Broken families, broken Britain

The Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has ranged widely in apportioning blame for the abuse or neglect of children in Britain. Those at the receiving end of his tongue-lashing included 20 local authorities, with the city of Birmingham in particular singled out as ‘one of the worst places to grow up in the developed world’.

But Sir Michael was clear about the root cause of children’s problems today: hollowed out and fragmented families, where the relationship between mother and father has broken down or never existed in the first place.

He said the problems exposed in child abuse scandals were being deepened by an apparent national obsession with ‘pussyfooting around’ and ‘making excuses’ for bad parents. At the root of wider social problems lay the alienation of many children from their natural father.

• ‘These children lack more than money: they lack parents who take responsibility for seeing them raised well. It is this poverty of accountability which costs them.
• ‘These children suffer because they are not given clear rules or boundaries, have few secure or safe attachments at home, and little understanding of the difference between right and wrong behaviour.
• ‘…Children [are] abused because their biological parents were long ago alienated from each other and the new man in the house –often the latest in a succession of men – is violent and resentful.’

Sir Michael is absolutely correct. He did, however, fail to identify the key culprit behind this inexorable process of social breakdown – the intellectual, legal and political class which caused it to take place.

For warnings about the lethal impact of family breakdown on the wider social fabric have been made since the early 1990s. Not only have they been ignored, but those responsible for this trend merely encouraged it to accelerate.

In Britain, the courts evacuated divorce of responsibility for individual behaviour. Successive governments incentivised mass fatherlessness through welfare provision for lone mothers. Cohabitation became respectable, despite the huge rate of breakdown once children came along.

The belief took hold that fathers were dispensable and it was every woman’s right to bring a child into the world without its father on board.

Social scientists manipulated the data to produce spurious ‘research’ dismissing the catastrophic effects on children of family fragmentation. Sperm banks did brisk business, while infertility specialists created embryos in test-tubes for anyone who wanted them regardless of family circumstances.

No-one was allowed to say that marriage was the best way of safeguarding children (and women); the only permitted judgement was that no lifestyle should be judged better or worse than any other.

In other words, the family fragmentation Sir Michael so rightly laments is the outcome of a profound cultural shift, led from the top and causing enormous damage in every social class, but whose most pernicious effects are felt most acutely at the bottom of the social heap.

That’s why the current contested proposal to give married couples in Britain special tax privileges is itself so pathetic. What’s actually needed is nothing less than a gear-shift in social attitudes, where the keepers of the cultural citadels – politicians, lawyers, clerics, university professors, charity heads, public figures of every stripe – say loud and clear not just that marriage is good but that lifestyle choice is amoral, that the broken family is a calamity best avoided, and that elective fatherlessness is wrong, a human tragedy and a social blight.

The willed fragmentation of family life has not just resulted in rotten outcomes for children, more abuse and neglect, more education failure and unemployment, more crime, more ill-health and all the rest of it.

Worse still, the psychic wounds it inflicts have caused its victims to project that rage and pain onto the world around them. Hence the constant palpable undercurrent of barely suppressed aggression, the venom and cruelty unleashed through social media, and the lust for power over others displayed through intolerance, the suppression of dissent and a myriad other ways.

Overlay on top of all that the radical disempowerment inflicted by an education system which has replaced knowledge by propaganda, truth by opinion and the ability to think by a profound conformism, and you begin to understand why Britain seems incapable of connecting to the real world any more.

Posted by Melanie Phillips