Daily Mail, April 29 2002

The Prime Minister is under siege. He has suggested that child benefit should be docked from parents whose children truant or persistently commit crime. This is an astonishing proposal.

For it would not only take an axe to the sacred Labour principle of universal child benefit; it would also introduce the revolutionary - and desirable –notion that welfare should be conditional upon its recipients’ behaviour.

Yet he has floated this suggestion in a vacuum. He appears to have ignored, for example, the labyrinthine complexity of the benefits system, and the fact that withdrawing child benefit would trigger other welfare payments to compensate.

No wonder his party has blown a collective gasket. No wonder Gordon Brown is said to be opposing it, since his whole welfare strategy is based on giving money to relieve child poverty irrespective of family structure or behaviour.

No wonder it has provoked the charge that this is just another gimmick, dreamed up in panic because Blair has lost the plot on juvenile crime.

But it is significant that Blair is being backed by David Blunkett, who thinks deeply about social responsibility and the part played in this by the family. That indicates that this attempt to inject a modicum of responsibility into family life betrays a desperate confusion over the family at the very heart of New Labour.

Blair understands that parental responsibility has been eroded. But his own policies have driven a stake through the intact family, the crucible of personal accountability, and have done nothing to put responsibility into welfare. Pandora’s box has been thrown open, and the result now is whole neighbourhoods where fathers are non-existent, resulting in violent children, uncontrolled juvenile crime and the unpunished killing of Damilola Taylor.

Blair is said to have been shocked by the fact that most truants when tracked down are accompanied by an adult. It is certainly true that at the core of juvenile crime and anti-social behaviour lie the indifference or even active connivance of grossly irresponsible parents.

But the government has already tried to tackle this with parenting orders, anti-social behaviour orders, getting tough with parents who threaten teachers, and so on. All to precious little effect.

The overwhelming reason why children are out of control is family collapse and mass fatherlessness. It is this that links the Peckham estate in south London where Damilola Taylor died to the school in the little German town of Erfurt, where a teenage gunman mowed down 16 people before turning the gun on himself.

Family collapse can produce children whose sense of themselves is catastrophically wrecked by the atomisation of the partnership that created their existence in the first place. The resulting emotional maelstrom, nihilistic despair and sometimes murderous rage often place them way beyond the control of lone parents, however hard and commendably they may try.

Nevertheless, the government has refused to recognise that the collapse of marriage is the problem. Instead, Gordon Brown says that the priority is to relieve the poverty of needy children. To this has been welded on the Labour orthodoxy that every relationship is of equal value. For Tony Blair, no less, is anxious to avoid ’stigmatising’ unmarried parents.

In this way, his government has utterly betrayed both needy children and all those at the mercy of their lawlessness. For it defines ‘need’ as money. But money is not the issue. The mother of the brothers who were acquitted of Damilola Taylor’s murder has said of these serial hoodlums that they have wanted materially for nothing.

The deepest need of such children is to be looked after by both their mother and their father. Giving money and other incentives like housing and child care to lone parents means that more children will be fatherless. And in any event, fatherlessness is a prime cause of child poverty.

Yet all this is never acknowledged. Instead, children are used as hostages to adult irresponsibility. If you doubt this, try a simple thought experiment. When fathers go to jail, their children suffer from poverty. So would anyone suggest a ‘prison benefit’ to meet their needs? Of course not; it would seem a preposterous reward for crime.

Blair cannot grasp that the main engine of mass fatherlessness is the absence of stigma. His policies signal that the problems of family breakdown can be solved instead by mothers going out to work and fathers paying maintenance. This is crazy.

At every level, society has simply stopped setting boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. Delinquent children are treated as if they were adults with rights. Teachers or social workers can’t restrain them without falling foul of some rights-based law.

The police have abandoned the streets to the child gangs. If they do catch them, such children play the adult system by entering not guilty pleas, triggering the massive delays and revolving-door farce of the youth courts, which have neither the resources nor the authority of the adult courts to stop such abuses.

Quite simply, our society now indulges adults as if they were children and treats children as if they were adults.

What would a sane system look like? It would mean youth justice run on quite different principles to the adult courts, so that children running amok could be dealt with promptly and appropriately.

It would mean investing in expensive special schools and secure accommodation, so that many more of these children can be locked up and given the routines, boundaries, and education that they so badly miss in their home lives and ordinary schools, and which are the only chance of rescuing both them and the communities they terrorise.

Above all, it means sending out the utterly unequivocal signal that it is simply not acceptable to bear children who cannot be properly raised and supported. That means that instead of equipping teenage mums with the flats, benefits and child care that connive at their fantasy of independence, they should be required to live with their own parents or in mother and baby homes.

It means reversing the policy of never prosecuting teenage boys for the serious offence of sex with under-age girls.

And it means tearing up the benefits system now destructively geared to mothers and children alone, and replacing it with tax allowances for married couples with dependent children, along with hardship payments for deserted or mistreated spouses.

That is because the only justification for the state getting involved in family life is not because people have a right to benefits, or because of the slippery concept of ‘need’, but because society has a vested interest in supporting marriage, from whose collapse the taxpayer is paying the massive bill for spiralling youth crime, ill health, the erosion of commitment to the old and the gross irresponsibility of the adult world.

In our most shattered communities, the breakdown of norms of behaviour has reached such proportions that it is on the scale of a social emergency. The Prime Minister talks of restoring responsibility. If only he understood what this meant.