Equally, when the boyfriend and the lodger emerge from jail both of them will be free to have their own children.

In fact, the skewed benefits system in this country provides massive incentives for the most dysfunctional people to have loads of children they cannot care for.

Multiple children mean a bigger council house for a start. Under new housing benefit rules introduced by Labour, having seven kids means getting a seven bedroom house.

The tax and benefits system also discriminates against couples staying together which in turn means many children of single mums have to put up with a transient collection of dodgy “uncles” or “step dads” moving in and out. It only takes one sadist to destroy a child’s life.

The social workers in the Baby P case may well have been negligent, but you cannot expect social services departments to monitor around the clock all the problem families we have allowed to be created.

To be frank, I would like to see any adult convicted of a serious offence of child cruelty sterilised – perhaps we could knock a year off their prison term in return for their agreeing for this to be done.

I know this marks me out as something of an extremist on this issue and the Human Rights Act would never allow it, but I am sick of liberal do-gooders pretending the state is always capable of protecting children at risk of abuse.

Any discussion of whether it would be a good idea to curtail the rights of everyone to have children, no matter how unsuitable they are, has been off limits in Britain for many years.

Those with long memories will recall that Sir Keith Joseph was once favourite to succeed Edward Heath as Tory leader.

But he made a speech in 1974 which appeared to call for unsuitable parents to be discouraged from having children.

The ensuing outcry ensured his hopes of leading his party were over and the more pragmatic Margaret Thatcher stepped into the breach. The rest, as they say, is history.

Here is what Sir Keith said: “A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness which are more important than riches. They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births. A high proportion of these births are a tragedy for the mother, the child and for us. Yet what shall we do? If we do nothing, the nation moves towards degeneration, however much resources we pour into preventative work and the over-burdened educational system. It is all the more serious when we think of the loss of people with talent and initiative through emigration as our semi-socialism deprives them of adequate opportunities, rewards and satisfactions. Yet proposals to extend birth-control facilities to these classes of people, particularly the young unmarried girls, the potential young unmarried mothers, evokes entirely understandable moral opposition. Is it not condoning immorality? I suppose it is. But which is the lesser evil, until we are able to remoralise whole groups and classes of people, undoing the harm done when already weak restraints on strong instincts are further weakened by permissiveness in television, in films, on bookstalls ?”

Can anyone read any of this and say that a word of it is badly argued?

In the intervening years billions of pounds have been thrown at the problems of poor parenting and the emerging underlcass.

There have been dozens of reviews into the deaths of children at the hands of violent parents. There will be dozens more in the years ahead.

There will be a Baby Q, a Baby R and a Baby S. And it is all because we allow bad people to bring children into the world without restraint.

At the risk of causing a similar outcry to that sparked by Sir Keith, I have to say that I do not think such an untrammeled freedom over the rights of innocents should be allowed any longer.

Does anyone out there agree with me?