PETER HITCHENS: Today's child-snatchers are as evil as Philomena's nuns We are very good at judging the past and sneering at the misdeeds of our parents and grandparents. We are not so good at seeing or condemning our own faults. A clever new film, Philomena, is a good example of this. Judi Dench does a wonderful job of portraying a badly wronged woman, robbed of her child by cruel and bigoted Irish nuns in a grim convent, with the complicity of the State and the law. The story is based upon an actual case. No doubt such horrible things were done. And they were done, as they always are, by people who believed they were completely right. Film: Philomena, starring Judi Dench as Philomena and Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith Modern audiences walk out of the cinema congratulating themselves that they are not like those nuns, and would never tolerate such things going on in their midst. But as they do so, they are barely aware of a monstrous scandal, similar in every way, now happening all over this country. Some may have seen the astonishing case of the Italian woman confined to a mental hospital, forced to undergo a caesarean section, and then actually deprived of her own child by the courts. This is so grotesque that they have probably concluded it is exceptional. On the contrary, thousands of British children are being snatched from their natural parents in secret each year, after totally unfair hearings against which it is almost impossible to appeal or fight. The villains are not nuns, but their modern-day equivalents - local authority social workers convinced of their own goodness, and dedicated to our new faiths of equality and diversity and political correctness. They worship the State as fervently as any nun bent before the altar worshipped God, and they view heterosexual married couples with the same glowering suspicion Mother Superiors once reserved for unmarried mothers. This bigotry is generally supported by wooden-headed police officers, and believed almost without question by the courts. All of them presume the guilt of parents accused of "abuse," often on the thinnest pretext. But they come from the same professions which so often fail to act on the most outrageous and blatant cases of real physical and sexual abuse. Perhaps one day a powerful film will be made about this scandal. But by then most of those involved will be dead, as are the villains of Philomena. Let us not wait for that. These unfair, secret snatch squads must be disbanded now, not uselessly condemned 50 years hence. Nelson Mandela: A great tidal wave of syrup swept across the surface of the Earth as soon as his death was announced A hero we shamefully ignored A great tidal wave of syrup swept across the surface of the Earth as soon as the death of Nelson Mandela was announced. I am sure Mandela himself would have been embarrassed by it. One of the many good things about him was his modesty. Another was his genuine forgiveness of those who had wronged him. May he rest in peace. It is those who overpraise him who are my targets here. He simply was not the perfect being they claim. He chose to adopt the path of violence. He did not have to. Apartheid South Africa was a political and moral slum, but many fought it without resorting to gun or bomb. And it is not just nasty, reactionary me making this point. Amnesty International, that great campaign for silenced and imprisoned voices of liberty, took up a then-peaceful Mandela's case in 1962. But after his turn to violent tactics, the British group reluctantly decided that he could no longer be called a prisoner of conscience. For years the African National Congress has used Mandela as window-dressing. It's not a nice organisation. Its armed wing, Spear of the Nation, is notorious for its brutality. The ANC was dominated at every level by the South African Communist Party, the most rigidly Stalinist movement outside North Korea, and grovelling supporters of Kremlin repression. This is the real point of the whole exaggerated Mandela cult. Anyone looking at the world in the second half of the 20th Century could see that the harshest and cruellest regimes on the planet were Left-wing ones, in Moscow, Peking and Havana. But the fashionable Western Left will never admit that. They are interested only in "Right-wing" repression and secretly think that Left-wing oppression might actually be justified. That is why there was nothing like this fuss on the death of another giant of human liberation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was at least as great as Mandela - and, in my view, greater. He never wielded anything more deadly than a typewriter, yet he brought down an Evil Empire, with all its concentration camps, tanks, guns and bombs. But when he died in August 2008, I don't recall hours of eulogies on the BBC, or his face on every front page. Ask yourselves why. Stand back... our Prime Minister's befuddled bonce is about to blow! I am worried that David Cameron may soon overheat and explode. How can one small head contain so many contradictions? We all know that politicians can be pretty flexible but most of them maintain some sort of identifiable core. And of course it's not just possible but right for people to change their minds thanks to thought and experience. However, in many long years of observing these odd creatures, I have never seen a person swerve and swivel so much and so fast. What does Mr Cameron believe? One minute he wants to commit us to war in Syria, so grieved is he by the plight of its downtrodden people. The next, he is denouncing the alleged horrors of the Sri Lankan regime. Then off he goes to China, the world's largest police state, dotted with prison camps, which also happens to be the world's most aggressive colonial power, and his hectoring voice diminishes to a humble squeak. He denounces "banging on" about Europe, crime and immigration, then he bangs on about them. He moves from condemning wind farms as "giant bird blenders" to being a green zealot, then lets it be known that he is tired of "green c***." He has been down a similar twisting lane on the subject of homosexuality. Not much of this has any meaning. Pledges to curb immigration have turned out to be as empty as I said they were when he first made them. He said he would bring down net migration. It increased, because we cannot stop EU citizens entering our territory. Didn't he know that? Of course he did. I just don't think he cares. Is it safe to have somebody like this in charge of a government? Seen in Sainsbury's, a small yellow notice warning that "for the safety and security of our colleagues and customers, audio may be monitored and recorded." We knew they were watching. Now they're listening too. Who would have thought that Big Brother would come into being among the yogurt and the biscuits? Last week I received my winter fuel payment. I am supposed to feel guilty about this. I don't. It's some of my own money, disgorged by the Government. I gave it straight to the Salvation Army. Does anyone really think they won't spend it more effectively, more quickly and more usefully than the State would have done?