"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" - W.B. Yeats.
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Showing posts with label families without fatherhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label families without fatherhood. Show all posts
"A Labour party member most of his life, and a compassionate socialist, he nonetheless became the leading critic of the British Left’s social liberalism which, he came to believe, was destroying society and in particular working-class life."
Peacefully, at home, on November 13, aged 81 years, Norman, beloved husband of Audrey, a loving father of Julia and John, father-in-law of Phil, devoted grandad of Robert, Sarah and Max. A short service at Sunderland Crematorium at 11.30am will be followed by a service at St Andrew's Church, Roker, at 12.30pm, to which all friends and family are warmly invited. Friday November 26.
In the late 1940s, a group of sociology students who would go on to shape and cement the discipline in Britain started their studies at the London School of Economics. Their number included AH ("Chelly") Halsey, Joe and Olive Banks, Michael Banton, Basil Bernstein, Percy Cohen, David Lockwood and Norman Dennis.
Unlike most members of this sociological establishment, Dennis, who has died aged 81, chose not to seek academic preferment (though chairs were certainly offered) but rather to focus his energies on community life, most notably in his home town of Sunderland. This preference became apparent in 1956 with his first major publication, Coal Is Our Life, the classic community study of "Ashton" (in fact Featherstone in West Yorkshire). Although this study tends to be overshadowed in popular opinion by the well-known Bethnal Green studies of the 1950s, it contains a much harder and less anecdotal edge, especially in analysing the ways in which economic forces structure social relations.
Dennis next turned his attention to the domains of housing and town planning. By then lecturing at the University of Newcastle and back in Sunderland, he was living in Millfield, an area which Sunderland council had selected for slum clearance against the wishes of most of the resident population. In his 1970 publication, People and Planning: the Sociology of Housing in Sunderland, he starkly exposed the social and technical weaknesses of the slum clearance programmes, the insensitivity of their implementation and the shallow nature of resident "participation". In undertaking this study, he achieved a rare degree of empathy with the people of Millfield. He became the secretary of their residents' association. and was in the vanguard of what would now be termed "communitarianism".
In 1972 his sense of empathy led to a further landmark publication. Public Participation and Planners' Blight was an excoriating analysis of the unwillingness of the bureaucratic-professional machine to listen to residents, and the failure of local politicians to challenge the narrative presented by their officials.
The previous year, he had been elected as Labour councillor for the Millfield ward, and I joined him as a fellow councillor for the same ward. It would be fair to say that his relatively short time as an elected member perplexed both the officials of Sunderland council and many of his political colleagues. However, the upshot was that many of the homes he defended from the slum clearance programme are still standing today as a testament to his description of them as "little palaces".
Some academics balked at the idea that a sociologist could be so intimately involved with his subject matter, thereby running the risk of "bias", but Dennis was never one for relativism – for him the possibility of an objective search for truth was not to be easily laid aside. It was a stance that led him into a final phase of work that (again) perplexed many – his association with the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Institute for the Study of Civil Society.
Under this rubric he wrote a series of highly influential studies that railed against what he saw as the decay of the moral fabric of society. These included Families Without Fatherhood (1992 - pdf), Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family (1993 - pdf), The Invention of Permanent Poverty (1997), The Failure of Britain's Police (2003 - pdf) and Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000 - pdf). His call for a return to the moral world of the "respectable working class" of his childhood struck a chord with many, and he found himself transformed from an icon of the activist left to the academic darling of the right. At the same time, he remained an active member of the Labour party in Sunderland. The explanation for all of this lay in his commitment to "ethical socialism" – a philosophy he developed in English Ethical Socialism (1988), which he co-authored with Halsey. Central to this position is the doctrine of personal responsibility, even under unfavourable circumstances, for it is this multiplicity of personal decisions that will form history. In particular he saw reproductive and family decisions as crucial to human destiny, and (in Families Without Fatherhood) highlighted the adverse consequences of raising children without a father. In line with his opposition to postmodernism, Dennis felt no qualms in stating the moral truth as he saw it.
Dennis was born in Sunderland, the son of a tram driver. He was educated at Green Terrace elementary school and Bede collegiate school, Sunderland. After graduating with a first from the LSE he worked at the universities of Bristol, Leeds and Birmingham, as well as spending time at Palo Alto, California, as a Rockefeller fellow. His heart, however, lay in Sunderland and he spent almost 40 years as a lecturer (and subsequently reader) in social studies at the nearby University of Newcastle.
A physically active man, and lifelong teetotaller, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia last July, though he remained active and alert until recently. Our families enjoyed a convivial meal in a Sunderland restaurant only weeks before his death, where he was in typically rumbustious form. He is survived by his wife, Audrey, and their two children, John and Julia.
• Norman Dennis, sociologist, born 16 August 1929; died 13 November 2010
Norman wrote: "I went to the LSE instead of Corpus Christi, Oxford, partly because of [Harold] Laski, Miliband's mentor, but mainly because of RH Tawney" and he described how he had continued to advocate Tawney's "fellowship based on family" socialism.
But this, wrote Norman – "along with its closely related chapel and temperance socialism and the philosophies of the benign, enabling state in which co-operation and fellowship are the best bases for social organisation, not capitalist competition" – was "one of the great lost causes of our age. Who now has any memory that such ideas actually dominated Labour Party thinking, until they were all dumped into memory's hole of oblivion at the time of the countercultural revolution? I really ought to be on a national register of cultural monuments, as one of the sole surviving representatives of this point of view."
For some reason there's nothing about his death on the Civitas website, despite the four of his books which are available there (links in the obit above). I'm very surprised at them - that's quite shameful.
His long essay "Defame Fathers, Create Crime?" is here.
Christian Institute tribute page - including an mp3 of 'Families without fatherhood'
With his passing, the ranks of radical, anti-our-new-Establishment sociologists are thin indeed. I can only think of Peter Saunders as keeping the flag flying.
The cultural dominoes are tumbling. Nick Clegg was AFAIK the first openly Godless party leader in British history - and, while not the first politician to notch the bedpost, the first to share his score with the electorate.
Now Ed Miliband is (AFAIK) the first party leader to be openly cohabiting and the first to be openly producing children whose parents aren't married.
A view which is perhaps defensible when Daddy was born into our ruling class and Mummy is a highly-paid lawyer. But for Mr and (especially) Ms Average that view's a disaster.
"The UK is bottom of the league of 21 economically advanced countries according to a "report card"' put together by Unicef on the wellbeing of children and adolescents, trailing the United States which comes second to last."
"The use of data on the proportion of children living in single-parent families and stepfamilies as an indicator of wellbeing may seem unfair and insensitive. Plenty of children in two-parent families are damaged by their parents relationships; plenty of children in single-parent and stepfamilies are growing up secure and happy. Nor can the terms 'single-parent families' and 'stepfamilies' do justice to the many different kinds of family unit that have become common in recent decades. But at the statistical level there is evidence to associate growing up in single-parent families and stepfamilies with greater risk to well-being – including a greater risk of dropping out of school, of leaving home early, of poorer health, of low skills, and of low pay. Furthermore such risks appear to persist even when the substantial effect of increased poverty levels in single-parent and stepfamilies have been taken into account (although it might be noted that the research establishing these links has largely been conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom and it is not certain that the same patterns prevail across the OECD)."
And what's one of the key producers of one-parent families ? Cohabiting partnerships a la Miliband.
# Cohabitation is one of the main routes into lone parenthood. Between 15% and 25% of all lone-parent families are created through the break-up of cohabitating unions.
# Children born into married unions are estimated to be twice as likely as those born into cohabiting unions to spend their entire childhood with both natural parents (70% versus 36%)
So there. The new Labour leader is setting a dreadful example - albeit one that's being followed by an ever-increasing number of his countrymen.
You could of course produce the beautifully circular argument, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies did a while back, that while it's true that cohabitees are more likely to split up, maybe they are just the sort of people who are more likely to split up. An unanswerable assertion.
"it is true that cohabiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones"
"it seems simply that different sorts of people choose to get married and have children, rather than to have children as a cohabiting couple, and that those relationships with the best prospects of lasting are the ones that are most likely to lead to marriage. "
So a/c/t the IFS, maybe cohabitees just aren't that serious about their children's welfare....
Raoul Moate's brother (by a different father) speaks. Nature, nurture, or what ? He's a tax officer with a Masters degree.
The brothers had different fathers, but neither was told who they were. Raoul made it very clear ('I haven't got a Dad' - LT), in his last stand in Rothbury, that this was something he cared a great deal about, and, even though Angus understands that the 70s were different, that there was far more stigma about babies born out of wedlock, his fury at the situation arrives almost on the same breath.
"I feel very strongly that a child has a right to know who his father is. I don't think a selfish woman has a right to have a baby as her own plaything. I think there are massive indications there for somebody's identity in adult life. We weren't given the opportunity, for what I believe to be very selfish reasons." He has since discovered who his own father is, though he has no intention of contacting him; apparently, after all the publicity, someone has turned up claiming to be Raoul's. "I think it's a crying shame he's only turned up now Raoul's dead. It's a bit late in the day."
On Nature vs Nurture, I'm a more-or-less rather than either/or type, as in so many other things. In Steven Pinker's the Blank Slate, he posits a rough guide to how your kids will turn out, given 3 approximately* equal factors - with (I think) upbringing being the least of the three - depressing information for well-meaning daddy :
a) natural inheritance (genes) b) upbringing c) post-adolescence peer group
If the third be true, it may be that yet another Sixties liberal myth (albeit one still being pumped out by our educators) is exploded - although there is a difference between childhood and adolescence, maybe being kept away from the rough boys then makes you less likely to hang with them later. Many times I've listened to or read of some successful figure describing his childhood and taking an affectionate but condescending pop at parents who wouldn't let them hang out with the rough boys down the road. Maybe that parental decision is why they're on Desert Island Discs.
When the academic Moat brother was doing politics at Nottingham, the other had discovered the society of the gym and its steroid subculture.
I don't think Raoul's background (more here) fits by any means the classic underclass scenario. But, as study after study shows, fatherless children, even after controlling for the lower income of single parents, do worse on pretty much every measure of human achievement.
“The children of parents who do not follow the traditional norm (i.e. taking on personal, active and long-term responsibility for the social upbringing of the children they generate) are thereby disadvantaged in many major aspects of their chances of living a successful life. On the evidence available such children tend to die earlier, to have more mental illness, to do less well at school, to exist at a lower level of nutrition, comfort and conviviality, to suffer more unemployment, to be more prone to deviance and crime, and finally to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves have suffered.”
There's nothing we can do about it, though. As Sunny so perceptively pointed out a month or so back, people who have children and don't get married wouldn't be any more likely to stay together if they DID marry each other. His conclusion is that people who don't marry are just the kind of people with low commitment to the relationship, who are more likely to split (aka desert the kids), married or not !
* I think those three factors stand provided the upbringing is not 'extreme' - in which bets may be off. Obviously an infancy or childhood of torture or abuse will have a hefty effect - as will, say, being brought up in a closed religious community, or selected for the Janissaries (in both these instances your peer-group gets chosen for you as well, securing two out of three factors).
What was the name of the record shop in Bradford's John Street Market ? I remember almost crying with laughter when they played this - and it's still pretty good now. Bill Cosby in Walrus of Love mode - a touching tale of domestic violence :
UPDATE - I grow old. The record stall which I can't recall the name of (Jumbo ? Discovery ?) was in the late Rawson Market, a small market of mostly butchers/fruit&veg between the (then) new Kirkgate monstrosity and John Street Market - John Street being a fine market with a pie and peas stand, Baltic food shop and the very wonderful Doris and Roy's Furniture, where house-clearance treasures were to be found.
I suppose this Robeson song would be most appropriate for the story. But lets have this, which my mother - a great Robeson fan like so many in 1930s South Wales - often sang to her little ones.
.. I can't find it in me to join in the chorus of abuse directed at that hideous Haringey harridan wot's been sacked because her social workers are clueless cretins. In fact she seems to have been treated somewhat unfairly, and I can "take comfort" from the fact that she'll almost certainly get a quarter of a million from the inevitable industrial tribunal.
Don't get me wrong. As a matter of general principle, I approve of sacking social workers with immediate effect and no compensation. But what's one among so many ? Why her in particular ?
We all know. A baby is dead, the firestorm swirleth, goats must be scaped. What really seems to have nailed her is social services inspectorate Ofsted's backside-covering. You may or may not recall that they gave Haringey social services top marks just before the murder - which is somewhat embarassing for Ofsted. One might be tempted to ask, as does hübsche Haringey hottie Lynne Featherstone MP, what the point of their inspections are.
But thinking on her feet, Ofsted supremo Christine Gilbert had the answer - Haringey social services deceived us.
Tactics used by the council included claims that managers had assessed children promptly when the files revealed that those assessments were in fact incomplete. The same files showed that such assessments of children were routinely and wrongly made with their parent or guardian in the room, when they could have been the ones harming them.
It wasn't until inspectors in this week's review began pulling children's files from the office shelves in the town hall that they realised the extent of the deceit.
One might ask what kind of inspection regime never opens a file and takes the inspectees word as gospel. If the Inland Revenue took that approach, a happy world it would be, and one with a lot less money for social workers and Ofsted inspectors. Methinks Ms Gilbert is either too hopelessly naive for her role, or she's neatly and cleverly diverted the pack onto the wounded wildebeeste yclepte Sharon Shoesmith.
The teenager was arrested within a week of her death and a search of his home found a dog lead belonging to her, which was stained with her blood. Forensic tests also confirmed that her blood was on the teenager's training shoes and a barbell used to kill her, which matched one found at his home.
Hmmm.
"I have told you I have no knowledge of this girl. You can ask me the same question but I will keep telling you the same thing," the teenager said during police questioning. "I am no murderer. I would not murder anybody. If I did I would not be standing here. I would top myself first ... It has been, like, tough, for three days now. I am 16, I am locked up with people telling me I have murdered someone ... This is beyond a joke. I am 16, I have got a job on Fridays, I enjoy the weekends and I party with my friends ... I am trying to be honest, but I do not know what the hell you are on yourself ... It makes me disgusted - I cannot believe that my name is down there for murder. I am upset ... I feel this is disgusting that I can basically be questioned like this... I would not be out of my house the next day laughing and smiling with my friends, partying basically... I am not a murderer, I would not have a clue. What would a murderer do, do you know what I mean. It's berserk."
Hmmm. In fairness, when you're 16 the world does tend to revolve around you. It's the mixture of truculence and self-pity that strikes me. But what about that evidence ?
The jury heard how during days of initial questioning by detectives after his arrest, the youth did not mention the lead. In police statements read out in court, officers then told him it had been found at his home and that the blood on it came from Ms Hyde. During the police interview the youth replied: "I do apologise. I panicked. I should have said from the start that I picked it up." He said he had discovered it while out walking along the bridle path where Ms Hyde was attacked, adding he had taken it home "and forgot about it."
Hmmm.
Officers also questioned him about blood stains on his Lonsdale trainers, which, tests showed, had also come from Ms Hyde. But he was adamant he had not seen any blood on the path. He told detectives: "I walked the path and now I'm here for murder. There is something wrong here." He demanded that police test the paws of his own dog, and the hooves of a horse he had seen on the bridle path, to see if they had also walked through blood without anyone realising it.
He demanded ? There is something wrong here, isn't there ?
In an interview, the transcript of which was read out in court, the teen said he had seen the lead lying on the path as he returned from walking his own dog. He also claimed for the first time that he spotted a small amount of blood nearby. "When I walked down the path I did see blood and picked up the dog lead and put it in my pocket," he said. "I thought I had just found a dog lead." He told interviewers that when he heard of Kelly's murder three days after his discovery he did not come forward because he feared that he would be blamed. He also maintained he must have walked through a pool of the victim's blood as he made his way home. When told that more than 40 officers had conducted a fingertip search of the area and been unable to find a single drop of blood he said he could offer no further explanation. "Why would there be blood on my trainers?" he asked interviewers.
Why indeed ? I imagine that there's a bit of a backstory to this young man, which we'll find out about with one verdict, and not otherwise. There's a bit here.
The boy told officers that he had got out of bed at around 10.30am, ate breakfast and watched part of the police comedy movie Hot Fuzz. He said that although he was feeling a little under the weather he was delighted when his step-father received a phone call offering the teen work the following day ... He said that he left the house at around 11.40am to take his dog for a walk and to secretly smoke a cannabis joint away from his home. He claimed that he walked along the bridleway just metres from where Kelly's battered body would eventually be discovered. The teen said that he reached a concrete bridge some distance beyond the bridlepath where he smoked the joint and then returned home the same way.
Not every dope-smoking, unemployed teenager is a murderer, or there'd be an awful lot of them. But Huw Davies QC appears to be playing a pretty thin hand.
The number of abortions in all women rose by 2.5% to reach an all time high of almost 200,000.
Big increases in children killing children - to be fair, this only parallels what's happening outside on the streets.
The number of abortions among girls aged under 16 rose by 10% to 4,376 in 2007, official figures for England and Wales show. In the under 14s, abortions rose by 21% from 135 in 2006 to 163 last year.
I wonder what the solutions to this great problem are. They wouldn't by any chance involve more, earlier and compulsory sex education ? There are a whole lot of tax-funded types just itching to get the message across to younger and younger kids. After all, that's the classic liberal solution.
"Whatever you did before that didn't work, do more of it"
Let the BBC tell us about a few :
Gill Frances, chair of the Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group, said: "We know what works to reduce abortion amongst teenagers. We need high quality sex and relationships education at school and at home and effective contraception."
Ah, the old 'what works' mantra !
Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said: "Much more needs to be done to equip young people to deal with the complexities of their personal relationships and to empower them to ask for high quality, user-friendly forms of contraception without embarrassment.
Quite right, Ann. Double doses of empowerment to be issued to all schools, and a rolling programme of upgrades to the equipment needed to deal with the complexities of their personal relationships !
(I digress - but surely the relationships between young males and young females are some of the least complex relationships on the planet - at least as far as the young men are concerned ? Ann's mum obviously never told her that 'they're only after one thing !')
Julie Bentley, chief executive at the FPA (Family Planning Association) said sex and relationship education should be compulsory in every school. "Younger women are making different choices about their lives and choosing abortion over motherhood, but education and contraceptive services will stop them becoming pregnant in the first place."
"Choosing abortion over motherhood", eh ? Just like some young men choose rape over temporary celibacy ? I guess its just a "different choice", after all ... for the person doing the choosing.
The strange thing is that all this nonsense is contradicted by the evidence of one UK community. They are characterised by what Ann Furedi and Gill Francis would doubtless consider extremely low quality sex and relationships education - namely "don't do it" - the sort of sex education that worked remarkably well for the British for the last 500 years, even when contraception was almost non-existent. Somehow around the early 70s we decided that Gill Francis had the right idea after all - and bastardy, sexually transmitted infections and abortions have been rising ever since, in tandem with a falling birth rate.
What would be interesting to see is the way in which the changing pattern of numbers of abortions in a given age group compares with the changing patterns of numbers of young women in said age group. After all, if the numbers of abortions in U14s rises by 21% but the number of U14s rises by 25%, that would be a fall in the 'per 1,000 U14 females' figure. (that's an example - I think it unlikely that the numbers of U14 females could change so rapidly).
What would also be interesting would be a breakdown by ethnic group. We know that more than 23% of schoolchildren are ethnic minority. We know that the Indian and particularly the Bangladeshi/Pakistani communities have low rates of sexually transmitted disease and high rates of fertility. I think it highly unlikely that they're having many abortions - although their (native) girlfriends might.
We can probably expect more episodes like this as the desires of the people (whose children get STIs and have abortions) for more and more sex education clash with the desires of those (whose children don't - and they want to keep it that way) for less or none.
So it appears that the shrinking native population is having ever more abortions while the incomers are having ever more babies. Keith Ajegbo's "British Lessons For English Children" report tells us that "in 10 years time, 15% of the workforce will be Muslim".
Some marketing geek at Lloyds TSB has been looking at the data and drawing his conclusions. These guys are paid a lot of money to do the figures. Double click to see it full size.
Burnley really does have some top underclass tottie. Even Beverley Lunt actually managed to send her down for two and a half years.
A friend reported about 9.15pm Duckworth had been very drunk and couldn't stand. She produced an eight-inch knife and said she was going to stab "Darryl the smackhead."
She wandered off to some nearby shops the victim lived above and knocked on his front door. Mr Hopkins's girlfriend answered and Duckworth asked if Mr Hopkins could give her a cigarette. Miss Statham said the victim went to the door, held out a cigarette and Duckworth thrust the knife into his chest.
Duckworth announced "cockily" to friends: "I have done it. I have done it. It went straight through." She then produced the blood-stained knife and said: "I'm well hard, me."
Duckworth made no comment when interviewed by police. She had 48 previous convictions, many for serious offences, committed her first assault when she was 13 and had been the subject of an anti-social behaviour order.
The defendant had been given a suspended sentence five days before the offence.
As someone said in the comments "Thank goodness we have strong judges like Beverley Lunt who pounce mercilessly on criminals. It's a good thing that Duckworth wasn't up for not paying her council tax, she would have received a long sentence."
Also in Burnley, from the comments I'm not sure that this 'yes means yes and no means no' stuff has quite filtered through to all sections of the community.
On the subject of the underclass, tonight's Radio Four 'Bringing Up Britain', on single parents, started with the usual liberal foolishness - presenter Mariella Frostrup actually asked 'is there any evidence that it's better to have two parents ?'.
But there was an interesting aside by one of the contributors, who'd been talking with a social worker.
'I can't remember when we last took a child into care whose parents are married'.
Former nightclub bouncer, Manderson, who has never had a driving licence, has been banned from driving every year since 1988 when he was just 15.
Unbelievable. Banned from driving every year for 20 years. What's even more impressive is that, according to the local paper, he's spent a total of 17 years in prison. How does he find the time to drive ?
In November 2006, Manderson vowed to give up his bad driving habits. He told the Advertiser he was turning over a new leaf for his son Kaine, after spending 17 years of his life behind bars.
In July 2006 he was jailed for five months after racking up his 48th driving conviction.
Five months didn't put him off, did it ? I'd say detention at Her Majesty's pleasure would be more appropriate. It may be more expensive than paying his benefits, but at least you could negotiate the Magic Roundabout without nervously checking the rear-view for him.
Rob Ross, defending Manderson, told the court: "He still has a problem with motor cars. He always will."
Regular readers will know Charles Murray, American sociologist of the UK underclass - indeed the guy who discovered it back in the 1980s, when in 1989 he wrote The Emerging British Underclass for the Sunday Times. He followed it up with "Underclass +10" ten years later.
Murray also wrote on prisons and was an early advocate of the "Prison Works" policy. But he's put these two strands together and come up with a bleak dystopia, one not terribly far away from those of leftish anti-prison campaigners.
It's a simple thesis, and, as with the underclass, he expects British experience to follow American. The key point, although he does not put it that way, is that the will to stigmatise and condemn bastardy and the single mother (which he sees as the root cause) while also removing child-related benefits, is simply not there. It isn't there in (relatively) God-fearing America, so there's no chance in secular Britain. The underclass will continue to exist and won't get any smaller.
At the same time, Britain will continue to discover what America has discovered - that prison works. The prison population will continue to grow. In America this has been accompanied by the gentrification of the inner cities, and the movement of the underclass poor to "decrepit neighbourhoods on the periphery that need not be on the travel route of the rest of us".
Neighbourhood schooling effectively means that the right postcode shields your kids from underclass kids (some idiots on the left talk about 'the poor' as if most parents give a damn about how much money a kid's got. Some of the nicest kids at my children's school are from poor homes - there are also some little sods from underclass homes which are poor. Can you tell the difference ? All the parents and kids can).
If these American trends, already apparent here, continue, "in 15 years, perhaps less, the underclass/Neet will no longer be a political issue in Britain and urban life for most of you will be more pleasant than it is now. The price will have been a great deal of money spent on prisons and, in effect, the writing-off of a portion of the population as unfit for civil society.
In the United States I have called this the coming of custodial democracy — literally custodial for criminals, figuratively custodial for the neighbourhoods we seal away from the rest of us. Custodial democracy is probably headed your way. "
I can see a few objections to this. The sixties and seventies radicals have a good deal more power in the UK than they ever achieved in the US. As we see with Labour's attempts to bash the middle classes over school admissions, keeping your children away from their underclass peers will be a lot tougher in Britain, unless you have enough money. Similarly it's less likely that the underclass will become geographically isolated, as long as councils hold the keys to planning permissions.
There's always the chance of a religious revival, of some latter-day Wesley who will condemn bastardy and restore stigma. Do you see anyone in the Church of England or Catholic Church who fits the bill ? As Peter Hitchens put it :
Much of the problem lies in the consciences of individuals and will not be fixed until and unless a new John Wesley appears, who can find some way of remoralising a population that is at least as demoralised as it was in the 18th century. (One rather alarming possibility is that such a figure will appear, and he will be a Muslim, which should concentrate our minds).
Enough. Here's the whole essay, pinched from this Father's Rights site. Please note that the title is a wry acknowledgement of the trend, not a prescription for action. Murray does not find it an appealing scenario, but it's the way he sees things going.
The Advantages of Social Apartheid
Underclass is an ugly word, and we live in an age that abhors ugly words, so it is good to hear that the Blair government has devised a cheerier label: Neet, an acronym for “not in education, employment or training”.
Once a government has given a problem a name it must develop effective new strategies for dealing with it. That too is in train, The Sunday Times told us last week, replete with urgent cabinet meetings, study groups roaming about the country and even a “Neet target” to reduce the Neet population by 20% by 2010.
You may use whatever euphemism the government adopts, but it’s still the underclass. Its numbers are not going to be reduced by 20% by 2010. Its numbers will increase. The good news is that the rate of increase will probably begin to slow in a few years and in another decade or two Britain will have learnt to manage the problem — meaning you will have learnt how to keep the underclass from getting underfoot, even though its numbers are undiminished.
When The Sunday Times first asked me to look at the British underclass in 1989, the American underclass was about 15 to 20 years ahead of Britain’s. You were tracking the American experience with remarkable fidelity then and you are still tracking it.
From the beginning I have used the simple-minded assumption that Britain 16 years on would look like America did when I was writing, and that’s more or less the way things have worked out. Nothing about the underclass is rocket science. It’s all basic, the kind of thing our grandparents took for granted. It just has to be rephrased to accommodate today’s delicate sensibilities.
Our grandparents thought bastardy was a problem to be avoided at any cost. Today’s translation: children who grow up without being nurtured by two biological parents are at risk. Poverty isn’t the problem. Inadequate educational opportunities aren’t the problem. Social exclusion isn’t the problem.
Throughout history, societies around the world have been poor, with inadequate educational opportunities and with socially excluded people. Those same societies have been remarkably successful at ensuring that almost all children came into the world with two biological parents committed to their care. That’s the difference between societies with small underclasses (for every society has had an underclass) and with large ones.
Children today usually still have a mother with them. The problem is the growing number of children who have no father and who live in areas where hardly anyone has a father. Girls without fathers tend to be emotionally damaged.
Among other things, they tend to search for father substitutes among young males, which in turn increases the likelihood of repeating their mother’s experience. Boys without fathers tend to grow up unsocialised. They tend to have poor impulse control, to be sexual predators, to be unable to get up at the same time every morning and go to a job. They tend to disappear shortly after the baby is born. These are not the complaints of a conservative lamenting the lost good old days. They are social science findings that are as robust and unambiguous as social science findings get.
I use the word “tend” because none of these outcomes is carved in stone for any particular child. But we can’t deny a problem exists because some children of single women do well. Of course, there are many exceptions but the statistical tendencies are pronounced, and tendencies produce a large and problematic underclass.
Our grandparents thought you couldn’t “do” with a youngster who wasn’t brought up right. Today’s translation: social programmes for intervening with children at risk have consistently meagre results. This finding has even longer shelves of analysis than the literature on the children of single parents.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Americans tried everything: pre-school socialisation programmes, enrichment programmes in elementary schools, programmes that provided guaranteed jobs for young people without skills, ones that provided on-the-job training, programmes that sent young people without skills to residential centres for extended skills training and psychological preparation for the world of work, programmes to prevent school dropout, and so on. These are just the efforts aimed at individuals. I won’t even try to list the varieties of programmes that went under the heading of “community development”. They were also the most notorious failures.
We know the programmes didn’t work because all of them were accompanied by evaluations. I was a programme evaluator from 1968 to 1981. The most eminent of America’s experts on programme evaluation — a liberal sociologist named Peter Rossi — distilled this vast experience into what he called the Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social programme is zero.” The Iron Law has not been overturned by subsequent experience.
I should add a corollary to it, however: “The initial media accounts of social programmes that ultimately fail are always positive.” Every training programme for young men or parenting programme for young women can produce a heart-warming success story for the evening news. None produces long-term group results that survive scrutiny.
None of this experience crosses the Atlantic. When the Blair government began its ambitious job-training programmes, I wondered whether anyone within the bowels of the appropriate ministries said: “You know, the Americans tried lots of these things years ago. I wonder how they worked?” But apparently nobody did or nobody listened. Now the government seems ready to admit that the results of the training programmes have been dismal. But as it sets off on the next round of bright ideas, I still don’t hear anyone saying: “You know, the Americans tried those programmes too . . .”
The bottom line for this accumulation of experience in America is that it is impossible to make up for parenting deficits through outside interventions. I realise this is still an intellectually unacceptable thing to say in Britain. It used to be intellectually unacceptable in the United States as well. No longer. We’ve been there, done that.
Our grandparents’ most basic taken-for-granted understanding, which today’s intellectual and political elites find it hardest to accept, is this: make it easier to behave irresponsibly and more people will behave irresponsibly. The welfare state makes it easier for men to impregnate women without taking responsibility for them, easier for women to raise a baby without the help of a man and easier for men and women to get by without working. There is no changing that situation without reintroducing penalties for irresponsible behaviour.
This is the sticking point for every political figure in Britain, Labour or Tory. Frank Field has been miles ahead of other politicians in recognising the growing problem of the underclass and in speaking out, but last week even he was saying: “Surely we can say that the traditional family unit is the best way to nurture children without making it a campaign to beat up single mums.” With respect: you cannot. If you want to reduce the number of single mums you have to be ready to say that to bring a child into the world without a father committed to its care is wrong.
The government need not sponsor publicity campaigns to beat up single mums. Put the cost of irresponsible behaviour back where it belongs — on the man and the woman, their families and their community — and the recognition that the behaviour is wrong will revive instantly, along with powerful social pressures to make sure it happens as seldom as possible.
Some of those pressures will be positive, celebrating marriage as a uniquely valuable institution and bestowing social approval on the bride and groom. Some of those pressures will be negative, consisting of various forms of stigma. This is good. Stigma is one of society’s most efficient methods for controlling destructive behaviour.
How can the government realise this desirable state of affairs? By ending all government programmes that subsidise having babies. But this moves us into the realm of solutions that haven’t a prayer of becoming reality. They haven’t in the United States, where the total package of benefits for single mothers has not been diminished despite the hoopla about welfare reform, and there is no reason to think Britain will act any differently in the foreseeable future.
Now for the good news, if you want to call it that. You don’t need to reduce the underclass to reduce the problems the underclass creates for the rest of us. As evidence, I point to a dog that no longer barks. The underclass, the most important domestic policy issue of the 1980s, is no longer even a topic of conversation in the United States.
The American underclass isn’t any smaller. The three indicators of an underclass — the proportion of children born to single women, criminality among young men and young men who have dropped out of the labour force — have all grown or remained steady during the past 15 years. The underclass is no longer an issue because we successfully put it out of sight and out of mind.
Consider the presence of the underclass in American cities. Fifteen or 20 years ago, the homeless, panhandlers and street hustlers were everywhere. Today they are virtually gone in most cities (San Francisco remains the exception). Graffiti used to be everywhere in American cities. Today it is rare in the better parts of town. You have no idea how depressing graffiti is until you’ve lived without it and then encounter it again, as you do in cities throughout Europe.
The social segregation of the underclass has been nearly perfected. We have not learnt how to compensate for the parenting deficits that cripple the lives of children of the underclass, but we have learnt how to avoid dealing with the consequences.
American children of the middle and upper classes no longer go to school with the children of the underclass. For a number of years, progressive American educators managed to dilute the old principle that a school drew only from a restricted geographic area. That principle has been reinstated so parents can be sure that if they move to the right neighbourhood their children won’t have large numbers of disruptive, foul-mouthed, sexually precocious and sometimes violent classmates. Middle and upper-class parents who remain within large cities commonly send their children to private schools.
Increased geographic segregation of the underclass has facilitated social segregation. In many large cities, urban renovation has reclaimed deteriorating downtown areas for glitzy shops and gleaming offices. Gentrification has retrieved much of the urban housing stock that had fallen into disrepair. The “inner city” is seldom literally located in the inner city but in decrepit neighbourhoods on the periphery that need not be on the travel route of the rest of us.
Most importantly, America has dealt with its crime problem. The crime rate has dropped by about one-third since the early 1990s. It has dropped even more in the better parts of town. People walk the streets of New York and Chicago without taking the precautions they used to take. Triple-locked doors and bars on the windows are not as necessary as they used to be. People feel safer and are safer.
We didn’t solve the crime problem by learning how to get tough on the causes of crime nor by rehabilitating criminals. We just took them off the streets. As of 2005, more than 2m Americans are incarcerated. That number is inefficiently large — it includes many minor drug offenders — but it responds to the question “Does prison work?”.
If you are willing to pay the price — a price that would amount to a British prison population of roughly 250,000 if your sentencing followed the American model — you can reduce crime dramatically.
All of these are policies that the British political establishment may come to accept in another decade or so. If London were to get a mayor who decided to take the homeless off the streets, scrub away the graffiti and adopt a zero-tolerance policing policy, I suspect he would find the same surge in popularity that Rudy Giuliani experienced in New York.
British parents are increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction with schools, and especially with their spinelessness in dealing with disruptive children. In every area of life that the underclass affects, the public mood is shifting towards support of the American solution. Politicians who covet votes will come around eventually.
Hence my prediction that in 15 years, perhaps less, the underclass/Neet will no longer be a political issue in Britain and urban life for most of you will be more pleasant than it is now. The price will have been a great deal of money spent on prisons and, in effect, the writing-off of a portion of the population as unfit for civil society.
In the United States I have called this the coming of custodial democracy — literally custodial for criminals, figuratively custodial for the neighbourhoods we seal away from the rest of us. Custodial democracy is probably headed your way.
It is not a happy solution. On the contrary, it means abandoning a central tenet of a free society — that everyone can exercise equal responsibility for his or her own life. But Britain, like the United States and western Europe, is locked into a welfare state that by its nature generates large numbers of feckless people. If we are unwilling to prevent an underclass by giving responsibility for behaviour back to individuals, their families, and communities, custodial democracy is the only option left.
Charles Murray is best known for Losing Ground, his 1984 book about welfare reform, and for The Bell Curve of 1994
My son came up to me the other day and said "You know what, Dad ? You were right".
When I'd recovered from these rare - nay, unprecedented words, "What about ?"
"That kid who got shot in Liverpool. You said that everyone would say how awful it was, and something must be done, and nothing would be done. I didn't believe you."
"But what really upsets me is that I know nothing will be done about it. Everyone will say how awful it is, and something must be done, and in six months we'll be watching a different set of relatives. I've seen so many of these interviews in the last thirty years, and the crimes get just that little bit worse. It makes me feel angry - and helpless."
A couple more kids in London this week, just typical stuff. Urban gun crime is the bastard child of the Scarman Report.
The death of Congolese immigrant Biendi Litambola has seen the traditional mourning rites being observed.
Today around 20 of his pals laid floral tributes to their friend at the murder scene and spray-painted "E6 Gangsta" in the doorway of nearby flats where it is understood two suspects were arrested.
But Ilford and Canning Town don't have any literary types nearby. Stoke Newington does, so the shooting of Etem Celebi was a little too close for comfort.
Suzanne Moore in the Guardian on shootings and urban child-rearing :
Most teenage boys act harder than they are, don't they? They have to. Unless they withdraw into their rooms smoking skunk, listening to angsty music, waiting till the next time they get mugged.
"The Urban Warrior, my older one, is more philosophical, talking about other people he knows Etem was friends with, including one who was done last year for all sorts of egregious things; he sounds pretty hard. I don't want my kid to sound hard. But he's bought his hardness dearly, and he knows how to work the streets. He's hard because he can't help being part of it, because he's a teenage boy. The only alternative is to sit in your room like his brother."
Sounds like the Guardianistas are breeding a 50/50 mix of intelligent street-smart kids, young warrior Beowulfs, and frightened victims. Back to the future !
"We have created the classic conditions for the emergence of a warrior class: separation of economic activity from family maintenance; children reared apart from fathers; wealth subject to predation; and male status determined by combat and sexual conquest."
The CiF comments are impressive too :
Has anyone seen that episode of the Simpsons where Flanders uber-liberal, beatnik parents go to the psychiatrist and complain about their inability to control his behaviour? "We've tried nothing Doc, and and we're totally out of ideas!"
"I give thanks every day my boy returns home safe. What kind of a society produces a reaction like that. He lives in London ffs, not Gaza."
"for those of you who dont live on a council estate and believe that people just wilfully will not deal with the police. Let me break it down for you. If you snitch to the police and the thugs find out, you will be killed/stabbed,/beaten up/ hounded out of your house, depending on the ferocity of who you snitched on. People who go about their day to day business not killing, using drugs, and all the other stereotypes abounding on this thread are hostages to the area they live in. It is not out of choice that they do not 'give up names'. Get real."
"all this is a spectator sport for a lot of middle-class white liberals. They LIKE a bit of deprivation and anti-social bahaviour, even the odd murder (not too close to home). It gives them a vicarious thrill. In Nick Hornby's 'Fever Pitch'. He talks about how despite coming from a nice house in Maidenhead. he's always wanted to come from a rough part of North London: "With a tube station and a West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems.""
"As a veteran criminal lawyer, I've got to say I've been alternately amused and disgusted by the clueless bleatings both of the column, and the various flavours of lefty who want to blame 'society' (or 'capitalism', or Thatcher, or whatever).
I actually have a clue, because I have known many, many, many of these thugs on a professional basis: my clients.
It's not the poverty.
It's not guns.
It's not the TV.
It's not Iraq.
It's not insufficient public spending, as if you could simply bury the problem by shoveling money at it.
The problem is the criminals.
The criminals, violent, selfish, callous sods; as well as a considerable segment of their subculture which worships the same idols: easy money, contempt for honest work, law enforcement, and decent society; and fatherless households going on four generations of workless state-supported existence, supplemented by thievery and narcotics.
What is the answer? Simple. Real law enforcement with serious sentences- not ASBO's or six months at a holiday camp, but hard time. You would be amazed at the change in a hardened thug's expression when he learns that *this* time he's looking at five years mandatory minimum, no parole. Serious incarceration also gets them off the streets, reducing the spread of the infection to the impressionable younger ones on the cusp.
And it *does* work. At this point somebody will bring up the USA's very high rate of imprisonment- and that's true. But it's true *because* thirty years of namby-pamby penology of the sort that plagues Britain produced an explosion of criminals, who all had to be placed when we finally got serious about it again. The price we had to pay for our hand-wringing softly-softly folly, as reflected by America's plunging crime rates over the last ten years. Yes, Britannia, your rates of serious crime are now *higher* than ours in all categories except murder, and you're rapidly overtaking us there.
You want to solve this problem? Lock 'em up. By the time they're 18 it's too late- concentrate on saving the younger ones. Make sure that minor vandalism and shoplifting are punished, not laughed off. Don't allow poor estates to become warzones of graffiti and broken glass. Give the poor jobs, not handouts. Make it abundantly clear that the law applies everywhere, not just in the leafy suburbs- then you'll see a change."
"Like Suzanne I lived, as I said, in the inner cities; when it came time to choose my lad's first school I walked in to the playground, clocked the looks I got from the older kids there, added that to the four shootings within two hundred yards of our house in eighteen months, and put the house on the market. I took a 50% wage cut to get out and head north, and it was a bargain. Anyone who makes their kids grow up in london when they don't *have* to, needs their head examined."
And the last word to commenter Peel :
This left wing commentator laments the products of the wholesale reconstruction of a culture, reconstructed by the cultural left. It dug up the old moral ethos. It assumed that ethos was just part of the atmosphere, not the result of centuries of Christian civilization. Now she realises the tide is coming in fast, there are no moral absolutes or norms, all is a sea of relativism and multi culturalism. The people who suffer most from this liberal elite destruction are the poor, and poor blacks worst of all. Well done Ms Moore - please don't think you and yours are not deeply implicated in this grotesque social catastrophe, as is most of New Labour.
... the social system was at least as authoritarian as the political system. It was shocking for an unmarried couple to sleep together and a disgrace to have a baby out of wedlock. A homosexual act incurred a jail sentence. Divorcées would not be considered for the honours list or the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Procuring an abortion was a criminal offence. Violent young criminals were birched, older ones were flogged, and murderers were hanged. Two years' National Service was compulsory for 18-year-olds. Small children sat in rows in the classroom and were caned if they misbehaved. Drugs were confined to the surgery (and the aristocracy). The bobby on the beat made sure the streets were safe at night. And for an England cricket captain to miss a Test Match by flying home to be present at the birth of his child would have ruled him out of serious consideration not just as a cricketer but as a man.
So what happened ? How did we get from there to here ?
OK, so Home Affairs Select Committee chair John Denham is an idiot.
"Committee chairman John Denham said there was no evidence young black people committed more crime than other groups."
(I think he's an idiot, anyway- but in fairness, he's following in the train of researcher Marian Fitzgerald, who seems to think that self-reported surveys - asking young people how many crimes they commit - is a more accurate measure of criminality than the conviction statistics. Apparently by this measure, when asked by the comedians at the Youth Justice Board, 37% of black schoolchildren admitted to committing a crime as against 26% of whites and 20% of Asians. In another survey by the Home Office, black respondents were significantly LESS likely than whites to say they had offended. I've written to her to ask if that's really how one measures criminal activity or if I've got the wrong end of the stick. The stats, the report, and the evidence - fascinating stuff - are all here - and the website has a disgusting feature by means of which right-clicking, as well as left, automatically loads the pdf.)
But at least some commentators are wondering if there could be a connection between the dire shortage of daddies in black communities and high crime rates. Figures cited by the committee indicate that 59 per cent of black Caribbean children and 54 per cent of mixed race youngsters are looked after by a lone parent. In the white British population, the figure is 22 per cent.
The Rev Nims Obunge, an evangelical pastor in north London, said that ''an acknowledged breakdown in the social fabric of many black families is most typically exemplified by the lack of a strong father figure in the home".
Well, yes. Take a look at this tragic City Journal piece - the Father's Day card marketed to black children with no fathers.
for My Mother ON FATHER’S DAY You hear a lot of talk these days about children growing up without a father— without this and without that.
You hardly ever hear About the mothers who, In spite of everything, Raise their children to be strong, To believe in God, to work hard To make their lives worthwhile . . .
That’s the story I’d like to tell Because that’s How you raised me. In spite of it all,
it’s our story . . . I made it because of you. Have a wonderful day.
As Heather MacDonald says, "Hallmark provides a darn good barometer of social breakdown — transformed, with all the cheerful non-judgmentalism of capitalism, into a business opportunity".
I did wonder if John Denham's own domestic arrangements have anything to do with his reluctance to call a spade a bloody shovel when it comes to fatherhood or lack thereof.
There's a graphic on the BBC website :
If his wikipedia entry is correct, his eldest children fall under "lone parent" and his youngest under "cohabiting couple". His website skates neatly over this fact by mentioning his three children but not their two different mothers.
As "everybody knows", all this 'stranger danger' paranoia hides the fact that most murder of children takes place in the family. And the vast majority of killers are dads. Just look at all those cases of fathers wiping out their whole family.
This is all so self-evidently true that Zoe Williams wrote a Guardian column about it last November.
"Of the 99 under-16s killed in the UK between 2002 and 2003, more than half were killed by a parent and maternal killings accounted for only 5% of that total. The spectre of fathers killing their children is not one that is conjured up to spook people, then, nor is it blown out of proportion because each individual narrative is so wrenching, arresting and memorable; it is not exaggerated by vengeful single-mother feminists as a critique on the authenticity of fatherly feelings. It is a phenomenon that happens - often."
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
It would appear that it's been blown out of proportion, by feminists like Zoe Williams - perhaps because of the arresting, wrenching and memorable narratives.
Give the Guardian credit for not pulling the piece. It's there in all its glory, with the following correction at the top.
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday November 13 2006
In the article below we said that more than half of under-16-year-olds killed in the UK between 2002 and 2003 were killed by a parent and maternal killings accounted for only 5% of that total. In fact, Home Office figures for England and Wales show that killings of children by a natural parent are committed in roughly equal proportions by mothers (47%) and fathers (53%).
(Ms Williams also seems to have discounted the 186,416 kids topped by their mum in 2006. Figures from Caitlin Moran. It may be that she (ZW) took the NSPCC definition of a "father" - any male who's shacked up with mum. A child is most at risk in the setting of single mother and mum with serial live-in boyfriends.)
Hey - all that stuff about fathers and gun crime ? This Times report blows it out of the water.
"Lawyer’s killers had good fathers and loving family. They chose a life of crime."
So they came from the traditional nuclear family that us throwbacks are always on about, did they ? One mum, one dad, still married ?
Not quite. Delano Brown's father had children by three different women. Delano lived with dad and stepmum - until they split up and dad moved to the States.
Donnel Carty's mother and father never married and did not live together. Donnel's father and grandparents raised him.
The court heard today how the men had a string of previous convictions for offences including robbery and burglary. Judge Blacksell, QC, said: "Carty and Brown were tried at the Central Criminal Court on two of the counts and also another count of murder, sadly for the same sort of thing that this jury has had to listen to, that led to the death of the victim." The group rampaged along trains in West London at night, using the interconnecting carriage doors to steam through the train and target potential victims. They would alight from the tube after the thefts, although on one occasion, jumped through the interconnecting doors onto the track when the train was halted in between stations after the alarm was raised.
During the trial Syed Hussnain described how he was one of the first targets as he travelled along the Bakerloo Line into town from Harrow in December 2005. He told the jury he saw a group of five to six boys wearing "hooded caps" walk past before a number of them demanded his phone. He said: "I resisted for 15 to 20 seconds, I held it tight. One of them hit me on the head, he hit me with a punch and my glasses were on the floor. I resisted for another few seconds before they took out two knives, and so when I saw those knives, I then gave my mobile to them."
In the same carriage a young woman had her handbag stolen. When her boyfriend attempted to stand up to the gang he was beaten. The following day Uthayakumar Kulasegrampillai was slashed around the face with a knife by Dennis. Mr Robinson called the attack a "particularly nasty assault", although the courageous victim still gave chase. Mr Robinson said: "The man who did the stabbing, Aaron Dennis, was handed the knife by someone else. He said, 'I have the knife. I'm going to kill you.' He extended it shoulder-height and slashed him in the face. "Dennis then stabbed him in the neck. he was bleeding profusely, but thankfully the injuries weren't as serious as they could have been. It was a particularly nasty assault. "Mr Kulasegrampillai ran after them on the train. He managed to get hold of one of them at the foot of the stairs and struggled with him to keep him there. He was asking for help from passers-by, but sadly none was given."
"The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of UNICEF."
It's written by breast-beating leftie Peter Adamson, founder of the New Internationalist, a chap who 'divides his time between Oxford and Tuscany' - as one does.
The only useful thing about it is that he (correctly IMHO) treats not having both biological parents as a negative point. There's a mountain of evidence to support that view. For a leftie liberal, he's surprisingly honest about this - although you can feel his pain. The use of data on the proportion of children living in single-parent families and stepfamilies as an indicator of wellbeing may seem unfair and insensitive. Plenty of children in two-parent families are damaged by their parents relationships; plenty of children in single-parent and stepfamilies are growing up secure and happy. Nor can the terms 'single-parent families' and 'stepfamilies' do justice to the many different kinds of family unit that have become common in recent decades. But at the statistical level there is evidence to associate growing up in single-parent families and stepfamilies with greater risk to well-being – including a greater risk of dropping out of school, of leaving home early, of poorer health, of low skills, and of low pay. Furthermore such risks appear to persist even when the substantial effect of increased poverty levels in single-parent and stepfamilies have been taken into account (although it might be noted that the research establishing these links has largely been conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom and it is not certain that the same patterns prevail across the OECD).
I'm sorry to see senior Tories who should know better (well, George Osborne, anyway - although his more detailed comments seem surprisingly sensible) using this report as a pooey stick to beat the Government with.
The report also contained data from Professor Jonathan Bradshaw from York, that nest of well-funded poverty specialists. You can download it in /Excel from his site. I'm sure he's a nice chap - but isn't it amazing what a nice little earner the poor can be ?
Polly Toynbee lets something slip as she pursues her campaign for the nationalisation of children. "An Englishman's home is a castle where his children are his to chastise. Never mind the complication that these days it's often stepfathers - with horrendous implications."
Horrendous implications ? Stepfathers ? Hang on a minute. I thought any arrangement of mum, significant other(s) and kids constituted a family these days. And children, as everyone knows, are far better off if their unhappy mum and dad split, rather than witnessing the rows and domestic abuse inseparable from the patriarchal unit of Mummy and Daddy. Surely only obscure Christian fundamentalists care about marriage or being brought up by your biological parents. After all, look at what a good job the state can do.
Back in the non-liberal world, of course, the evidence that children are best brought up by married parents is overwhelming. On every indicator they do best even after adjusting for income and social class.
I had a quick look at the Home Office's latest Domestic Violence research the other day. It's full of feminist fatuity (abuse can, for example consist of 'not getting your fair share of the household money'. A quick show of hands in my house revealed that husband, wife and four children all considered they were being abused on this definition) and I still haven't been able to work out whether their definition of rape includes having sex when you'd really rather not, but I'm presuming the figures are uncooked, if the presentation isn't.
Table 5.13 is the one - Prevalence of IPV (inter personal violence - doesn't include the household money) by marital status.
2% of married women experienced violence in the last year (so, interestingly, did 1.8% of married men)
Widowed 1.3%
Cohabiting 6.2%
Divorced 6.8%
Single 6.9%
Separated 14.5%
Now assume, as the survey does, that a large proportion (say half) of the 'Separated' figure consists of angry exes. You're still looking at a rate for singles/cohabitees three times that of the dull straights.
And a quick look at the single mums (of whom my mother was one) shows us an even grimmer picture. The rate for a single mother with children is up there at 14.9%, topping even the 'separateds'.
Stop Domestic Violence - Defend Bourgeois Marriage !
Because the personal is political. The Miliband/Thorntons are stating that "they don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall".
A view which is perhaps defensible when Daddy was born into our ruling class and Mummy is a highly-paid lawyer. But for Mr and (especially) Ms Average that view's a disaster.
Remember the UNICEF report a few years back ?
Did you know that one of the indicators of child well-being used in that report was whether a child lived with both biological parents ?
"The use of data on the proportion of children living in single-parent families and stepfamilies as an indicator of wellbeing may seem unfair and insensitive. Plenty of children in two-parent families are damaged by their parents relationships; plenty of children in single-parent and stepfamilies are growing up secure and happy. Nor can the terms 'single-parent families' and 'stepfamilies' do justice to the many different kinds of family unit that have become common in recent decades. But at the statistical level there is evidence to associate growing up in single-parent families and stepfamilies with greater risk to well-being – including a greater risk of dropping out of school, of leaving home early, of poorer health, of low skills, and of low pay. Furthermore such risks appear to persist even when the substantial effect of increased poverty levels in single-parent and stepfamilies have been taken into account (although it might be noted that the research establishing these links has largely been conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom and it is not certain that the same patterns prevail across the OECD)."
And what's one of the key producers of one-parent families ? Cohabiting partnerships a la Miliband.
So there. The new Labour leader is setting a dreadful example - albeit one that's being followed by an ever-increasing number of his countrymen.
You could of course produce the beautifully circular argument, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies did a while back, that while it's true that cohabitees are more likely to split up, maybe they are just the sort of people who are more likely to split up. An unanswerable assertion.
So a/c/t the IFS, maybe cohabitees just aren't that serious about their children's welfare....