Daily Mail, September 16 2002

The single greatest problem of our time is the progressive disintegration of the family, an unprecedented calamity which is not only causing a rising tide of misery and harm but is undermining some of our society’s most important values.

So what is the response when Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith highlights the scourge of fatherlessness, the risks to children from their mothers’ transient boyfriends and the crying need for politicians not to take refuge in moral ‘neutrality’ over the family? Why, John Humphrys attacks him on the Today programme over his party’s position on repeal of Section 28, the law prohibiting councils from promoting homosexuality.

Er, hello? Are we really supposed to think that with an illegitimacy rate of some 40 per cent, the single most important question for the nation is whether or not councils should promote a gay lifestyle?

Despite the impression given by the media, the proportion of gay people in our society is minute. The crisis over the family is overwhelmingly a crisis of heterosexual behaviour.

As a pamphlet published today by Civitas, the independent institute for the study of civil society, makes clear, the disintegration of the family is taking a terrible toll on children.

In general, children from single-parent households are more likely than those in intact families to suffer deprivation and ill-health, to get into trouble at school, suffer physical and sexual abuse, drink, take drugs and commit crime, contract sexually transmitted diseases and become teenage parents.

Adults suffer too. Lone parents are poorer, more depressed and more unhealthy, and separated fathers have higher death rates, drink more heavily and have more unsafe sex.

Nevertheless, ministers have indicated that they will try again to repeal Section 28. The cynical purpose is to expose the profound divisions in the Tory party between those who propound a heartless, manipulative and utterly destructive libertinism, and those who are developing a concept of social justice that helps protect and liberate the vulnerable rather than do them more harm.

Duncan Smith belongs firmly to the latter camp. These decent, principled instincts are leading him to resolve the problem of articulating a moral position without appearing harsh or shrill.

His speech last Friday, in which he updated William Beveridge’s five giant social evils, was an intelligent and even audacious attempt to reposition his party on the moral and compassionate high ground.

For Duncan Smith has understood two things: that this ground is vacant; and that the social libertines in his party, despite their claims to ‘social inclusion’, would in fact turn society into an even harsher, more self-centred and amoral place.

The territory is vacant because Labour has simply abandoned the vulnerable. The old are turfed out of care homes that are forced to close. The sick cannot find a hospital bed. Children are running wild through the breakdown of family life.

Family and society are indissolubly linked. If there is to be such a thing as society, the family has to be defended.

Faced, however, with many constituents in the leafy shires who may be divorced, or who have children who are cohabiting or are lone parents, many Tories don’t know what to say to them.

But the fact remains that most people yearn to make attachments that endure. They want not to be alone. They want to do the best for their children. The pressures of today’s society are making achieving this more and more difficult.

The political path through this minefield is to avoid blame, and to emphasise instead how to help improve people’s lives. To find ways to tackle fatherlessness. To make it easier for people to stay together, both financially and emotionally. To address above all the sexual precocity and exploitation of young children.

Foolish people high up in the Tory party think that by going along with lifestyle choice, they will make themselves relevant, modern and electable. But they have fundamentally misunderstood both why they lost the last two elections, and the basis of Tony Blair’s appeal.

He was elected not because people wanted more family disintegration. Quite the opposite: people believed society was broken and he would repair it.

He has failed to do so. Indeed, the fractures have notably deepened in those areas that connect us to each other: the public services and family life. His government has conducted a remorseless vendetta against the two-parent family. And it is beyond belief that he is presiding over a relaxation of the drugs laws, which will cause untold harm and ruin thousands of young lives.

In this socially destructive and amoral vacuum has risen the politics of self, with more and more interest groups pressing their rights agendas.

Which brings us back to Section 28. If another attempt is made to repeal it, Duncan Smith should turn it into a political boomerang.

The Tories have said they are thinking about redrafting it so that it no longer offensively singles out gay people. Very good. It is indeed an anachronism. There is a far wider and graver issue to be addressed: the sexual promiscuity of the young in general.

Section 28 should therefore be replaced by a requirement not to promote or encourage sexual activity by any kind of schoolchildren, regardless of their sexual proclivities.

After all, is it not extraordinary that a society apparently so obsessed with paedophilia should nevertheless actively connive, through so-called public health education programmes, at equipping children for grotesquely premature, harmful and destructive sexual activity?

Is it not a disgrace that under-age children are prescribed contraceptives without their parents’ knowledge of this tacit encouragement to juvenile sexual behaviour? Are we to continue to allow the promotion of activity leading to the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe?

If the Tories went down this route, it would be fascinating to discover whether the government would fight to defend the right of public authorities to promote the general sexual activity of schoolchildren.

It would also enable Duncan Smith to make explicit that gay people are both welcome and valued in his party, but that gay rights do not define either society’s problems or its solutions.

Conservatism is quintessentially a defence system against a perceived threat. When the threat of socialism disappeared, Conservatives found they didn’t know what they should be defending any more. As a result, their shallower members have concluded they must go with the Blairite flow.

Apart from the moral bankruptcy of such a position, it is a tactical error of the first magnitude. For it is quite clear that they should be defending society against a political programme which is unravelling the social bonds of attachment and care, and casting the vulnerable to the wolves.

The Prime Minister, whose whole belief system rests on his delusion that he is repairing society, is deeply vulnerable to such an attack. Duncan Smith has the right agenda. What he painfully lacks is the confidence to trounce both his ludicrous libertines and the sneering amoralists of the liberal media.

But if he learns to raise the political temperature by pressing home his attack with boldness and passion, he may yet have the last laugh over those who have written off both him and his party.

Posted by admin at September 16, 2002