What was her mum thinking?

8:57am Friday 14th March 2008

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FIRST WE had the McCanns and missing Maddy: nice, middle class professionals, a massive media campaign, and God knows how many millions flowing into the appeal fund.

Next up was little Shannon and her dysfunctional Dewsbury council estate family: a mother with seven children by five different fathers, a current partner who looks a bit scruffy and simple, and the kind of daily routine that didn't ring alarm bells until the nine-year-old was four hours late home from school.

Now we have the appalling tragedy of Scarlett Keeling, the 15-year-old raped and murdered in the so-called holiday paradise of Goa after being abandoned after an argument by her soap-dodging, pikey mother who left her in the care of a boyfriend ten years older than her.

Scarlett subsequently died horribly after staggering out of a bar and on to the beach at 4am, drugged up on LSD, ecstasy and cocaine.

Now in some areas of the media, Scarlett's mother, Fiona MacKeown, has been made out to be something of a heroine for forcing a corrupt local police force to accept that her daughter had been murdered after they at first tried to sweep the incident under the carpet.

Well not in this manor, squire.

Bleating to the liberal TV channels, whose judgement has been distorted by years of Leftie management, Mrs MacKeown gets away with claiming that "if police had taken more interest in previous suspicious deaths then Scarlett might not be dead now".

Well forgive me, love, but if you hadn't decided to cart your eight (repeat, eight) children off to India for a six-month holiday, and then left one of them to fend for herself while you cleared off with your partner and the other kids (exact number of fathers unknown, but at least four), then there's an even better chance that Scarlett might not be dead now.

Frankly, the mind boggles. This woman lives on benefits on a caravan site in Devon. Her feral children, aged from five to 19, are the victims of a laid-back hippy upbringing that puts the whims of a self-indulgent adult before the needs of her own children.

And what are they doing in India in the first place? Are the social now handing out long-haul plane tickets along with the dole? Why aren't the children at school? Why isn't poor Scarlett sitting her GCSEs, instead of rotting in a mortuary on the other side of the world?

We are quick to moan when social services interfere in what we see as normal family lives; that shouldn't stop us asking what they, and the education authorities, knew of the MacKeown clan and what they did - or didn't - to stop a selfish mother driving a caravan through the rules and regulations.

• WHILE WE'RE on the subject, why isn't there a national scandal over the 3,000 (yes, 3,000) British Asian girls who have gone missing from school registers every year, believed to have been forced abroad into arranged marriages?

Local education authorities have a statutory duty to ensure that children attend school. Indeed, several white mothers of the scrote variety have been jailed for failing to make their feckless teenagers turn up for double geography on a regular basis.

So what of these 3,000 children? What are the authorities doing about the missing kids? Well, nothing really. And that's because these cases are regarded as being "culturally sensitive". I haven't heard anything so pathetic in my whole life.

The massed ranks of Guardian-reading Lefties who infest the public sector simply can't bring themselves to enforce the law when it comes to ethnic minorities.

They're scared of being accused of being racist; it's just so much easier to turn a blind eye and instead persecute the helpless mother of a teenage Goth who won't come out of his bedroom until Kurt Cobain is miraculously resurrected. So much for the concept of Britishness.

It really is shabby. Meanwhile, frightened girls, some as young as 12, are shipped out to become the sex slaves of husbands' they've never met. I wonder what the feminists in NuLabour's ranks make of that?

• ONE AFTERNOON last July I was driving through torrential rain when I heard a reporter on local radio blithely blaming global warming' for the rising floodwater lapping around the top of his wellies.

I was so cross that I emailed the station when I got home and asked what evidence they had that 'global warming' was to blame, rather than a lot of rain on top of even more rain. The answer I got from an idiot producer was along the lines of "everyone knows that climate change is responsible for extremes in our weather".

Well I'm sorry, but no they don't. And this week the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology finally reported that the summer floods were "a freak event unrelated to global warming".

It appears that they were caused by lots of rain falling on top of even more rain.

In fact, our summers aren't even getting wetter - there was more summer rain around during the 19th century than there is today.

So as I said last week, fire up the Quattro and let's drown some more polar bears.