Civitas Blog

Prime Minister Tony Blair used a speech on May 12th to launch a campaign to restore to these benighted shores a culture of respect, especially among their wayward young.

Doubtless it was to boost the respect in which he is held by this group, that, during the general election campaign, the Prime Minister's wife boasted of her husband's prowess as a five-times-a-night man.

In that speech, Blair was quick to disclaim government able to solve the problem, shifting the onus back onto parents. ‘I cannot solve all these problems… I cannot ... raise someone else’s children for them’, he said.

Today it fell to Beverley Hughes, Minister for Children, to acknowledge the limits of the government's power to control the behaviour of young people and to berate their parents -- this time, for not doing enough to discourage them from emulating the nocturnal habits of her boss.

In an interview reported in the Guardian, given in response to concerns about Britain continuing to top the European league-table for teenage pregnancies, Ms Hughes claimed that parents, and not the state, have a decisive role to play in providing children with sex education. ‘We really need parents to now see themselves as making an absolutely unique and vital contribution to this issue… It is a contribution I don’t think anyone else can actually make', the Minister was quoted as having said.

The Guardian was quick to reassure any readers otherwise in danger of choking on their muesli at the thought the government might actually want parents to discourage their teen-age children from indulging in sex that this was not what it was calling for from them. 'Ministers stress that they will not… encourage parents to advocate abstinence',it reported.

So, parents must know their place in the government's sex education programme. They are to play a more active part in it, but only in the government-prescribed manner of teaching their children how to enjoy sex without pregnancy.

In calling for greater parental involvement in the sex education of their children, the government show little sign of wanting to rescind the 1985 land-mark ruling of the House of Lords that upheld the right of NHS doctors to dispense contraceptive and abortion advice and treatment to under-age girls without their needing first to obtain the consent of their parents or even inform them.

One wonders whether government will also want parents to tell their children of the results of medical research also reported in today’s papers that has found ‘women may suffer a permanent decline in sex drive after taking the contraceptive pill.’

In matters of sex education, it seems, the only educative role for parents it wants them to play is to teach their children to live now so as not to play later!