A doctor noted that the baby should "not be allowed home", but did not follow up on that. Another failed to diagnose a broken back. Others did not see that bruises were covered up by being smeared with chocolate.

Failed to diagnose a broken back? WTF?

Yet, of course, there's a less than zero chance of any of those incompetents being struck off by their guild.

Before you blast people not named, and whom you probably don't know, for incompetence (based upon a few lines in the Guardian-THERE'S a fine source right there!-written about events that you probably didn't see for yourself), consider what competence and success is:

"Ma'am, it looks to me like this child is in danger. She's coming with me. No, I didn't ask for your permission. You can step back and quit blocking the door or you can spend the night in jail."

Prevention: having cops wandering through your house, inventorying your groceries, bedding, and clothing, canvassing your neighbors about suspicious sounds and when's the last time they saw all of your kids[1] and ordering you out of the room in order to interview the kids.

[1] There was a case of this a year or so back, not too far from me. One little girl disappeared and it took about a year for anyone to notice. The smart money IMHO is on mom's boyfriend killing the child and hiding the body, but the investigation was hampered by, among other things, racial identity bullshit.

This case is terrible, but cases like it are vanishingly rare. But it will be used to justify all manner of extra intrusion into our lives.

The problem is,not that we want a "nanny state" but that the state now has a monopoly in so many social areas,ordinary citizens and excluded. Taking into consideration the state having these powers,it is not unreasonable that we demand it discharges its duties properly.
Until there is societal involvement in,what is after all, our problems,not the government,nothing will be done.
The misery farmers will keep collecting their £100,000 a year.

"No amount of control that is tolerable in a free society can ensure that a Climbié or a Baby P will "never happen again"."

This is the key quote, I think. The article suggests that if procedures were looser, and human intuition more valued, then this particular case might have ended better, and perhaps that's true. But if so, other cases would have been missed, because human intuition isn't infallible, and process and procedure isn't a complete waste of time.

The real flaw in the thinking is the expectation that a local authority can ever be perfect in detecting these things, and that no price is too high in improving their ability to detect these things.

Someone needs to come out and say that some wicked people doing wicked things, undetected, is a price worth paying for the law abiding to do lawful things unmolested.

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The weirdly ironic/sad fact is that the only upshot of this is that it will to be used to justify a strengthening the immunity from prosecution that Social Services have when they wrongfully confiscate children.

""No amount of control that is tolerable in a free society can ensure that a Climbié or a Baby P will "never happen again"

Again ,this misses the problem. The control is already there in abundance,it is simply that the system has too much power and excludes the rest of society.