The best commentary of the last week on Baby P has been amongst the most depressing. Yes, those who say such ghoulish horrors have and will always happen are half-right. But what they miss are the common themes tying such crimes together: broken and welfare-gorged families with incomes that would be envied by countless previous generations - and no real values at all. Sophie Heawood writes for The Independent on Sunday:
"It's what seems to be an underclass, a level of British society that is not just struggling with poverty – this is way beyond being poor – but often getting by with subnormal intelligence levels, living in a world with no professional aspirations whatsoever, for generations, where criminality is normality, with people who seem to have not just fallen through the net of literacy or personal improvement, but missed out on education or social development altogether."To many – to me, certainly – this is as unthinkable and remote as holidaying with a Russian oligarch.
"I suspect things are getting worse. A friend of mine has worked in child protection for 20 years and says that yes, there is a definite underclass, and that it has grown. Drugs are usually involved, pornography is normalised, anything goes. The family who passed around a teenage daughter with Down's syndrome as a sexual plaything, with visiting uncles happily running their hands up her thigh in front of my visiting friend. The heroin-addict mother whose five kids were all addicts too. The parents who threw the baby at the wall to stop it crying. The father whose child needed adopting, but didn't want his mum to know what a mess he was in, so he faked his mother's death rather than let social workers give the child to grandma. (She surfaced two years later, back from the dead, in search of her grandchild.) Then there was the man who raped his grandmother, then tried to commit suicide. Most of us struggle to imagine a world in which these acts are possible. And yet, it's here, living if not next door, then a few streets away."
"[It can be] be a loving act to tell somebody that their way of life is unacceptable, and that it must stop. Wrong is wrong."
The evil of baby P's abusers and murderers is rightly attributed to them alone. But the circumstances under which they and their kind were able to do so much evil did not happen only by chance.
There have always been people at the extreme lower end of the intelligence spectrum, capable of the barbarism that baby P met with. But even many of these people were once protected from themselves because they understood the easy language of simple, unambiguous laws tied to tough punishments - and by moral codes that they may not have had the native intelligence to work out for themselves, but which they could scarcely help but pick up from their family and/or society. Yes, paedophiles and dim-witted, unfeeling sadists existed in past generations, too. But the external influences on their behaviour were generally agreed upon social taboos and fear of prison or the rope. Now they face a criminal justice system formidable only to those with jobs and reputations, and their only ethical influence is a do-it-yourself morality preached from on high, its sole enthusiasm the chastising of those unfashionable enough to point out that there are right and wrong ways to live one's life.
Further, even the dimmest and most feral of adults can be expected to share with the animals a natural and genetic sympathy for their own kin, and to show them some care and concern. But with the destruction of the family and the perversity of the benefits system comes the phenomenon of a string of live-in boyfriends responsible for the wellbeing of hundreds of thousands or more step-children to whom they have no ties of kinship. This is not, of course, to say that step-parents are likely to abuse step-children. They aren't. But it is to say that even some child abusers make distinctions, and are likely to prey on step-children in a way they would not on their own.
Such disfunctional and bizarre lives would simply not be possible for most of the people who live them without the social liberalism and blank cheque welfare spending of governments of both parties. As Peter Hitchens notes:
"[T]hings are different in the earthly hell inhabited by ‘Baby P’ - life financed by £450 a week of other people’s money, filthy rooms and clothes, infestations of lice, the house stinking of human waste and overrun by smelly, aggressive dogs.
"The mother, constantly watching TV or staring at rubbish on the internet, was so unmoved by her child’s death (the little martyred corpse was actually blue) that she asked the ambulance men to hang on while she fetched her cigarettes.
"And, of course, there’s an ever-shifting queue of serial boyfriends lurking just out of view, hoping for a slice of the benefits.
"But we cannot own up to this problem. Officially, we aren’t even allowed to disapprove of this way of life or be ‘judgmental’ about the people who lead such lives. Why? Mainly because the Left cannot admit that these things are bad. Because to accept that would be to accept that it has made a terrible mistake.
"This type of misery stems mainly from decisions taken in the Sixties - especially to begin subsidising women who got pregnant outside wedlock, and to make the marriage bond easily breakable.
"The predictable result was that we quickly saw many more households where the child has no natural father in the home.
"Worse still, we saw a substantial minority where there is a stream of serial boyfriends, likely to view any child as a nuisance or a plaything, or both.
"Research done by the Family Education Trust shows that abuse of children - either violent or sexual - is 33 times more likely in such households than in homes where there is a stable marriage.
"This underlines the dishonesty of a famous NSPCC advertising campaign in which child abuse was portrayed as taking place in clean, tidy, prosperous homes. No doubt it can and does happen there, but much less than it does in the urine-perfumed slums of New Britain."
Roy Jenkins commented long ago: "The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilised society."
How is that looking now?
