At first I thought it was Twitterish hysteria, when on my commute home yesterday I read that Brown had announced plans to lock up young mothers in hostels. But it's true. He does want to do this. Mothers of legal age but without a male partner will be put into hostels, under the 'care' of social workers.
This is how it ends. But how did it start?
OK first you have to pretend that you don't actually subscribe to any fixed view about the correct way to raise children. It'll take a few decades for this to notion to bed down and become a norm, so start early.
It'll help you if you create an industry which provides succour and income to the likes of Beatrix Campbell OBE, a woman whose intellectually incoherent columns for the Guardian never mention the role she played in creating the current climate of hysteria about child-care and the family. You can enlist the BBC to pump out a sequence of dramas and soap operas whose plots will pivot on - surprise! - a hidden case of child abuse. The 'work' of this industrious cohort will help embed the idea in the nation's subconscious that there's something frankly suspicious about the family unit.
It's also a good idea to completely downgrade the role of men in society. Create a culture where cracking a joke in private becomes a criminal offence; make sure that the jobs of blue-collar workers are downvalued and most at risk from uncontrolled immigration. Almost for a laugh, why not drive working men from their pubs by refusing to let them smoke inside them?
Start young! Re-engineer the teaching syllabus to ensure that boys suffer from their predilection to study hard in fast bursts for exams designed to probe factual awareness; replace all this outdated stuff with overlapping sequences of 'coursework' and demand empathy with historical subjects rather than a requirement to learn about those subjects' role in the creation of modern Britain. Girn, and wring your hands every year about the increasing gender differential in exam grades, but don't for goodness' sake do anything about it, like resetting the curriculum to make it more male-friendly.
Moving on, you'll be ready to remove the requirement for fathers to be involved at all in childrearing. You'll already have arranged the benefits system to not only remove any benefit for stable partnerships, but in fact to penalise such stable partnerships. So why not go the whole way, and remove the requirement to have a man involved even in the production of the child? You can provide all the sperm anyone needs, free on the NHS!
You might find it helpful to develop a tin ear with regard to the obvious outcomes of such policies in the inner cities, where gangs of fatherless children take over the public space and turn them into no-go zones for the meek, the unaggressive and the sociable. But of course, you're unlikely to live anywhere as ghastly as that anyway, so with a bit of luck your exposure to such events will be limited to tutting over the failure of the government to spend more money on 'the kids'.
A crisis will eventually occur, when the Opposition becomes electable again, and makes the suggestion that some of this lunacy should be unwound, that there should be a tilt in favour of stable bi-gendered partnerships with regard to welfare and child-rearing. If you're not careful, millions of people will say 'Goodness, what a sensible idea, you know, it's important that kids have dads in their lives'.
Here's what to do.
First of all scream bloody murder at the Opposition for its 'nastiness' in telling people 'how to live their lives' (even though the Opposition policy is to nudge, to rebalance; and its policies are backed up by shedloads of evidence in its favour). Get a woman, richer than most of her viewers' dreams, to sneer at the leader of the Opposition on Newsnight, and ask him if a 'tenner a week' would have encouraged her to get married (displaying ignorance about the state of the lives of the people for whom a tenner a week is a measurable proportion of their income). It's important to misrepresent the gentle nudging suggested by the Opposition, to pretend that some sort of holy terror is about to be unleashed on people who don't want to get married.
This might work; but if it doesn't, and the voters remain aware that something has gone very badly wrong with the socialisation of children, the role of men in childrearing, and our view of the family unit and the state's right to interfere with (for example) looking after your friend's kids while they're at work, go to plan B.
Plan B: stand up on your hind legs in Brighton and announce, with a straight face, a policy to house single mums in hostels. This will fix all the ills your previous policies have unleashed, tell people. That this is, in fact, the policy of the BNP, shouldn't worry you. Copying the BNP's sloganising has worked so well for you in the past, hasn't it.
That's how you get to where we are now, Prime Minister. Well done. You must be so very, very proud of your period in government.
