Bill Carmichael: Attack on the family to blame

Sir Michael pointed out that 700,000 youngsters are growing up in homes blighted by drug and alcohol abuse and yet almost six out of ten councils are failing to do enough to protect vulnerable children.

Child protection services at 20 councils, including Barnsley, Calderdale and Doncaster in Yorkshire, were described as “unacceptably poor” in the Ofsted report.

And things are about to get much worse with social services haemorrhaging expertise and with many of the most experienced staff due to retire in the near future, said Sir Michael.

So sadly it seems we will have to steel ourselves for more heart-breaking abuse cases like Baby P, Daniel Pelka and Hamzah Khan, the four-year-old who was starved to death by his mother in Bradford.

But Sir Michael argued that the heart of problems such as child abuse ran much deeper than failures in social services departments. He blamed “hollowed out and fragmented families” where parents suffer a “poverty of accountability” and no longer teach their children the difference between right and wrong.

Sir Michael is surely right. Social breakdown on this scale is about more than a lack of money, and I’d like to suggest one significant cause – a well organised and largely successful attack on the traditional family. For years left-wingers and radical feminists have argued that the family is an evil, patriarchal construct designed to aid capitalist exploitation and to subjugate women.

This theory has shaped social policy over the last 50 years so thoroughly that we now have a tax and benefits system that is deliberately skewed against families that try to stay together and which encourages couples to break up.

Once free of the oppression of husbands these women were supposed to reach the sunlit uplands of female emancipation – but for many working-class women it hasn’t quite worked out like that, as a series of inquiries into child abuse cases have demonstrated.

Instead they become enslaved by a succession of brutish, feckless “partners” who treat them like dirt, milk the family for benefits and use the children as convenient punchbags, frequently with fatal results. In short the attack on the family has proved a disaster for precisely those people it was supposed to help – women and children.

The family has been around for thousands of years for a reason – it is the best environment in which to bring up children. Children brought up in stable, two-parent families are healthier, do better at school and are less likely to become involved in crime or drug abuse and less likely to suffer physical or sexual abuse.

It may be too late to put the pieces of our broken society back together, but the Government could help by encouraging marriage and by doing even more financially to help couples who strive to stay together to raise their children.

Profit and lust

Singer Charlotte Church and actress Romola Garai have been complaining about sexism in the music business and the media. Apparently pictures of scantily clad young women are used to sell records and magazines! Who knew?

These ladies are perfectly placed to comment. Church appeared in revealing outfits when she was a teenager and Garai, who is campaigning against lads’ mags, once posed for a sexy photo shoot herself.

So who is being exploited here? The girls who cynically use their sexuality for financial gain, or the lads who shell out their hard-earned money to make them fabulously wealthy?