I was as tickled (in a teeth-grinding kind of way) as I was rendered aghast by that ineffable humbug Roy Hattersley in the Guardian today. Aghast because he was defending -- nay, extolling -- Children's Minister Margaret Hodge's Soviet-style programme to tell parents how to bring up their children. Hodge opined last week that family life should not be a private affair bcause the consequences to society of its failing were severe. Consequently, the state had every right to tell parents how to bring up their children and she was intending to do just that in a myriad ways shortly to be unveiled before our mesmerised gaze.

This is simply astounding. This is the government that has justified its removal of the privileges and supports for marriage because family life is a 'private' matter in which the state must not interfere. Accordingly, it has promoted instead the myth that all family lifestyles are of equal value -- even though it is demonstrably and conclusively proven that mariage is the best protection for family members -- particularly children -- from abuse, poverty, and physical and emotional ill-health, and that the problems of parenting are infinitely exacerbated by having to bring children up alone and unsupported by their other parent. Having thus created countless inadequate parents and even more countless distressed and traumatised children, Hodge's government now says parents can't cope and so the government will have to step in. In other words, having helped destroy properly functioning family life, the state will now take it over instead on the grounds that it needs 'help'.

This is nothing other than an attempt to nationalise the family. On BBC Radio Four's The World at One last week, I said precisely this after Hodge was interviewed. This is where Hattersley comes into the story. The vain hope that no individual with even the sketchiest knowledge of the evils of Communist control over family life, and the fundamental value of the family as the supreme protection for the individual against totalitarian state control, could possibly endorse Hodge's preposterous argument was dashed upon reading his column. Yup, Hattersley -- long-term advocate, in effect, of state control of children's minds and their government-engineered place in society through ruthless state educational control -- thought it was a truly fabulous idea:

'At last a member of the government has described the "state" - which is no more than the collective will of the people - as "a force for good". It was a mistake to use the verb "intrude" to describe the help that the community can give to families, but that was a minor flaw in an otherwise impeccable performance...However, intervention is not - as I understand it - the noun that best describes the principle on which the government will base its family policy. If what Ms Hodge said on the radio (and later to a meeting of the Institute for Public Policy Research) is to be believed, all she wants to do is offer advice and support. Who doubts that a proportion of parents need both and that at least as many will welcome all the help they can get? Not to provide it would be an abdication of a progressive government's duty.'

It appears that Hodge had subsequently protested that all she wanted to do was offer advice and support. But parents already get advice and support from armies of welfare workers. What the government is moving into is quite different -- pushing mothers out to work while schools look after the children instead from breakfast to dinner time; ordering or inducing parents to conform to state ideas of child care through parenting orders or SureStart programmes; and now, we are told, producing booklets telling parents how to do everything, from what kind of food not to give their children to what kind of TV programmes they should watch.

But here's the funny bit. Hattersley began his paean of praise for Hodge thus:

'Last Friday, I switched on The World at One when it was half over. So I do not know the name of the egregious ass who announced that the government plans "to nationalise the family". But I did catch the name of the politician who rebutted that manifest absurdity with admirable common sense and absolute conviction. It was Margaret Hodge...'

So guess who the egregious ass -- later described as the

'nameless female Savonarola at the top of the programme'

was? You got it. Except that I wsn't at the top of the programme. I was in the middle, after Hodge and before Theresa May, whom he also heard. So why didn't Hattersley name me? Was it a) because he was so enthralled by Hodge's vision of the socialist utopia that he temporarily blacked out in a swoon; or b) because I am so great an enemy of the said socialist utopia and the nationalisation of family, children and every last redoubt of a free society that I have now become She Who Cannot Be Named, and airbrushed out of the public prints altogether like in Stalin's photo albums?

Posted by melanie at November 29, 2004