One of the definitions is that government has total control.
That's the definition for totalitarianism. You need to couple that with populist extreme nationalism and state corporatism to really be properly fascist though.
If you want to understand how the UK social services manages sometimes to be quite so completely fucked up (and I am in no way denying that they can be scary fuckers), you need to understand the confluence of the British jobsworth, combined with really bad incentives. Using the epithet fascist doesn't really tell you anything about this though.
To put it simply, the professional penalty for wrongly taking kids away is much much lower than the professional penalty if something goes wrong through inaction. This is due to a series of high profile cases where kids died after not being taken from their parents. Unfortunately there are also a lot of jobsworth box tickers throughout the UK bureaucracy.
This is not all of them, but there are enough that when coupled with a system that doesn't really punish them as long as they are seen to be doing something, encourages some really dark Kafkaesque insanity.
That's the definition for totalitarianism. You need to couple that with populist extreme nationalism and state corporatism to really be properly fascist though.
If you want to understand how the UK social services manages sometimes to be quite so completely fucked up (and I am in no way denying that they can be scary fuckers), you need to understand the confluence of the British jobsworth, combined with really bad incentives. Using the epithet fascist doesn't really tell you anything about this though.
To put it simply, the professional penalty for wrongly taking kids away is much much lower than the professional penalty if something goes wrong through inaction. This is due to a series of high profile cases where kids died after not being taken from their parents. Unfortunately there are also a lot of jobsworth box tickers throughout the UK bureaucracy.
This is not all of them, but there are enough that when coupled with a system that doesn't really punish them as long as they are seen to be doing something, encourages some really dark Kafkaesque insanity.