did not tell me that, making it sound more like a sword of Damocles. Historic provision of presumption of innocence was squashed.

Before the enquiry was held, the social worker held out the prospect of my mother and I being reduced to the role of minors, under state guardianship, taking control of our finances and stripping me of my general power of attorney [Tuesday 1 october 2019].

Social worker later admitted she was wrong to block medication information about Ella to [one] live-in care agency [08/10/2019 17:15]. But she later also canceled the arrangement by [another] live-in care agency of a profile bed being delivered to Mums home by the district nurses team. I gave the care home four weeks notice of Mum leaving, and paid. But social worker made me break my promise that Mum was coming home to me, [informing me of a so-called best interests decision not to accept the four weeks notice I gave the care home, on 10/12/2019 12:16].

My social complaint against social services was only used by the services manager to tighten their control. Unless I paid the care home for Ella's detention against our wishes, they threaten to reject my application for financail deputy to Mum. This dilemma is a case of heads they win, or tails you lose, to financial expropriation.

I have taken my complaint onto the ombudsman, but that is uncertain of outcome and takes 6 to 8 or more weeks, while social services go on ruining our lives.

* * *
15 january 2020, 20:17.

To my Member of Parliament and the DoLS team.

### Made miserable by order of state.  
Ella deprived of liberty.

Table of Contents.

Mum has been miserable in her institutionalised state for half a year. First in hospitals, now in care home, rather too similar. I made this inhumanity to Ella, abundantly clear, over all this time, only to be disregarded.

I cannot be with Ella to give her the mental and emotional support of her son, with her, and knowing her life, as no-one else does. So, I can fill in the gaps. It was little enough I could do for her, trekking to the next town by train in winter or to the other end of town most days. But since I caught the vomiting virus at the care home, I have also been coughing up phlegm and nose-bled profusely. My voice was too broken to speak on the phone, a few days ago.

I could do so much more for Mum at home, be with her anytime she wants, answer her any time. I was quite happy to do it. I could give her her sons love, which others cannot do. They can only charge a fortune to keep her miserable in a care home. Two of the staff had the effrontery to blame me for telling Ella she was coming home. (Another woman told us not to give up. I paraphrased what Ella said to her.)

She was coming home, till the social worker stopped the arrangement, and the delivery of a profile bed from district nurses was cancelled.

Since then I've only said I am trying to get her home. But you have stretched the rack, once again, from 6 months to 8 months -- and counting. There have been promises of Mum coming home -- unfulfilled. (Our MP received one from the Health Authority, on 16 september 2019. Then the excuse for delay was a DoL against myself. It was declined, but prejudice was still evident in the Social Complaints Response.)

We have been together over 70 years. Why is it so terrible that this should continue to be the case? Cannot the mighty state pull itself together sufficiently to make it humanly possible for a mother and son, who love each other, to still live together at home?

* * *
16 january 2020, 09:48.

To Social Complaints (Customer Response Coordinator)

I have only just discovered, yesterday, 15 January 2020, that not only was I threatened with deprivation of liberties, but my mother has just been deprived of liberties, by being detained in a care home, against her will.

To inflict (what amounts to) a criminal condemnation of a physical impairment is a medieval superstition.  
[My mother contemplated the quaintness of her treatment as "medieval," when I visited her, on saturday 25 january 2020. I replied, that is what I said.]

We are not public enemy number one and two. Neither mother nor son has any history or record of offenses. We do not deserve these tyrannical oversights.

I have related my mothers bitterly felt protests against being institutionalised. They have been passed by in silence by the coteries of anonymous strangers supposed to be officiating on her behalf, but in the pay of the state.

I would go so far as to call it a case of "Wilful Blindness."

It is a twofold ignorance to both love and liberty. The mother-child bond of love is the foundation of society. It should be the very basis of our social policy. But nowhere, in relation to ourselves, do social services help to bring us together, only obstruct us.

Ellas desire for freedom is the main theme of my journal:...

We don't mind paying for a trained live-in carer to assist us in our domestic freedom. What we do mind is having to pay for Mum being kept in misery in a care home.

This is relevant: Louise Tickle

Guardian frid 15 april 2016 17:07 BST.

"Rise in referrals to social services causing trauma to families, expert says."

Deprivation of liberties is autocratic administrative law. It is replacing the old English law of due process for protecting the liberties of citizens, with the old Prussian law, a sausage factory of summary justice, that makes an autocrat of every official, and turned the German Empire into a land of little dictators. The wilful blindness of politicians to tyranny is taking Britain in that direction.

* * *
23/01/2020. 19:36.

(Reply to Customer Response Coordinator),

After the Social Complaints Response, I filled the Ombudsman form, as directed at end of a Response, which merely sought to tighten control over my mother and myself. So, there was no prospect, on the basis of that Response, of ever obtaining a sympathetic hearing from that direction.

But I had to keep complaining to Social Complaints, because of the continued unwelcome intervantions in our lives, by social services.

However, I thank you for including my refutation, and [County Council] documents, in the Ombudsman file, or otherwise, I think, the Ombudsman would have received a hopelessly biased misrepresentation of the situation.

I had to write again to you, because of the unexpected (by me) deprivation of liberties against my mother: Perhaps a self-legitimation of the social worker or best interests group blocking my mother coming home, as arranged by the live-in care agency.

The glib assurance that mother would be safe in care home is contradicted by my own visits there. I previously recorded the eye-socket injuries of a residents apparent nasty fall. Also (without informing me, as hospitals must) mother had a fall, in the care home, and was taken to hospital.

I am not criticising the care home but the DoLS Deprivation of Liberties] team: there is nothing safer than locking someone in a safety box. But as my mother has said more than once, it is not worth living.

A Best Interests meeting is announced, the first I will have attended. I complained to the announcers, that the prolonged distress caused to my mother, by depriving her of her liberties, is cruel.

It is potentially tragic.

Yours sincerely,...

* * *

### Address of grievances before Best Interests meeting.

Table of Contents.

26/01/20, 9:46.

Hello [Social Worker 2] and other members of the Best Interests meeting (whoever you may be).

This brief is to give you a chance to assimilate what the son, Richard, of Mrs Ella Lung believes to be her best interests.

This is not to forget what I've said in my journal and elsewhere, to yourself and others.

We have been together now for 70 years (apart from when I was at college). We have a huge amount of shared experience, that can bypass her dementia in innumerable ways. No one else can do this. (Assessments, receiving obviously wrong answers, may miss important elements of truth in them, that only family could possibly know about.)

Mother and son are a part of each others lives, dedicated to each other. I don't have to be paid a fortune a week, to scarcely bear to be in the same room with her, say hello Ella, and then pass on to my next pressing duty.

At home I can be with her any time, she wants me, and take pleasure in her company. I could work with a live-in carer who is a dementia specialist, for whom we are willing to pay, but for ever-obstructive social services.

The services managers Response to my Social Complaint intends to force us, like brutes, with a threat to my financial deputy application, to pay for Ella to be imprisoned, against her will. Not even criminals are expected to pay for their board.

Like some soviet prison visitor, to another town, or the other end of this one, all winter I have been trying to see an institutionalised Ella. Never robust, at 70, I just don't have the reserves of strength to do this, any more, and had to stay away poorly, most of January. On my return, Mum was poorly and sorely missed me.

To separate Ella from her son and companion of 70 years and her home of 30 years inflicts a memory wipe, twice over, on a woman already mentally impaired.

And you strangers have the audacity to dictate her best interests.

I was told by a manager of the Best Interests decisions, "That is the law."

The Court of Protection impresses on the applicant, to be a financial deputy, the utmost respect for the mentally impaired persons wishes. And that is the law. I have seen no sign of respect for it from social services. Instead, she has been subjected to prolonged distress and discomfort. She felt as if she were in a forever waiting room. She felt treated like a convict.

Consequently, Ella believes she is of no importance, because she has been treated as of no importance.

In an effectively punitive captivity, institutions rob their inmates of remaining initiative as free citizens (which is really what the book, Asylums, by Irving Goffman, was about).

I repeatedly asked my mother about the care home, and she has repeatedly said, of her own accord, that she does not want to be there. She wants to be with me. Ella replied to me she wanted freedom, not to be in a regime. In other words, she wanted to do as you like. (I journaled this and much else, that makes explicit my mothers feelings, in the matter.)

As I've already said, in my opinion, this chronic imposition of bitterness and hopelessness, on my mother, is outrageous and unacceptable.

* * *
07/02/2020 18:58.

Dear MP... and staff,

I've written up impressions of the Best Interests meeting. (The minutes of the meeting will be much longer. [Minutes not received by morning of 3 march, tho chased-up.])

I think the direction social services forces us into, is a choice between state control or family love, as the governing influence in peoples lives.

### Best interests meeting (6 February 2020) at care home.

Table of Contents

Since my mother was admitted to hospital, half a year ago, this group of strangers has been ruling our lives, without our consent, and against our wishes. This is the first time that I have been hauled in to join them. And for the first time of hearing their discussion, at last I have a fair idea of their mentality and motives.

They are complete partisans of the care home, and as complete obstructors of Mrs Ella Lung returning home. In the process, they use language not so much as an instrument of knowledge, as a weapon of conquest. The conquest they seek is of the state over the family; of state control over family love.

These control freaks put alleged safety over liberty. Instead of helping Ella to live safely at home, they make every excuse to obstruct it happening. This is the one respect in which they have been resourceful.

Originally, a specialist live-in care agency offered a 24-hour live-in carer, on the understanding that I would be trained to assist her. If needed, there would be two of us on hand to help.

At the Best Interests meeting, I was surprised to hear, from the social worker, that the agency had assessed Ella as needing two live-in carers, plus a night carer at a hundred pounds a night. In total, this would come to something like £2000 or about twice the original charge of £1230.

I was told nothing of this, so the care agency gave social services preferential treatment. (I had noticed their two women, who came for the assessment, were not friendly towards me, or somewhat lacking in warmth. There are other dementia live-in care agencies.) The meeting gave me no time to consider this fortified obstacle to Mums home-coming.

It takes time to reflect on these matters and to realise that the care home does not employ a night carer at a hundred pounds a night. The profile bed has a bed sensor, to alert someone if Ella gets out of bed in the night. She fell out of bed in the night, and was taken to hospital. The care home did not tell me of this, as hospitals must report falls, but Mum told me, and the hospital dog tag was round her wrist. The hospital visit was not denied, when I raised the matter with staff, tho a claim to safety was changed to safer!

In anticipation of the Best Interests meeting, I sent an e-mail of grievances. This was not answered. There was only a mention, of Ella having more freedom at home, which could have come from any of my complaints. They pictured for me the prospect of little freedom, if Ella was always under the watch of two live-in carers in one room (as they would have it).

This is a ridiculous exaggeration. Two carers would not have to be in the room at the same time when one pair of eyes is as good as two pairs, and when that one pair is often my own. Sometimes there is no care home staff in their large lounge.

The Best Interests discussion was long but I can illustrate why it was partisan.

Mum had nearly two months at the care home, with no one articulate enough to speak to, all day. When someone came, who could exchange words, it was like a release from solitary confinement.

This new arrival was enough to prompt the care home deputy to claim that Ella now had friends, who were her family. This might be called the Lego brick theory of replaceable human relationships.

With her new friend, I asked Mum, did she want to stay here or leave. It's your choice. She replied: Home home home home home... with you!

The advocate retorted Ella didn't know her home. Before the meeting, the advocate showed Ella a photo of our home, and asked where it was. She looked at it, turned away and then said the street name.

Incredibly, at the meeting, the advocate said Ella did not recognise her home, because she had not named it while looking at the picture! A few seconds delayed memory, in a 94-year-old with dementia, were counted out, by a young woman who will one day be old herself.

Ellas recognition of her home didn't fit the advocates profile of a dementia patient who doesn't know her home (as very largely she doesn't), so she left it out. It didn't help the advocate, in her illogical argument, that Ella cannot be allowed home if she doesn't know her home. Ellas memory is a little like short wave radio signals that unpredictably fade in and out.

It emerged from the social worker that Mums dementia was "undiagnosed." In other words, the experts don't understand it. That didn't deter the advocate from the impertinent remark: She didn't ask for you, she asked for her Mum and Dad.

The options are not mutually exclusive. And how does she know? A few visits do not make her omniscient. She wasn't there. I often was and know very different.

The advocate asked Ella if she wanted to be with Richard. Ella made it perfectly plain that I was everything to her and that she couldn't live without me. At the meeting, Ellas eloquent declaration of unconditional love was reduced by the advocate to: "Yes."

A comparable thing happened on a previous visit to Ella by the social worker and advocate. They made out the care home was fine but for some boredom, which could be relieved by activities (unfortunately absent). Poor Ellas message of utter dissatisfaction with the place (she relayed to me) was also completely lost in transcription, as I said by e-mail at the time.

When the Best Interests meeting was over, Mum and I went to a seat in a corner. I told her: They won't let you leave.   
Several times, Mum has deplored what the country has come to. She condemns her captivity as wicked. Also standard was the statement I clearly remember: I hate this place.

Sitting across the hall the deputy manager was no doubt taking in our response to their incarceration of my mother. The staff are supposed to record Ellas expressed wish to leave. It must be so tempting not to, especially with social services talent for understatement of peoples wishes.

On 27 December 2019, during her most public defiance, she miserably told the deputy manager that she felt like doing away with herself. The deputy soothingly replied: You won't.

That is making a gamble that a fellow creature will not die in captivity, or that the caged bird sings. That I was the best son in the world, Ella, in deep distress, exonerated me – something which social services never has done, over its safeguarding enquiry. But then Ella loves me.

Footnote:  
I was promised before the meeting that I would be sent a copy of the minutes. On 26 february, 20 days later, I reminded the social worker. As of morning, 3 march, I have not even received an acknowledgment of request for the minutes. If and when it does come, it is likely to be by another of their hideous encryptions.

* * *

### "Best Interests" conflict of interest

Lawyers are not allowed to serve two opposing interests, because they are then caught in a conflict of interests.

Giving officials the job of depriving liberty gives them a vested interest in doing so, even if the deprivation is supposed only to be a last resort. This is a conflict of interests. It becomes the best interest of social services to deprive people of liberty, to give themselves a job. It serves social services job safety to pretend people are being deprived of liberty for their own safety. The job incentive to deprive of liberty also deprives of reality.

The Best Interests meeting amounted to a barrage of excuses why Ella could not be free to go home. So intransigent was it, from all, that it set me to wondering what was behind this zealous prohibition.

I have met helpfully human occupational therapists. Already forgotten that I had installed central heating and an insulated bay window and door, the chairman charged me, at the meeting, with being "resistant" to the visit of the OT. This was not entirely true. I accepted what wheat there was amongst all the chaff, like bringing the glass inner door up to current safety standards. Anyone would be resistant to someone whose conversation was that of being thrown into a mental wrestling match. I felt like I was a servant under a new master in my own home.

She commanded that Ellas bed couch be removed, to make room for the profile bed, with three arguments, each one contradicting the one before it: there was not enough room for the profile bed; there was not enough room to assemble the profile bed; there would not be enough room for the patient to move around in. In point of fact, the room was too congested but I removed other furniture, than Mums bed couch which made for her extra comfort: a bookcase with swing open glass doors, and an easy chair. I knew the profile bed wasn't an aircraft carrier, and after measuring it, in the care home, found it would fit length-ways or width-ways into the dining room for Ella.

The OT had a little snipe against the old night storage heater, well placed behind the door, to block drafts.

The OTs next objection was to the convenience for Mum of an ensuite toilet in the dining room.

She had another little snipe against there not being an accompanying sink (to clutter the room). But there is one next door, as there is a sink next door to the toilet upstairs.

She went next door and chose the kitchen pantry for the toilet. It so happened that the fridge freezer had broken down and been removed, which I told her.

She said: No problem.

Which it was. Other than in the pantry, there was no room in the kitchen for the new fridge freezer, which could only be stowed in a corner, if the food cupboard were removed, as well as all the many shelves for food and utensils in the pantry.

On her visit, the OT dropped her objection as "only a suggestion". But at the Best Interests meeting, she went on the attack again.

The pantry had a stop cock. She pointed-out this water supply.

(Under the floorboards, the en suite toilet was close by the kitchen sink. Moreover, it led directly out thru the wall onto the stack, about a foot away.)

Under the official order of things, while people were having their meals, someone like Mum would have to shuffle out of the dining room, thru the kitchen into the kitchen pantry to have their toilet. An unhygienic, unaesthetic, and inconvenient, not to say embarrassing operation. All due to the dysfunctional dictates of so-called social services. "Loonatic" social services want the kitchen to have an ensuite toilet, instead of the bed-sit to have one.

The official as combatant succeeded in distracting, downplaying and discrediting me for a very beneficial convenience for Mum within her own room. So much for the sinecurists war of professional self-assertion.

It made one wonder. Well, social services are being as awkward as they know how to be, in an all-out wrecking of our domestic arrangements, to prevent Mum coming home with a live-in carer. Why?

Upstairs, in Mums bedroom, there was a raisable double bed next to a lower single bed. Mum has a curved spine, so that the only place she was able to belly flop was on the stepped margin of the two beds. This was important because Mum still suffers badly from sores on her behind.

When I pointed this out to the social worker and the OT, they made gravely disapproving noises. They wanted Mum confined to one room, in the spartan hospital conditions of just a profile bed and a recliner. (Mum never wants to recline on the recliner.)

I asked the OT for some bed bars. She immediately said they are classed as "restraints" and refused them, regardless of the fact that I told her my late father had one.

I asked the OT for physiotherapy appointments for Mum, to which, unlike a previous OT, she clammed-up, for once.

It occurred to me, that these social service visitors (intruders) were not the slightest bit interested in Mums welfare beyond standard state provisions, thus impressing (if only on themselves) that home was no better than hospital or care home. They were just enforcers, obeying their regulatory masters, in the process of mastering us, and destroying individual freedom and initiative and happiness. In short: Social servants of the state, not the people.

* * *
06/02/2020 21:44.

To: Care.

I was called to a Best Interests meeting that informed me for the first time of your care agency assessment, which was completely different from the terms you gave me, something like twice as expensive, involving three carers.

You sound like the care home, from which you reckoned to want to free elderly inmates.

Originally, I was to be trained to assist, to which I agreed: hence two carers but not double the expense.

I must say you appear to have let us down very badly.

[In fact, the live-in care manager had left the agency. The two assessors did not tell me this when I mentioned her name. They did not tell me of the unaffordable price hike, which was sprung on me by social services, to confirm their Best Interests meeting in preventing Mum going home.]

* * *

### Prolapse

Table of Contents

#### On Saturday, 8 February 2020

visiting the care home, I was told that Ella had a prolapse with much loss of blood, and had to be rushed to hospital. She had emergency surgery, and was moved to a ward. On my visit, she was still constipated.

Amongst a steady flow of small talk, she said she didn't want to go back to that "dump," one of her typical references to the care home, which I made sure was the place she meant. Of course that is where social services has determined that she will stay.

On Tuesday 28 January 2020, at the care home, I mentioned to the visiting live-in care assessors of Ella, that I intended to feed her purée fashion, to be met with the objection that the care home now had her on ordinary food. (It hinted where their alliegance lay.)

Hence the constipation.

At the Best Interests meeting, the care home claimed the improvements they had made on Ella. It seems that an ordinary diet was one of their improvement targets.

The care home and the live-in assessors were young people who don't realise that old peoples teeth cannot take the punishment of young strong teeth. My dentist advised me against eating nuts. At home, Mum told me, and demonstrated, that she couldn't eat hard food. Not only for her sake but my own, I bought the strongest blender (JR Ultra) that I could find on the market, so that we could still gain the nutrients of hard foods. (It easily turns almonds to powder.)

I have no wish to deter the care home from taking pride in its work. However, I see no compelling reason why Ellas prolapse should further condemn her to the care home. Rather the contrary, as the victim of their unsuitable policy for her. Institutions may not suit individuals.

* * *
04 February 2020 19:38

To: Peripatetic Benefits and Assessment Officer.

[Hence, "Benefits"]

Good evening,

As a "benefits" officer, I explained to you that I did not think my mother would qualify for them. Also your requests for copious hard copy were simply not convenient to supply, as also explained.

Yes, my mother has savings over that amount.

The referral for residential care is disputed. I gave the care home four weeks notice, as required by their terms, and paid accordingly. [Specialist] care agency organised a profile bed with the district nurses for Mrs Ella Lung to return to her home, at last. But social services detained Ella, and therefore the detainers are liable to pay for her captivity. Not even convicted criminals are obliged to pay for their involuntary board.

Kind regards,...

11 Feb 2020 18:44

To: "Benefits"

Good evening,

As also per my previous e-mail, I have informed you that payment is disputed, because I gave the care home the required four weeks notice, which I paid for. The responsibility is with social services, who detained my mother against our will, when a live-in care agency organised with the district nurses for a profile bed as part of her home-coming.

Even on my visit today, she made clear, yet again in tearful distress, how much she hated her detention. Perpetuating this torment on my mother is not part of my duties as her loving son. Life is liberty. Denying liberty crushes the life out of a person.

I repeat: Even convicted criminals are not expected to pay for their involuntary board. At very least, it is not customary for people to be charged for services they have not asked for -- perhaps it is the case in a slave state.

Regards,...

* * *

### Emergency meeting

Table of Contents

12/02/2020 06:48.

Dear...MP

Last night, I forwarded social services demand for care home payments. I intend to go to your office, this lunchtime, to ask for an emergency meeting with your staff.

The Response, to my Social Complaint against paying for Ellas detainment in the care home, was that my application, for Financial Deputy, would be taken away, if I didn't pay.

Before the Best Interests meeting, I sent a summary of our grievances, including that, under the terms of the financial deputy application, I had to pay scrupulous attention to my mothers wishes. My mother being the person for whom I was seeking to become financial deputy. In 2013, she already gave me a general power of attorney.

The Best Interests meeting made no explicit reference to my petition, only a vague reference to freedom, which could have come from any of my writings. In other words, my complaint to them was ignored.

Just before the Safeguarding warning enquiry, the social worker intended to put us, and our finances, under state guardianship, stripping us of our rights as free citizens (which she did not deny) and taking away my general power of attorney.

We have 164 years of inoffensive behavior between us.

No-one would help us against this old Prussian style autocratic officialdom, which has thrown out old English due process. It was like a miracle that the county council "declined" the safeguarding warning for deprivation of liberties.

Even so, the Response, to my Social Complaint, did not mention that it had been declined. Instead, I was treated to innuendo about being aware of the "allegations". (There were no allegations or charges to defend myself against.)

Similarly, at the recent Best Interests meeting, I was ambushed by a surprise accusation. I flatly denied it. But this emphasises the point that these people have no sense of fair play or a fair trial. A defendant has to be properly prepared for an accusation. You cannot just drop it on them out of the blue. This is especially the case, when a decision has already been made in their favor, which again social services failed to mention at the meeting. The meeting was a barrage of arguments that we are not good enough for freedom, making up in quantity what they lacked in quality, for any future legal dispute.

I have already sent you emails about my mothers extreme distress at her captivity in the care home. Yesterday, Tuesday 11 February, I visited her, giving her notification of my financial deputy application, which she approved. As usual, we had an emotional reunion. Near the end of my stay, Ella was in tearful distress, at the prospect, she has complained about before, of being stuck in the care home, day after dreary day. To think that she had led such a hard life, to end it like this.

I knew that was true.

Moreover, Ellas frustration and anger at her captivity is destroying her, undermining her naturally peaceable character and state of mind. There are black bruises on her arms again, which a member of staff recorded. My preaching non-violence is not well received. Her disgust at her treatment is expressed in profanities. The Best Interests meeting made a reference to Ella hitting, which was treated as tho it were a badge of proprietorship by her staff.

Ella has never hit me.

Of course, I am seriously, desperately concerned at what this social services mincing machine is doing to my mother, let alone myself.

I do not know where to turn against this state police in the form of social services.

I have gone thru the so-called no win no fee solicitors, who have always shied away from that offer, becoming no win, fee solicitors.

One solicitor offers a first hour, at a reduced fee of £150, opening the way for ruinous open-ended charges.

I have applied to the ombudsman. At one point, I was asked, whether I was still applying, because I was still sending complaints to Social Complaints. I said, in effect, that I had to, because there was no sympathy from Social Complaints. But I'm not absolutely sure whether my ombudsman application has not been suspended. In any case, the ombudsman may not even take up my complaint, and not for some time. Certainly, the biased Response to my Social Complaint, was enough to put off any ombudsman!

If I give in to social services demand I pay for mothers captivity, I am financing her degradation in misery and madness. If I don't, they will take over our finances, making slaves of us both, without compunction, as they were determined to do, before.

I have no one to turn to, to rescue my mentally impaired Mum, for her happiness (and mine) and her sanity, but you my MP.

Regards,...

* * *
12/02/2020 19:10.

Good evening, social worker 2 and Benefits,

Benefits said:

"Further to my earlier email dated 5th February 2020, should you have any concerns regarding the placement, please direct these to your Social Care Assessor."

I have already done that. Please see forwarded message [26/01/20, 9:46.]. No explicit reference was made to our grievances at the meeting. They remain unaddressed.

Regards,...

* * *

### Ellas Groundhog Day.

Table of Contents.

Friday, 21 February.

Ella noticed my blurry left eye (with the cataract in) concerned that I might go blind. My eyesight has been deteriorating, with innumerable spots on my vision. Computer glare is a problem. A mother knows. Ella told me to stop. She told me to put lint over the eye. She put her hand over the closed eye (to the amusement of the best-known member of staff). Ella told me to stop working for the government. She could kick the government in the arse.

I began to weep, and told her: You're upsetting me (not on account of the government).

She replied: I don't care. I love you.

Thursday, 27 February.

Ella says: I hate this place, but for my company, and even with my company, she hates the place. Her expressions of aversion are more varied than I can well recall, such is the richness of her language.

Ella says she was going to come to see Granddad, but I wouldn't be there. Or, she was coming but never got to see me somehow. She sometimes wants to know the bus I come by. On occasion she believes she did come. The confinement of her reality, to the care home, perhaps unleashes her imagination, which I think always was strong. She asks how far it is away, to where I live, with apparent designs of reaching there. Her loss or lapse of memory keeps her wondering why she cannot leave or come with me.

I have to remind her that they won't let her leave. She remembers like a bad dream.   
Mum confided not letting her leave "disgusting" but has ever in despair that anything can be done about it.

The reaction to Ellas mental confusion may be compared to the reaction of conventional art to modern art. Post-Renaissance painting of a scene, at an instant in time, captures a realist two-dimensional perspective. But Cubist art, with its child-like regression of expression, well-known from Pablo Picasso, displays three-dimensions, impossible to see at once. This compares to Ellas memory lapses going thru inconsistent awarenesses.

Near the end of this visit, a young blonde carer explained that the care home had been giving two calming pills a day, as prescribed, but that Ella would become immune to them.

She informed me that two people had been to give Ella memory tests of her mental capacity.

Mum had already told me about these visitors.   
For instance, they asked her to draw the head of a cockerill. Ella just dashed off a head with spikes on it and a couple of eyes.

As the two testers were leaving, Ella said she overheard one say to the other: She knows more than the lot of them put together.

Saturday 29 February.

Poor Ellas mind is on a tread-mill of all the possible alternatives by which she can leave with me. She wants to know the buses. She says she will have to get a taxi. She even resorts to my driving her. I have to remind her that I don't drive.   
She seriously suggests, as she has before, that we should emigrate. And I have to explain that this also is not possible. If we had known what was coming, we would have done. (Many people have emigrated to escape the peculiar social services of Britain abducting their children.)

Social services have inflicted a version of Groundhog Day to torment my mentally impaired mother.

Ella surprises me with the question, that ought to be addressed to our statesmen: When is this law going to end?   
I confirm that she means this law of detention at the care home.   
Then I have to state the obvious, that this country is generally dilatory in abolishing bad laws.

Ellas friend Audrey is also sensible of the ordeal of being parked in a care home. That day, she said to me: Time here lasts forever.

I said I knew how she feels.   
(As I've said before, social services would soon put a stop to this internment, if they had to endure it themselves.)

On another occasion, Audrey said to me: If you weren't mad, when you came here, you would be by the time you left.   
She often says: You would think they had something organised.   
She is frequently and literally bored to tears.

Residents, who are no longer able to say so, in words, show frustration in their behavior traits.

Bunty used to make a tour of residents. Unable to do more than make stuttering sounds, she would home in on them, maybe come round them. Perhaps she would take their walking frames, before staff checked her intrusions.

She withdraws into herself, almost in the womb posture, head over her lap, or head on the table, where she sat.   
Then, Ella tried to engage her attention. I have seen a smiling Ella stroke her back, when they were sat together on a small couch. As a farmers daughter, she is very good at winning the trust of mute fellow creatures. But I saw no effect on Bunty.

Another woman sits mainly in the hall, on her own, before the code-locked door. Once, she got up with her walking frame, in a burst of energy and with a screech of frustration, did a quick tour of the lounge. I think a frequently vented screech comes from her, but it may come from others.   
The stereotype of the howling madhouse becomes all too understandable, as a perhaps avoidable tragedy, if we had strong local communities that were able to look after their weakest links. Instead of the notorious game-show adage: "You are the weakest link. Goodbye."

The lady, on her own in the hall, is uncommunicative. She might sit with her chin in her palm, the picture of despondency. But when she sees her daughter arrive, she quickly heads with her walking frame to the code-locked door, as if she had been waiting only for her.

The daughter asks: Are you all right? Do you watch television?   
(No, to both those questions, if she had answered.)   
Relatively young and active people cannot endure to stay sat long, so their visits tend to be fairly short, and perhaps infrequent.

One of the relatively few men residents does seem to watch the television sometimes or be aware of it, unlike some sedentary residents round the screen.   
He makes muttering noises and busies himself with thumbing thru a magazine, or other ritual activity, as if he is doing something.

Sometimes Ella thinks he is busy. Other times, she realises the poor man does not know what to do with himself.

It must be admitted that some residents are beyond almost any form of expression, virtually comatose, so that it seems nothing more can be done for them, than what the care home mainly does, which is look after basic bodily functions.   
In one such case, Mum told me of a young man (at least to her) who visited to give loving attention to the comatose woman. I have seen him do this myself.

* * *

### Mrs Ella Lung is weary of care home captivity.

2 march.

Dear...MP,

I promised Ella that I would write to our MP about her utter weariness with the prospect of being condemned to the care home for the rest of her life. (I think social services would do it, as well, judging by the antagonism to Ellas freedom in the Best Interests meeting of 6 February.)

I have previously expressed my alarm at the intensity of my mothers aversion to her imprisonment. In this instance, I was alarmed at Mum just being tired of life. I commented that she looked tired and sure enough it was this deprivation of the liberty of life that was draining her spirits.

From the start, this 2 March visit took up with renewed insistence, remarks like: How can we get out of here? I don't want to come here any more. I've had enough. I don't know how I've put up with it so long. I want to be with you. They just keep us here for their own convenience.

I'm dying to get out of here and go with you. It's terrible... It's horrible. What can I do? There's nothing to do. I have no life. I have nothing. It isn't good enough.

These sentiments and many more, in the same strain, were made by Ella, during just one visit. Every visit, I want to release her from her ordeal but am helpless to do so.

She asked me how I would like to be made to stop here, and I admit it would drive me mad.

Her friend Audrey, in the care home, even said to me: If you weren't mad when you came here, you would be by the time you left.

Please do what you can to end Ellas deprivation of liberty, so she can go home to be reunited with her son.

Regards,...

* * *

### The spiritual and materialist Ella.

On Wednesday 4 March 2020, the staff did not see the spiritual alter ego of Ella. Because, we just talked together in her room, overlooking green and yellow-green bushes, and a house top.

She was halfway to the door, with her walking frame, when I stood in the door frame.   
She recognised "Richard" instantly and joyously.   
When I commented on this later, she remarked to the effect that she knew every feature of me.   
She raised her arm by degrees, to show how much her spirits rose on seeing me.

I told Ella of the (corona) virus going round. She said she didn't want to know about it.   
She advised me to keep off the buses – good advice – with or without knowing it would keep me from her.

Later, I kissed her forehead. She mock rubbed it off with her jumper, saying she liked the kiss but not the germs.

Ella wrapped my cold hand in her woollen jumper, and put her own hand on top. She talked freely and fluently, not always understandably, as to what place she meant. I tried all her old homes. She said, amusingly: No, twit!

She remembers, reciting as a child, the advert for a future farm – situated between two villages "on a road due west". The adults laughed at her precocious literacy.

Ella overlaps relationships. Sometimes she thinks I have a brother, sometimes associated with someone who wrote to her every week, then stopped. Probably found someone else.   
She affects not to be bothered by a friend, at the care home, finding a new friend.

Sometimes she calls me her husband. I correct this to mother and son. She retorts: Whatever, I just want to be with you.   
She says I mean more than anyone to her. I don't encourage that belief, because I know how deeply attached she was and is to her mother and father.

Ella said she didn't want to be selfish with her love, that I needn't come if unable. She didn't want me to make myself ill over trying too hard to help her. She didn't know what she would do when I was gone.   
Towards the end, she calls me Richard, again, as she occasionally does, with that close confidence of address, I know she means the son she knew of old.

Departing, I said: I love you.

Outside, I peer thru her room window, and blow her a kiss. She does likewise.

06/03/2020

Early on, in the care home, I commented that Ella was restless. Staff member retorted: She is always restless. On Friday, her mind was restless and in a turmoil for not knowing how to leave.

I completely understood that, not for the first time, she was sick of hearing my excuse: I wanted her to come home with me, but social services blocked me, and won't let her.   
She's perfectly right: my efforts, at freeing her, never get anywhere.

Just a few snatches of Mums voluble conversation give a slight idea of her feelings:

I'm sick of my life. I really am. It's ridiculous. I never in my life saw anything like it. Not even in the old days, the bad old days. It's horrible. Is there nothing you can do about it?

I want to see you, that's everything. Let's get out of this hole. It depresses me. I'd walk miles to be out of here. Now you know. I don't like it. Let's go out then. I want to be out. I've been locked in here before. I want to be out.

I don't want to be on my own without you. I don't, honestly. It's making me really poorly.

The care home imprisonment is extra cruel to Ella, because she is a country girl, a farmers daughter used to walking miles upon miles in the open air. Hence, her notion of leaving by getting far enough away.   
I was surprised when she used the word, claustrophobic, not just because it is a sophisticated term but because of the understanding it showed of her own oppressed feelings by her surroundings.

Ella made up her mind she wasn't going to let me leave without her. She suited her deeds to her words. As staff let me thru the code-locked door, Ella, stood up with her walking frame, elbowing her way thru, after me, getting into the foyer. She called her husbands name, Albert, which is also my first name. She had abandoned the mother and son relationship for the husband and wife relationship, perhaps because the former, but not the latter, naturally separate. (Yet this mother and son only have each other.)

She grabbed hold of my rucksack, too tightly to be released. Staff reinforcements surrounded her. She passively resisted by making herself a dead-weight on the floor. They got a wheel-chair under her, to roll her back into the innards of care home incarceration.

It was, on the face of it, the pathetic resistance of a senile old lady. Yet, it reminded me of the resistance of the suffragettes, with the essential difference, that the militants went looking for trouble. Whereas, Ella just wanted the liberty to love. We all do, but she is not being treated as a human being, like everybody else, just an inferior to be managed, driving her to a courageous protest. She was a 94-year-old mentally wounded hero. Do as you would be done by.

However, this was the materialist ego of Ella, treating me as a possession, who was hers, and not to go without her. A final touch to that was added, on her reaching the outer door, when she said she wanted to go shopping!

* * *
9 March 2020.

### Alright, let's be off.

At the care home, we sat on two two-seater couches with two other residents. I thought Ella was satisfied with this arrangement, until she said to me that she wanted to be off. The weather was becoming overcast, the sky curtained with grey. She wanted to leave before it started raining.

She got up with her walking frame. As she left the lounge, onto the polished floor of the hall, she asked where is this? Then seeing the light from the glass front, said: Oh, there's the door. I had to remind Ella that they won't let you out. I'm the only one that is honest with her about her arrest. I asked her not to fret too much at it.

She settled for the couch by the door.

"Isn't it a dozy do here?" was the forthright Ella I know and love.

I warned her about the virus (the coronavirus pandemic) that might soon lead to quarantine and our separation. She did not want to be reminded about it.   
I had to come and go on four different buses, which could carry the infection. I might have to stop at home.  
Ella asked: Can't you walk?  
I said I was too old now. She could have done, when she was young. (She was a champion runner, trained in journeys between farm and village.)

I could only make a note of the merest snatch of her conversation, to give you an idea of it: I don't want to leave you. I can't bear it. I think I'd rather die than be without you.

Whether I was with her or not, I still loved her.

I encouraged her in the company, we had been in. Perhaps she didn't want them as a substitute for myself, because, with knitted brow and flashing eyes, she was only more outspoken against them, adding: They're good enough for their own people. They're not mine.   
She was bored with their talk about their own affairs. It didn't matter that I am the most boring man in the world, as I put it. I was hers.

It is true, my life is bound-up with my lifelong association with my mother.

Before teatime, Ella was given her usual calming tablets. She is now also on lactulose. My bringing a bottle had got home, even tho it was only allowed under official administration.

The fact that she suffers from severe constipation is not taken into account in the general tea-time servings of residents. I asked what was the bowl she was given. I was told: macaroni. It was a lumpy mash of white stodge. Ella couldn't eat it. Neither could I have done. This was replaced with soft white sandwiches, which she told me were like glue. I said to staff that they are gluten, and Ella has constipation. So they brought some tinned mandarin oranges in syrup with added milk: something which she likes, and I had stocked for her.  
(Tinned fruit would be a treat for a 1930s and 1940s child.)

I thought, well I could do better than that, at home, with respect to Ellas dietary needs.

11 march 2020.

Ella was on the two-seater couches with two other residents. Memorable of her discontent was the (paraphrased) remark: Never in all my life have I known such a thing, that if you go in a place, they won't let you out!   
Of all the options going thru her mind, she asked again: Shall we emigrate? She keeps wondering how the country has got into such a state. So do I.

Her friend Audrey often cries. Today was one of her more enduring outbursts. She apologised for it. Ella smiles, offering comfort, in words to boost her self-esteem, and by stroking her arm.  
To each other, mother and son are also very affectionate.

#### E-mails to County Council Credit Control.

Table of Contents

8 March 2020.  
Dear... MP;...Ombudsman (Confidential: Case ID - ...); Credit Control,

I ask you, on compassionate grounds, to help home with a live-in carer, Mrs Ella Lung, who remains tormented by imprisonment in a care home.   
It is deeply disappointing to me, heart-breaking, that in retrospect, I should have kept at you, to insist that social services reply to your question about my being willing to pay for Mum to come home with a live-in carer.

With our MP in view, the social worker meekly acquiesced, but once they got away with pretending to answer, the social worker drifted back to a "placement." She had still not accepted... live-in care agency.

At first, the social worker said she was going to try as near as possible to me but in the end she contrived to line-up [an] outlying village, impossible for me to access routinely, so I gave in and moved Ella to [a more local] care home. My father died of a hospital-acquired infection, and I was desperate to get Ella (with pneumonia history) away from winter hospital, especially as she was as desperate to get out of hospitals, after over a hundred days, bottled-up there, by social services.

Since the sympathetic manager... left..., her successors, via social services and the care home, sprang, at the Best Interests meeting, 6 February 2020, a surprise price hike on me for a live-in care: about £2000 a week. This they did, by leaving me out of the picture as apprentice live-in carer, and insisting on a night watch carer at £100 a night. Whereas the care home use bed sensor and perhaps baby alarm.

On Friday 6 March 2020, I visited my MPs office with the County Council demand they should be paid for, what amounts to, tormenting my innocent mother with permanent imprisonment at the care home. If I do not pay very soon, they will seize our assets, cruelly condemning a helpless mentally impaired elderly lady to a miserable confinement for the rest of what life she has the will left to live.

The county council bill would cost much less than private live-in care but that would be at the cost of a bearable life for my mother. It was not I who incurred the public expense but social services in detaining Ella Lung at the care home. I paid for the required four weeks notice. Social services should pay for Ellas detainment.

They ignored our grievances in anticipation of the Best Interests meeting [Thunderbird Document, 26/01/2020, 09:46] where six strangers vetoed Mums return home.

The services manager had already rejected my Social Complaint (of 14 December 2019) to county council. A deprivation of liberties safeguard was the reason given. The services manager did not mention that a safeguarding warning, against me, had already been declined. She persisted with innuendo.

However, the Ombudsman has said his team will investigate, when they have got thru other pending complaints. I have drafted a reasonably short complaint (with a folder of source documents) for the Ombudsman team, if and when they are ready to look at it. (This is more to the point than my journal, which contains much extra information, not to say information over-load, from repetitive documentation.)

That Friday 6 march, at the care home, Ella was engrossed in how to leave, as she usually is, more or less. I believe her when she feels life is not worth living there, unable to leave, day after day after day, for months on end, for the rest of her life, as she is well aware. That is not the first time that I passed on similar sentiments, and much else to the same effect thru-out [this] journal (I up-date at intervals).

It was distressing to be a sounding board for the distressed turmoil of Mums mind at how to get out of the place. In the end, she determined not to let me leave without her.

After I was let thru the code-locked door, she got up on her walking frame, elbowing her way thru. In the foyer, as staff gathered round her, she laid down, in passive resistance to being moved. My much loved mother grabbed hold of my rucksack. She grabbed hold of my hand, before they got a wheel-chair under her, back into the innards of the care home.

Ella is not treated like a human being any more, with as much rights to be free as anyone else. She is patronised as an inferior to be duped and managed. A poor deluded old lady is further deluded into believing she is not stopped from going out, when she makes enquiries about doing so, by bus or whatever.

However well-meaning of staff, in placating Ella this way, the big picture is that, taking away freedom, takes away the truth, also. That is life, or a poor semblance of a life, under a totalitarian state.

As the Hardie report says, this was not the intention of the Mental Capacity Act, which was to maximise the freedom of mentally impaired people. As the report says, Safeguarding has been used to "oppress" (as I indicate).

It seems to me, social services have seized on the term Best Interests and turned it into (We Know) Best Interests, nothing more than a throw-back to Divine Right.

7 June 2020.

Dear.... Credit Control,

I have now received invoices from your department, totalling about double the original demand, when I emailed my first reply (see above) to your charging Mrs Ella Lung, my mother, for deprivation of liberty in a care home, despite the fact that the ombudsman has agreed to investigate our complaint.

In my phone call, you gave me to understand that credit control would not suspend your seizure of our assets, unless you were informed by the ombudsman that he was currently investigating our complaint.

The ombudsman has suspended operations, not to interfere with the work-load brought on the county council by the coronavirus crisis. Their officer reminded me of this, on the phone. She called for information and has now received my formal complaint. It will be some weeks, before I even hear from them again. The ombudsman also has a long queue of complaints before ours will be reached. It follows that credit control will probably pre-empt the ombudsman decision, by seizing our assets, before the ombudsman has a chance to decide the justice of the case.

As Ellas son, I have both a sacred moral duty, as well as a legal duty, under the Mental Capacity Act, which was meant to empower and liberate the mentally impaired, to have a scrupulous regard for my mothers wishes. As my previous email, above intimated, there is no doubt my mother wishes to be with me, at her home (as I dearly wish to be with her, as I have for 70 years); and she (not to mention myself) has been put thru an unacceptable ordeal by social services. We are all the love each other has got.

She has held this wish, from the start, at the care home (You're not going to leave me here!) to the present. Indeed, it is a legal obligation to continually ascertain my mothers wishes. The evidence remains overwhelming that Ellas right to freedom is being chronically denied, for what little life, she may have left to her.

And, of course, if Ella had been allowed home, under the auspices of a live-in care agency, with us paying privately, there would have been no question of "credit control".

#### Note:

In mid-March, the care home stopped visitors coming, because of the corona-virus crisis. On the phone, Ella would say she was "stuck" there. She was loving and considerate, and said she missed me. And I shared her feelings. I took notes of Ellas conversations, and of her great distress. I intend to publish this in a second journal, Talking To A Cat In The Moonlight (Poorly mind lovely mother). This is to help high-light Ellas plight. -- A plight of one of those tens of thousands of elderly people imprisoned in care homes, according to the Hardie report.

On friday, 15 May, I received a call from the office of the Ombudsman, which investigates incorrect council procedures, requiring them to be followed correctly. They were seeking information of my complaint, which I sent with a compilation of source documents, to verify my account. The following section is my formal complaint (with names omitted).

* * *

## Formal complaint to the Ombudsman against the Detention of Mrs Ella Lung.

Table of Contents.

Prime facts   
(disregarded by social services):

Parents and children love each other.

Captivity is hateful.

### Summary:

Mrs Ella Lung and Richard, mother and son love each other and, with help instead of hindrance, want to be back home together, as we have been for the past 70 years (apart from college).   
My fullest testimony of this is in [this] my journal of Ellas ordeal and distress.(1)

Social services have persecuted each of us, inoffensive citizens both, with deprivations of liberties. Mine was declined but they talk as if it wasn't, as a pretext to imprison Mum in a care home.   
Social services, investigating a safeguarding warning against me, flouted due process and threatened us with slavery to a state guardianship. They blocked illegitimately, not just once, but twice, it is here complained, Ellas return home.   
Social services are in denial of an intolerable stress on a frail old lady, continually wanting to be away from a hateful captivity.

On 16 September 2019, the corporate director,.... of the ...County Council Health authority replied to [my] MP that, after a safeguarding enquiry, "the aim being that Mrs Lung returns home with appropriate support to meet her assessed and eligible needs." (2)

The MP expressed the hope that I would be reassured by this news that Mum would be coming home.

* * *

### Five principles of the Mental Capacity Act, 2005.

The letter from the Health authority is in keeping with the 2005 Mental Capacity Act, statutory principle 5:

"Anything done for or on behalf of a person who lacks capacity should be the least restrictive of their basic rights and freedoms."

Social services failed to implement the first principle of the Mental Capacity Act, because, from the start, as Ella said to me, in the care home, she wanted freedom, not to be in a regime. I have recorded, in my journal, Home Free, many expressions of Ellas desire to "escape" her captivity.

As to best interests principle 4, Ella continues to know her best interests, which is the decision to be with her son, who she loves and loves her. Social services have affected not to recognise this primal fact of life.

With respect to the second principle of the Act, social services chronically obstructed, instead of helping, Ella in her wish to be free.

Social services have transformed principle 4, of Best Interests, into: We Know Best Interests, in effect, over-ruling the third principle of the Act, whereby individuals have the right to make their own decisions, whether deemed "unwise" or "eccentric". Mother and son, wanting to be together again at home, should be the accepted norm, as promised by the Health Authority.

The report, by a House of Lords select committee set up to examine how the act is working in practice, concluded that the legislation "is not working at all well".   
"We were very concerned by what we heard about the safeguards", Lord Hardie said.   
"The evidence suggests that tens of thousands of people are being deprived of their liberty without the protection of the law, and without the protection that Parliament intended.   
"Worse still, in some cases the safeguards are being wilfully used to oppress individuals and to force decisions upon them, regardless of what actions may be in their best interests."(3)

* * *

### Brief of the detention of Mrs Ella Lung.

For Friday, 13 December 2019,..... live-in care manager,... (who later left the agency) arranged with district nurses for a profile bed to be delivered, for the return home of Mrs Ella Lung, from ..... care home, [in her home town].(4)

I informed the social worker,.... (subsequently taken off this assignment). She had apologised for misinforming me that a previously approached live-in care agency,..... had to be on the county council approved list. Not the case, if you have sufficient independent means.(5) I gave [the care agent], [the social workers] phone number, but [the latter] blocked [the former] receiving Ellas medication information, on grounds of confidentiality.

[My] MP asked me to convey to [the social worker] that we were willing to pay for a live-in carer. She promised an answer and professed to want Ella home:

"I have been assured that [the MPs] request has been appropriately responded to by the Care and Support Manager.  
There are currently no plans to place Mrs Lung elsewhere as we all would like to get her home however as described there are a number of processes which are over lapping and interlinking hence my suggestion to have a meeting."(6)

The answer to the MP never came.(7) When social services got away with not replying, they forgot their avowed intention to get Ella home.   
The suggested meeting did not prepare for Ellas home-coming. On 1 October 2019, the social worker visited our home, to inform me we were to be put under state guardianship, taking away my general power of attorney. This stealthy usurpation would rob two inoffensive people of our finances and rights as free citizens, reducing us to the status of children. She did not deny this, when I said it. Nothing was presented to me in writing of this intention, to make us slaves of the state, that could be legally challenged.(8)

An eminent civil liberties law firm would not defend me against this back-door totalitarianism. I was left completely alone and helpless against the designs of autocratic officialdom.

In general, social services followed a wrong or unlawful procedure in investigating the safeguarding warning, without due process.   
I was not charged with any offense, that I could defend myself against, nor given the opportunity to do this, before the board of enquiry.  
I had not been informed of my rights, not knowing a hostile investigation was going on. I was not informed of the ambulance womens safeguarding warning, of 11 august 2019, till 2 september, by social worker,..., when mother was moved to .... ward, in a multi-patient room. (I had called for help for my mother, not to be put under a social services reign of terror.)

Meanwhile, a secret police investigation collected hearsay, which is inadmissible evidence, from .... Ward [home town] hospital staff, like informers in a totalitarian state. (For instance, turning a compliment about the ward food against me, and claiming I could not account for my mothers bowel movements!   
Had I known of this gossip against me, I would have asked for the witness of those [initial] ward nurses, who said, at the time, that Mother and son are close.)(9)

3 October 2019, the safeguarding warning for deprivation of liberties was "declined" by [the County Council]. (10)

I did not suspect that the social worker, having apologised once, would exceed her authority a second time against a live-in care agency. But she and her team detained Ella at the care home, on (We Know) Best Interests grounds.(11)   
The profile bed delivery was cancelled, the district nurse,...., was told, according to ..... (?), for safety reasons.

According to the Response to my (14 december 2019) Social Complaint to county council (6 january 2020):   
"Your Mother is not being detained unlawfully at Eagle View care home, she is on a Deprivation of Liberty Safeguard." (12)   
As the safeguarding warning, against myself, had been "declined", it was not a lawful basis for intervention. Yet, the Response speaks accusingly of (unspecified) "allegations" against me. Social services conducted a presumption of guilt witch-hunt, which never ends.

Apart from that unacceptable omission, in the Response, of the "declined" warning, and the innuendo, there were further inaccurate and misleading statements:   
"Mrs Lung was transferred to [another town] hospital where she remained until the safeguarding concern was investigated and concluded."

The [County Council] letter I received, showed that the safeguarding enquiry was concluded by 3 October 2019. Ella my mother was kept at [other town] hospital till 22 November 2019, and even then it took myself to move her. By that time, the norovirus had broken out in .... Ward, and I was desperate to get Mum (with a pneumonia history) out of hospital. My father died from a hospital acquired pneumonia infection. I was having to commute by train to [other town] daily for Mums morale. She wanted me to come: "More than anything in the world."

The dilatory social worker,.... still hadn't moved her from what was supposed to be a rehabilitation ward. She was stalling on ...., the second live-in care agency I approached. Without my approval, she announced her intention of finding a "placement". Despite promising to try to find as near as possible a care home (13), eventually, she lined-up Mum for ...... This is an outlying village, only two stops nearer than [the other town], from [the home town], and not even close to its train station. It was a pending "internal exile", to effectively separate mother and son.(14)(15)   
It was in keeping with the social workers first of October attempt to reduce us to Soviet style "Non-persons".

I was the one who had to move Mum back from [other town] to our home town ....., where I found a vacancy at the other end of town, [in]..... care home.

Social services made much of the fact that I had fallen in with their plans of moving Mum to a care home. It must be remembered, that my weakness stemmed from social services putting me in a position of exceptional weakness.   
My letter of agreement with them (in a journal full of others) was admittedly to "expedite" matters (remove a frail old lady from the danger to her life of winter hospital infections, that killed my father).   
That letter also makes clear that both my mother and myself never wanted her to be put in a care home.

It seemed the only recourse at the time. In ..... ward, [other town], she was a "falls risk", with a nurse constantly at her side, during the day, or looking in, every quarter of an hour, over the night.   
That risk was due to the negligence, or game-plan, of social services scandalously bottling the patient in hospital for months on end (over 100 days), agitating her to always be leaving.   
Ella has ceased to be more a falls risk than any other elderly person.  
And night surveillance may be achieved with the help of bed sensor and baby alarm.

Moreover, I had not seen the soul-destroying ordeal, of captivity in a care home, to which Ella was subjected, and which is hateful to her.

Ironically, the care home is from where I caught the norovirus.(16)   
It served as an introduction to the phlegm coughing virus, going round that winter. This illness kept me from Mum most of January 2020, and its after-effects restricted my visits in February and later.

As you would expect, and as I learned, there are some fine people at the care home. Economics dictates that staff can do not a lot more than look after basic bodily needs, which is job enough. (Mum says she wouldn't like to do their job.)

Inmates of institutions, like animal captives of a zoo, follow aberrant behavior patterns, as Desmond Morris described, in The Human Zoo. These are more or less desperate outlets for the sheer frustration and boredom of imprisonment. (Some human instances are mentioned in my journal.) Just as a zoo tears animals out of their ecology, institutions tear humans out of their social environment or ecology of family, friends and neighbors. This was decried by John MacMurray, 90 years ago (17), and currently by Norman Lamb.(18).  
The Hardie Report reveals tens of thousands of elderly people 'prisoners of care homes'.(19)

From day one at the care home, it was evident that, like other residents, Ella was left to sit in a chair all day. (Visits over the months confirmed this initial impression.) As I departed, her expostulation still stays with me: You are not going to leave me here!

It would have been cruel and cowardly of me not to set about freeing her. I could never have forgiven myself for so betraying my dearly loved mother. My lasting sorrow for Mum is that I have been helpless against social services subjection and obstruction.

I went back to live-in care manager, ...., to facilitate Mums return home, and gave the care home manager, ...., the required four weeks notice, obtaining her signed acknowledgement.(20)

I paid for the four weeks stay. When social services prevented Ellas departure, that was their financial responsibility.(21)  
Ellas deprivation of liberty is like the punishment of a child by school detention, which, however, only lasts maybe an hour. It is not the prospect of life imprisonment, a severest of punishments, which poor Ella believes she faces, knowing she has done nothing to deserve it, and well knowing "the insolence of office."

On 15 January 2020, I was informed of a retrospective deprivation of liberty, against Mrs Ella Lung leaving the care home, at least till 17 April, acknowledging her son wants her home.   
It was printed "DOLS Administrator", the signatory too ashamed or guilty to give their name, or betray their identity with their own handwriting (in cursive script).(22)

An address of grievances before Best Interests meeting was not acknowledged by e-mail or at the subsequent meeting. And never has been since. (26/01/20, 9:46.)(23). Like the Response, they also ignored my journal, at the same time, pretending I could not account for myself, in relation to my mothers condition! (I flatly denied it.)  
This was an insinuation the social worker sprang upon me, long after the enquiry declined the safeguarding warning, as if its verdict had never been, and without informing me to prepare a refutation. This ambush was another symptom of social workers lacking any sense of fair play or a fair trial by due process. They are just playing a war game of attrition, without apology or exhoneration. Social services are apeing the nations adversary politics.

Another instance of this unfairness, at the meeting, was how the social worker sprang on me a huge increase in costs by the ..... live-in care agency, without informing myself, their employer, before-hand. They did not tell me that the sympathetic [manager] had left the agency, when I asked where she was, as the new assessors came to visit Ella, at the care home. The Best Interests meeting did not give me the opportunity to arrange live-in care with another sympathetic professional. And this frustration is currently the situation.  
The care home deputy manager agreed with the social workers that Ella would need an extra watcher at £100 a night. Whereas the care home uses a bed sensor and perhaps a baby alarm to do the job.  
I was given no time to see thru this cost-padding to deny Ella her freedom. (When I told Mum about this after-wards, she suspected that they had done it "deliberately", amidst her general disgust at not being allowed to leave: "I hate this place!" she said, not for the first time.)

The Best Interests meeting, of 6 february, vetoed Mums home-coming. The promised minutes were with-held from me (for two months 20 days, after the intervention of the psychiatric nurse) to be "authorised" (censored) by "the chair," denying transparency.(24) Thus, one or more liberty-deniers gave themselves privileged access, denying to myself the benefit of short-term memory to check contents of the minutes.(25) After so long, this disputant has been denied adequate opportunity to generally agree on what was actually said at the meeting.  
That is why briefings, conducted as soon as possible after the event, is standard practise, which social services have disregarded, in this and many other respects of due process. While memory was fresh, my journal gave a critical account of some contributions to a negative meeting.

On 27 february 2020, the care home was visited by a pair of mental capacity testers. On leaving her, Ella over-heard one say: She knows more than the lot of them put together.

On Friday 6 (dated 2) march, I received a [first County Council] invoice for Ella Lung to be kept in imprisoned misery, by social services, in a care home, enforcing payment by court collection or debt recovery agency.  
The county council says they have a duty to protect public funds. Social services could have done so, by allowing Mum home with a private live-in carer, instead of detaining her at the care home.

The service managers Response expected me to "cooperate" if I were to become Mums financial deputy.  
But the position of financial deputy, with respect to the five principles of the Mental Capacity Act, expects me to pay the most scrupulous attention to my mothers wishes. From the start, she could not have made it plainer, that she does not want to be in the care home, and that she wants to be with me. (Two of Ellas most public protests were on 27 december 2019 and 6 march 2020. My constant winter visits left me too ill to visit in most of january or as regularly afterwards. But I was a sounding board for Ellas dissent continuously, as recorded in my journal.)

### References

(1) Home Free (How the misery makers of social services twice obstructed Mums home-coming with a live-in carer.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/996968

(2) MP Response [pdf]

(3) Patients 'imprisoned' in care homes, report finds. 13 March 2014. BBC News.

(4) Re Equipment [Thunderbird Document: TD]

(5) Re Mrs Ella Lung [TD, 08/10/2019 17:15]

(6) Re Statement attached & [my] MP's request. [TD, 26/09/2019 08:14.]

(7) Re FW MP Response – Lung [TD, 03/10/2019 08:31

(8) Re FW MP Response – Lung [TD, 03/10/2019 10:26

(9) Mother distressed for not seein me. Safeguarding enquiry suspects abuse.

(10) ....CC-DoLS-letter; standard-authorisation-not-granted, enclosed in:   
Bringing Mrs Ella Lungat home with her son. [TD 07/01/2020, 13:41]

(11) Re: Ella Lung [TD]

(12) 111970 Response 06.01.20 [pdf]

(13) Re: Financial Assessment capacity assessment. [TD, 21/10/2019 12:39;  
23/10/2019 08:39 - "...the EMI homes - I will try my best to get one within walking distance of your house."]

(14) Re Bed availability (again) [TD, 30/10/2019 09:13]

(15) Re [other town] Hospital - Closed

[TD, 05/11/2019 15:27]

(16) Refuting [county council] complaint rejection. [rtf].  
Attached to: Bringing Mrs Ella Lungat home with her son. [TD 07/01/2020, 13:41]

(17) Freedom In The Modern World, by John MacMurray. Faber and Faber 1932.

(18) Neglectful nation blamed for forcing elderly into care homes. 2013. Norman Lamb, care minister interview with Daily Telegraph. Accessed from HomeCareDirect. [rtf]

(19) Report reveals tens of thousands of elderly people 'prisoners of care homes'. Steve Doughty for The Daily Mail. UPDATED: 10:11, 13 March 2014.

(20) notice_care_home [jpeg].   
Thus, it was not the care home that cancelled the profile bed, when the Response claimed: "In terms of cancelling the delivery of the profiling bed to your home address, I can confirm that the Local Authority did not cancel this." This statement does not confirm, it merely "asserts." I know of no other source for this assertion than social services themselves, thru the services manager.

(21) Compensation from social services blocking Ella Lung's departure from care home. [TD]

(22) 2020-01-08 DoLS Granted – Consulted Person (2) [pdf].

(23) Best Interests meeting [TD 26/01/2020 09:46].

(24) Re: Minutes of Best Interests Meeting on Mrs Ella Lung.[TD 03.03/2020, 11:40]

(25) Social workers under scrutiny as parents capture sessions on camera _ Society _ Society _ The Guardian.  
Louise Tickle, Wed 17 Jun 2015 07.30 BST. Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 16.09 GMT:

'Minutes of meetings are taken but Johnson believes that parents cannot rely on their view being reflected. "What I've said in the past has been twisted to help the local authority's case. You just cannot win," she says.

Rebecca Carr-Hopkins, an independent social worker, has some sympathy with this view. "I've been to meetings and had the minutes back and thought that bore no relation to the meeting I was in," she concurs.'

* * *

## Dissent from depriving liberty to my mother

#### as recorded in the so-called "minutes" of the Best Interest meeting

on 6 February 2020. Received by anonymous post, as an unspecified DRAFT on Saturday, 25 April 2020. (See Appendix). And identified as the minutes, in accompanying covering letter, sent on 5 june 2020.

Table of Contents.

### Preamble

I was promised "the minutes" of the meeting and reminded social services on 20 February 2020. Only after the promptings of the psychiatric nurse, was I posted an anonymously sent official document, two months and 20 days after the meeting. A later request, for properly specified minutes, was promptly granted by the (replacement) social worker.

It is not what I understand by minutes, which would be a minute record of the proceedings. All the telling detail is omitted. To give just one example. When Ella got a friend at the care home, I asked her if she wanted to stay. It's your choice.   
Ella replied: Home, home, home, home, home, home home -- with you.  
The advocate rejoined: She doesn't know her home.  
That is true (tho only more or less, some of the time) but she still wants to be home with me.

The term, minutes, here is a euphemism for an official version of events. (For convenience, I refer to the document, by their term, as the minutes.)

* * *

## "Best Interest"

### Ella institutionalised.

I want freedom, not to be in a regime.

( _Mrs Ella Lung against being in the care home._ )

The update, by the replacement social worker, stems from a period when she was not present and does not know what actually happened. Prompted by my reminding her of her promise to find an approved live-in care agency, the social worker instructed the town hospital ward to send Ella to a rehabilitation hospital. Another broken promise was that she should not be kept there, for more than a fortnight, before being taken home, as foretold by the corporate director of the health authority, in reply to my Member of Parliament.

In the event, the negligent social worker kept Ella there till 22 November 2019, leaving her over a hundred days in hospitals, driving my poor mother to desperation to leave, and enough to drive anyone up the wall. The norovirus had broken out in her ward. Ella had a pneumonia history, and Dad had died of winter hospital-acquired pneumonia.

The social worker took it upon herself to find a "placement" promising one as near as possible to our house. Eventually, she contrived to line-up the most remote outlying village care home, to split mother and son, indefinitely, as she had also done by keeping Mum much too long in another towns supposed rehabilitation hospital ward. It took this 70 year old, two train journeys and two bus rides a day, to see her.

The social worker had stalled for a second time on my applications to live-in care agencies. To smooth things over, I had to fall in with her plans for a "placement". But instead of allowing her to place my mother irreparably out of my way, I managed to find a care home at the other end of our home town, over-looked on the social workers list of local unavailables, with which I was presented.

Far from being everyones best interest decision, as the minutes claim, that care home was no ones best interest decision. It was far from ideal or a best interest decision. It was the best I could make of a bad job. The social workers did not agree that it was in Ellas best interest to make that move. They were contriving a care home so remote, it amounted to internal exile, for her, from me.

They did not even inaugurate the move to the home town care home. Nor was I in a position to agree such a move in Ellas best interest, as I was at none of their best interest meetings. (I confirmed to the chair-woman that the 6 February 2020 meeting was my first. And recited much of this narrative. This particular account, of mine, is absent from the minutes.)   
Social workers did not agree to the move. They did not even make the move.

I was the one who saw to it that Ella must be discharged from hospital. And it happened like this. The dilatory social worker, who should have done the job six weeks ago, was on holiday in America. Her temporary substitute could not be found for the discharge. Instead, I was made to visit the care home and sign the necessary admission papers. The manager confirmed my question that the care home required four weeks notice to leave.

The social worker had impressed upon me that they thought my wish to bring Mum home (with a live-in carer) would be too hard for me.   
I told this to Mum, newly arrived at the care home, and she replied that I didn't know what hard work is. Looking back on her life, I fully agreed with her. Ellas parting words, that day: You're not going to leave me here!

On reflection, this social worker solicitude, for me, did not make sense. This was the liberty-depriving person whose intended state guardianship would have reduced us to the status of children. My mother loved me. Social services didn't.

Ella arrived on Friday, 22 November 2019. And on the following Monday, I gave the manager the required four weeks notice, to which the manager gave written acknowledgement. And which stay I duly paid for.

Social services blocked my mother from coming home, with the help of a live-in carer, to live with me, as she has virtually all my 70 years.

That is the minutes unsupplied reason why I refused to pay for my mothers detention. By the draft not giving the reasons, it was perhaps part of their characterisation of me as an unreasonably "resistant" person. (I was resistant to their depriving my mother of liberty, the well-spring of life. Life is liberty. To rob of liberty is to rob of life.)

The minutes give a good précis of my description of my mothers pre-hospital condition, when I was initially called-on to speak. It is the first time in six months that I read any recognition that social services knew what I was talking about.

However, they did not repeat my putting Ellas weight loss in the context of her life history. And I called the doctor, the day Ella stopped eating any solid food, because she would only get weaker. But the minutes ignored this, saying she had not received any medical intervention for 4 years. (I did ask Mum but she always turned down doctors visits. Doctors are over-worked, on long hours, and don't have much time for you, anyway. It's a kindness not to call them. A live-in dementia carer might assess the situation.)

The minutes disclosed that Ellas dementia was undiagnosed. If they couldn't explain it, they could hardly expect me to. But the last sentence reference to "safeguarding" glosses over all the persecution and privation that social services have imposed on us, especially Ella.

### Household contention.

I would urge readers of these minutes to read the other side of the story, in my Brief: the section, Best interests meeting, [here] in my book journal, Home Free (How the misery makers of social services twice obstructed Mums home-coming with a live-in carer).

That section even has something constructive to say with regard to the care home managers reference to Ellas "skin integrity".

In Orwellian fashion of "Ignorance is Strength," the (we know) Best Interest meeting ignored my journal, as they ignored my Address of grievances, to the social worker, in anticipation of the meeting. (Also obtainable from the journal [here].)   
That section anticipates many of the negative arguments of the minutes, not least from the occupational therapist.

Instead of recognising home improvements, the OT turned them into contentious issues, behaving like a zealous prosecutor. She avoided acknowledging the comfort to Ella of a mild summers day, in warm-aired central heating, by complaining about the new boiler.

The minutes ignore that I measured the profile bed, which would fit lengthways and sideways, in the dining room, after I removed furniture. The OT had not seen the difference. It wouldn't have made any difference if she had. She just wanted to enforce her intital demand, on visiting, that I remove Ellas comfortable couch bed, sabotaging my arrangements, any way she could.

She ignored the convenience of a ground floor toilet, by complaining about it not being installed, in the pantry, as an ensuite to the kitchen! Instead of ensuite to Ellas sunny south side room.   
There I also installed double glazing in the bay window and its door, because Ella could not put up with the drafts from the old window and door. This last improvement was not mentioned by the meeting. Instead, I had to ask the OT why she was making such an issue of a glass door, I agreed to upgrade weeks ago.

At the meeting, it popped out of her head to accuse me of not letting her see the back. I had explained I locked down, so I didn't have to worry I'd left back door and gate unlocked, when visiting Mum. Before leaving, when she could not get round by the gate, I explained: same reason as the back door. And OT replied: It doesn't matter.

Social services helping! Preparing an all-out case against us, more like: Adversary politics!

### Holding Mum hostage to any short-fall.

The next heading, to which my name is attached, largely assails me on the required funding for Mum to go home with a live-in carer. I have dealt with this question in my Brief. In the light of these minutes, some more comments are perhaps in order.

The minutes estimate of about £2000 a week is at least double the going rate for a typical dementia care assessment like that of Ella.

The claim that Ella only had eight months funding to pay for the live-in carer is based on misinformation. The social workers called at our home, before the meeting. I told them that the previous social worker wanted a financial statement to prove we had more than the about £24,000 threshold to make our own decisions independently of the county council. I told them that we had more than that. But the social workers still used that statement as an estimate of Mums total assets. Hence the false claim that Mum could only finance live-in care for eight months.

The minutes give several estimates up to 3 or more years (which is still a conservative estimate). All my mothers assets are given in my financial deputy application to the court of protection. I did not see the need to disclose such confidential information, or bare ones breast, to social services. Especially as the previous social worker tried to turn us into non-persons, by subjecting my mother and her life earnings to a state guardianship, taking away my general power of attorney.

State confiscation of assets of the elderly infirm, from their family, is poorly publicised, as I said, in my resistance, on the day. (I heard of such robber baronry in an obscure article in The Mail on Sunday.) The meeting minutes said the so-called general power of attorney was no longer valid. Meanwhile, I still paid our bills. (And have since been appointed financial deputy.)

It is evident that social services wanted to know more about our finances, but it is not evident that this would have helped Mum in any way. Perhaps quite the contrary. The entire attitude of the meeting shows no intention of freeing Ella. These minutes merely anticipate a case for not freeing Ella.

The minutes say I do not have lasting power of attorney, without which I don't have the power to take Mum home, much needed for her health and happiness.

Our town hospital discharge assessors included an older middle-aged woman (thin with glasses and perhaps fair or fading curly hair – the hospital knew who I meant). She said people usually go for the general power, to look after finances, rather than the lasting power, to look after health. Don't worry about it. It shouldn't matter.

Our previous social worker said that the woman was wrong to say that. Even, as she herself later admitted, she herself was wrong to block my first-sought live-in care agency, because it was not on the county council approved list. (That shouldn't matter because we had independent means.)

I remember that the power of attorney form gave an either-or option. I was used to reasonable kind people, like this older woman, who didn't take advantage of legal loop-holes. (And "general" should mean general, without interlopers.) Had my parents and I known that both options were available and that we now live under a bureaucracy of rules mongers, we would have ensured both general and lasting power of attorney. Who would parents generally prefer to decide for them: their family or the state?

On the visit of the (replacement) social worker and OT, I told them that there were also my savings, for another year or so of live-in care for Mum. This was not mentioned in the minutes.

The minutes quote my saying they were breaking her spirit. Mum sometimes gets so depressed, by not being allowed to leave care home, that I fear and grieve for her, not solely on account of the subsequent mortal danger to her of the coronavirus infection in care homes, but also because of social services continued wilful detention of Ella at the care home.

Mum is my only family responsibility, yet social services have prevented my giving Ella the loving care, she wishes for.

I am prepared to give up all my savings, as well as my mothers legacy, so she can have her freedom till she is a hundred or more, God willing. But no, social services want to hijack our lifes earnings on a punishing life-shortening imprisonment of the helpless innocent that is my mother.

Social services are holding Ella hostage to a possibility of funds eventually running out. To make this twice as likely, they colluded with the care agency to bump up the live-in care fees to about £2000 per week, at least double the going rate for a dementia patient (About £900-£1000 per week.) I hired the care agency, they were answerable to me, not necessarily to social services, depriving me of the right, at the meeting, to have prepared an independent care plan.

Ella would jump at the chance of years of being Home Free, over the barrier of hypothetical risks contrived by social services. Life is a risk. It so happened that social services put Ellas life in mortal danger by detaining her in the care home. They were negligent in detaining her indefinitely in winter hospital at risk of dying from a hospital-acquired infection, as my father died.

When I subsequently asked, via the psychiatric nurse, for Ella to be released on compassionate grounds, their pumped-up bill was their excuse. And not Ellas safety, in a care home during the coronavirus crisis. Safety indeed is not an issue in the minutes. They express "concern" that I do not understand my mothers "needs" (these strangers knowing better than a sons life-time experience, and who have left a free spirit institutionally imprisoned for life). But they do not demonstrate their primacy, only exert their power, and fob us off with ambiguous arguments. And that is what it is all about: holding onto their power and all the balony that goes to bolster it.

As with the self-contradiction, Mum, back in her own home, would be too isolated and too crowded, social services cannot have it both ways: I cannot look after Mum (with the help of expert live-in care) but I will look after Mum so well that she will out-live the funding.

Another self-contradiction, mentioned in the meeting, rather than the minutes, was both that Ella at home would lack freedom (discussed in my Brief) and lack its opposite, a routine. The minutes say: " home could potentially be more restrictive than being in a care home..." -- those creepy places, that never let you out, since some evil genius had code-locked doors fitted. This is a piece of Orwellian doublethink: Freedom is slavery. --   
Hypocrits!

### Unfamiliar professionals.

My Brief discussed the negative contribution of the advocate. There is more of the same in the minutes section in her name:

"... but Ella knows that she knows [first name of the advocate]"...

This redundant statement just means that Ella (to the credit of Ella, not the advocate) remembers the advocate. Most probably not by her first name. That is an unwarranted implication, making out Ella knows the advocate better than she does. She goes on to make out that Ella knows her son, less than she does.

When asked did Ella want to be with her son, the advocate replied: Yes. In fact, Ella gave me an eloquent testimonial, a eulogy that I meant the world to her, Afterwards, she reminded me of how much she had praised me, so they would be sure to know what she wanted. But it was water off a ducks back to the advocate. I think that was perhaps the cruellest thing of all, how Ellas supposed Advocate brushed-off Ella, in expressing her heart-felt love of me. The advocate is biased. Instead she said:

"Ella had not recognised Richard and believed him to be her brother."

When Ella was moved into the unfamiliar surroundings of hospital, she slipped into calling me her nephew. I asked afterwards: Why did you call me your nephew?   
With a gentle sigh, she replied: "I don't know what I'm saying."

That Ella call me her brother, or other relation, as she does, does not imply that I was not recognised. (My Brief suggests other instances of a logically challenged advocate.)

The advocates quoted statement that she has 'improved "by leaps and bounds"' descends to propaganda. The only leaps and bounds were the advocates jumping to conclusions. She was advocate for the care home, not my mother. Like the OT, she did her worst for us.   
After the meeting, I told them all: I expected no better from you. You are strangers, who know nothing about us, and have too much power.

My institutionalised mother has generally given me the most heart-warming responses. Social services demean both my mother and myself by their superficial dismissal of the closeness of our relationship.   
Strangers see a mentally crippled old lady, as typically described by the advocate. She "was calling out for her parents at the end of the visit." (Possibly, to end the visit!)

Of Ellas story, the best interest team only offer a few scraps, which are a garbled account of a garbled account from my unfortunate mother.   
The so-called professionals grievously under-estimate the fact that family, not themselves, are the prime source of knowledge about the dementia sufferer.   
The supreme irony of their professional presumption is that it leaves them the confused misinterpretors of a confused human being, saying more about themselves than about Ella.

Ella is not alone in her forgetfulness. The minutes constitute a remarkable case of selective amnesia, reminiscent of the modern classic, Willful Blindness, by Margaret Heffernan.

I see my 70 years with Mum, before me. I could have done so much more for her, home free, being with her whenever she wanted me.

### No freedom, no truth.

If you take away someones freedom, you also take away the truth.

At the meeting, the care home manager objected to my telling Ella that they wouldn't let her leave. I replied that social services have prevented my mother from leaving. That's the truth.

The manager had nothing to say in response. And of course, that exchange is absent from the so-called minutes.

Exerting force on a person is to cheat or defraud them of their liberty. Pretending that they have not been so defrauded, or robbed of their freedom, is a further deprivation of knowledge and understanding.

That is the alternative we face: Know the truth and it will make you free -- or -- the Realpolitik of force and fraud: Hide the truth and it will make you slaves.

The final two headings, attributed to the deputy manager and the social worker, are a ramble of unsubstantiated assertions.

The deputy care manager says Ella definitely needs two carers. My arrangement with the live-in care manager was that I agreed to be trained by the live-in carer as her assistant: two carers. She wanted to make a list of activities for the live-in carer to do, like preparing meals, cleaning and house-keeping. The live-in carer is not so much tried by activity as inactivity.   
Most of the time, I would be keeping Ella company, as she wants. Sometimes, the live-in carer would need to be called for. She would be welcome to join us, of course, if she wanted to. And I would have to be away for various reasons and duties.

A family life is not a question of "advantages", as the minuters would have it. Family, not the state, is the foundation of society. A foundation is not an advantage to a house, it is a necessity - a foundation. A house built on sand cannot stand. No more can the shifting sands of social service assertions.

The chair-woman first suggested Ella would be "potentially isolated" at home. I said, before I was interrupted, that I discussed her with three elderly lady neighbors, and we had good neighbors.

Then the meeting contrarily objected to expense-paying holiday lodgers, as "very distressing for Ella". That from the Deprivation of Liberty hypocrits! I generally discuss things with Ella, not lay down iniquitous laws.

I also pointed out the contradiction of complaints that Ella would be too lonely or too crowded. Social services were so intent on depriving Mums liberty, that they would trip over themselves to do so.

Even so, there is a book by David Reisman, called The Lonely Crowd. Ella has complained to me that the care home is full of strangers, and she has no-one to talk to. (Mother Teresa said that when they visited homes for the elderly, all eyes went towards the door.) When the lounge empties or she is in the vacant hall, she is also lonely. In both cases, she complained, personally to me, she has no-one to talk to.

That situation is why Ella was right, and social services were doubly wrong, when the minutes say: "Ella thinks of the care home as a hotel and seems happy and settled there."   
It is a hotel (disability friendly) and not truly a home, as alleged.

Any apparent happiness of Ella is due to her ingrained politeness, even in adversity, and she has known some hard times. She is of the generation that puts a brave face on things. My company is a release for her true feelings. When I asked her about this contrast, she said, with the ghost of a smile: I can say anything to you.

Getting on for a couple of months, Ella was in virtual solitary confinement, until one, then two residents arrived, with the capacity to converse. This was an improvement but no substitute for family.

The manager and deputy manager of the care home, at the meeting, were in a conflict of interest. They were bound to laud their own office.

The sequence of events is more prosaic. Tho she has lock-knee, Ella could walk, with the occasional stumble, before she went into hospital. She continued to be off her food, which weakened her. She was having falls, so the hospital kept her from trying to walk. That deprived her of the necessary exercise to keep walking. Hospitals are busy looking after sick people. Ellas body eventually re-stabilised to her youthful slimness. And the care staff were able to get her walking again, with the help of a frame. We have one at home but she didn't need it then.

They claim to have fed her up. Ella complains to me about the food. No doubt economics dictates that it is so basic. (Like Mum, I couldn't have eaten their stodgy macaroni.) As discussed in my journal, the care home mass feeds the residents, without taking into account Ellas chronic constipation. The minutes report that they got her "off her purée diet". But, shortly after the meeting, they landed her in hospital with much loss of blood, for an emergency prolapse operation.   
At home, I bought a heavy duty blender (JR Ultra) for both of us, because Ella could only eat soft food. A crowd of young strangers don't know what it's like to be old, let alone know anything of my mother. They have no cause for self-congratulation.

By 22 May 2020, Ella caught a water infection, going round (the care home), and had to be put on a five day course of anti-biotics. She was hallucinating over worms or snakes, at the bottom of the bed. She was inconsolable and sobbing, and too upset, to dare go to bed and sleep for their presence.

I am not criticising the staff of the care home. They do what they can and I like them. Privately, released from group-think, as a human being, the manager admitted to me that she would rather have her own mother at home. I felt compelled to remind her of this at the meeting.   
Likewise, the deputy manager privately admitted to me, afterwards, that she wasn't against my mother going home.

She shouldn't be. She didn't mention (on 27 December 2019, logged in [this] journal as just one example) that Ella, in bitter tears, threatened to do away with herself. The deputy manager soothingly said: You won't.

At the same time, Ella exonerated me, as the best son in all the world.

Such a disclosure would have helped me, at the meeting. The gloss, amounting to a cruel falsehood, from the minutes, said "No disadvantages were identified, other than occasional distress and some requests to leave." In other words, Ella is civilised and self-possessed, so she can be safely ignored. (If she wasn't, they would say she was mad, and exert tighter control than ever.)   
All this falsification by the Best Interest meeting to justify their control and seizure of our assets to pay for Mums miserable incarceration.

Mental disability is a physically based disability. The invalid had to campaign to be regarded as valid. They used to be segregated, as if they were a liability, and had to fight for their rights to be part of the wider community. That condescension seems to be the attitude of these reactionary "professionals", to my mother, supervisors, to impose upon you, and tell you what to do. They should get a real job, so far as disrupting our lives is concerned.

The mentally disabled deserve better than that pretty outrageous dismissal of "disadvantages" (which are an abuse of human rights). Civilised cultures, from Confucius to Christ, believe: Do as you would be done by. How would the liberty deprivers like their "occasional distress and some requests to leave" being patronisingly ignored? Distress generally is occasional. Causing distress is none the less to be deplored and avoided by compassionate people.

These officials are not the heirs of Perikles, who sowed the seeds of liberal democracy, in the midst of slavery (human and animal). Their exemplar is the patriarchal socialism of Bismarck. His diplomacy of force and fraud finds its counterpart in deprivation of liberty.

They have adopted the over-seers ideology of the workers state. They call themselves social workers. They are-anti-social, their work being climbing on peoples backs. Social worker is an almost exact translation of Soviet socialism or workers socialism. But fascism or communism, they have in common an officialdom of little dictators over the people, being fostered in Britain thru arbitrary administrative law.  
Milovan Djilas wrote of The New Class. Michael Young satirised The Rise Of The Meritocracy. He objected to Tony Blair (bureaucratiser) using his term as an advocate of this new form of aristocracy, based on professional qualifications.

The meeting, believing what it wants to believe, is more pleasant than facing the fact that a slave state, in the making (as Winston Churchll warned about, in an ever-since disdained 1945 broadcast) has since converted care homes into prisons of helpless innocents. This unintended consequence was to the dismay of the Hardie report.

The deputy manager said that Ella no longer kept going to the door. She jumped to the conclusion that Ella no longer wanted to leave. Ella likely had learned she could not get out, by the code-locked door.   
For that matter, these strangers minutes, don't see thru her mental handicaps to her intelligence of old.

The minutes state: "All professionals agree that Ella has improved remarkably whilst at [care home]". Ella disagreed!  
On friday, 6 march 2020, Ella determined to leave with me. Getting up on her walking frame, she elbowed her way thru the security door. To move her back into the care home hall, staff had to put a wheel-chair under her, while she lay down in passive resistance, grabbing my rucksack and then grabbing my hand.

County council credit control demanded I pay for Ellas imprisonment, which not even criminals have to do. My e-mail response included this event. The following monday, there was a county council entry in the care home reception book. With thousands of pounds of confiscation at stake, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they checked on my story. At any rate, they didn't deny it.

The minutes said Ella "does not express a desire to be with him when he is not present." In other words, Ella has expressed a desire to be with me. Naturally, she tells the person she wants to be with, rather than people she doesn't want to be with.   
At the meeting, I was confronted, by the chair-woman, with supposed evidence, which I qualified was just inference.

On 26 April 2020, care home staff answering the phone told me: She was asking after you yesterday, Richard. She was upset people were not picking her up. She is more settled now.

I cite this, because I'm trying to stick to evidence. Actually, this has been Ellas theme, on my visits, from start to finish, heart-breakingly so, recorded in my journal (and sequel journals of phone conversations) but glossed over, by social services.

### Wilful blindness

"No disadvantages were identified, other than occasional distress and some requests to leave." This gloss sums-up the Best Interest meetings "wilful blindness", which a search engine defined as:

"Willful blindness (sometimes called ignorance of law, willful ignorance or contrived ignorance or Nelsonian knowledge) is a term used in law to describe a situation in which a person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally keeping himself or herself unaware of facts that would render him or her liable or implicated."

My above comments mentioned several omissions, of my input, to the meeting, which refuted its case. The basic crime is a pretentious tyranny against love and liberty. Family love is denied and deprived in favor of a hypocritical captivity. With scarcely a crocodile tear, "family life" is jettisoned in a sentence. Love is not a luxury. Liberty is indivisible.

### Appendix

Following the prompting of the psychiatric nurse, for the minutes, I received, on 25 april 2020, an anonymous undated post of a DRAFT. There was no reference number or date, either in a covering letter, which was absent, or on the document itself. The document was a "DRAFT" without even an indication of draft one or two or three...

However, the replacement social worker promptly agreed to have supplied a specified minutes (no longer termed DRAFT) with covering letter naming a sender and date (5 june 2020).

The description DRAFT would be a license for the official story to be changed without notice, to spring any surprise accusation, or excuse, on myself, the dissenter, without giving me any chance to prepare a refutation. This is moving the goal-posts. This is taking a liberty to deprive liberty to my mother.

Social services presented themselves as a moving target. The april posting was part document and part Unidentified Flying Object.

At the meeting, the social worker did spring an insinuation on me. I admonished this lack of scruple, in early criticisms (above), while the meeting was still fresh in my mind.

I conformed to standard practise of holding a briefing as soon as possible after an event, to ensure the most accuracy, by taking advantage of short-term memory.

A DRAFT, tho leaving out their insinuation, might return it, or introduce some new trap, in a future draft, not properly distinguished from the original one, and presented in some dispute with my continued attempts to free my mother to come home.

* * *

### To Deprivation of Liberties Supervisor

Table of Contents.

3 July 2020. 16:51.

I am the son, Richard, of Mrs Ella Lung, who has been deprived of her liberty. The previous deprivation order acknowledged that I wished to bring my mother to her home. This order does not. It does not even give the name of the social worker, who phoned me, and to whom I poured my heart out, about the injustices of the Best Interest meeting, of 6 February 2020. These complaints, over the phone, were essentially the section in my journal: Home Free (How the misery makers of social services twice obstructed Mums home-coming with a live-in carer.)

We lived together, my 70 years (apart from college). A live-in care manager arranged with the district nurses to provide a profile bed, cancelled, in December 2019, by a previous social worker,..., who was then taken off the case.

In September,..., corporate director of the health authority, told [my] MP, that the intention was for Mrs Lung to come home, after a safeguarding enquiry for deprivation of liberties. This was "declined" [by county council] on 3 October 2019. But the social worker kept Ella another six weeks, in what was supposed to be a rehabilitation ward, in [other town] hospital. Ella should have been home in a fortnight.

Ella was kept in hospitals for over a hundred days, which I witnessed, on visits, was extremely stressful for her, a physically frail and mentally poorly old lady.

[The social worker] stalled on my new live-in care agency contact, and was only finding care home placements. Despite promising to find the most convenient, she contrived to line-up the most inconvenient: [a village], only a couple of train stops short of [another town], and not even close to the railway station.

Winter was coming on. In November, the norovirus broke out in her ward,.... My mother has a history of pneumonia. My father died of hospital-acquired pneumonia.

I got Ella into [a care] home, which at least was in the same town. On my visits, I caught the norovirus. On top of that, the phlegm coughing virus kept me from seeing Ella, most of January.

According to a funeral director, every single care home in [town] has the coronavirus. Ellas life has been put in mortal danger, by social services, when she could have been living relatively safely and much much more happily, with her son at home, as she always has done.

On 27 December 2019, Ella, sobbing at her imprisonment, told the deputy manager, that she would do away with herself.   
Only to be soothingly told: "You won't."   
Ella also exonerated me as the best son in all the world.

The best interests meeting dismissed Ellas wishes as "occasional distress", that she was getting over.

On 6 March 2020, Ella's chronic discontent with her captivity, broke out in a determination to leave with me. She got up on her walking frame, elbowing her way thru the security door, grabbing hold of my rucksack. The staff surrounded her, in the foyer, and she laid down in passive resistance, till they got a wheelchair under her, when she grabbed hold of my hand, as staff wheeled her back into the innards of the care home.

I included this incident, in my reply to [county council] credit control, determined to confiscate Ella's life savings to pay for her life imprisonment. (An act worthy of protection racket crime lords. Even convicted criminals don't have to pay for their involuntary board.) The following Monday, someone from [county council] booked into the care home, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they checked on the truth of my story.

I told this to the unknown phoning social worker, placing another deprivation of liberty order. I said to her that you have given Ella a phone call. I gave her 30,000 words (in my sequel journal, of her phone conversations [Talking To A Cat In The Moonlight]). The Best Interest meeting gave her zero words, not even allowing her to attend the meeting that was supposed to be in her interest.:

[An official] has been appointed ombudsman investigator of my complaint. But it is being archived to relieve the present pressure of work on [county council].

It is just as the Hardie report said: the Mental Capacity Act is not being implemented. The most important thing, the love of mother and son, for each other, which we all have, has been disregarded. That captivity is hateful to Ella, as it is to all of us, has also been ignored.

Yours sincerely,...

* * *

#### To Social Work England:

7 july.

Carl Gustav Jung once found an associate angry with someone. He reasoned with her. Even if he is nine-tenths wrong and you are only one-tenth wrong, there is nothing you can do about the nine-tenths, but there is something you can do about the one-tenth. I thought about that listening to Dominic Raab on the Magnitsky law. I wholly appreciate its sentiments. But, from my experience of the imprisonment of my mother in a care home, Britain has a gulag for the elderly. Six years after the Hardie report, I testify that nothing has changed from its findings, at least how they affected my mother and myself. Liberty is indivisible. I grieve for her every day.

With reference to your organisation, my complaint is a positive one: I only wish to have Mum back home, with help of a suitable live-in carer. I can forego recriminations about the wilfully blind and heartless way we have been treated by social services. Tho, I've had to tell the things that have happened to Mum and myself, to make my nearly year-long complaint comprehensible.

I enclose my latest complaint against the DolS [see previous post], and its acknowledgment.

Yours sincerely,...

* * *

#### To psychiatric nurse.

8 july.

Good wishes. I have repeatedly given you evidence that Ella dearly wishes to be home with her son, who lived with her all the years of his life. Instead, you have interposed the visit of a complete stranger, yourself. As to the care home staff, personally I like them, and appreciate their hard working conditions. Ella is a good person but she does not want to stay there - as she has made painfully aware to me, many times.

It is the legal requirement of the authorities to respect Ellas wishes. From my now long experience, I can confirm, with regard to my mother and myself, that the Hardie report is fulliy justified in its conclusion that the Mental Capacity Act, meant to liberate, is not being implemented. I have explained why this was the case with the Best Interests meeting. Notoriously Family-splitting Social services are the problem.

The GP is legendary for being over-whelmed by patients, even before the pandemic. The GP has not the time to be a representative, that I can seek the help from, that you have been unwilling or unable to address. This is the general problem with the authorities, remote top-heavy and unaccountable.

Yours sincerely,

* * *

### Please free Mrs Ella Lung to come home with her son.

Table of Contents.

Monday, 27 July.

Dear ... credit control; Councillor ...; ... MP; DolS supervisor ...; Ombudsman, ....

I received your 20 July invoice, with its "failure to pay" notice, for a debt which social services incurred, by detaining, in mid-december 2019, my mother in a care home. In reply to my complaint, "pre-empting the ombudsman", [an official] confirmed the credit control position that you would seize my mothers assets, even tho an investigator, ..., has been appointed to my case,....

To take total control of all three branches of government, administration, executive, and judiciary, makes one judge, jury and executioner! It is totalitarianism, like Imperialism or Military Communism.

I must now explain my position, lest there be any mistake that I'm not taking you seriously.

On 1 october 2019 visit, a social worker (...) tried to put us under state guardianship, confiscating my mothers life earnings and taking away my general power of attorney, reducing us to the status of children.

I have abided by the law of the land, as a free citizen. My mother and I have 166 years, one and two thirds centuries, of inoffensive behavior between us. Yet social services could not leave us in peace.

I gave the care home a required 4 weeks notice, and paid for it. I hired live-in care manager,... to have Mum, Mrs Ella Lung, brought home.

The social worker had already apologised for wrongly denying access of the live-in care agency,...., because it wasn't on the (county council) approved list. (That shouldn't matter, if you have independent means.) Yet, unexpectedly, social services again detained my mother, against her will and mine, regardless of my contract and written acknowledgment of my notice to the care home manager.

We are free citizens, we are not under martial law, in a state of war, requiring unquestioning obedience to the authorities. In Response to my 14 December 2019 Social Complaint, the services manager said that Mrs Lung was not unlawfully detained; that she was under a deprivation of liberties safeguard. She stigmatised me, over a safeguard warning, which her Response failed to mention had been "declined," on 3 october 2019. I was never charged with any offense, nor told for three weeks of a safeguarding warning, with a secret police investigation, using hospital staff as informers against me.

Subsequently, retrospective deprivations of liberty have been issued against my mother: one DolS scourge was broken, so they picked up another. This confirms the Hardie reports special concern that safeguarding warnings are being used to oppress people.

Mrs Lung, my mother has been institutionalised nearly a year, when it was the avowed intention of ..., corporate director of the Health Authority, replying to ... MP, that Mrs Lung would be returned home, under suitable conditions, when the enquiry was over.

Mr ...[MP] offered to endorse our wishes to the Ombudsman but his office was over-whelmed by the needs of constituents, distressed by the coronavirus crisis.

The Hardie report also said that the Mental Capacity Act is not being implemented. The law requires scrupulous attention to my mothers wishes. In my reply to credit controls first invoice, I could hardly have made that situation plainer. A sobbing Ella said her imprisoned life wasn't worth living, and threatened to do away with herself, whilst exonerating me, as the best son in all the world. (27 December 2019). She was brushed-off by the deputy manager with the soothing words: You won't.

On 6 March 2020, in her avowed determination to come home with me, Ella elbowed her way thru the security door and lay down in passive resistance, in the foyer, grabbing hold of my hand, before the staff wheeled her back into the innards of the care home. Before 6 February 2020, Best Interests meeting, was held, Ella made, to the advocate, an eloquent declaration of love for her son. Mum drew my attention to her praise of me, afterwards. At the meeting Ella was not allowed to attend, in another brush-off of my dear mother, the minimalist advocate reported this, with one word: Yes. (Damning with faint praise. Not even that is mentioned in the minutes.) That, and much else, is in my first journal, Home Free (How the misery makers of social services twice obstructed Mums home-coming with a live-in carer).

When an unknown social worker phoned me, to rubber-stamp another DolS, on Ella, I told her, that you have given her a phone call. I gave her 30,000 words. This was my second journal: Talking To A Cat In The Moonlight (poorly mind lovely mother). The Best Interest meeting gave her zero words.

The attending care home manager and deputy were in a conflict of interest. The meeting was a team effort to laud the care home and denegate our home. I answered it, promptly, in Home Free. With a further up-date [since made] of that journal, I could even provide a detailed answer to the minutes. But it is Ellas own words, in my subsequent journals that most immediately tell her heart-breaking situation. Before reading very far, anyone should soon appreciate the monotony and misery of her imprisoned existence.

I have now completed a third journal: Short-Wave Memory Mum (life imprisoned on her life savings). A selection of my mothers grievances is published in the further title: Impaired Imprisoned Innocent (speak thy grief).

If you seize my mothers assets, to pay for her imprisonment, that would be worse than treating her like a criminal. It would make slavery of her lifes work. If there is a court application, I will have to defend my mother against unscrupulous pursuit of financial interests, at my mothers expense.

There are no health care solicitors in the Scarborough district; no independent informed person I could speak to, personally. For months, I approached far-away city solicitors unwilling to go the distance. [One solicitors firm] were too far away to help but told me that someone, deprived of liberties by social services, was entitled to legal aid.

Recently [a solicitors] approached the (couny council) law officer, telling that I had plenty of evidence that my mother wanted to be home with me. Twice, the barrister was refused even an answer, depriving us of our right to legal representation against this "wicked" (as my mother called it) imprisonment of her.

That is a government machine, regardless of the inhumanity (recorded in my journals) of what you are doing to Ella, my mother, who only wants to be back to the home, she worked to earn, with her son and life-long companion. We have a right to family life. So, please observe it.

Norman Lamb said we are a nation neglectful of the elderly, who should not be separated from their communities. I have been forced from caring for my mother. I am desperately worried for her frail and poorly state.

On a practical footnote:

Ellas home now has the warm air central heating, this pneumonia-history patient needs. A new bay window frees her of the drafts that prevented her live on the sunny side of the house. I measured the care home profile bed, which has a bed sensor, and would fit lengthways or sideways. The south room now has an ensuite toilet and closet with extractor fan. Then live-in care manager, ... confirmed that the living room is acceptable for a live-in carer. When she was manager, she originally arranged that I would train as assistant.

Other measures are being taken. We could have regular visits from district nurses, which my poorly late father had.

The Office of Public Guardian could confirm that my mother has the funds for substantial live-in care. I would draw on my own savings, if necessary, to keep my mother free, as I don't have other family responsibilities.

Finally, regular visits to the care home have become impractical. I cannot use the bus any more. Visits would be only occasional, having to rely on other people, from the wider community, with its further risks of infection. Ella would be safer at home, where we can always be together, which is all-important to us.

Yours sincerely,...

* * *

### "the bigger picture"

Table of Contents.

Time passes and all our sorrows turn to dust. I do not know the finish of this story. The other town is two bus rides and a taxi away from its hospital. The MP found that out for me. However, there was some mistake there, I did not find out till later. So I [at first] arranged a taxi service, expensive, of course, but we only have one mother.

[In actual fact, it would take three buses there and three back, or six buses a day, with all the times, there and back, to be co-ordinated, as best as possible, something I might conceivably have attempted in middle age, but not in my old age.]

After my mother was moved away, I was told, from social services, that it was very personal for me but they were looking at "the bigger picture".

Well, I have already given my opinion on that. (In the Soviet Union, they called it "the greater good." I think there is an Alexander Solzhenitsyn story about it.)

Now I am going to look at "the bigger picture," as I see it.

The political Left have been criticised for making the National Health Service too top-heavy with levels of management. My criticism is that the state health-care is really two conflicting movements, one of scientific medicine and effective, the other bureaucratic and ineffective.

Of course, this is a broad generalisation. The doctors and nurses working "at the coal-face" do make mistakes, sometimes horrendous ones, and have been known to make matters worse, with cover-ups. (Namely, over the contamination of blood transfusions.) Very unscientific! Something they would do well to remember before jumping to conclusions and condemning some poor old unskilled layman. They might forego an ego trip in wrath and righteous indignation, if they knew how much torment it would inflict on the isolated person they are supposed to be "safeguarding."

My mother fell out of bed, in my care (onto a soft carpet). By the first week in october, she fell out of bed, or otherwise, at least four times (onto a hard floor), under NHS care. They have an army of staff to keep an eye on her, tho, it is fair to say, other patients, as well.

And it would not do to demonise the clerical staff, especially as they have to work on prescribed lines.

However, I'm getting at the contradiction between the scientific approach, which seeks understanding, on the basis of an unbiased search for evidence, and some politicians judgmental approach to administrative law, which seeks to condemn, and then fabricate the evidence for their condemnation, to put a pseudo-scientific gloss on their arbitrary proceedings. The condemners pretend to be part of the same NHS creature as the understanders, but they are not. They are in a direct conflict, that contravenes the basic principles of scientific method.

For instance, a first rule of understanding is not to presume what one is supposed to be trying to prove.

In my case, the hospital did not understand the situation they encountered, when I called them to my mothers home. The very fact, that they did not understand, should have warned them against presuming anything, let alone that it may have been my fault. Traditional English law says everyone is innocent until proved guilty. Instead, when they eventually openly admitted it, they put me under the disgraceful slur of being a suspected abuser. It was a sort of creeping character assassination.

A second rule of scientific understanding is that one should make unambiguous tests, which are capable of being disproved. Otherwise, one can believe anything one likes, without actually learning anything. In the hands of authority, that course of action is a prescription for tyranny and break-down of society.

The old English law recognises this threat to personal freedom, deeming that all suspects be charged with a specific offence, that can be defended against. In other words, it is the elementary rule, that a scientific hypothesis must be one that is capable of disproof.

The advent of scientific evidence in English courts ruled that it must be relevant: Not the kind of indiscriminate pickings, towards an indiscriminate stigma of suspected abuse, that some official privately harvested from people, who had been in conversation with me, weeks before, when I did not realise that I was under serious formal investigation. If you could call such a joke of an investigation serious.

The price of liberty is perpetual vigilance.   
In recent decades, for allegedly good motives, it has given way to a presumption-of-guilt persecution mania. A reign of terror is itself a prejudice that compounds the social prejudices, it is supposed to curb. All things considered, I don't think this day and age had a better standard of good manners than previous ones. Perhaps quite the reverse. This age may deserve to be remembered as when they snuffed out the harmlessly funny Benny Hill and over-looked Sir Jimmy Savile.

A good many famous people have had their innocent lives made hell, and who knows how many helpless undistinguished folk have endured, or failed to endure, the same fate.

If you unbalance the equal scales of justice, or equality before the law, and make special provision for some group over others, or, if the law is no longer a level playing field, then there are bound to be some who take unscrupulous advantage of that unfair condition: the law will be abused.

Inequality is also favored by vesting public officials with powers over the man in the street, in their "best interests." I have encountered social workers, who adhere to this doctrine, as might devotees to a catechism of dogmas. It means: We know best (interests).

It is an unshakeable, unarguable feeling of moral superiority buttressed by legal power, that they think gives them the right to take over other peoples lives.

CS Lewis said he was a democrat, because no-one is good enough to be another mans master.

There is a famous poem, to the effect: When they came for a certain tribe, I did nothing, because I was not of them. When they came for another group, I did nothing, because I was not of them. And so it goes on, until: then they came for me.

The turning point in the witchhunt may have been the persecution of Cliff Richard and Tony Blackburn. I did raise my mouse voice against that (in the Guardian, Comment Is Free).

However, all my adult life, I have sought to show that our representative government is very far from being either democratic or scientific. The two go together. If one falls, the other falls. I believe this malaise has spread from Parliament into sectors of society, as by way of arbitrary administrative law, exemplified here. These law-makers and law administrators seem to have in common an inclination to monopoly or to cut out the competition. (On Friday the 13th September, our MP asked me to confirm to HDA, that I was willing to pay -- exorbitant tho it is -- for Mums live-in private health-care, at home, which HDA had blocked. I got onto it the same day but I still hadn't an answer by the end of the month [and counting]. At the time I said, I wouldn't be surprised if the MP got the brush off.)

He didn't even get that. He didn't receive an answer at all.   
On 3 october, the MPs office sent an email not knowing of an answer.   
Tho, the social worker, on 26 september, was "assured" that the answer to the MPs request had been sent by "the Care and Support Manager".

As for the politicians monopolies, they cling to their single-member constituencies, or votes that are only counted for parties. Those counts are not for all social groups, which is possible via personal representation. Many of my books are on unfair and unfree voting methods, and their remedy.

* * *

### Private health-care.

Table of Contents.

I am not a privatiser. I have written against out-sourcing the cleaning of hospitals to private firms. I have also supported Paul Harrison (The Third World Tomorrow) in not exporting impossibly expensive health care provision to the developing world. The ideal is the barefoot doctor, walking from village to village, trained in the basic medical skills that can deal with the common health problems.

Likewise the over-developed world, as Paul Harrison calls it, needs to provide a general public education in simple but widely effective medical skills. This was an education which I never received, rendering me largely ineffective, as a carer. I don't know whether the present education system could do with it, but I suspect...

The fact that the national health service doesn't provide, for a live-in carer, helps explain why the private provision is so uncompetitive. People should still have the right to avail themselves of it, at least until the NHS provides a competitive alternative of the same service. The state should not have the right to deny people the choice of private health-care, if they can afford it, from savings and extra earnings. To say it is an unacceptable privilege is an ignorant presumption. If I choose to save my money, and earn extra income, it's nobody elses business how I should spend it.

For instance, in my case, I am a chronic teetotaller. Even in youth, when introduced to alcohol, I was never a regular drinker, and have never smoked cigarettes or taken any kind of recreational drugs. I have never owned a car, never flown in a plane or been on a cruise, or been abroad, or even been on holiday. I have often been embarrassed for identification purposes, by not having a driving licence or a passport. I have never married or had a family. Except for the last sentence, my mothers case is not much different.

So I think I deserve a little indulgence in personal freedom, without anyone, the state health system included, telling me otherwise.

* * *

### Helping.

Table of Contents.

Assessments comments seemed to try to foster the general impression of someone who wasn't pulling their weight, hence needing the guidance of the paternal state.

We live in an insulation-ignorant 1930s house, with solid walls, unable to be foam filled; with raised floor-boards, over an earth base, with drafts, thru the cracks, straight from the Arctic Circle. All the windows had to be uPVC double glazed, except the one where I built the conservatory, and that will be done after an unavoidable delay; an accident in the joinery firm. I triple glazed windows, in three cases with the original early model of double glazing.

The loft was the one place, where I started from a good base, as it had floor-boards and plank panelling of the rafters and on the side. Anyway I got the glass wool laid, all over, despite these obstacles, and put in a carpet with underlay. I wood-fillered and sticky filmed and hard-boarded the planking, to stop the mortar showering in.

I hollow boarded walls of some rooms and used four millimetre insulation paper on more exposed walls and ceilings.

(As I write this, the plumber will start with central heating tomorrow.)

For my mother, who particularly feels the cold, from her history of pneumonia and rheumatic arthritis, I have given hot water bottles for longer than I can remember.

She was a carer for her late husband, in the living room. I put together, in the corner, every stick of a bunk bed, with its sheltering roof. Even the shop owner asked me a bit dubiously how I was getting on. I said I would get there eventually. I also got a proper thick sprung mattress.

When it turned out that Mum was too sensitive to the cold, to even venture in that corner, I obtained a made-to-measure sprung mattress for her couch bed, in the warmer middle of the room.  
(I showed some of these things, I mention, to the visiting HDA.)

I also bought electric clothes horses for Mum, to warm her damp clothes. And clay core heaters, which were powerful but not very adaptable.

I got a dehumidifier for her, to ease the discomfort of her always perspiring – something that the persecutory health authorities never got their heads round.

It took me three attempts to get the dehumidifier I ordered with the reusable filters. On the second occasion, I had to print out the return label, for the return of the wrong model. I had to perch this on the seat of a mobile chair, and trundle it half a mile to the shop, from where it would be taken back. The shop assistant didn't want to take it, for lack of room. But I said the Internet map still showed their willingness, so she made a last exception.

This anecdote at least shows that I was not a person to be fobbed off.

* * *

## Detention timeline of Mrs Ella Lung.

Table of Contents.

Only yesterday, as I write this (4 February 2020) visiting the care home, my mother, Mrs Ella Lung, deplored the routine. They are expected to sit in a chair all day, go to bed, and then get up again to the same thing, day after day after day. She said there is no humanity in it. I couldn't have put it better, and have said as much, in my correspondence of complaints, time after time. Because, Mum has been suffering this ordeal, in hospitals, ever since 11 August 2019.

Much of her conversation was taken up with leaving the place, and wanting to know whether she could go back with me, and why not? And I have to tell her that social services won't let her leave.

Naturally she is disaffected with this state of affairs, that the country has come to. A respected Scottish judge, called out of retirement, reported that the system is working not at all well, and that thousands of elderly people are prisoners in care homes.

The care home staff is kept busy enough looking after the residents basic needs, lifting them out of their chairs, one after the other. Indeed, looking on, Ella said: I wouldn't like their job.

The respected Liberal Democrat health spokesman, Norman Lamb said we are a nation neglectful of the elderly, leaving it to the state, instead of help from friends and neighbors.

But this is not the case with Ella, who wants to be home with her son, who is willing to pay for a live-in carer, and has talked with neighbors, including three elderly ladies, about his mother.

Having taken away my mothers physical freedom, the state wants to take away her financial freedom, by making her pay for her misery of captivity. Even convicted criminals are not expected to pay for their involuntary board.

We are willing to pay for care in the freedom of our home, yet social services have always denied this to us. Twice, they have used outright obstruction against live-in care agencies. On the first occasion, the social worker later apologised for the over-reach of her authority. It is evident that she over-reached again, on the second occasion.

More difficult to pin down, but just as important to demonstrate, is the devious, dilatory, pressure that the social worker, and co, brought to bear, to park Ella in a care home, and deny her return to her own home.

### 2019.

11 August.

Ella, weak with dehydration, falls out of bed and, on a call from myself, her son Richard, is admitted by ambulance to ... Ward, ... hospital.

Only a day before, when Mums diet shrank to eating no solids at all, I called in the doctor.

In hospital, she was monitored and medicated.

I was questioned over the phone for explanations of Ellas condition.

15 August to 7 September, I visited Mum every day in Hospital.

29/08/2019, 21:31. Richard Lung applies to a government-approved Live-in Care agency..

2 September, Monday,

an assigned social worker informed me for the first time that a Safeguarding Warning had been issued against me by the ambulance women.

Unknown to me, while I was visiting the Ward, hearsay was being collected against me, in violation of all the norms of due process. (For example, I said their NHS food was better than mine, and this compliment was used as imaginary evidence that I was not feeding my mother properly. My mother long continued to be off her food, in hospital. But this explanation of my mothers condition was over-looked, in prosecutory questioning by the social worker.)

I realised from the start that my mother would need a live-in carer, and contacted a live-in care agency. Social worker told me they were not on the county council approved list. I asked her to find an agency that was approved, which she promised to do.

6 September, Friday, I reminded the social worker by phone of her promise.

8 September.

The only response was her decision, (as I was told by phone from [a later] Ward) to move Ella to hospital [in another town]. I objected to her being moved out of reach. I was assured Ella would be moved home in a fortnight, maybe less.

13 september,

Mr ... MP phoned me to advise that I make clear to the social worker, who blocked [the live-in care agency] obtaining Mums medication needs, my willingness to pay this fully managed government approved live-in care agency. His opinion was that we were "at cross-purposes" because you probably assumed that our reaction would be unwillingness to pay. (From my email, 25/09/2019, 11:02)

16 September,

...the Health authority replied to our MP that Ella coming home awaited the safeguarding enquiry, and assessments: "the aim being that Mrs Lung returns home with appropriate support to meet her assessed and eligible needs."

25 september, wednesday.

Social worker interrogates by phone, using the word "abuse" with regard to the Safeguarding enquiry. But admits that Mum [in Othertown] is "struggling" for want of seeing me. [Reported in email to MP, 26/09/2019 14:25.]

26 september:

"I have been assured that [the MPs] request has been appropriately responded to by the Care and Support Manager." (26/09/2019 08:14, Social worker.)

3 october, from staff of MP: "I am sorry but we don't seem to have had any further correspondence." [03/10/2019 08:31 MPs staff.]

30 September.

After three weeks in ... Ward [Othertown], it was evident Ella was not returning soon. I knew so little, at first I hired taxis, until a mate told me of the train service.   
Except Sundays, when the hometown bus didn't run right, and the norovirus struck the ward, I visited my mother without missing many days, till 19 November.

I asked Mum if she wanted me to come. She replied: More than anything in the world.

1 october, tueday

[Appointment made 26/09/2019 08:14 by Social worker]. Visit by social worker, announcing intention of deprivation of liberties, making my mother and myself wards of state, without citizens rights, stripping me of my general power of attorney. [Described in my journal section: Further unpleasant developments. 1 october.]

3 October.

Letter from ... County Council informed me that the Safeguarding Warning for deprivation of liberties was "declined." (See 11 october.)

08/10/2019 17:15, Social worker completes her assessment of Ella, including 24 hour care (which I wanted from the start) and this statement:

"Currently, mum is over capital limits so a 24 hour care at home package could be sourced. I apologise about misinformation about a care company having to be on our provider list, they only have to be on our provider list if we are creating a contract with them but as mum is a self-funder then it gives you more flexibility in finding a provider. If mum is to come home please can you give me the contact details of the providers that you will chose to give them the relevant information pertaining to mums needs."

I put another live-in care agency, specialising in dementia, in touch. [18/10/2019 15:02, Social worker]

11/10/2019 13:12, Social worker:

"I would like to let you know that the safeguarding following a meeting yesterday has been closed down and has been marked as inconclusive."

However, the social worker did not let me know that the County Council "declined" the warning. (Standard authorisation not granted.)

It might have helped the meeting to arrive at a conclusion, if they had allowed me to defend myself against actual allegations, on the record. Something known as due process.

29/10/2019 11:55, Social worker:

The social worker in her search for a "placement" (read: parking space) for Ella."Therefore it has been suggested that we would look out of area for mum at the present moment."

05/11/2019 15:27, Social worker:

"We feel like mums needs will be best met in a placement due to the strain it will place on yourself as mum currently is not able to be left alone and I would be concerned about the strain on yourself."

This comment I find frankly unbelievable, after the terrifying ordeal, she put me thru. It is more like policy in solicitudes clothing. I may have been taken-in at the time. For, I told Mum that care was too hard for me. She said I did not know what hard work is. And she was right. Social services have put Mum thru misery, for months on end, by parking her, in hospitals and rather too similar care home.

For the best part of two months, after the safeguarding enquiry was over, the dilatory social worker made no move to discharge Ella from rehabilitation hospital. She was applying to an outlying village, which would involve a train journey, and where I could not have seen Mum regularly on a sustainable basis.

So, I arranged for Ella to leave [Othertown] hospital on Wednesday 20 November, to come back to our home town at last, if only in a care home at the other end of town, but a social worker, on temporary assignment, didn't show up, and I was made to intervene, with a contract signing at the care home, for it to happen on Friday 22 November.

23/11/2019 19:00, Live-in care agency manager wrote:

"I am sorry to hear that the experience of a care home is not what you expected. The reason I do this job is to avoid people having to go into those places so I would be more than happy to help in any way I can."

10/12/2019 12:16, Social worker wrote:

"I am liaising with the Independent Mental Capacity Advocate IMCA, ...[care home] and my manager in regards to handing in the notice at [the care home]. The decision for mum to move to a twenty four hour placement was made in the best interests and initially you were not in agreement with this and then you were in agreement with this decision. After speaking to the advocate, we are unable to accept the notice for mum to be moved as this is not in agreement with the best interest decision. I have spoken with the IMCA who has informed me that you are able to refute this decision by going via the Court of Protection for Ella."

[Note: From the start, I wanted my mother to have 24 hour care, live-in care. My mother was still in hospital (with the norovirus in her ward) in late november. My father died of hospital-acquired infection. Under stressful circumstances, I briefly gave-in to a "placement," at least, at the other end of our home town, instead of an outlying village, to which the social worker was applying, and which would have been beyond reach for close and regular contact, vitally important to us both.

I had never met the so-called advocate ... who is a stranger, like the rest of these back-room bureaucrats, who over-rule a sons 70 year knowledge of his mother. Such is "the insolence of office".]

10/12/2019, 18:44.

Hello [live-in care manager],

... the District nurses has arranged for a profile bed to come, scheduled for Friday 13 december 2019.

I have just received a dreadful blocking email from Social worker...

14 december. Submission to Social Complaints at County Council.

* * *

### 2020

6 January 2020

Services manager at County Council Social Complaints reject my complaint.

Fail to mention that the safeguarding warning was "declined" but write with innuendo of "allegations" which were never made, and their response does not make.

They threaten my financial deputy application if I continue not pay for the care home detainment of Ella in misery at her deprivation of liberty.

07/01/2020, 13:41.

Refuting the rejection of my social complaint:

I have made a request for the intervention of the ombudsman. Your version of events is too far removed from reality to go unanswered.

I attach my refutation, and also refer to my journal (which you did not): The safeguarding warning broke every rule in the book of due process. Yet it was "declined." (I also attach the two relevant documents [that "declined" the Safeguarding warning].) You have no business to try to stigmatise me, without exhoneration or apology, for your base and baseless suspicions, to enforce control over our lives.

Social services fits the saying: No man is good enough to be another mans master.

15/01/2020.

Deprivation of Liberties team forbid Ella to leave care home. (Signed DOLS ADMINISTRATOR too ashamed to give their name or even reveal their hand-writing.)  
This was a retrospective ban (making up the rules to suit themselves as they go along) made more then a month after the social worker blocked Ella leaving, and after my protest, of 14 december 2019, to Social Complaints.  
I signed an agreement with the care home, which stipulated that I had to give four weeks notice. This I did on 25 november 2019, in writing, to which the manager gave signed acknowledgment.

26/01/20, 9:46.   
Address of grievances before Best Interests meeting, which was not acknowledged by e-mail or at the subsequent meeting.

6 February:   
Best interests meeting at care home.  
A self-justifying barrage of excuses against Ella returning home. Still seeks to make personal accusation against me, and does not admit that the safeguarding warning was declined. (They did not contest the fact, when I mentioned it.) Does not make explicit reference to our address of grievances or deal with its complaints. Makes no mention of my journal of the ordeal they have caused Ella.

8 February.  
Ella has a prolapse with much loss of blood. She is rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. Has persistent constipation.

12/02/2020 06:48.  
Emergency meeting sought and held with staff of MP, against being forced to pay to perpetuate the misery of my mother in enforced captivity.

26 february.  
Ella taken to hospital for a bowel scan.

27 february.  
Ella given a mental capacity test.   
On the testers departure, over-hears one say: She knows more than the lot of them put together.

Early March,   
I make notes of visits to Ella, who still wishes to leave the care home.

6 March, friday,   
Ella determines to leave the care home with me, getting thru the security door, gripping my rucksack and my hand, passively resisting being moved, with a sit-down, before being wheeled back into the innards of the care home.

Mid-March.  
Care home closed to visitor because of the corona-virus crisis.

25 April.  
On the intervention of the psychiatric nurse, I received the minutes (actually just their self-serving version of events) of the 6 february Best Interest meeting, sent without a covering letter, anonymously and without date or reference number, as a "DRAFT" or unspecified document, which could be secretly changed to avoid any criticisms made against it.

15 May.   
Ombudsman staff seeks information. In accord with their wishes, I send my Formal complaint to the Ombudsman (now a section in this journal).

2 June.  
Unknown social worker rings son to tell she has made a phone call to my mother, who she thinks is a charming lady but doesn't know her own needs; the social workers non sequitur for slapping-on another deprivation of liberty, that could be a life sentence. (That would be no surprise to my mother, who knows the ways of authority.) I mentioned the 30,000 words, I gave to Ella, in my second journal, Talking To A Cat In The Moonlight. Whilst the Best Interest meeting gave her zero words, not even allowing her in the meeting that was supposed to be in her interest.

3 July 2020. 16:51.

Protest e-mail to the Supervisor of the second Deprivation of Liberties order against my mother, which was acknowledged.

27 July. 12:07:51.

Please free Mrs Ella Lung to come home with her son.

(E-mail to credit control, constituency Cllr; MP; DolS supervisor; Ombudsman investigator.)

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### Winston S Churchill (Liberty At Home) broadcast, 4 june, 1945 general election.

Table of Contents.

My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Although it is now put forward in the main by people who have a good grounding in the Liberalism and Radicalism of the early part of this century, there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.

Look how even to-day they hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of war-time inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.

How is an ordinary citizen or subject of the King to stand up against this formidable machine, which, once it is in power, will prescribe for every one of them where they are to work; what they are to work at; where they may go and what they may say; what views they are to hold and within what limits they may express them; where their wives are to go to queue-up for the State ration; and what education their children are to receive to mould their views of human liberty and conduct in the future?

A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects – and that is what I am speaking of – could not afford to suffer opposition. Here in old England, in Great Britain, of which old England forms no inconspicuous part, in this glorious Island, the cradle and citadel of free democracy throughout the world, we do not like to be regimented and ordered about and have every action of our lives prescribed for us. In fact we punish criminals by sending them to Wormwood Scrubs and Dartmoor, where they get full employment, and whatever board and lodging is appointed by the Home Secretary.

Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. A Free Parliament – look at that – a Free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire. Have we not heard Mr. Herbert Morrison descant upon his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolutions of broad principle in the House of Commons, afterwards to be left by Parliament to the executive and to the bureaucrats to elaborate and enforce by departmental regulations? As for Sir Stafford Cripps on "Parliament in the Socialist State," I have not time to read you what he said, but perhaps it will meet the public eye during the election campaign.

But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist to-day will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are short-sighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk – the common people, as they like to call them in America – where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?

I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual within the laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed. I stand for the rights of the ordinary man to say what he thinks of the Government of the day, however powerful, and to turn them out, neck and crop, if he thinks he can better his temper or his home thereby, and if he can persuade enough others to vote with him.

But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.

Winston CHURCHILL, The First Conservative Election Broadcast, 4 June 1945. Quoted in CAPET, CHARLOT & HILL, p. 201-2. Taken from Free Republic website:   
http://www.freerepublic.com/

It was easier to find critics of this speech, than it was to find the speech. This wide-spread reaction reminds of the saying: A prophet is without honor in his own country.   
Only after many years of disbelief and disregard was Churchill recognised to be right in exposing certain OTHER countries. He is still chastised for rightly warning of the danger, to his own country, which is now upon us.

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### References

Table of Contents.

Report reveals tens of thousands of elderly people 'prisoners of care homes'  
Daily Mail Online

Neglectful nation blamed for forcing elderly into care homes  
Home Care Direct.

Tory council set to force disabled people into residential care to cut costs  
Disability News Service

13,000 pensioners could be forced into care homes against their will  
The Telegraph

More than 100 elderly a week are having properties seized to pay for care home fees  
Daily Mail Online

Rise in referrals to social services causing trauma to families, expert says.  
Louise Tickle. Guardian frid 15 april 2016 17:07 BST.

'I was so numb I couldn't even cry': Daughter blasts 'Gestapo' social services as they bundle mother, 86, out of family home  
Daily Mail Online

Council faces bill of over £100,000 for unlawfully depriving 90-year-old of liberty  
By Mithran Samuel on January 22, 2015 in Adults, Deprivation of liberty, Mental Capacity Act. CommunityCare.

Revealed, the networks helping families to flee social services - Channel 4.  
"It's a very British phenomena."

Facebook pages (among many others):

Fighting Against Social Services and Family Law.  
Truth Exposed on Social Services UK.

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### Author Profile page:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/democracyscience

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