The Stealing of Emily - IT’S MINE I Can Grab What I Like

It’s Mine. I Can Grab What I Like — Martin Newbold It’s Mine. I Can Grab What I Like is not a conventional exposé, nor is it a memoir in the ordinary sense. It is a forensic, deeply unsettling examination of how modern institutions can fail catastrophically without ever appearing to do so. The book does not rely on sensational revelations or hidden-camera moments. Instead, it exposes something far more troubling: the quiet, bureaucratic mechanics by which responsibility evaporates, accountability is deferred indefinitely, and real people—especially children—are reduced to data points that can be moved, erased, or “resolved” without consequence. At its core, the book is about disappearance. Not disappearance in the dramatic, cinematic sense, but a more insidious form: administrative disappearance. Newbold argues that in the contemporary state, people no longer need to be physically removed to be lost. They can be deleted procedurally. A record changes. A status updates. A file is “exited.” A dashboard remains green. And the person at the centre of it all ceases to exist in any system that carries responsibility. What makes this book compelling is not only its subject matter, but the way it is constructed. Newbold does not write as a distant commentator. He writes as someone who has spent years inside the machinery he is describing—writing letters, filing requests, chasing replies, analysing responses, comparing documents, and noticing patterns that most people never see because they are never meant to look across systems. The book reads like an accumulation of pressure. Each chapter adds another layer: another system, another process, another polite response that leads nowhere. Individually, each interaction might look mundane. Taken together, they form a picture that is both chilling and coherent. The early chapters focus on the mechanics of record-keeping and decision-making in education and safeguarding. Newbold introduces the idea of “ghost schools”—entities that exist administratively but have no meaningful physical presence or capacity. These are not necessarily illegal creations; they arise from licensing and registration loopholes, digital convenience, and outsourced systems that prioritise compliance over reality. Children can be enrolled on paper into places they cannot attend in practice. Attendance then becomes impossible, and impossibility is treated as failure. Automated rules trigger exits. Responsibility moves elsewhere. The child has not “gone missing” in the traditional sense; they have been processed out of sight. From there, the book widens its scope. Newbold examines how similar logic appears across multiple domains: policing, complaints handling, archival systems, and government oversight. A recurring theme is the difference between recording and acting. Information is logged. Intelligence is entered. Concerns are “noted.” But action does not follow. Systems such as police tracking databases or safeguarding registers create the impression of diligence while simultaneously insulating institutions from obligation. The presence of a record becomes a substitute for response. .