'Posh tests' won't rob your child of a job - socialist snobs did that years ago

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Why is the Tory high command in love with Alan Milburn, a chip-on-the-shoulder Blairite class warrior, who shows little sign of having grown out of the Marxism he once embraced?

George Osborne and Michael Gove have publicly praised this former Labour Minister, and he has been put in charge of a nasty little quango, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

Under his leadership, this body ceaselessly complains that Britain is unfair (which, of course, it is) while flatly refusing to mention the main reason – the disastrous comprehensive school system.

Last week, launching a particularly silly report, Mr Milburn claimed: ‘This research shows young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs.

‘Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a “poshness test” to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades and abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.’

The claims of a ‘poshness test’ were duly taken up by many in the media, who swallowed them whole. I actually read the report. It is remarkably free of specific evidence from named companies or about named individuals. Much of it is a simple statement of the obvious. Big City firms hire the sort of people who are likely to succeed in the work they do.

And since they can choose from huge numbers of applicants for every job, it is no surprise that they pick men and women from the best universities, who are confident, fluent and literate.

The sad truth is that such people come overwhelmingly from private schools and the tiny few remaining state grammar schools. Some others will come from the sort of schools favoured by our Left-wing elite, which pretend to be ‘comprehensive’ but in fact select on the basis of postcode, wealth or religion.

Something similar happens at the opposite end of the labour market. In such unposh sectors as the building trade, employers understandably prefer rigorously schooled Poles to the young victims of British bog-standard comprehensives. That is not the employers’ fault.

People’s fates in life are decided largely by their schools. And many must wish it were not so (as we shall see).

But Mr Milburn (who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school) is, like the whole British political class, a dogged supporter of comprehensive state education.

He can’t admit it’s been a disaster for the poor he claims to speak for. Instead, he blames the employers for picking the recruits they need, not the school system, for destroying the hopes of poor boys and girls early in their lives.

This is deeply unfair, as Mr Milburn’s own press release actually acknowledged in a less-noticed passage: ‘Some of our country’s leading firms are making a big commitment to recruit the brightest and best, regardless of background. They should be applauded.’

In fact, much of the report describes the considerable efforts made by such firms to encourage applicants from poorer backgrounds. And it flatly dismisses claims of old-fashioned snobbery.

There is a fascinating passage on judging people by their accents, in which one interviewee says such things used to happen but have now virtually died out.

The real dead hand of snobbery in this country is to be found among Left-wing elitists, dwelling in their warm pockets of state-funded privilege, refusing, after 50 years of failure, to admit that they are wrong about anything.

The REAL reason for gun massacres?

Another mass killing is followed by the usual thoughtless political and media responses. The last time I looked, the southern states of the USA contained plenty of people with stupid white supremacist views, most of them armed.

Indeed, this has been so for more than a century. At the same time, the past few years have seen gun massacres in this country (Hungerford and Dunblane), Finland, Norway, Germany and Switzerland, and knife massacres in China, a police state where guns are genuinely difficult to obtain.

So it would seem that blaming these events on widespread gun ownership and white racialism doesn’t quite work. If all these events were properly investigated (and few are, because conventional wisdom closes the minds of investigators), my guess is that almost all of the killers would be found to have been taking legal or illegal mind-altering drugs.

Often, as in the case of James Holmes, the Colorado cinema shooter, the facts don’t emerge for many months. Or the authorities refuse to release the killer’s medical history, as they have done in the Sandy Hook case.

Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston murderer, was recently arrested for possession of Suboxone, a drug given to opioid abusers, and suspected of causing personality changes and violent outbursts. A student at his high school described him as a ‘pill-popper’.

It is the use of legal and illegal mind-altering drugs that has hugely increased in recent years. Gun ownership and racial bigotry haven’t. Please think about this.

By scattering morning-after pills into the outstretched hands of girls as young as 13, the state believes it may at last bring down the numbers of unwanted pregnancies.

The signs are that this ferocious medical intervention, now to be given out to under-age girls by chemists, is working. And it is doing so where sex education has not just failed, but has been followed by an accelerating increase in the things it claims to prevent.

The pregnancy figures are falling at last, though sexually transmitted diseases continue to spread rapidly, suggesting that sexual activity is not declining.

Well, it’s success of a sort. We’re well on the way to the loveless nightmare of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which sex has been completely separated from the making of babies.

A few questions arise. Is there any remaining justification for sex education now we have turned pregnancy into an easily curable disease? And does anyone know what the long-term effect this potent chemical dose will have on the bodies of those who use it? Or are they unwittingly taking part in the trials that will find that out?

Don’t blame Rachel for our stupidity

I’m surprised that more people don’t emulate Rachel Dolezal and pretend to be black, or members of some other minority.

Our gullible society rushes to reward such status, often with jobs and money. As I am actually partly Cornish, I am frequently tempted to start some sort of Cornish liberation front in the Home Counties, where our language rights are badly neglected.

I fear to do it because it would probably work. Within months I’d have an EU grant and there would be Cornish-language library books in Stow-on-the-Wold. In which case I’d probably have to actually learn Cornish.

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How the Tories Became New Labour

Some of you may have noticed, in a recent debate on the election at Hay-on-Wye, a reference I made to John le Carre’s first-class novel ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’. I spoke of the ‘very clever knot’ described by le Carre and untangled by George Smiley, by which everything was made to appear the opposite of what it was.

 

It worked like this. The KGB agent who was actually debriefing the mole inside British intelligence was believed by MI6 to be a Soviet Traitor, the exact opposite of the case. Those who went regularly to meet this KGB man in a secret safe house in North London (surrounded by elaborate precautions)  believed they were running a deep-penetration agent inside Soviet intelligence.  One of this team of debriefers (you’ll have to read the book to find out which)  was in fact an MI6 traitor, who thus managed to hold meetings with his KGB controller, on MI6 premises, at the British taxpayer’s expense and under the protection of MI6. His senior colleagues helped to provide cover for this traitor.  The very boldness of the deception made it all the more effective. When it was exposed, the disbelief and fury of the duped was enormous. Had it not been for the detective genius of George Smiley, it might never have been exposed at all. Nothing is, but what is not. Everything is the opposite of what it seems to be. In that way, those who might act against it become its active and committed defenders.

 

Some remarks on Monday by James Harding, the head of BBC news, brought this to mind again.

 

The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday : ‘THE boss of BBC News has denied any trace of Left-wing bias despite a series of rows over its coverage in the run-up to the election.

James Harding insisted that the Corporation is always 'scrupulously impartial' and rejected as 'fable' claims that it is prejudiced against Right-wing parties.

However, he did admit to some failings, saying that the BBC had allowed political polls - which predicted some form of coalition - to 'infect [its] thinking'.

As a result, he said, they spent too much time examining which parties might do deals with each other instead of analysing their policies.

Addressing the accusation of bias, Mr Harding told a conference in London: 'I find this increasingly hard to take seriously.

'In the light of the Conservative victory, what's the argument? That the BBC's subtle, sophisticated Left-wing message was so subtle, so very sophisticated that it simply passed the British people by.'

 

Gosh, how witty.

 

But it depends entirely for its force on the idea that the Conservative Party is in some way ‘right-wing’. What if it’s not, and the BBC’s behaviour helped that party into office? Perhaps it was quite subtle. Then everything’s upside-down, and everyone’s doing the opposite of what they seem to be doing, aren’t they?

 

Now, as we have discussed here, the modern Tory Party is not conservative, and has not been for many decades, if it ever was. It is all but impossible to believe that it once contained, at its heart, such people as Janet Young, a committed and determined foe of the sexual revolution.

 

It is certainly *liberal* in economics, in culture and morality. Many politically unlettered people think of this position, associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as ‘right-wing’.  It certainly conflicts with the pre-1989 ideas of the political left, which until the end of the Cold War was still devoted to state ownership of large chunks of the economy.

 

This devotion, while essential to Soviet Communism,  doesn’t actually have any particularly strong connection with Social Democracy. States which are largely Social Democratic, Germany, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries spring to mind, seem to me to be quite pragmatic about state ownership of the economy, certainly more pragmatic than the 1945 Labour government were.  For the Labour Party under Alastair Campbell to pretend to abandon (which they didn’t really) Clause Four of the old Labour rules, wasn’t a great step. In effect, Harold Wilson had abandoned nationalisation as a policy in the 1960s. I still meet people who think New Labour was ‘right-wing’, when in fact the ideas of New Labour came out of  Eurocommunism, social and cultural radicalism stripped of Soviet impediments, and was crammed with former Marxists who weren’t all that former, which is why they don’t like it mentioned to this day.  

 

The modern Labour equivalent of Clause Four is in fact comprehensive education, something David Blunkett repeatedly pledged never to abandon during the Blair years, and which he legislated to make compulsory in all new schools. This is because it is the absolute key and foundation of Labour’s commitment to ostensible egalitarianism, a position it will not abandon. Of course, its own leaders and rich supporters don’t believe in this, and are very skilled at avoiding it in their own lives. But they do very much want to impose it on the fast-declining independent middle-class, the main opposition to the strong state and the main defender of common sense against dogma.

 

Now we come to the very clever knot in British politics, the one which you must undo to grasp what is actually going on.  For this, readers are strongly recommended to get hold of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, or its earlier hardback version. The Broken Compass’ (they are broadly the same but ‘The Cameron Delusion’ was brought up to date to deal with Cameron Toryism).

 

Read especially the early chapter ‘The Power of Lunch’ (the index, itself a work of art, will find the passage if you look up the name ‘Goslett, Miles’).

 

It recounts the failure of a Freedom of Information request, pursued doggedly by Miles Goslett, to obtain details of a meeting at the Palace of Westminster on 28^th February 2008. The location is important because who went to see whom is also important in working out who was setting the agenda.

 

What we *do* know about this meeting is that it was hosted by David Cameron,  then Leader of the Opposition, and his visitors were Mark Thompson, then Director-General of the Corporation, and Caroline Thomson(no relation – though ‘Thomson and Thompson’ reminds one of the two hopeless detectives in the Tintin books), at that stage the BBC’s chief political commissar. Caroline, whom I know slightly, is very well-connected in the left liberal establishment, especially its pro-EU wing.  Her father was the former Labour MP, later Social Democrat peer Lord Thomson of Monifieth, her husband Roger Liddle, Eurocrat extraordinaire ( from 1997-2004 special adviser to the Blair creature on EU matters), who in turn became Baron Liddle of Carlisle in 2010 (his supporters were Lord Mandelson and Lord (William) Rodgers).

 

This was not a meeting about Tory policy on the BBC (Licence fee, Charter etc). BBC officials were having other meetings with the relevant Shadow Cabinet members about that.

 

This was, I believe, a meeting about the BBC’s policy towards the Tory Party. And that is why they won’t talk about it.

 

The BBC, as Mr Thompson has frankly accepted, had been institutionally hostile to the Tories in the Thatcher era http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/09/lecture-thompson-bbc-interview ,  though he asserted that this was now all in the past.

A more general admission of cultural liberal bias was made by Andrew Marr at a famous ‘impartiality summit’ recorded here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-411846/We-biased-admit-stars-BBC-News.html

Round about the same time, some will remember, the conservative media were rather sceptical of Mr Cameron’s re-engineering of the Tories, and concerned that they had been cowed into liberal policies by a fear of the BBC  as we see here in a (BBC) report of a rare speech by the editor of the Daily Mail:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6289751.stm

 

The full text of this speech can be found here

 

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Media/documents/2007/01/23/CudlippDacre.pdf, and contains this passage;

 

‘I recently had lunch with the BBC’s Director General and I don’t think it’s breaking a confidence to reveal that he told me that their research showed that the BBC was no longer perceived as being anti-Tory. “That’s because you’ve broken the buggers”, I said laughing.’

 

He added : ‘Cameron’s cuddly blend of eco-politics and work-life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee – a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for but is a totemic figure to the BBC – his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and Euro scepticism, are all part of the Tories’ blood sacrifice to the BBC God.’

This is very perceptive. The re-engineering of the Tory brand in this period might have been (in my view almost certainly was) aimed at placating the BBC, the arbiter of orthodoxy and the gatekeeper of government.  Suddenly the Tories were Greener than Green, metrosexual, Euro-friendly, comprehensive-friendly, equality-friendly, immigrant friendly. For many of them this was no great effort. The private opinions of the Tory upper deck have for many years been left-liberal, with concessions made at conference-time and during elections, during which these people try to appear to be conservative, by talking tough on crime, immigration, the EU, drugs, human rights, schools etc, in non-specific, non-committal ways which will never translate into real policy.

 

Even odder, in this instance, was that Mr Cameron (whose leftish sexual politics I explored and recorded in my lonely way in 2010, to the interest of nobody,

 

see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/the-lisbon-scandal-and-other-cameron-matters.html

 

went ahead with the legalisation of same-sex marriage without putting it in his manifesto, a very clear sign that his real,  true views are further to the left even than he confessed in his BBC-wooing period before 2010.

There’s also the excellent point made by my old adversary David Aaronovitch, in ‘The Times’ of 29^th April 2008, that ‘Tony Blair's mission, unexplained even to himself perhaps, was to make it not matter whether the Tories came back, as they would be hemmed in by Blairism just as Labour was by Thatcherism’.

 

This may also have helped the BBC come round. But come round it did. In 1997 and afterwards, the BBC did not of course openly shout ‘Vote Labour’. It just used a lot of energy reporting on Tory ‘splits’ and rows. All parties are split, always,  and generally these splits and rows remain minor unless exploited by active media coverage.

 

It also virtually ignored everything they said that wasn’t to do with a split or a row. Then the ‘split’ reporting faded, and indeed the splitometer was directed instead at Gordon Brown’s Labour government. Tory speeches and policy initiatives were reported more fully and more respectfully. The Tories had in short, been presented with the cloak of electability and Gordon Brown had been robbed of it.  Only incredibly expensive, day-to-day, hour-to-hour monitoring across all the channels for years could actually demonstrated this, and who can afford that. It was done on the edge of a remark, or by nuance, timing. It wasn’t organised or directed. It was just permitted, when it previously hadn’t been, and everyone knew it.  Conventional wisdom understood that the Tories were on their way back, and indeed went so far as to believe they could actually win in 2010, which *was* a physical impossibility.  All this was helped by Gordon Brown’s unfashionably conservative manners and style of dress, his rejection of Blairite style, things that made BBC liberals less bothered about whether he won or lost.

 

The election of Ed Miliband, a second Brown, ensured that the Tories would continue to receive the blessings of BBC patronage. I wonder if, had David Miliband been picked instead, things would have been the same. I suspect not, though we shall never know. John Rentoul, of the Independent on Sunday, is a useful Blairite barometer on such things.  I don’t get the impression he is especially grieved by the Labour downfall last month.

 

But that chance to reconnect the BBC with a  Blairite Labour Party has gone. Labour is almost certainly done for now, because the Scottish loss has destroyed it as a national party, probably for good, while  the Tory party has become New Labour. David Cameron truly is the heir to Blair, and UKIP can scrabble for the Noisy Minority which is all that is now left of a supposed ‘Silent Majority’ that, by staying silent and indeed endorsing its own destruction by voting Tory, allowed itself to be marginalised and defeated.

Without Comment

Here is a transcript, without comment,  of an exchange on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme which took place on Tuesday 26th November 2013.  I believe it to be accurate.

 

After a series of anonymous interviews with young women at South Bank University about women’s changed views on promiscuity,  John Humphrys introduced Professor Kaye Wellings, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to discuss her report on more relaxed attitudes to sex. After some preliminaries, the following exchange took place at roughly 7.36 a.m.

 

Professor Wellings: ‘We’ve got a major change in the status of women over the last 20, 30 years which you would expect to carry through into their sexual lifestyles. You have also had in the last half-century a severance of sex from its reproductive consequences And then of course there’s the …

 

JH ‘Well once the Pill came along, obviously that changed everything…

 

KW: ‘Yeah, sure.  And other things, assisted reproduction, medical abortion and so on. But as your young women at the South Bank said,  it’s also about the media and social representations of women’s behaviour so that the old divide, the old double standard between a man as a super-stud and a girl as a slag is eroding’

 

JH: “Oh, that’s interesting, yeah and, and good…. …I mean that.. that... hardly necessary to make a value judgement on it, but , but quite encouraging in a sense, but if that is what’s happening to women it means that women are no longer being regarded in the way they were once regarded, which, which had to change.’

 

 

 

 

 

So Much for 'Father's Day' - in a Country Where Fatherhood is Dying Out

By the end of his or her childhood, a British boy or girl is much more likely to have a TV set in the bedroom than a father at home.

 

Our 45-year national war against traditional family life has been so successful that almost 50% of 15-year-olds no longer live with both their parents. At the same time we have indulged our neglected and abandoned young with electronics, so that 79% of children aged between 5 and 16 have bedroom TVs.

 

And as we soppily mark ‘Father’s Day’ with cards, socks, sentimentality and meals out, we should remember that in almost all cases the absent parent is the father.

 

There is no doubt about the facts here. Let me list some of them. The cost of our wild, unprecedented national experiment in fatherlessness is now £49 billion each year, more than the defence budget. This figure, currently costing each taxpayer £1,541 per year, is rising all the time, and has gone up by almost a quarter since 2009.

 

The money partly goes on handouts and housing which an old-fashioned family with a working father would not have needed. Partly it goes on trying to cope with the crime, disorder, truancy, educational failure, physical and mental illness and general misery which are so much more common among the fatherless than in those from stable homes.

 

And there is more to come. One in three marriages ends in divorce, while many who would once have married never even bother.  Roughly 300,000 families of all kinds separate every year. There are now three million children growing up in fatherless homes.  Another 58 fatherless families are launched every day.  And be in no doubt that it is the fathers who are, overwhelmingly, absent in these new-style modern households. Only 8% of single-parent homes are headed by a lone father.

 

Four in ten children being brought up by their mothers – nearly 1.2 million - have no contact with their fathers at all.

 

Another 67,000 (In England alone) dwell in the organised despair and neglect which are cruelly misnamed ‘care’.

 

In the last 40 years the proportion of adults who are married has sunk from 70% to fewer than half.  The number of single adults has hugely increased (up 50%). A quarter of a million people each year spend Christmas alone. One in six adults now cohabits, compared to one in 50 in the 1960s.  Cohabiting households, which have doubled in number since 1996, are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the United Kingdom.

 

By 2015, there will be two million lone parents (up 120,000 since 2010); more than 24% of children will be in lone-parent households.

 

It matters. Young people from fractured homes are statistically twice as likely to have behaviour problems as those from stable households. They are more likely to be depressed, to abuse drugs or alcohol, to do badly at school, and end up living in relative poverty.

 

Girls with absent fathers (according to studies in the USA and New Zealand) have teenage pregnancy rates seven or eight times as high as those whose fathers have stayed in meaningful touch with them.

 

By contrast, the link between marriage and good health is so strong that one study showed the health gain achieved by marrying was as great as that received from giving up smoking.

 

In all these dismal statistics of marriage decline and failure, the United Kingdom is one of the worst afflicted among advanced nations.  And in many of the poorest and most desolate parts of the country, the problem is concentrated into certain areas where fathers in the home are an endangered species.

 

From Gosport in Hampshire, to Cardiff, Liverpool, Easington in County Durham, Inner London, Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield, there are whole city wards where at least 60% of the households are headed by a lone parent.      

 

And it is in such circumstances that a procession of serial boyfriends, a type of domestic arrangement closely associated with physical and sexual abuse of children, is most likely to exist.

 

This great fleet of hard truths is known in general to those who govern the country, and in hard detail to millions who suffer from their consequences.

 

How, as a country and a people can we manage to be so indifferent to them, when we claim to set fatherhood and fathers at the centre of our culture? The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words ‘Our Father’. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’. The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

 

If he is gone, who takes his place ? Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfilment for man, woman and children.’

 

But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is,  fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.

 

And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.

 

I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’.

 

The CSJ is very close to the Tory party, to the government and to Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary. So it is startling to find that the report is coldly savage in its dismissal of the Cameron government’s efforts to fix this problem.

 

‘Conservatives say they would have been more radical on family policy had it not been for their Liberal Democrat colleagues, but even those commitments made in the Programme for Government have been ignored so far.

 

‘So for all of the promises the Conservatives made in Opposition, for all of the gimmick giveaways politicians have unveiled for middle-class families, and for all of the safe ‘families come in all shapes and sizes’ rhetoric ministers have used for decades, hardly anything has been done to resist the tsunami of family breakdown battering the United Kingdom’.

 

The authors continue: ‘Saying that family form is irrelevant is inaccurate and ultimately counter-productive…’ This is true. Someone ought to speak up for marriage. But is it entirely true to say that ‘Backing commitment and setting a goal of reducing instability does not equate to criticising or stigmatising lone parents.’? Doesn’t approval of the one inevitably stigmatise the other? And if you aren’t prepared to do that, will you get anywhere?

 

They also assert that ‘marriage is not a right-wing obsession’, though, speaking as a right-winger I rather think it is. It certainly isn’t a left-wing priority.  They argue : ‘People throughout society want to marry, but the cultural and financial barriers faced by those in the poorest communities thwart their aspirations’.

 

It is certainly true that some benefits actively discourage couples from being or staying married.

 

But it is the ‘cultural’ barriers I want to talk about here. Anyone who dares to discuss this subject is quickly accused of ‘hating’ or wishing to persecute ‘single mothers’. Any article on the subject is supposed (maybe it is an EU regulation?) to contain a disclaimer saying that many single mothers do a great job.

 

 

Well, I neither hate single mothers nor wish to persecute them, and I am perfectly prepared to believe that many of them do a great job. But it isn’t the point. The main problem with single mothers is that they are acting rationally, in a society which actively encourages them with money and approval. Who can blame them?

 

There is a lot of piety about this. Suggest that anyone deliberately gets pregnant (or rather, in this age of morning-after pills and abortion on demand, deliberately stays pregnant) to get a house and a handout, and you are angrily dismissed as some kind of snobbish hate-figure.

 

Well, mightn’t it be true? As far as I know, nobody has ever researched the motives of the young women who accept this sparse arrangement. I wish they would. But is it unreasonable to suggest that if you reward certain types of behaviour with money and housing, and with social approval, then that behaviour will increase?

 

It’s not just me. Adele Adkins once recalled ‘The ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government’, adding: ‘That ain’t cool.’ Perhaps successful singing stars can get away with saying what others only think.  

 

I don’t myself see that it is a particularly harsh view to hold. A baby is a wonderful thing, and many young women long to be mothers, and good luck to them. Many modern males are a pretty unattractive proposition, so why marry one, if the state will give you a home and an income on your own?

 

Meanwhile men have learned enough about the divorce courts to know that marriage is a big risk. If it goes wrong, they are the ones who have to move out, and yet they will still have to pay.

 

Why not take advantage of the fact that the state - which once demanded the father’s name when any baby was registered, so he could be made to pay for his child - now happily allows us to leave this space blank? 

 

My guess is that doing anything really radical about this scares all politicians too much. For the War on Fatherhood is protected by a great taboo.

 

In every family, every workplace, every school, every pub, every weekend football or cricket team, every political party, every church congregation, there are now large numbers of people who signed up for the Great Cultural and Moral Revolution which was launched in the 1960s and swept through the land like a mighty rushing wind in the 1970s.

 

The fiery heart of this was the Divorce Law Reform Act of 1969.  This change was very popular.  It is interesting to note that, just before it began its way through Parliament, Engelbert Humperdinck’s hymn for would-be divorcees, ‘Release Me’, pushed the Beatles off the top of the music charts for weeks on end.

 

The new law pretty much embodied the song’s plea ‘Please release me, let me go/For I don't love you any more/To waste our lives would be a sin/Release me and let me love again.’

Portrayed at the time as a kindness to those trapped in loveless marriages, the new law made it much easier to end a troubled union than to fight to save it.

 

And once this had become general, marriage changed with amazing speed from a lifelong commitment into a lifestyle choice. And from a lifestyle choice it changed into a risky and often inconvenient contract. Divorce wasn’t shameful or embarrassing any more. The country was littered with male divorcees complaining about the division of the property and the child support payments. 

 

Men began to calculate that marriage wasn’t worth it. And the Pill and easy abortion (other parts of the 1960s revolution) put an end to shotgun weddings.

 

Who, in such a society, could condemn the pregnant teenager without hypocrisy? Hardly anyone, especially rackety politicians and flexible churchmen.  The middle classes had abandoned lifelong marriage with a sigh of relief. The aristocracy had never cared for it much. Even the Royal Family was riddled with divorce.

 

The housing-estate poor were simply following the same moral code as those who posed as their betters, and weren’t actually better at all. And the adults of the era have all had a lot of fun as a result. But everyone, throughout this great period of release and revolt, forgot one small thing. What was to become of the children?

 

Now we are finding out. And a generation which has never known fathers, or family life, or fidelity or constancy, is now busy begetting children of its own. What will become of them? How will boys who have never seen a father learn to be fathers?

 

I’d have a moral panic at this stage, if I thought it would do any good. But perhaps it will be the victims of this selfish generation, our children and grandchildren, who – having suffered its effects - will re-establish stable family life in our country.

 

**A Hostile contributor complains about 'a distinct lack of citations' in thjis article. Apart from the fact that newspaper articles are not normally footnoted, the piece clearly states:

"I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’."

 

This document is fully footnoted and can be found here :

http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/UserStorage/pdf/Pdf%20reports/CSJ_Fractured_Families_Report_WEB_13.06.13.pdf

 

 

 

How does the State get away with grooming 13-year-old girls for illegal underage sex?

As the age of sexual consent is 16, what are state employees doing fitting contraceptive implants in 13-year-old girls? Aren’t they colluding in a criminal act?

These sinister devices are a clear admission by the Government. It actually expects these children to have unlawful sexual intercourse, and wants to make it easy for them.

How strange, given that the one crime we all disapprove of utterly and completely is paedophilia. Even convicted gangsters, rapists, burglars and muggers look down on the paedophiles in their midst (they have another word for them, as they cannot spell or pronounce the official term).

Those who engage in paedophilia are often also accused of ‘grooming’, preparing their victims for violation and abuse.

Yet here we have a policy that directly condones and encourages the sexualisation of children, and is at the very least comparable to the ‘grooming’ we are all so shocked by.

What child, equipped with this rather revolting chemical lump or dose, would not grasp that she was expected by the authorities to act accordingly? I would be very interested to know exactly what the victims of this scheme are told, and how they are chosen.

This thing is done by doctors and nurses, supposedly symbols of rectitude and mercy. It often takes place in schools, where our children are meant to be safe from molesters. It is protected by law. It is paid for by your taxes and mine, extracted under the threat of prison.

Perhaps most sinister of all, it is – like all child-molesting – ‘our little secret’. The girls’ parents are not asked their permission beforehand for their daughters to be corrupted by our sick state. Nor are they told afterwards. This is both totalitarian and evil.

The judges are always ready to confirm that this is no longer a Christian country in anything but name, and did so again on Friday – though I do wonder where they think our laws and their powers come from.

But it is much worse than that. We are turning into a sort of Babylon, only with drizzle and sleet. Almost every sexual practice and habit – with the single exception of faithful marriage – is now encouraged by the state.

First, the state poisons young minds with so-called sex-education, which is now unleashed in primary schools. Then, when the poor things act on what they have been told, doctors push chemical anti-baby capsules under their skin. I believe this sort of thing is known as ‘harm reduction’.

It all depends what you mean by harm. Having privatised the telephones, electricity and the railways, we have nationalised paedophilia.

West is making things worse for Syria's victims
The BBC is working hard to get us to go to war in Syria. Its incessant coverage is – as it was in Libya and Egypt – mostly dim, partial and unquestioning. This should cease.

If there is a rebellion against a dictatorship, then it must, as far as the BBC is concerned, be noble. If a government defends itself against rebellion, it must, according to the BBC, be wrong.

Great slabs of history tell us that this is not necessarily so. In this case, I tremble for the fate of Syria’s Arab Christians if the Assad regime falls.
Bad is often replaced by worse. This is already happening in Egypt and Libya, though the BBC seldom troubles to record the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’ it welcomed so simple-mindedly.

Perhaps the Corporation is trying to please our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, an increasingly pathetic figure who seems to have mistaken military intervention in foreign countries for conservatism. Someone should also ask him why he gets so outraged about Syria, and was not outraged by equally bloody repression in Bahrain.

It seems that, having been refused UN permission to destabilise Damascus under the blue flag, we are now looking at running guns to the rebels. What British interest is served by this dangerous policy?

The revolt in Syria would long ago have faded away had it not been for the noisy support of Washington and London. Much of the bloodshed and destruction is, I believe, the responsibility of the ‘West’, which has falsely encouraged naive people to believe that Nato helicopters and bombers are just over the horizon.

ID cards: the spectre's still lurking
Since identity cards were abolished long ago, why do we still have an ‘Identity and Passport Service’?

I asked the Home Office, and they treated it as a silly question and snapped dismissively that it would cost too much to change the name. I said I was sure that the plaque on the Home Secretary’s door didn’t still say ‘Alan Johnson’, but they didn’t get the joke. Then I asked the

Department for Education, as it is now known, how much it had cost to get rid of the stupid New Labour name it used to have. For the entire department (far bigger than the Passport Office), it cost £8,995, small change in Government terms.

So why do we still have an ‘Identity and Passport Service’? I wonder if identity cards have really gone for good.

What the Dickens?
Sad to think, as we mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, that hardly anyone will still read his books 50 years from now.

What with mass ‘dyslexia’ (otherwise known as very bad reading teaching), and the takeover of childish imaginations by TV and the internet, reading books for pleasure will soon be as rare as seedcake and clay pipes.

You can't replace warships with empty words
The more David Cameron rattles his rusty sabre, the more I fear for the Falklands. Margaret Thatcher nearly lost them, by proposing to scrap much of the Navy and withdrawing HMS Endurance. Luckily for her, the Argentinians didn’t wait till we had sold or melted down the ships that formed the Task Force, or she’d be a footnote.

Now, we could not possibly take the islands back if we lost them again, and I am not convinced we are strong enough to hold them against a determined attack.

We also have many fewer friends in the world than we had in 1982. I dread waking up one morning and hearing that Port Stanley is once again in Argentine hands.

Mr Cameron hopes to look tough by boasting about ship deployments. But while I don’t want to give too much away, our ships may not be well suited to the task they face. And they can’t stay for ever.

He should boast less, and try to rebuild the Navy he has cut so clumsily, before it is too late.

Will men ever take the contraceptive pill?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

The excitement over a new and supposedly better contraceptive pill is a sign that many women still - quite reasonably - worry about taking this rather frightening medication, which is designed not so much to do them good as to fool their bodies into behaving in an unnatural fashion.

The more I think about it, the more I am amazed that so many people have been ready to do such radical, powerful things to their most complicated and powerful working parts. Do we really know what we are doing?

And I am quite sure that men would not willingly swallow a tablet that did anything comparable to them and to their masculinity. Talk of a male pill will, I suspect, always come to nothing. Anyway, what woman would trust a man to take it regularly? He isn't the one who will get pregnant if he has forgotten to swallow his capsule.

Long ago I looked into the history of the pill and found that one of its main sponsors, Margaret Sanger, was a bizarre fanatic who believed so strongly in sexual 'freedom' that she urged her husband to take a mistress.

Eventually Sanger got together with the immensely rich old eccentric Katharine McCormick, who thought motherhood was tyranny and wanted to liberate women from it. They encouraged and paid for the research that led to the invention of the pill.

And they got their revolution. In fact, I cannot think of anything in politics or economics in the past 50 years that has had such an enormous effect on so many lives. But, in my view, not quite the effect that many people imagine.

It is always portrayed as a great liberator of women. But, once it became established, surely it was men who were liberated by it? They have grown to think they are entitled to expect women to be infertile, that this is their normal state. Sex is much more readily available, and - as far as liberated men are concerned - it is the woman's problem if it has the unwanted (by the man) consequence of pregnancy.

And so men are no longer made to pay the price for sex they used to have to pay - marriage, or even commitment. That doesn't matter so much when women are young. But what about later, when they decide that perhaps they do want children after all, and marriage looks more attractive as a way of life? Men - much less scared by the onset of middle age and used to getting what they want without giving much in return - face no pressure to behave, or to be unselfish.

I cannot help thinking that, however much it has made life easier and simpler, the contraceptive pill has a dark and unpleasant side, which is not discussed often enough.