Missing the obvious

Chris Pond, the ex-Labour MP who now is now the chief executive of the charity One Parent Families writes today in the Guardian. He feels that what is required to get single parents working is even more state funded childcare. It may be seen as somewhat ironic that he should be writing this today of all days.

We have just seen the third murder in south London apparently associated with black gangs and the propensity of their members to settle little local tiffs with guns. There have been widespread comments pointing to the connection between a lack of fatherly presence and the disaffection of black youths.

Elsewhere, Mr Cameron, it is reported, is going to suggest that the state should intervene more actively in order to 'compel' men to look after their children. The BBC reports,

"We urgently need to encourage a culture of intervention. In a healthy society, children are the responsibility not just of their parents, but of the whole community," he will say.

No Mr Cameron, state intervention, and any indication that it is required, is the sign of a sick society. Mr Cameron's conversion to state compulsion is made quite obvious by his reference to other European countries where sanctions are applied to ensure fathers stayed with their families, although a worthless sop was thrown in the direction of traditional Tory belief by stating that marriage and families should be supported. Ideas that the care of children should be a community, rather than a family, responsibility have done enough damage already.

Then we have Alan Duncan, in an obviously co-ordinated pas de deux with Mr Cameron, who suggests that certain youths are living the plot of William Golding's novel 'The Lord of the Flies' for real. In some ways it would be nice if they were. At least we could take comfort from the fact that they had read the book. A task, I suspect, way beyond the ability, or range of interest, of south London's black youth gangs.

It has also been reported this week that the preponderance of girls over boys entering university continues, while this morning there was yet another report on the Today programme drawing attention to the fact that the highest academic achievers in schools are the children of ethnically Chinese and Indian parents. Indian, incidentally, does not include Muslim Pakistanis, whose priorities tend to lie with routes to paradise rather than routes to academic achievement. Still, they don't bunk off school so much which is at least one positive.

So what, if anything, ties all these disparate stories together? Mr Pond is the key. To say that Mr Pond is blind does a terrible discourtesy to those who cannot see. Now I appreciate that some children may only have one parent for various reasons. One parent could die, the parents could split up, or there may only have been one parent in the first place.

I believe I am correct in saying that the vast majority of people who marry and subsequently part, remarry. As the number of one parent families caused by the death of one member must be relatively small, we are left with the fact that the majority of single parent families are that way from the start. They are not the result of broken homes, they are the result of incomplete homes in the first place.

And what does Mr Pond see as the answer to this? Let's encourage it, he says, by rewarding single parent households with even greater amounts of other peoples money to pay for child care. Yes, let's do that Mr Pond, and if we really try our absolute hardest we could end up with all children being brought up in single parent households.

Now, offensive as it is to feminists and equality-mongers, it is nevertheless a fact that throughout over a million years of human existence the best way that humanity has found of rearing children is within a two parent family, with a woman, at least in the early years, providing full-time, or at least nearly so, the care that children need. This backed up by a father who provides the necessities of life for the family and provides additional care for the children.

This state of affairs, which was accepted as the ideal, has been undermined over the last roughly thirty years by a feminist critique of society which casts men in the role of wastrel, violent exploiters, backed up by a gospel of valueless equality which fails to distinguish worth between one lifestyle or another. It matters not whether a child is brought up in a single parent or in a traditional family. Both, it is screeched at us, are individual choices of equal validity.

The proponents of these bizarre ideas have infiltrated government, education, social charities, local authorities and the universities. Anywhere where they can find a way of warping society in the direction of their crazed ideas. We have benefit systems, which far from encouraging individuals to work, actually penalise them if they do. We have charities, such as Mr Pond's, demanding another billion or so of tax payers money to fulfill their dystopean dreams.

There is a causal chain which leads from destruction of the family to single parenthood to a lack of male role models in the shape of fathers and teachers. Along the way it promotes disaffected male youths to variously embrace drugs, guns, and antisocial behaviour or dismiss education as pointless. At best their heroes are footballers, at worst gun toting drug dealers.

It finishes with men who are bewildered as to what their role in life should be as they are not wanted for the one thing that men do well. Work hard to take care of women and children. All the time this awful progress of social destruction is being boosted by the financial reward of the behaviour which causes it.

Worse still, it acts as a positive feedback system. The fewer men that become good fathers, the fewer men that advance themselves through education, the fewer men that enter education as teachers, all of whom provide the leadership that boys need, the more single parent families will be brought into existence.

The family structures of the Chinese and Indians have yet to be infected by this cancerous gnawing at the fabric of society. That is why they tend to do better at school. They have two parent families who provide the stability, care and enthusiasm for education which the British once had. Even though Muslims may not share this enthusiasm for western secular education, they do at least have the social structures in place which mean that their children grow up in supportive but disciplined homes.

Addendum: King Lear's comment deserves to be read.