16th November 2025
This is the true account of one man’s struggle against a system that forgot its humanity.
Richard Lung wrote “Case Law Unseen” after witnessing how his elderly mother, Ella, was taken from her home and placed under a so-called “safeguarding” regime, one that stripped her of liberty, dignity, and family life. His words expose the silent cruelty hidden behind bureaucratic language: “Deprivation of Liberties,” “Best Interests,” “Safeguarding.”
Through this work, Richard laid bare the human cost of state overreach — how law meant to protect can instead destroy.
Ella’s story is not only his family’s tragedy, but a mirror for a society that has lost sight of compassion and truth.
Because this work is long and profound, I will publish it here in concise parts to make it possible for more people to read, reflect, and respond. Each section stands as both witness and warning.
Case Law Unseen — Part 1: “Dysfunctional Safeguardings” by Richard Lung
It’s a tangled story, and I don’t know how to do it justice briefly.
In August 2019, I called an ambulance for my mother, who had fallen behind her bedroom door. From that moment, our lives were consumed by the machinery of “safeguarding.” What began as a request for medical help turned into a campaign of suspicion and intrusion — a system determined to protect against imagined threats rather than respond to real needs.
If social services had not been distracted by their continuous “safeguardings” against the son, they might have given Mum a proper health check and discovered her aggressive skin cancer before she was almost dead of it.
The district nurse said she could not comment — but of course she did, to exonerate her colleagues. She worked hard, but she didn’t realise that social workers are not so well trained. Allowing social workers into medical records, I warned, would be disastrous: polluting science with hearsay gossip.
Our country has forgotten the presumption of innocence. The government has replaced it with a presumption of guilt — a noose of state approval or disapproval tied around everyone’s neck. Instead of people approving or disapproving of their government, the government now approves or disapproves of its people.
We degrade ourselves when we leave our conscience in the keeping of state power.
Case Law Unseen — Part 2: “Usurped Representation” by Richard Lung
Even before any verdict was reached, the social worker went over my head to replace me — the son who had lived with his mother for seventy years — with a paid stranger to “represent” her. That single act opened the way to deprive my mother of her liberties.
They tried to put her under state guardianship — a quiet confiscation of her person and her assets. Twice I tried to bring Mum home with a live-in carer. Twice the social worker blocked it, hiding behind “confidentiality” as if my mother’s medication were a state secret.
When the social worker went on holiday to New York, my mother was left waiting in a hospital for over a hundred days. She had already suffered pneumonia. She was deteriorating, and winter was coming.
To save her life, I finally agreed to move her into a care home in the same town, just so I could reach her. She wanted to come home. I was assured she could — “just give a month’s notice,” they said. But their words meant nothing.
The official records left out every fact that might have protected her — and me. The Ombudsman admitted, at the last moment, that I had not even known about the deprivation decision. Her final statement was opaque; my witness corrections were kept private and forgotten. My mother, an innocent woman, paid for the crime of old age. You think you live in a civilisation — until you find, too late, that you are the prey.
Case Law Unseen — Part 3: “Lack of Due Process” by Richard Lung
An impudent official, ever presuming guilt, used the original slur against me — the same baseless “safeguarding” invented from my call for an ambulance. Deprivation of the mother goes with defamation of the son.
After seventy years of caring for my mother, I told the County solicitor at the hearing:
“Between us, my mother and I have one and two-thirds centuries of law-abiding life. We have earned the right to a good name.”
But that counted for nothing. The state operated not by justice, but by Realpolitik force — “Deprivation of Liberties” for her, and character assassination for me. No charge, no hearing, no fair test of evidence — just whispers, reports, and assumptions. I was never given a chance to defend myself. I was a target for suspicious minds who never apologise.
Civil law runs on hearsay, not proof beyond reasonable doubt. It has become an anti-scientific system — two sets of truth: one for the powerful, and one for the powerless.
Parliament is supposed to represent the people. Instead, the people are being reshaped in Parliament’s image — obedient, silent, and subdued.
A social worker should never have taken away my mother’s right to be represented by her son. Yet she did. And because of that, both of us were betrayed.
Case Law Unseen — Part 4: “Prevention Better Than Cure” by Richard Lung
The only reason my mother’s “representative” ever agreed that she should come home was this: within a week she had caught Covid-19 in that death-trap of a care home. Being in her nineties, perhaps they didn’t expect her to survive. When she didn’t show symptoms, they back-tracked — but the wheels were already turning.
My mother survived only the average two years of life expectancy in a care home. That tells its own story. Two truths became painfully clear.
First: cancer kills faster than the courts can act. Half the population will get cancer, as she did. A system pretending to “protect” the elderly by dragging them through months of bureaucracy is not just absurd — it’s deadly. Families, not the state, provide emotional support. A courtroom can’t keep anyone warm at night.
Second: the NHS could save countless lives by giving people basic scans early, instead of reacting when it’s too late. Years of “safeguardings” were wasted chasing imaginary dangers in the son, while the real danger — an aggressive skin cancer — was ignored until it nearly killed her.
My mother was an innocent woman, treated as a problem to be managed rather than a human being to be helped. And when the state’s “protection” finally arrived, it came too late, with too much force, and for the wrong target.
Case Law Unseen — Part 5: “Family Application Coupled With State Censorship” by Richard Lung
When the second care worker repeated the obstruction of the first, a court case became inevitable. And just when I thought reason might prevail, an email arrived from the local MP — not offering help, but forestalling any protest. He was on first-name terms with the health chief. The message was clear: the machinery was closing ranks.
The Council sought to ban the publication of my journals documenting my mother’s distress. The excuse? An unsubstantiated claim that my mother “did not consent” — the same mother they simultaneously claimed lacked capacity. Convenient logic for censorship.
At the first hearing, the judge admitted she hadn’t read my journals, but gave every indication she would approve the ban anyway. The Council wanted silence. The Applicant — supposedly representing my mother — wanted silence. That tells you everything. I was only added as a respondent during the hearing, after the judge checked that no one objected to my existence. The solicitor for the Applicant had already told me I “didn’t have to take part.” Of course she didn’t want me to. Her firm relied on councils for business. Obedience keeps the contracts flowing. Even so, she accidentally revealed the truth: — that these cases are happening “up and down the country,” — that the expert report on my mother had to be redone because the first one wasn’t good enough, — and that the system was operating on the wrong standard altogether, ignoring the Mental Capacity Act and its requirement to give vulnerable people the benefit of the doubt.
In the meantime, officialdom pretended I didn’t exist — unless they needed my signature for the Covid vaccine. When the case finally ended, they insisted on an injunction, offered no explanation, and hung up. A future judge would later be surprised I didn’t possess a copy of the “Transparency Order” — a neat euphemism for a gagging order.
But the title of my journal — Nobody Knows — survived. A small victory in a system built on secrecy.
Case Law Unseen — Part 6: “Social Services Exert Unrepealed Liberties-Deprivation Anti-Human Rights Law” by Richard Lung
When Social Services announced their “best interests” plan in February 2020, the result was already fixed. It was a case-building exercise: they constructed justification first and looked for facts later. My mother was not even allowed to attend the meeting about her own future. The phrase “best interests” has become their divine right — a licence to overrule families, silence objections, and impose captivity. Before the meeting, my mother said to me: “I praised you. I thought it might help.”
She believed in fairness. They ignored her entirely. At the end of that meeting, I told them plainly: “You are strangers. You know nothing about us. And you have too much power.”
Their response was the usual: soothing noises from the care home manager, who was protecting her own position, and a social worker who admitted that her colleagues “pull people’s lives to bits” at these meetings. She wasn’t wrong.
Journalists have been saying it for years: the state interferes far too much in family life. And care homes — with their code-locked doors and endless restrictions — have become a modern version of the old Poor Law. Not overtly abusive, just soul-destroying.
My mother was a farmer’s daughter, used to open air and freedom. They locked her in a place that felt to her like a cage. Her distress still echoes in the pages of my journals. And every echo is a reminder of a simple truth: the state cannot replace love, and it should not try. Yet here it is, dressing up captivity as compassion, and calling itself righteous.
Case Law Unseen — Part 7: “Care Home Conditions” by Richard Lung
The care home was officially graded as “good.” That word means almost nothing. It simply means “not abusive.” It does not mean humane, stimulating, or dignified.
The truth is more uncomfortable: care homes fail to ignite a spark of life in the people forced to live in them.
They separate the elderly from the only thing that keeps them going — their families. The state pretends its institutions can substitute human love. They cannot. One woman sat in the hallway every day, watching the door, waiting for the slightest glimpse of her daughter through the glass. She rushed forward each time she appeared. That was her life’s meaning — one person, one connection.
Inside, there were asylum screams, withdrawn crouches, people who had forgotten human speech, people who wandered like lost satellites, people who simply stopped raising their voices at all. A quiet bedlam. A slow death of the spirit.
The teenage staff — working exhausting 13-hour shifts — did their best with what little they had. But capitalism treats their energy as disposable, and these homes run on the backs of the young and underpaid.
Meals were economy rations. Burnt toast, starchy macaroni, “cheese” that wasn’t cheese. My mother refused much of it. She missed the simple kindnesses of home — things institutions forbid because someone, somewhere, once got scalded.
The care home manager was perfectly pleasant — until she had the power to block my mother’s discharge. Then she hardened. Power does that. She refused even to listen to recordings of my mother begging to come home.
A senior staff member once said, with complacency, “You won’t” — meaning: you won’t kill yourself, you won’t break, you won’t give up.
But that’s exactly what happens. Not all at once — slowly. A kind of administrative suffocation. My mother saw it clearly. She called it a death-trap. And she was right.
Case Law Unseen — Part 8: “Illnesses” by Richard Lung
Every care home in town had Covid in 2020. A funeral director told me this plainly. Social Services brushed it off with the usual Jack-I’m-Alright indifference.
My mother caught one infection after another. She was stuffed with antibiotics until they terrified her. She hallucinated snakes at the bottom of her bed. She couldn’t sleep. She broke down in the mornings, exhausted and frightened. A defensive official dismissed this as “commonplace.” To them, everything is commonplace except compassion.
She suffered constipation and needed a purée diet. Instead of listening, they put her fate into the hands of a speech therapy committee who wanted the bragging rights of putting her on “normal” food. One night she had an embolism and lost so much blood they had to rush her for emergency surgery.
She was medicated into compliance. They spoke of antidepressants — the very drugs known to worsen despair — instead of considering the obvious: her depression came from captivity, not “chemical imbalance.”
Then there was her psychosomatic illness. As a child, she was lost in a snowstorm. Decades later, her mind told her she was cold even when burning hot. Those care home draughts tortured her. No one diagnosed it. No one treated it. They didn’t care enough to understand the woman in front of them.
And behind all that, silently killing her, was the aggressive skin cancer that went undetected because Social Services were too busy “safeguarding” against the son.
Near the end, she said to me: “I am just a nuisance.” I told her the truth: “No. You are not a nuisance. I love you more than anything in the world.”
That moment was worth more than all their paperwork put together.
Case Law Unseen — Part 9: Post-script & Advance Statement by Richard Lung
Celia Kitzinger of the Open Justice Project publicised my fourteen journals on family-splitting. She saw the truth and refused to look away. Others did not. Smashwords and Draft2Digital deleted all fifty of my books after a tax form malfunction. A lifetime of work erased in seconds. Ninety-eight other authors had the same fate. It taught me that unless your grief profits a corporation, it barely registers. My adult life was spent studying electoral systems. Ninety-eight percent of the world uses a “stub vote,” a single preference masquerading as democracy. I invented Binomial STV, a voting system that treats elections and exclusions with one rational count — a single truth instead of the contradictory arithmetic used everywhere else.
But none of that mattered once my mother was taken. After that, the only truth worth fighting for was hers. What follows is my Advance Statement — written so the system cannot do to me what it did to her.
Richard Lung — Advance Statement / Statement of Intent (9 March 2025)
This is my living will, in case my “mental death” is declared before my physical death — even by mere allegation, or social-services hearsay. The Mental Capacity Act grants people the benefit of the doubt, but the Hardie Report showed it is not being implemented. I intend to remain in my mother’s house until I die. This home exists because of her determination. It is the last link to the people I love. No institution has the right to take that from me.
Like the majority of people — 97%, according to the Homecare Association — I want to stay in my home even if my abilities decline. That is not eccentric. It is human.
Dying “deconditioned” in a hospital bed is not living. Statistics show fewer accidents at home than in hospital. And home is familiar. Safe. Mine. Institutions overlook the “memory box” of a person’s own past. When my mother returned home for her last brief days, her confusion lifted. Her instincts recognised the kitchen before her words did. She bolted the door out of sheer memory — a tiny proof that familiarity is medicine.
Care homes are code-locked captivity, exposed years ago by the Hardie Report. Litigation is too slow to rescue the elderly; by the time the courts finish talking, people have died waiting.
I remember my mother saying shortly before the end:
“I am just a nuisance.”
She was wrong.
Her life was worth more than the entire bureaucracy stacked against her.
My Statement of Intent stands with the same clarity as Sheila Kitzinger’s:
If the time comes when I cannot decide for myself, I want comfort, dignity, pain relief, and home — not machinery, not tubes, not institutional delay. Let me die in my own bed.
