Civitas Blog

A French appeal court has just overruled the decision by a lower French court taken in April of this year to annul a two-year old marriage on the grounds the bride had lied beforehand to her husband as to being a virgin.

Apparently, the bride confessed to her lie on their wedding night after blood failed to appear on the sheets of the bed in which they had consummated their marriage following the ceremony. In seeking an annulment, the husband claimed that he would not have married his wife had he known beforehand that she was not a virgin.

Does anyone know, really know, how best the relentless rise of gang culture might be reversed that has come to afflict so many of Britain's cities? Many of their run-down neighbourhoods bear today greater resemblance to the most depraved sections of south central Los Angeles than they do to the comparatively peaceful leafy suburbs that are often just streets away from them.

Anyone in need of insight into the scale of the problem and the urgency of the need for its resolution should read a truly frightening piece that appeared in last Friday's Times. It was about the gun-bearing drug-running gangs of youths that afflict certain parts of Sheffield where, until recently, many in authority refused to admit publicly that there was such a problem.

"Family structure doesn't matter," is a favourite Labour mantra. The government's keenness to distance itself from confused Tory "family ideals" is understandable, and on the basis of equality, in principle more appealing. There is a problem with Labour's "diversity" embracing position, however, and that is that it's inadvertently also embracing deprivation.

Continued at Comment is Free

To claim, as some leading Tories recently have, that ours is a broken society involves their making two tacit assertions. One is about human societies in general; the other about ours in particular.

A new report from Civitas, Second Thoughts on the Family, finds marriage to be more popular than ever – but a luxury beyond the reach of the poor

Overwhelming majority of Britons want to marry

Defying the idea that marriage is dead, a new Civitas/Ipsos Mori survey of 1,560 young people reveals that the overwhelming majority want to get married:

Marriage: fit for purpose in 21st century Britain

• A nationally representative sample of 20-35 year-olds shows that seven in ten want to marry
• Cohabitation has NOT replaced marriage: nearly eight in ten (79 per cent) of those cohabiting want to marry
• The number one reason why young people want to marry is to make a commitment (47 per cent)
• Just two per cent want to marry for tax reasons
• Less than one per cent think that marriage jeopardises equality between men and women

To tackle the increasing danger of ‘over-hydrated’ parents, those with children are being subjected to a harsh rationing of 2 drinks per visit. Perhaps Wetherspoon’s (famous for cut price alcohol and meal deals) is set to become a guiding light in the battle against binge-drinking, by advocating a sensible approach to responsible parenting?

Wetherspoon’s have asserted “what we don't want is the adult just staying and drinking in the pub while the child is just sitting there”. Ah, so we are also concerned for the mental stimulation of our future generations - “We don't want children there bored while adults drink.”

However, reading between the lines suggests Wetherspoons’ motive might be less admirable, writes Claire Daley.

Yesterday Ed Balls, the secretary of state for children, schools and families, unveiled the government’s plan to make Britain "the best place in the world for our children to grow up in" - writes Claire Daley and Nick Cowen.The so-called “Children’s plan” aims to tackle crucial education and social issues facing children today in the light of recent critical reports by Unicef, which have sparked concern over the state of British childhood.

The government has faced criticism for generating policy which “lacks vision”, so the question is, could the new proposals really revolutionise the British childhood (as Balls has pledged), or it is simply a new excuse to flood teachers’ desks with directives and undefined reviews?

What is a Philistine? Strictly speaking, the Philistines were the Canaanite enemies of the Hebrews living along the southwestern coastline of present-day Gaza. However, its modern usage derives from the great Victorian cultural commentator Matthew Arnold who used the term to describe those who have no conception of the value of art, culture or spiritual values in life. 'The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich... are just the very people whom we call the Philistines.'

It is sad to have to report that the well-known think-tank Demos has just published a report which exposes both it and the report’s author to grave suspicions of philistinism. ‘Publicly-funded culture and the creative industries’ by John Holden, published by Demos, is the most grossly philistine account of the arts, or the ‘creative industries’, that I have ever read.

The Office of National Statistics' release of the latest Social Trends report has brought the issues facing Britain about which we are most concerned into sharp relief. David Green was interviewed on Radio 4's Today program this morning on the consequences of increasing lone parents (listen again here).

Robert Whelan was interviewed by the Daily Mail, commenting on several problems that the social trends report highlights. He also commented on the dangerous trend, sanctioned by the government, of treating poor pupil behaviour differently according to their ethnic background. Minority children over the years have gone from feeling the stings of racism to experiencing the patronising stereotypes of so-called 'anti-racism'. All without even the brief respite of being judged equally as peers regardless of the colour of their skin or religious background.

And finally, Nick Seddon has an article published in the Guardian on local government leisure trusts and their misuse of charitable status to redirect funds from the voluntary sector into providing statutory services.

This week marks ten years of National Marriage Week. And ten years of marriage-less Government policy.

Marriage has been kept off the Left’s agenda in order to give people greater choice. Yet for all its democratic ambitions, the Left’s stance on marriage is jeopardising its very own principles.

‘Every one who receives the protection of society owes ... for the benefit ... a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists ... in not injuring the interests of one another; or rather certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights...
[S]ociety is justified in enforcing [this conduct of] ... those who endeavour to withhold fulfilment.’

So John Stuart Mill wrote in his ‘Essay on Liberty’ which, to this day, remains the best point of departure for classical liberal reflection about which forms of conduct and voluntary association should be permitted by law and which proscribed.

I was put in mind of Mill’s Essay by a brief news story in today’s Times. It concerned objections against the Sexual Orientation Regulations, recently introduced into Northern Ireland and shortly to be extended to mainland Britain, raised by the proprietor of a Bournemouth hotel that caters exclusively for homosexual and bi-sexual men.

These Regulations have been much in the news of late because of their likely impact on those Catholic adoption agencies that, because of the religiously informed moral abhorrence towards homosexual acts many Catholics share, will not place children with gay couples, being unable in good conscience to be complicit in causing them to be brought up in households where such acts are openly engaged in. The effect of the Regulations will be to force such agencies to cease discriminating against homosexuals in this fashion or else shut down.

The Bournemouth hotelier was opposed to the Regulations because they will also make it unlawful for hotels like his to discriminate against heterosexuals in the way they currently do. They too will be forced to close unless they cease catering only for homosexuals which is their whole point. Because they will have this effect, he considers the Regulations to discriminate against homsosexuals!

The left-leaning pressure group, Compass, has launched a campaign against what they refer to as the ‘commercialisation of childhood’.

Two commentary pieces have bothered me today. The first is by Alice Miles in The Times, the second by Deborah Orr in the Independent. Actually, both pieces are notable for their compassion and intelligence. They are well argued and persuasive. In both the general thrust is that the illegality of prostitution forces vulnerable women into dangerous situations, and that if legalised it’s extremely unlikely that the prostitutes in Ipswich would have been killed.

The largest UK study ever to look at why adults develop schizophrenia has found that children born into families which split-up before they reach their 16th birthday, are two and a half times more likely to develop schizophrenia than those raised by parents who stay together.

Comparable to the Future Foundation’s report, ‘The Changing Face of Parenting’, which looked at parenting patterns, is a new American publication ‘Changing Rhythms of American Family Life’. The significant thing about the study (a collaborative work between the American Sociological Association and the Russell Sage Foundation reported in the New York Times) which explores how parents spend their time, is its scale and detail. Building on one of the three authors’ demographic research done for the Census Bureau, ‘time diaries’ were used to chart how families divided up their work, childcare and housework time. This involved interviews with thousands of households by professional interviewers who used a standard set of questions. As with the Future Foundation’s report, what made headlines with this study was the fact that despite an increasing number of working mothers and total working hours in families, the amount of time American parents are spending with their children has risen in the last 40 years.
But perhaps the two most interesting findings are to do with gender equity and the amount of time spent on housework. In relation to the former, the authors state that there is now ‘remarkable gender equity in total workloads’ between mothers and fathers. This claim is based on the fact that although women continue to do twice as much childcare and housework than men in two-parent families, in terms of total unpaid and paid workload, men and women both appear to do around 65 hours a week. Relating to the latter point of interest, time devoted to housework, the study also revealed a steep decline since the 1960s of time women spend on household chores. This finding applied particularly to married women. Furthermore, whilst married women’s housework time has nearly halved, married men’s has more than doubled.
Anastasia de Waal

The Future Foundation, a think tank amongst other things, brought out a report last week telling us that today’s parenting is - contrary to popular belief - better than ever. According to their report, The Changing Face of Parenting, recent concerns about dangerously pressurised childhoods seem to have been misguided. However, a closer examination of the findings suggests that perhaps they don’t present such a break with recent concerns about overly pressuirsed children.

In a landmark decision this week, the European Court of Justice has ruled employers may pay their more experienced staff more than less experienced ones from a belief that extra job experience increases productivity, without needing to justify that belief first.

The Court was called on to decide the matter after employers of a 44 year old female health and safety inspector from Manchester appealed to it against her successful challenge in an employment tribunal against their having paid her less than male colleagues on account of their greater years of service. She argued the practice to be discriminatory, since it was invariably women like her who took time off work to look after their children who fell behind male colleagues as a result.

Thank goodness for this sane ruling. In an age when lesbians and single women are equally as able as married women to have children, whether a woman has a child is entirely up to her. Men hardly come into the reckoning, save through the decision of a woman to involve a man in the upbringing of her child.

After a fortnight of concern about the ‘state’ of childhood, the Archbishop of Canterbury has stepped in: to warn us about the huge pressures that children are under. A key strain Rowan Williams highlighted in an interview this morning with BBC Breakfast, was the ‘relentless’ testing children are now subject to, which starts from a very young age. The saddest part of this particular contributor to the nation’s increasingly unhealthy and unhappy children is that it is so needless. Far worse, in fact, it is actually setting back holistic primary school learning, with inevitable effects on pupils’ later school careers. Last week, fresh evidence came to light of the widespread cramming which is now happening in primary schools. Research found that children who had gained the required level in the tests at the end of Year 2, were found to be significantly below that level when tested informally the subsequent year. Tragically, the purpose of this so-called ‘teaching to the test’ was to reach government targets. Pupils under pressure not for their own benefit, in other words, but for party politics’.

Last Friday, the government was widely reported to have recently requested local councils and primary health trusts specially to target black and mixed race Caribbean youngsters in an attempt to reduce their comparatively high rates of teen-age pregnancy which do so much to make Britain top of the European league-tables for teenage-conception and teenage-motherhood.

In a letter to council and primary health trusts making the request, Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes stated as the government’s reason for making it the fact that:

‘Teenage pregnancy is strongly associated with poor outcomes for both young parents and their children. It contributes to the transmission of poverty, inequality and low aspirations between generations’.

Should women juggle work and childcare? Give up work to look after their children? Or give up having children and opt for straight and narrow career paths? If women do have children, should the government pay for childcare? Or should husbands? Or should mothers themselves? The motherhood debate rages on. Yet the only thing to have become clear is that there simply isn’t a single, feasible solution to the conundrum. We are better off acknowledging this and rather than attempting - and failing - to come up with a miracle policy, striving to facilitate varying options.

Two American researchers form the Universities of Florida International and Miami, Finley and Schwartz, have ‘redone’ Parsons and Bales’ famous 1950s study on fatherhood fifty years on (Volume 7, No.1, 42-55 of Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 2006). The outcome of the revisit is surprising – in that it is surprisingly similar to the outcome fifty years ago. Looking at the ‘characterisation of the fathering role,’ Parsons and Bales’ found that fathering centred on so-called instrumental functions. That is, fathering was more about providing income, protection and discipline, than it was about ‘expressive’ functions – the more emotional aspects of care giving, which were found to be largely mothering functions. The original study covered an ethnically diverse sample of American students from both divorced and in tact families. The aim was to gauge the role that the respondents’ fathers had played in their upbringing. In reproducing the study, Finley and Schwartz have gathered a similar respondent pool. What Finley and Schwartz’s research shows is that 50 years later, despite huge societal change, little has altered in the nature of fathering.

There is an excellent article by Camilla Cavendish in The Times today, arguing for a revaluation of the relationship between the state and the family. I'm reminded that in Brave New World the family is systemmatically fragmented to the point where the most horrific swearword is 'mother'. We have gone too far already. Let's not go there.

In what must surely go down as one of the most bizarre and astonishingly inept decisions by any appeal court in the land (since the last one!), today’s Times reports that an appeal court yesterday awarded primary care for two sisters, aged 7 and 4, to the former lesbian partner of the girls’ 32 year old (biological) mother, who had originally conceived the girls by AID when living with her former partner, now aged 47, but with whom the mother broke up some five year ago.

We have passed this way before.

Yesterday’s appeal court ruling is but the latest episode in a long-running saga of contention between the two former lesbian lovers over the two girls about which I had occasion first to write almost a year ago to the day.

It is reported in today’s Times that, in the north Indian state of Haryana, a doctor has just received a two-year jail sentence for having arranged a number of abortions on female foetuses carried out because of the gender they were.

Apparently, in that part of the world, a girl is somewhat of a liability to her parents. For, upon her marriage, they must stump up a hefty dowry to give to their future son-in-law and then stand by as their daughter is absorbed into the bosom of her new family-by-marriage, along with whatever earnings and other human capital she might bring with her.

Small wonder is it, then, that, with the advent twenty years ago of ultra-sound scans which can detect the sex of a foetus when only 12 weeks old, it has been estimated that something like ten million abortions have been carried out on female foetuses in India, bringing down its ratio of females to males from near par in 1910 to its present level of 927 males for every 1,000 males.

According to the report, the richer the area of India, the greater is the liability that the parents of a girl consider her to be. For example, according to the latest census figures for the Punjab, one of India’s most affluent states, the present ratio of girls to boys is as low as 793 to 1,000.

Precisely because of fear that prospective parents will engage in this same practice here, the NHS forbids them being told the sex of their potential future child when a pregnant woman undergoes her routine scan at 12 weeks of her pregnancy.

Actually, here in Britain, it would be far more likely that, were such a form of sex selection practised at all, it would be male rather than female foetuses who would be liable to culled on account of their sex.

The government’s paternity leave proposals, currently being prepared for the forthcoming Work and Families Bill, have come under attack from those who will be carrying the cost: employers. The government’s plan is to give fathers a standard three months of statutory paid leave and a further three months unpaid. Additionally, new policy will enable mothers to transfer some of their entitlement to the father of their baby. The problem with all this is that employers are worried that the arrangements will be open to abuse. According to Meg Munn, Minister for Women: “Businesses are concerned that while women claiming maternity leave are obviously pregnant, they can’t tell with fathers. Fathers may or may not be married and may or may not be living with them.” And as the Sunday Times pointed out, with the number of births outside marriage now as high as 42%, determining fatherhood is a much harder task. And of course the other issue, also pointed out in the Sunday Times, is that even when a man is genuinely the biological father, how can we be sure that he will use his paternity leave to be paternal?

‘Does marriage make people happy, or do happy people get married?’ is the title of a new paper from economists at the University of Zurich. Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey analysed the ‘causal relationships between marriage and subjective well-being’ using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey. One of the most interesting findings from the data (which spans 17 years) was the alleged impact of different roles taken by each spouse within marriages. According to the author’s analysis, ‘potential, as well as actual, division of labo[u]r seems to contribute to spouses’ well-being’.

Tomorrow is the first day of National Marriage Week. To many (those out of touch with both the stats and the young) Marriage Week might seem like a last ditch attempt to resurrect an antiquated institution. Yet marriage today is far more robust than is publicly acknowledged. 7 in 10 families are still headed by a married couple, and multiple attitude surveys show that young people are as keen as ever to tie the knot. This is not to deny, of course, that significantly more marriages end in divorce than half a decade ago. However, high divorce rates reflect a great deal more than attitudes to marriage, and the number of cohabiting relationships that dissolve is infinitely larger. As Harry Benson, one of the country’s chief champions of marriage is fond of saying, family breakdown in cohabiting relationships has become the new concern, displacing divorce.

Last week, news of Scotland’s unprecedented rise in lone parenthood – since 1997 the figure has risen from 140,000 to 174,000 - re-awoke issues around the relationship between policy and behaviour. Whilst Scotland’s record rise in single parents outstrips the UK’s by 7% (24% compared to 17%), Office for National Statistics figures show that under New Labour the number of lone parents in the UK has risen from 1.6 million to 1.88 million.

Less shackled by the falsely-pc notion that the two-parent family is a thing of the past, too antiquated to be backed by contemporary policy, academics in the USA have contributed extensively to the contemporary body of research which evidences the benefits of the ‘traditional’ family. The latest contribution from across the Atlantic comes out of the economics departments at the University of California and the Claremont McKenna College.

It’s that time of year again – the sparkly trees are in people’s windows, stockings hanging, holly on the doors, mistletoe dangling like a potential rape charge above unsuspecting heads, the morass of heads bobbing through our shopping centres, tripping over their bags of shopping, shoving each other with their bags of shopping, telling each other to sod off with their bags of shopping. And then there’s television – all those vapid entertainments like Eastenders and Desperate Housewives – and cinema and pantomimes and turkeys and mince pies and mulled wine and beer and an armageddon of parties.

So far it’s just Winterval, as they called it, with characteristically obscene banality, in Birmingham, the pre-Christian and the post-Christian cocktail of traditions. Yet so much of what we enjoy at this time of year draws its force from this nation’s Christian heritage. I’m thinking about the Christ in Christmas: Christmas carols – when the idiotic PC lobby in the CofE isn’t de-gendering and de-poeticising them, as Magnus Linklater points out in The Times today – and all the stuff about Bethlehem (where Palestinians have just kicked out the Christians) and the manger and the adoration of the magi, & c.

Few choose to have a puritan Christmas, without presents, without a tree, because both from the Christian and the atheist perspectives there has been what Salman Rushdie calls the chutneyfication of cultures, a blending and mixing and enriching. So the idea that we should try to cut out, in some politically correct way, the Christian bits, apart from being nasty, is patently absurd. Yet there are those who, wrongly believing themselves to be representing the sensitivities of a minority in Britain that is alleged to be offended by the Christianity of our Christmas, want to do just that.

To lose, not only Christmas, but also the KJV, Prayer Book, Order of Service, which are essential to an understanding of our literature, art, music, philosophy and architecture, would leave us noticeably impoverished. The majority, such as those who are flocking to churches for their weddings, and those who love to visit our historic churches and ruins, and those who cram into churches at this time of year, clearly don’t want to see our Christian heritage erased. Even if they are themselves atheists.

Indeed, an understanding of this great world religion can, at a time when Britain as a nation is seeking a corporate and unifying identity, help us to work out what we can call ‘ours’. Shared identity is a combination of the old and the new: as ethnic groups become more and more established and influential, they already enrich and add to our nation’s narrative, and will continue to do so; but Christianity, too, is integral to the old as well as the new. This is not the place to examine all of the issues, but Simon Heffer considers a few more in today’s Daily Telegraph.

Last week the Office for National Statistics published figures on what it described as a ‘new social trend’. According to a report by Oxford statistician John Haskey, the number of ‘living apart together’ – LAT – couples, is now broadly in line with the number of cohabiting couples. Using the 2002-2003 General Household Survey, Haskey estimated that around 1 million couples can be classified as LATs – 3 in every 20 men and women between 16 and 59 who were neither married nor cohabiting at the time of the survey. The study showed LAT-ing to occur most frequently amongst the 30-34 year old cohort, with around 20% of these couples living in separate accommodation. To not exaggerate the phenomenon, Haskey sought to eliminate ‘casual’ daters from the figures, by excluding teenagers and students in the count.

Haskey offers numerous explanations for what The Times described as this ‘social revolution’, but he identifies the common theme as 'risk aversion'. This risk is described in the report as faced by divorcees with children, professionals with jobs in different cities, those caring for relatives and those striving to protect their children’s inheritance rights. Haskey is emphatic that the rise of LAT-ing signifies neither less commitment, nor greater individualisation. Rather, the increasing number of LATs is indicative of ‘caution…holding people back from situations they [see] as risky’.

Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder in New York by a deranged fan of the rock singer turned anti-War protestor, John Lennon.

‘All you need is Love’ and ‘Give peace a chance’ were the compositions with which, in his distinctively nasal Liverpudlian drawl, Lennon lamented America’s war effort in Vietnam and implored its forces to lay down their arms.

A quarter of a century on, another American war in another equally faraway theatre, this time undertaken with active British participation, evokes similar opposition from similarly well-heeled English literati, who, like Lennon, would have lasted no more than five minutes under the regimes against which the US was and is fighting.

Last night, from the clinic in which the ailing seventy-five year old playwright is undergoing treatment for widely suspected throat cancer, Harold Pinter delivered an excoriating attack upon American foreign policy since World War 2, especially its current military action in Iraq.

The attack formed the substance of his Nobel acceptance speech, ‘Art, truth, and politics’.

As a piece of theatre, Pinter’s televised delivery of his speech was truly electrifying. As an actor himself in his time, Pinter really knew how to deliver to maximum effect his scathing indictment of Bush and Blair. By the time he had finished, viewers of it could be forgiven for thinking there was little to choose morally speaking between Bush (or Blair for that matter) and bin Laden beyond the former's more frequent recourse to a barber.

‘The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading. as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.’

‘We have brought torture, cluster bombs, … innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.’

‘How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arranged before the International Criminal Court of Justice.’

‘At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began.’

Powerful stuff, undoubtedly. The question, however, is how much truth is there in the assertions of Pinter with which he indicted America?

Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss has had an extraordinary career, spanning thirty-five years as a judge in the family courts and rising to be the most senior female judge in the land, as President of the High Court Family Division in 1999. It has not been a career without controversies, and many of the cases over which she’s presided - including the Cleveland Inquiry, which many believe led to the Children Act 1989 - have been highly sensitive. She has often been accused of penalising fathers, but the lack of a consistent track record in judgements makes it difficult to conclude as to her personal opinions. Now, as the newspapers are reporting, she has come out in favour of the traditional family unit and criticised the government’s failure to support it in any way more substantial than rhetoric. ‘It is a sad fact’, she has said, ‘that a government which has published excellent proposals on helping parents and children after the breakdown of relationships has done nothing practical to support married couples.’ There is a good analysis of this in the Daily Telegraph by Jill Kirby, who chairs the Family Policy Group at the Centre for Policy Studies. The voices speaking out for the family are getting louder and more numerous. The time has come for policymakers to respond.

As the Civil Partnerships Act comes into force today, traditionalists may be up in arms and progressives rejoicing, but how will civil partnership actually affect their respective political agendas?

The Child Support Agency (CSA) has become synonymous with failure. The agency has a case backlog of 350,000, they succeed in collecting even nominal money from only 70% of those owing maintenance, and the number of public complaints has risen by 30% in the last year to 63,678. Indeed, the CSA failed five of its seven performance targets.

Mrs Henderson Presents, a new film about the famous Windmill Theatre in London’s Soho, opens in cinemas across the country tonight. Judi Dench plays Mrs Henderson, an eccentric and wealthy widow, who went into partnership with producer Vivian Van Damm to revive the ailing genre of music hall and variety, hard hit by the talkies. She took over the lease of a run-down cinema, converted it for stage performances, and attracted the punters by presenting nudes for the first time on the British stage.

Ever since 1737, the Lord Chamberlain’s office had exercised powers of stage censorship. Every theatrical performance had to be licensed, to ensure that standards of taste, decency and respect for the Christian religion were maintained. Oscar Wilde’s play Salome was banned in 1893 on the grounds that Biblical characters could not be represented on the stage. Topics such as homosexuality could not even be hinted at, and bad language was suppressed. Nudity was out of the question.

Laura Henderson and Vivian Van Damm got round the Lord Chamberlain’s office by arguing that galleries are full of statues of naked women, and that a stationary nude woman on the stage was no more erotic than that. Amazingly, this specious argument was accepted, and nude girls featured in the shows at the Windmill, which went under the generic title of Revudeville, from 1932 until its closure in 1963. The shows still had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, but so friendly were the officials that they would ring to say when the inspector was on his way over. On one occasion a nude sneezed, and on another a dancer knocked one of the girls off her podium. On both occasion there were stern letters from the Lord Chamberlain’s office, warning them that the girls must on no account move. As long as that rule was adhered to, the Lord Chamberlain was satisfied. During the war the Windmill was regarded as an important contribution to the war effort, keeping up the spirits of the troops home on leave. It was the only London theatre not to close during the Blitz, and its proud slogan ‘We Never Closed’ was easily transmuted into ‘We Never Clothed’.

‘Parents blamed for unruly pupils’ ran headlines across the press last week. A survey of 500 primary and secondary school teachers conducted for Teacher’s TV found that eight out of ten teachers saw parents’ failure to control their children as the primary cause of discipline problems in school. According to the findings, twice as many teachers believed parents were the cause of poor behaviour than thought it stemmed from school-related factors.

Like the Ministries of ‘Peace’ and of ‘Truth’ in George Orwell’s 1984, ‘social housing’ is a term used in public parlance today to denote the very opposite of what it might at first sight be thought to. What the term designates is the publicly owned housing estates on which are accommodated many of the lowest income groups, among whom single parent households form a disproportionately large part.

It is a mark of the extent to which the government recognises much of the anti-social behaviour stems from this quarter, or rather from these quarters, that, as is reported in today’s Times, David Miliband, the minister with overall responsibility for super-intending the government’s culture of respect campaign, is to announce today two new government initiatives to improve the behaviour of residents of these estates.

The government is to adopt a sticks-and-carrot approach to the problem, so it is reported.

Its carrot will be improvements to the infrastructure of currently deprived areas so as to attract owner-occupiers to them or the vicintiy of them by whose increased presence there the government hopes to raise the tone of these neighbourhoods.

Its stick is to be greater use of ASBO’s, and, no doubt, also of parenting orders that, it has recently announced, are to be about to become able to issued by anyone in authority against the parents whose children they judge at risk of sliding into anti-social behaviour. These sticks are to be wielded by ‘wardens, neighbourhood managers, youth facilities and childcare’.

This second measures is bound to make life on these estates increasingly resemble that in a prison camp, albeit a slight improvement on their often current greater resemblance to Thomas Hobbes' state of nature.

Moreover, the suggestion that introducing owner-occupiers onto these estates, or into the vicinity of them, will improve their tone, rather than worsen the behaviour of the children of those owner-occupiers induced to buy homes on or near them, displays a degree of optimism the sincerity ofwhich, I will believe, only when David Miliband and Tony Blair set us all an example by moving their families into one of these deprived areas to be given improved amenities.

Having said all that, there is a germ of truth contained in these new proposals. Owner occupiers have a greater stake in their neighbourhoods being free of anti-social behaviour than do residents in social housing: that greater stake is the equity in their properties which will fall, if their neighbourhoods deteriorate socially.

Rather than trying to improve the quality of life in sink estates through inviting owner occupiers to move to or near them and raise their tone, with all the attendant risk they will merely be dragged under, it would make much better sense for the government to encourage new low cost housing for owner occupation and make it available to the most responsible of residents currently in social housing through very favourable mortgage terms. Only currently vastly inflated land-values by over-regulation makes the cost of building high quality homes as prohibitively expensive as it currently is.

Should it be complained that it would give government too much largesse to be able to decide which families merit such favourable mortgages, the answer would be to make this a self-selecting matter by stipulating that only those families who personally contributed their time and labour to the construction of these new houses, their own and those of others in the scheme, would be eligible for such mortgages. That requirement would be enough to separate the sheep from the goats, as well as give every inducement for women in social housing to co-opt into the scheme the fathers or future father of their children who are often otherwise unemployed and have time on their hands. Indeed, what better inducement can be given current young residents in social housing to marry before having children?

Gradually building up neighbourhoods of owner occupiers, with a much greater personal stake in the quality of life in their neighbourhoods than have residents in social housing, seems a far more promising way to solve the problem of anti-social behaviour associated with such housing than sinking yet more public money into them, and risking human as well as private capital too!

Today’s Times, contains a letter to the editor from Professor Bernard Crick, the man who more than any other is responsible for having foisted upon today's school-chilldren compulsory classes in citizenship which are, apparently, as unpopular among them as they are among the teachers required to provide them.

In his letter, Professor Crick gently berates the Prime Minister for having mounted a £90 million raid on the budgets of his Deputy, the Home Secretary, and the Secretary of State for Education to find cash to fund his new Respect Task Force.

Professor Crick argues a culture of respect more likely to be restored by government sticking to the two e’s of education and example than by any new gimmick such as the Prime Minister's new on. These are education in citizenship and a good example from public figures and celebrities.

Professor Crick omits a third e more likely still to be effective in restoring a culture of respect than any of the other ways and means to which New Labour has, with his collaboraiton, resorted in pursuit of this elusive goal. This is enforcement of the law.

The incidence of disruptive and badly-behaved children is far higher among single-parent families than among married couples. Anything, therefore, that reduces the incidence of such families is likely to reduce incivility and anti-social behaviour among the young.

A report in today’s Times reveals nearly a half of all lone parents have yet to receive their first maintenance payment that the CSA has ordered from the other parent of their children. Meanwhile, 40% of single parents who have applied to the CSA y for an assessment of what they should be receiving in maintenance from the other parent have yet to receive one, so it is also reported.

Given the lamentable track-record of the CSA in enforcing the financial obligations that parents incur by having children, it is small wonder that the rate of single-parent births in thei country continues to soar and now exceeds 40%. With such large numbers of single parent families comes such a huge incidence of anti-social behaviour in children and the young.

Rather than making citizenship classes in school compulsory, or calling for a good example to be set by public figures and celebrities, something which goes without saying but probably would pass unnoticed by those most in need of being set one, or requiring hard-pressed single-mothers attend parenting classes, the apparent goal of the new Task Force, the goverbnment is far more likely to restore a culture of respect by seeing to it that the law is by properly enforced requiring non-domiciliary fathers pay for the maintenance of their children. Its proper enforcement would make men think twice before siring children outside marriage. That would reduce the number of single-parent families and with that reduction would diminish the kind of domestic environment which is probaly the single biggest enviromental factor responsible for anti-social behaviour in children.

Frankly, I can’t wait for 24-hour drinking. It’s going to be hilarious. Quite apart from pubs packed to the rafters at three in the morning with insomniacs who’ve come down for a nightcap, and bedraggled nymphs who’ve tumbled out of clubs looking for a quick eighteen pints of lager before going to bed, we’re going to be treated to a round-the-clock version of those most contemporary of spectator sports – chav fighting and oik baiting. As the BBC reports today, the Council of Circuit Judges, responding to a Government consultation document, Drinking Responsibly, has warned that with the relaxed licensing laws that there will be ‘an inevitable explosion in alcohol-fuelled violence’. Certainly anyone who thinks that longer drinking hours in Britain will turn us into svelte continentals, eating bouillabaisse late into the evening with a glass of montepulciano had better think again. Or even better, think Faliraki.

Today, flags are to be flown half-mast in mourning for victims of yesterday’s atrocities in London.

If nothing else good comes of what happened, let us hope it will finally lead the BBC, and other media who have so lamely followed it in recent times, to consign once and for all to the dust-bin of history the term ‘militant’ as a euphemism with which to refer to perpetrators of such dastardly deeds.

There is little comfort to be gained from today’s papers. But alongside the eyewitness accounts of startled commuters and the photographs of the carnage, there is one story to lift the spirits, not without relevance to what happened yesterday.

According to a report in today’s Times, archaeologists have just unearthed in the Syrian city of Palmyra an apparently phenomenally well-preserved third century mosaic depicting St George slaughtering the dragon. Some archaeologists are reported to believe the mosaic may well be the source of the St George legend.

So closely associated today is England’s patron saint with this legend that we forget he once had an identity altogether apart from and prior to it and that it only became tacked onto the story of his life to commemorate some genuine heroic act of his which the story was intended to symbolise.

It is deeply politically unfashionable and incorrect these days to venerate the name of this saint whose status as the patron saint of England is often ridiculed today in view of his not being a native-born Englishman.

But there are many important quintessential elements of British national culture which have a foreign origin. For example, our national flag in which St George's red cross figures as the symbol of England, is known as the ‘Union Jack’ from the practice of King James 1, in whose reign England became united with Scotland and Ireland, of referring to himself by the French equivalent of his name – Jacques!

The non-English origin of the patron saint of England is one of them.

Who was St George? When and why did he become patron saint of England? How and why did the legend of the slaying of the dragon come to be attached to the story of his life? And what possible grain of comfort can be thought capable of being drawn from knowledge of any of these things, given yesterday’s atrocities?

The expression 'to beg the question' has become so widely misused today to mean ‘to raise or give rise to the question’ to have arguably acquired this new connotation as its meaning. In fact, however,the expression is a term of art that derives from the realm of logic where it has another one. There it denotes the fallacy, otherwise known as petitio principii , whereby an abortive attempt is made to establish the truth of some contested proposition by advancing an argument on behalf of its truth that, explicitly or tacitly, assumes the truth of the conclusion in one of its premises, thereby vitiating any probative force the argument might otherwise be supposed to have.

An example of such a fallacy would be seeking to demonstrate Tony Blair to be an honest man by citing his being British and the honesty of all British men. Since the latter universal proposition requires for its truth that Tony Blair be honest, if British, it cannot be legitimately employed in an argument seeking to establish Mr Blair's honesty without his honesty having first been independently established, something that would render otiose the argument in question seeking to establish he was.

Widely tipped front-runner for the Tory Party leadership, shadow education secretary, David Cameron, committed this same fallacy twice in the speech he is reported in today’s papers as due to deliver today at the Policy Exchange in which he calls for tax breaks to support families.

He begged the question twice in that part of his speech in which he argued that, because it is demonstrable (i)that children do better if their mother and father are both there to bring them up , and (ii) that married couples stay together longer than unmarried ones, therefore (iii) there is a strong case for marriage being supported by the tax system.

Assuming we want children born in this country to do in life as well as possible, and assuming also, as premise (i) of Mr Cameron’s argument asserts, that, on the whole, children do best in life when brought up by both their natural parents together, there would be a strong case for the tax system being made to support the institution of marriage, provided most children were conceived or at least born to married couples, and provided, conversely, most people who married went on to have children.

Neither proviso shows signs of holding true for much longer, however much some might wish they both would. Thus, Mr Cameron might be said to have begged the question when arguing in favour of marriage being fiscally supported by having assumed it to be within marriage that most parents begat their children, and by also assuming that most couples got married with the intention, or effect, of their having children together.

Neither assumption seems likely to hold true for much longer, as a greater and greater proportion of children continue to be conceived and born in Britian to parents outside of wedlock, and more and more homosexual and lesbian couples call for, and seem increasingly likely to gain, the same fiscal and other legal benefits as were in the past the exclusive preserve of heterosexual couples upon marriage.

Homosexual and lesbian partnerships tend to be childless, or else, where one of the partners has a child they both then raise, these children grow up in the absence of one of their parents.

In so far as, by going through the formalities of some analogous knot-tying ceremony, homosexual couples succeed in becoming eligble for whatever fiscal and other legal benefits were formerly the exclsuive preserve of heterosexual married couples, then heterosexual couples who choose to remain unmarried will have just cause to complain of being victimised, if denied the same benefits. This is especially so, if they should go on to have children and if the rationale cited for such benefits is to encourage parents to stay together foer the sake of their children.

Why, they will ask, should their life-style choices be any less fiscally favoured than those of childless homosexual couples?

Previously incorrigibly naughty six-year old Joshua Cohen was permanently cured of his bad behaviour by being briefly placed by his desperate parents in a local Catholic school. When they asked him what the nuns had done there to effect his miraculous reform, Joshua replied, ‘ Didn’t you see what pictures were on their walls?’

I was put in mind of this rather feeble Jewish joke by a report in today’s newspapers that a 5-foot gilt and wooden crucifix that for the last half century has adorned the wall of a Torquay council crematorium has become the latest casualty in a concerted campaign to rid the nation’s public places of all Christian symbols and artefacts.

Last week it was the turn of bed-side bibles in NHS hospitals in Leicester. This week it is the turn of crucifixes in council crematoria.

The feeble joke was brought to mind upon reading about the crucifix by the thought that it can now surely only be a matter of time before some bright spark calls for all representations of the Passion to be removed from churches on the grounds the sight of them might frighten children or encourage them to emulate its example on some poor child.

We seem to have entered into a new Puritanical age, only this time inspired by secular multicultural zeal rather than religious enthusiasm.

Prominent Catholic MP, Ann Widdecombe is reported as having remarked of the removal of the crucifix, ‘This is yet another cretinous and pointless surrender of our heritage.’

Ms Widdecombe is not the only one lately and rightly to have become concerned about the threat to Britain’s cultural heritage posed by so-called ‘progressive’ forces.

Yesterday's papers carried reports of a speech made the previous day by the Prince of Wales to a group of teachers in which he voiced concern about how Britain’s cultural heritage is in danger of failing to be transmitted to schoolchildren in the name of the need for contemporary relevance.

According to a report in yesterday’s Times, what prompted the Prince’s remarks was the recent decision of the examinations board, Edexcel, to replace a requirement for students preparing for examination in English literature to study ‘classic texts by authors such as Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare in favour of focussing on slang, the language of digital communication and reality television shows’.

Edexcel is reported as having been motivated to make its decision by concern ‘to make English more accessible to students, particularly in cities’.

The mind boggles: one would have thought the decision bound to have exactly the opposite effect!!!

One of the few remaining whole texts that children studying English are required by the National Curriculum to study is George Orwell’s fabulous 1984 which becomes daily ever more prescient.

Let us hope children will not be distracted by their English home-work assignments to watch ‘Celebrity Love Island’ or web-footage of ‘Phone Chicken’ to prevent them reading Orwell’s novel through to the very end. There they will find an Appendix which outlines the history and principles of ‘Newspeak’ in words that ring all too chillingly true today:

The way in which Michael Jackson’s trial has been dominating the world’s news for what seems like forever is a sign of the unhealthy obsession that we have developed with paedophilia. In an age of moral relativism, it seems to be the only thing left we can all wholeheartedly agree upon. Many people take an extremely relaxed view of lifestyle events like divorce and abortion which used to occasion shock. But sex involving younger children is – quite rightly – considered to be beyond the pale, and we want to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent it.

Unfortunately, the scale of the response has now overtaken the real risk. Measures have been put in place that seem to be based on the assumption that there are paedophiles lurking everywhere, and that anyone who wants to get close to children must be a pervert. This is a terrible insult and injustice to the majority of people working with children who would never dream of harming them.

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!

It doesn’t take a paediatrician to tell us that what happens during early childhood probably has a significant impact on the rest of our lives. The Greeks used to say your future lies behind you. The Bible talks of the sins of the fathers. Then there’s that famous poem by Larkin. In whichever configuration, the basic point is that parents have a substantial influence over – and thus responsibility for – the future of their children. Not that we’re very fond of that notion in our society. What with an unprecedented rate of divorce, and a high number of women in the labour market, not to mention men, how are our children growing up? With state childcare and faceless nannies? As it stands, a good many seem to be wiling away the hours until mummy and daddy come home by eating crisps, watching television (nice educational shows, such as the Teletubbies or Powerpuff Girls) and playing cute computer games like Grand Theft Auto, Kill Zone, and Gruesome Blood and Guts II: The Revenge of the Revenge.

Who knows what this does to their psyche, but one thing’s for sure, it makes them fat. Blunt, perhaps, but not bigoted. ‘Shame!’ shouts the political correctness lobby. ‘How dare you blame the individual or even their parents? It’s the fault of a relentlessly fatist system.’ But the biology’s simple as can be: put calories in and take none out and the body will bloat. We live in the age of the cult of the specialist, where common sense is forever being contradicted by sophistry, so it’s especially gratifying when scientists confirm the bleeding obvious. Today, in research by the universities of Bristol and Glasgow we discover that when three-year old children (read: any young kids) watch lots of television they have a particularly high chance of having a high body mass index – i.e. of being obese. And there’s no genetic get out clause. Professor Tony Barnett, head of the University of Birmingham’s diabetes and obesity group said these findings were not unexpected: ‘The rise in obesity we have seen in recent years cannot be put down to genes.’ So it really is lifestyle? Well, of course it is.

In what is claimed to be a landmark judgement in terms of the legal treatment of same-sex couples, today’s Times reports that contact rights in respect of two young sisters, aged 6 and 3, have just been awarded by an appeal court judge to the former female partner of the children's lesbian mother who split up with her former partner two years ago after she conceived the children by means of AID whilst still in relationship with her.

In explaining his reasons for the decision, Lord Justice Thorpe, Deputy Head of the Family Division of the High Court, said he had made it so that the former lover of the mother of the girls could continue to play ‘a significant role’ in their lives.

In arriving at his decision, the judge appears to have been swayed by the 'expert' testimony given by a court welfare officer who claimed that ‘excluding the former lover would not help the children understand the history of their earlier lives.’

The same officer is further reported as having claimed their continued contact with the former lovewr of their mother “would help the girls to have clear picture of where they fit in when they grow older.”

Lord Justice Thorpe indicated the general ‘principles’ that had helped him to make up his mind on the issue when he added that:

“What has been said about the importance of fathers is of equal application in same-sex parents…. I am in no doubt at all that the children require firm measures to safeguard them from diminution or loss of a vital side of family life.”

Had this story appeared last Friday on 1st April and not today, I would have thought it a joke, and one in poor taste at that.

According to reports in yesterday's papers, the Sheffield branch of the Samaritans is facing threat of closure. It is doing so because the Big Lottery Fund recently rejected an application from it for a £300,000 grant with which to refurbish new premises it recently acquired because of the imminent expiry of its current lease.

The Sheffield Samaritans claim it was told by the Big Lottery Fund that the reason it rejected their application was that it judged they had not been doing enough to target minorities such as asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, the young, and the elderly.

The Big Lottery Fund deny this was their reason for rejecting the Samaritan's application. They claim they rejected the application simply because of the sheer competition from other worthy causes.

Clearly, if the Samaritans’ version is accepted of why their application was rejected, the group to whom the Big Lottery Fund has just awarded £360,000 to help prostitutes in their work was judged by it to be doing enough to target these minorities.

Even if the Lottery Fund’s own version of why it turned down the Samaritans' application is accepted, it still seems odd they should have judged that helping prostitutes in their work is worthier than helping those in a state of desperation and often on the brink of suicide.

“We cannot be surprised that some within the next generation do not value our parliamentary democracy if they know nothing of the English Civil War, do not vote if they are not taught about the struggles to widen the franchise, and do not value any authority figures, if they are not told the inspiring tales of the national heroes of the past.”

So, Tim Collins, Shadow Home Secretary for Education, is reported as yesterday having declared at a conference of Catholic Head Teachers. He went on to make a new Tory pledge that, if elected, they will extend the compulsory study of history at school beyond the age of 14 when it can currently be dropped to 16.

The remedy Mr Collins prescribes for the malady he claims to detect in today’s young seems remarkably ill suited to cure it.

If you are interested in changes in English culture from, say 1956, when there were still quite large pockets of disquiet at the introduction of government-sponsored gambling in the form of Premium Bonds, and still for the Labour Party the redistribution of income by gambling was morally only marginally superior to its redistribution by theft, I hope you did not miss the gem on the BBC Today programme this morning.

One in six of us, it was reported, have adopted as our New Year Resolution ... "winning the Lottery".

While I was picking up the morning paper I mentioned this in the shop. "What clown came up with that figure?", a man growled. "It'll be more like nine out of ten."

I have been asked to add a bit to my last posted article. In it I said that crime had been brought down in the 1990s by people's own precautions, instituted because they were very reasonably experiencing a growing fear of crime; but that crime on the streets, the control of which depended on the police, continued to grow for another ten years.

With the numbers of robberies doubling and redoubling, the country at last awoke from the stupor into which it had been lulled by our academic and media elites. For decades they had dismissed the rise of crime as what they loftily dismissed as "moral panic". It was a double-barrelled sneer. Being "moral", for them, was worse than being in a panic.

I've been asked specifically to give the facts about the Home Office under Mr Straw from 1997 to 2001, and under Mr Blunkett from 2001 to 2004. Robbery is a police-controlled crime, as distinct from crimes where the public can do something to protect itself without the police (locks, bolts, alarms, staying indoors).

Mr Straw and Mr Blunkett, as Home Secretaries, were in charge of the Metropolitan police, London's police.

In the year that Mr Straw took over the Home Office there were 27,386 robberies of personal and business property in London.
By 2000 there were 35,709 robberies of personal property in London.
In 2001, the year Mr Straw was promoted to the Foreign Office, there were 47,559 .

No the wonder that Mr Blunkett said that Mr Straw left the Home Office in a mess.

In the first eleven months of 2004, the year of Mr Blunkett's departure, with December's figure of about 2,500 still to be added in, there have been 33,673 personal-property robberies in London--with December included, not fewer than 36,000 for the full year.

Thus Mr Blunkett has not succeeded in getting the figures back even to the 35,709 personal-property robberies of 2000. Mr Blunkett was all the further, of course, from getting back to the figure with which Mr Straw began, the 27,000 of 1997, which included business robberies as well.

No body of evidence in the social sciences points more plainly in one direction than that which deals with the welfare of children conceived, born and brought up by their own two biological parents within the institution of life-long monogamy, as compared with children brought up under other arrangements, or lack of them.

There are failures and successes in all situations that have to do with conception, procreation and child-rearing. The failures are far more frequently found outside marriage than within marriage.

The law of the land is one element in the complex of inculcated attitudes and of organisational support for the institutional family of birth and childrearing within formal marriage.

The Prime Minister continues to support the Home Secretary, on the basis that it is Mr Blunkett's private affair that he has been the lover in an adulterous relationship that (he claims) has resulted in children being conceived and born.

There are plenty of people who think that sex, procreation and child rearing should be treated in some sense as the private concerns of the consenting adults.

Some of these believe that "privacy" means privacy from State interference. They believe that the media and the opinion of neighbours and friends have a role in condemining, praising or condoning such conduct, but that the State has no business favouring any sexual or child-rearing arrangement over any other.

Abigail is mother of two year old, Adam, and also the best friend of her neighbour, Brenda, also the mother of a toddler, Boris.

Both mothers have temporarily suspended paid work to stay home to raise a family. Currently, neither receives any government financial help to do so.

Under government proposals announced today, both mothers will shortly become eligible for considerable tax breaks, should either decide to resume paid work and hire a qualified nanny to look after her child instead.

Fast-forward in time from today to six months after the scheme has been introduced.

Sociology until the nineteen sixties was greatly interested in "understanding" how people behaved socially. "Understanding", though he retained much of its ordinary meaning, was defined with painstaking exactness by Max Weber.

One of his basic ideas was the common-sense one, that people can't act on the basis of what all the facts of the situation are--they can't possibly know the truth of more than a tiny fraction of them--so they act on their beliefs about what the facts are (and can, of course, be quite mistaken).

The sociology established by Max Weber saw its business as examining the evidence about what people believed to be factually true. What do given people believe is factually true about human nature? Are human beings born good or bad? Does every human being on the planet come into the world as a blank sheet on which society can transcribe any personality and from which it can draw any ability it wants, or is every individual mainly programmed by his or her genetic makeup?

'Creating stronger families' was an explicit objective of the Home Secretary's recent Five-Year Plan. 'Families' were allegedly placed 'at the heart' of his policy to combat crime. (Confident Communities, Cm 6287, July 2004.) In the document, however, the word 'family' appears only when it means any household arrangement whatsoever. 'A family', to the Home Secretary throughout Confident Communities, is a household composed of any single adult, or any 'partners' of any sexual orientation, in any relationship, together with children, whatever their parentage. In the whole of the document 'marriage' is mentioned once, and then in order to denigrate it. At the time, I was baffled that in formulating public policy a Home Secretary could dismantle and transform the concept of the married family in this way. I'm not baffled now.

I rarely listen to Radio 5, but I happened to turn it on just before midnight last Saturday (4 December) to see if I could catch the score for the Sunderland v West Ham game. The announcer was just letting people know what the next discussion would be. His exact words were: "Does anybody in this day and age actually think prostitution is wrong?" I can spot a joke as well as the next man, and he was not joking.

Only a few years ago it would have been inconceivable that the question could be anything but "Does anybody in this day and age think that prostitution is right?" For of course wives and mothers thought it was wrong for their husbands and sons to go cottaging, kerb crawling or frequenting brothels. Fathers and mothers would have been horrified at the thought of their daughters or sons being prostitutes. In that recent innocent age, children would have hardly been able to grasp that their fathers might be using prostitutes or their mothers paying for the services of a gigolo.

So have we really sunk so low that the BBC is correct in its casual assumption that hardly anybody in this country today believes that prostitution is wrong? Has William Blake's prophecy come so close to fulfilment in 2004, "The harlot's cry from street to street/Shall be Old England's winding sheet"?

Or was it just that BBC moderators and commentators, circulating within their narrow media coteries, have come to believe in TV's own world of ridiculously unrealistic "realism", according to which England is populated almost exclusively by foul-mouthed and promiscuous male and female louts?

TV seems to have a mission to make bad behaviour seem not only normal, but morally neutral. Ordinary people end by feeling that all their equally decent friends, neighbours and relatives must be exceptional relics stranded in some time warp, and that they themselves must be social and psychological freaks.

The tragedy is, life imitates art. What begin as a fiction ends as fact, especially when there are vast funds from licence money, virtually a poll tax, to freely play with every year, and the medium is as powerful as modern television.

The most important effect of the Blunkett affair could well be the hitherto most neglected, namely, the astonishing twist he has given to the old legal question, Who is a child's father?

From at least as far back as the twelfth century the legal rule has been that if a mother of the child is a married woman then, unless proven to the contrary, her husband is father of the child. ("Pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant.")

The main intention was, of course, to protect the institution of marriage from the destructive intrusion into the life of a family of the lover of an adulterous wife.

The subsidiary intention was to allow the husband if that was he wanted, to refuse to accept the life-time burden of bringing up another man's child. The husband's get-out of proving the child is not his is bluntly called in some American states "the milkman clause". The husband's only purpose in seeking proof that the child was not his own was, and could only be, his wish that the marriage be dissolved because of his wife's infidelity. In common law the rebuttal of the presumption of the husband's paternity required evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the husband was not the father. The Family Law Reform Act 1969 reduced the burden of proof to the balance of probabilities, and Lord Reid ruled in one case that even weak evidence must prevail--all obviously in the interest of the the husband who was otherwise being tricked into raising someone else's child. The idea that any of this was in the interests of the milkman, the wife's lover, probably never occurred to anyone for hundreds of years. Yet this is exactly the way in which Mr Blunkett is seeking to use this body of law. The very recent innovation of DNA testing for the first time removes all doubt about biological fatherhood.

For this fact to be used to enable the offending male to intrude permanently into the family life of a husband and his reconciled wife turns topsy-turvy the unambiguous intention of the law and public opinion of centuries, and if accepted would deal another grievous blow to the precious and battered institution of life-long monogamy. For the Home Secretary of all the people in the land to take the initiative in playing the litigious milkman is simply grotesque.

David Blunkett is daily exhibiting a startling obtuseness about a distinction that lies at the heart of government--that between the public and the private. It is this, more than anything else, that has exposed his incapacity as a senior politician at the heart of national affairs, whatever his past achievements or present merits. Religion and secular morality define and attempt to control all public affairs. Politics define that small area of public affairs that are appropriately controlled by the coercive powers of State. Day-to-day politics are mainly arguments about where the line should lie in the light of current circumstances and knowledge.

Forty years ago, circumstances and knowledge seemed to indicate that sex could safely be privatised. They could be removed from public censure and praise, and notably from the rewards and punishments administered by the government. The condom and the pill between them seemed to have separated sex from both procreation and disease.

The surge in lone-parent families, with the expense of housing and maintaining mothers and their children being thrown onto the State meant not a reduction, but a vast expansion, in the involvement of the public in what has been primarily a matter for the spouses. The most public of institutions, the prisons, have being filling with the casualties of families without fatherhood. The surge in sexually-transmitted diseases has also made its own enlarged claims on public intervention in the interests of the sufferers' health.

Instead of simple assumptions about paternity that minimised the need for the law to intervene, public disputes about the rights and duties of the all sorts of divorced fathers, cohabiting fathers and one-night-stand fathers have had to be dealt with by more and more lawyers in an ever-larger public court system.

But to these disputes Blunkett has added an almost entirely novel one: the right of an adulterous woman's lover who can prove paternity in the courts, to use the courts and the apparatus of the State to control from the outside the child's family the upbringing of the child he had no right by religion, custom or the promises made in a civil marriage, to bring into the world.

What makes the Blunkett case far more important and far more public than any previous sexual scandal involving senior public figures, who simply knew and eventually acknowledged that they had misbehaved, is that he is seeking to establish through the courts, as a principle of national life, that the lover of another man's wife, if he demands it, must be publicly granted and publicly guaranteed a permanent right to a place in that man's family. Blunkett is publicly proclaiming that it his wish to make this social monstrosity the public norm.

And on what basis does he pursue this course? On the basis that it is nobody's business but his own, and the public should do the decent thing to a wronged and misunderstood man, and respect his privacy.

Among the various results of Tuesday’s elections in the United States, of only slightly less significance than George Bush’s victory over John Kerry was the decisive rejection by the American electorate of ‘gay’ marriage. In eleven states, voters were given the opportunity to vote for or against amendments to their state constitutions confining marital status to unions between members of the opposite sex . In not a single one of them did voters do other than register their support for such an amendment, often by huge majorities.

In the same week as that in which the political elites of Europe made it plain no European could expect to hold high public office there if prepared openly to call homosexuality a sin, the American public made it plain no Americans could expect to enjoy the benefits of marital status unless prepared to join in union with a member of the opposite sex.