Martin Sewell: The Conservatives must engage with faith communities so they are prepared for helping to deliver the responsibility agenda

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer specialising in child protection.

Despite much talk of the secular society, faith in Britain still matters. Not only do followers of faith heavily populate the voluntary, charitable, educational and  caring spheres, but Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, and Gurdwawas probably  represent some of the few places left in Britain where people of different ages, economic  status, politics, education etc mix freely and with common purpose. Whilst each faith may have a very different in outlook than others, on many levels there are genuine inter-faith groups in dialogue across the country.

When pubs, post offices and corner shops have left deprived communities, places of faith with dedicated ministers remain as a last link to the wider community.  A survey of David Cameronʼs speeches over the past few years show that he has grasped this point firmly.

When speaking on “Islam and the world today” at Cambridge University he reached out to Muslims, saying:

“... the onus also lies with Muslim community and faith leaders, many of which are here today and whose work is an inspiration, to actively lead the communities they represent in the direction of involvement with the wider local community.  By that I mean extending their sense of civic responsibility and social work beyond places  of worship or local community centres to people from other faith groups and backgrounds.”

In 2007 he articulated his social vision to the Jewish Community with the words:

“It also means trusting charities and voluntary bodies more, giving them longer-term funding, respecting that often they've got the answers rather than government, trusting  them to run larger programmes. It's a big cultural change in terms of the way the  government interacts with the social and voluntary sectors.”

Last month his vision of a modern responsible Britain was a similarly inclusive one:

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer specialising in child protection.

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer specialising in child protection.

Martin Sewell: The next Conservative Government should abolish the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer specialising in child protection.

If you were to ask most childcare professionals what is the single most beneficial innovation for children over the past fifty years, most would nominate the creation of the role of the Children’s Guardian (formerly know as the "Guardian ad Litem").

The public outcry, following the death of Maria Colwell in 1973, led to much soul searching and a public enquiry, which led to children involved in legal proceedings being given an independent social worker and lawyer to act on their behalf. They worked together as a team with access to all Court papers, past histories and official files. They had a limited case load, spent time with the children and their families and ultimately assisted the Court with recommendations independent of the views of parents and Local Authorities. Few children have died once a Children’s Guardian was on the scene.

In the early years they were highly experienced self employed social workers with many years' experience. Often they had become disillusioned with Local Government practice and knew a great deal about where the deficiencies lay. They delighted in their new found freedom to tell the Court what was really happening in official care and judges came to know trust and rely upon them heavily.

They were modestly paid by the hour, and their organisation was both efficient and delightfully low-tech. A single administrator for an area sat with a telephone and a card index. When a Court needed a Guardian, the administrator asked a little about the case, judged if special expertise might be needed, made a few phone calls, called in a few favours and the child was immediately assigned a Guardian. When there was difficulty, a call to the child’s lawyer usually "did the trick" as they knew which of the Guardians were concluding cases and suggested who to try next. When not on the telephone the Administrator checked simple expense claims.

This was not good enough for New Labour.

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer specialising in child protection.

Martin Sewell: Does the Supreme Court represent a Lawyers’ Coup d’Etat?

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer.

Lord Neuberger has raised concerns this week about the effects of one of the quietest revolutions in the British Constitution for many years.

Under the Constitution, the final step in any appeal had traditionally been to the House of Lords. They had been regarded as the Guardians of the rights of the people although the role had been delegated exclusively to Lords who were eminent lawyers, although they still exercised that right and power within the overall role of the Upper House. Law Lords mixed with, and had a sense of responsibility towards their peers whilst exercising a separate function that few felt was functioning badly.

The reform was announced by Tony Blair without the knowledge of his then Lord Chancellor, and with no prior discussion. It represents, in some way, the triumph of Napoleonism and the spirit of the French Enlightenment, and yet, far from being a true expression of " Pure Reason", has within it the same flaws of many ancient regime institutions.

We are bound to cast our eyes across the Atlantic to see how matters unfolded there. The Founding Fathers may have been inspired by French philosophers, but they reformed within a Common Law system which they valued and preserved, and so that may serve as our best predictive model.

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer.

Lord Neuberger has raised concerns this week about the effects of one of the quietest revolutions in the British Constitution for many years.

Under the Constitution, the final step in any appeal had traditionally been to the House of Lords. They had been regarded as the Guardians of the rights of the people although the role had been delegated exclusively to Lords who were eminent lawyers, although they still exercised that right and power within the overall role of the Upper House. Law Lords mixed with, and had a sense of responsibility towards their peers whilst exercising a separate function that few felt was functioning badly.

The reform was announced by Tony Blair without the knowledge of his then Lord Chancellor, and with no prior discussion. It represents, in some way, the triumph of Napoleonism and the spirit of the French Enlightenment, and yet, far from being a true expression of " Pure Reason", has within it the same flaws of many ancient regime institutions.

We are bound to cast our eyes across the Atlantic to see how matters unfolded there. The Founding Fathers may have been inspired by French philosophers, but they reformed within a Common Law system which they valued and preserved, and so that may serve as our best predictive model.

Martin Sewell: If Britain could accommodate Karl Marx, we should also be able to cope with US "Shock Jock" Michael Savage

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer specialising in child protection.

One of the few principles of the 18th Century Enlightenment that will be familiar to many people today is that of Voltaire:

"I disagree profoundly with what you say but will fight to the death for your right to say it."

It is a principle for which many Britons have indeed died, when Conservatives and Communists, Empire Loyalists and Anarchists, jointly fought against those who challenged such an important part of who we are as a nation.

And then along came Jacqui Smith.

American "Shock Jock" Michael Savage has been excluded from entry to this country. He had no plans to come here. He poses no threat to any person here, and yet has been placed in the same category of persons as Russian Nazi Skinheads who promote the attacking of Jews and those who promote suicide bombing. Why?

If the Conservative Party is to establish itself as a true defender of liberty it is essential that this simple question is asked, pursued, and driven home between now and the coming election as a litmus test of whether this country is to be a truly liberal society - in the true sense of the word - or an increasingly narrow one where debate can be restricted in accordance with an increasingly narrow "progressively radical" agenda.

Mr Savage will not be to everyone's taste, even in the Conservative Party. He expresses himself in forthright terms.

He dislikes the influence of the Hollywood "gay mafia" in a similar way that climate change protesters "hate" Big Oil. He asks liberal priests where in the Bible it says it is OK to kill children in the womb. Strong stuff, discomforting to many perhaps, but surely not something that has yet become un-sayable in a free society?

He does not, however, promote "hatred" in a way that places him in a different category than, say, Michael Moore, who could, to no greater or lesser degree, have been said to have promoted "hatred" of George W Bush".

I strongly suspect that in accordance with its "balanced" approach, the Government dare not ban an Islamic figure without finding someone from a different perspective to "prove" its even-handedness. That is the signifier of their moral cowardice.

If Mr Savage does not want to come here, it would be easy to let this matter pass, and yet the fundamental question surely divides who we are, from who New Labour has become. It is a cause that is still capable of rousing the libertarian instincts in all parts of society, those who agree with Mr Savage and those who do not.

It is a simple but important watershed moment and if we deserve to be trusted with shaping the future of our country in accordance with the finest traditions of the past it is essential that we do not fail the test.

The country that could accommodate Karl Marx can surely cope with a Californian polemicist like Mr Savage.

Martin Sewell: We must trust the professional judgments of those involved in child protection (and not shackle them to procedures designed to protect the bureaucracy)

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer specialising in child protection.

Lord Laming’s report into the death of Baby P repeated a number of the lessons which should have been learnt from similar enquiries from his own into the death of Victoria Climbie, to that of Maria Colwell in 1973. If there is a single golden thread that runs through each of these reports it is surely the necessity for there to be a free flow of information between the agencies charged with the responsibility of identifying children at risk of significant harm.

Unfortunately my current impression of the response "on the ground" causes me concern that the bureaucratic response is not yet focused upon the principal objective: we are not "keeping the main thing", the main thing.

The first important objective is to identify those children with significant risk factors who have slipped below the protective radar. This can only be done if the first rung of the child protection hierarchy are "out in the field" and talking to each other. As a military friend of mine once observed "time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted".

What this requires is for school teachers, health visitors, social workers, police and medical centre staff, to be in regular and purposeful contact both formally and informally. The latter is important because the throw away comments of neighbours family and friends may never have the weight to end up in a formal report but shared in the context of a general conversation may be just what places another seemingly unimportant fact or observation into more worrying context.

The lessons we should learn from Baby P

Martin Sewell is a Kent-based family lawyer specialising in child protection.

The discussions and recriminations over the death of Baby P will long continue, and no doubt the lessons and recommendations will join those from a plethora of previous Public Enquiries from the time of Maria Colwell to Victoria Climbie. The whole process is depressingly familiar.

There are, however, a few common features which we should usefully bring into account at this stage, whether we are offering commentary today or making plans for carrying these responsibilities in the longer term.

Before drawing out those themes however, we ought to pay heed to some of our own core values and those who enunciate them. David Cameron speaks of "the Broken Society" and Iain Duncan Smith writes elsewhere of the need to promote marriage.

We ought not to be shy of prefacing our analysis with the plainest of statements that, however hard it is to re-achieve it, children are safest in the homes of parents who are married to each other, in work, and who do not abuse drink or drugs. When the parents additionally understand that the care of children involves at least as much self sacrifice as self fulfilment, then the incidence of such tragedies becomes virtually negligible.

If we are serious about promoting the welfare of children then nothing that undermines those principles should be allowed to pass unexamined. For as long as we treat as unimportant the drift from the traditional family model, with all its imperfections, we shall miss the very simple point. Chaos theory tells us that things move from order to disorganisation and family life is no exception to this.

Martin Sewell: The legal aid crisis

Martin Sewell, a Family Lawyer specialising in Child Protection, laments the chaos caused by the Government's mismanagement and underfunding of legal aid.

A convicted drugs dealer recently evaded the possibility of his frozen financial assets being confiscated, because no legal aid barrister could be found to represent him at the hearing. The simple reason for this is the arrogance of a Government that will not listen to the serious concerns about reforms when expressed by practitioners in any professional field, be they dentists, teachers or, in this case legal aid practitioners.

It is always asserted by New Labour that any professional opposition to Government reforms is based upon unreasonable obstruction by interested parties, but the facts of the case were surely so plain that anyone with half an open mind could see such a problem looming.

As a result of changes by which legal aid lawyers are paid, a barrister undertaking the case in question would have had to study and retain the significance of 6586 documents and to prepare a detailed cross referenced schedule of 4548 transactions. Taking into account the number of hours not infrequently needed to master a substantial set of papers this can work out at as little as £6.50 per hour, given that the preparation time cannot be charged in addition, but is expressed only in terms of a fixed daily fee.

Martin Sewell: Special Rules - OK?

Martin Sewell is a Family Lawyer specialising in Child Protection and Adoption and an Anglican Lay Reader.  His work puts him in daily contact with the disadvantaged of society who experience the consequences of social policy the most acutely.

On the day that newly appointed Minister for Justice Jack Straw chose to restate his interest in a Bill of Rights, by which Judges would be further empowered to legislate by statutory interpretation, we had an interesting example of how they might choose to exercise those powers.

Idris Francis challenged the legal basis of speed cameras objecting that  the requirement for the owner of a vehicle to identify the driver, compromised his “right to silence”.

The European Court decided that holders of driving licences accepted “special rules” which enabled the Prosecuting authorities to overide the normal principle, and justified this by stating that  “anyone who chose to own or drive a car knew that they subjected themselves to a regulatory regime imposed, because the possession and use of cars was recognised to have the potential to cause grave injury.”

Martin Sewell: It's time for conservatives to reclaim moral high ground

Reflecting on Martin Luther King's teaching and William Wilberforce's campaign against the slave trade, Martin Sewell calls for moral clarity in confronting gun culture and other contemporary social enslavements.

Martin Sewell is a Family Lawyer specialising in Child Protection and Adoption and an Anglican Lay Reader.  His work puts him in daily contact with the disadvantaged of society who experience the consequences of social policy the most acutely.

One of the major influences of children of the 1960's, like myself, was the Civil Rights Movement, and anyone who can remember the impact of newsreel footage of the brutality endured to secure desegregation and the vote for black Americans, will recall the moral outrage that led so many of us to instinctively side with the underdog protesters.

It became the prototype for every other protest movement, from then to the present day. Its marches, songs, and placarded demonstrations were recycled to a myriad other causes until, as so often happens, style became the dominant partner over substance. We declared ourselves liberal, we carried the language and concepts from one cause to another and came to despise discrimination of all kinds, until perhaps the early foothills of political correctness began to make us wonder if this direction of travel was truly where we wanted to go.

Inevitably, the Civil Rights movement had a strong attraction for liberals, and attracted celebrity endorsement which enabled its moral imperative to be expropriated and later exported through the media to every other “progressive” movement thereafter. Those of us who have studied the movement, will know that there was, in fact, a deeply conservative foundation to this most iconic of liberal causes, and it is about time we reclaimed some of the moral high ground for the conservative values from which it stemmed.

Whilst everyone looks immediately to Dr Martin Luther King Jnr. it was his father Martin Luther King Snr who was the moral mainspring of the family. He was known as Daddy King.  If you have not visited the churches where father and son preached, you may not appreciate how very low-key conservative their churches and communities were. Their soberly dressed congregations followed dignified services that were, and would be, instantly recognisable to anyone teleported from Worcester in the 1930s.

Daddy King’s startling early lesson for young men like his son was a trio of very conservative values. “Get yourself the vote, get yourself an education, and get yourself a mortgage.”

His son learnt to take as his starting point a similar cluster of inspirations: the wisdom of the American Constitution, the power of the scriptures, and putting his trust in non-violence and the goodwill it could engender from his white fellow citizens.

Now, it might be occurring to you, that these are some considerable distance from the current nostrums being offered the black community today.  We might usefully ask whether they offer a better prospect of advancement than the currently favoured option which can be loosely described as “victimhood” and “dependency”.

The overwhelming virtue of the Civil Rights Movement was its refusal to accept victim status; slavery was too close.  They did not want an excuse for degradation they wanted the dignity of equal opportunity. They did seek to exchange the impotence of bondage for the impotence of welfare dependency. The Kings had moved up the economic and social ladder and wanted to bring their people along.

Fast forward to UK 2007...

Gangster culture? -  a valid lifestyle choice.

Educational curriculum? - how can we accommodate your preferred political narrative?

Marriage? - optional extra.

Religion? - best out of schools unless diluted into a cultural study.

Slavery ? What an opportunity for a victimfest!!!  Have an apology  - P.M. ? - fine! Archbishop of Canterbury? - take it as read. Her Majesty? Tricky, but  we’ll see what we can do.

Daddy King and his son would be turning in their graves.

Martin Sewell: Drugs have moved on, Lib Dems haven't

Martin Sewell is a Family Lawyer specialising in Child Protection and Adoption and an Anglican Lay Reader.  His work puts him in daily contact with the disadvantaged of society who experience the consequences of social policy the most acutely.

For so long, “progressive” thinking has had a Neo-Marxist confidence that “history will absolve us”, and fueled by this dogma, liberals always feel able to make free with established wisdom, institutions, and experience, with a confidence unencumbered by recollection of their past failures.

Consider the following “progressive solutions” to recent problems. 

“The provision of sex education will reduce teenage pregnancies and the incidence of sexually transmitted disease”.

“Special needs children will fare better in mainstream schools” 

"Relaxed opening hours will reduce binge drinking”

“More money will inevitably result in an improved NHS”

Not looking good? Well consider, for a while, the latest Lib Dem proposals on drugs, but first, do remind yourself that everyone of the above policies was originally accompanied by the assertion that reason, and evidence from elsewhere, justified our moving away  rom a policy that had hitherto served the country well, towards a more “progressive” solution.

Martin Sewell: Should Drugs tolerance become the new Racism?

Martin Sewell is a Family Lawyer specialising in Child Protection and Adoption and an Anglican Lay Reader.  His work puts him in daily contact with the disadvantaged of society who experience the consequences of social policy the most acutely.

In November’s edition of Marie Claire, you can read an interview with television celebrity Graham Norton in which he cheerfully acknowledges having used a variety of drugs, and indicating that the only “downside” is the people you end up mixing with. 

It is, rather like Ernest Thesiger’s condemnation of  the First World War

“ My dear, the noise ..... and the people!” 

Never mind the reality, it’s only the affectation that matters.

True to form, the BBC duly rushed to reassure us that these utterances in no way placed Mr Norton’s lucrative career as a presenter at any jeopardy . He is of course, paid at very considerable - and compulsory - expense, by you and I.

The rush to defend his quite deliberate exposition of anti-social views stands in marked contrast with the fate of the hapless football pundit Ron Atkinson whose off camera remark about the racial origin of French footballer Marcel Dessailly was not only caught accidentally but deliberately publicised by the broadcaster to make a public point, and it had a completely different outcome.

Martin Sewell: Are " Human Rights" Alien, Culturally Insensitive, and Undemocratic?

Martin Sewell is a Family Lawyer specialising in Child Protection and Adoption and an Anglican Lay Reader.  His work puts him in daily contact with the disadvantaged of society who experience the consequences of social policy the most acutely.  "I am more interested in human beings than human rights, and I want to take the actual effects of  liberal change back to its advocates and ask "Is that really what we want for our fellow citizens?"

The Human Rights agenda owes its origins to a post war Europe which had to confront its recent past in an utterly shamefaced manner.

The heirs of Goethe and Beethoven had an immediate moral dilemma, but plenty of others had shown a complicity or indifference towards persecution and the holocaust.

France, Germany and Italy began to re-invent themselves, with 1945 as a new "Year Zero", and it is not insignificant that as they coalesced, the resentments of General De Gaulle towards his erstwhile Anglo-allies, influenced the direction that Europe took, incidentally drawing its legal inspiration from the18th Century rationalist principles of the European enlightenment, rather than the more pragmatic example of the English Common Law.

Continental Jurisprudence has always preferred to enunciate metaphysical grand principles in a codified form leaving the judges to develop the law from those precepts, unfettered by any greater sense of history. Judges from the Anglo-sphere tempered their application of the law with a deeper sense of historical precedent so that Judges, like the redoubtable Lord Denning, could often be found interpreting - or creating law - in the spirit of "freeborn Englishmen" with reference to precedent of considerable antiquity.

This anchored sense of English history was, of course, anathema to anyone of a progressive persuasion.

It did not seem to have mattered to the critics that such attitudes had actually played a major part in preserving freedoms in the countries that followed the English Common Law, and neither was much credit given to the remarkable record that rather conservative Judges had for advancing enlightened causes. Before anyone proclaimed "Liberty, Equality, or Fraternity or "Give me liberty, or give me death", the normally reactionary Lord Mansfield was nevertheless capable of outlawing slavery in Somerset’s case in 1772. Later Lord Denning himself played a major role in developing, property rights for women and a benevolent approach to workers' compensation. The Common Law actually served us rather well.

Whilst most of the countries that signed up to the European Convention did so as they emerged from tyranny, Britain did so, not because we needed to, but rather because it seemed rather impolite not to!

I wonder if those who took that decision would have done so, had they realised the carte blanche that it offered to modern, mainly liberal judges, to subvert traditional values and to strike down legislation of elected Parliaments?

What would they have made of the decision to keep a 13 year old’s abortion from her parents? Would they have espoused the rights of prisoners to have access to pornography and condoms? Is that where the high flown aspirations of the Convention were heading at the point of its inception in 1950?

Both the Common Law and the Convention allow judicial discretion, but whereas the former was rooted in a culture, acceptable to its peoples, the latter seems only to be constrained by the prejudices of the current crop of Judiciary.

This is not a uniquely European phenomenon. In the past 40 years, both State and Federal Supreme Courts of the USA have evolved in a similar direction, with liberal majorities moving away from the simple interpretation of laws into the field of significantly changing it.

Some of the examples are breathtakingly bold. Thus in February 2004 the Massachusetts Supreme Court managed to "discover" that the 1776 American Constitution intended gay marriage all along, but amazingly this fact had eluded all the other jurists for 200 years and only they had been bright enough to notice this!

Of greater import are the issues of abortion, gun control, the death penalty and school prayer, each of which have been controversially brought before the Court by liberal pressure groups.

Not only do these attract visceral debate in their very nature, but raise both for Americans, and us, an important point of principle.

Within the American controversy lies a fundamental issue of democratic deficit.

In Britain, those who promoted Abortion Rights, and Civil Partnerships did the honourable thing and put their case through Parliament. In the USA, Liberals who do not have a hope in hell of securing a democratic mandate have secured their way through legislative interpretation by unelected Judges against the wishes of the majority of the people.

That is about to change with the imminent appointment of Judge Samuel Alito, but his plain bias against judicial "activism" (for which read "legislation") will signal an end to the creeping barrage of liberal social change.

The likes of Teddy Kennedy who were happy to appoint liberal judges are currently howling at the moon at the effrontery of a President willing to shift the balance the other way.

But as we watch this unfold over there, should we be asking similar questions here?

Is it not time to unpick some of the assumptions woven into the Human Rights discourse that the current interpretations of human rights are universal, immutable and valid?"

Does a country with access to a national and international heritage of culturally sensitive Common Law still need to be tied to a European Standard? Is not the sub-text that we cannot be trusted to protect our own people’s rights without supra- national intellectual oversight?

Why should our elected Government not have the right to imprison foreign nationals who have chosen to inflict their unwelcome presence upon us? There is, after all a choice, Belmarsh - or some place else? We did, after all, imprison many foreign nationals as we went about freeing Europe so that we could set up the European Convention on Human Rights. Does anyone detect a certain irony here?

As the EU expands, is it right to assume that there can, or needs to be the same parameters of family life, in say Istanbul, Islington and Warsaw?

I invite you to devise your own questions along these lines.

And so I ask my question in the heading.

There is an unspoken assumption amongst the chattering classes that our currently defined "human rights" are unquestionably good and necessary, and any suggestion that we could profitably do without them and the paraphernalia that goes with them will of course send Cherie Blair into paroxysms of uncomprehending fury - but there are other advantages!!

Martin Sewell: A rational case in support of marriage

Martin Sewell is a Family Lawyer specialising in Child Protection and Adoption and an Anglican Lay Reader.  His work puts him in daily contact with the disadvantaged of society who experience the consequences of social policy the most acutely.  "I am more interested in human beings than human rights, and I want to take the actual effects of  liberal change back to its advocates and ask "Is that really what we want for our fellow citizens?"

Nowhere is this more noticeable than in our society's approach to the institution of marriage.

 

It is a feature of every successful culture on earth, and whether one regards it as an "honourable estate, instituted by God" or simply as a mutually beneficial Darwinian contract for the propagation of genes, it certainly appears to have a provenance of considerable antiquity and overwhelming success.

 

To Conservatives, whose watchword is usually pragmatism, that ought to have been a big enough hint  to ensure an inherent bias in support of the institution, and yet somewhere along the way, an over enthusiasm for individualism enabled a core value to become not only unfashionable, but seemingly unpalatable to defend. Thus when David Cameron was recently bold enough to mention the love that dare not speak its name on the BBC Today programme, he was immediately, and predictably accused of wishing to discriminate against the unmarried, and took some moments to get back on track.

 

If modern Conservatism is to be not only progressive, but effective in its supportive of the poor, it is time for us to reconnect with the strong reasons for supporting marriage for the very best of social, personal, economic, and practical reasons.

A generation of Woman's Hour has so plainly skewed the thinking of the majority of our media hacks that they cannot detach themselves from the idea that marriage is nothing more than a historic legacy from times when women were virtual chattels. Like the revolutionaries of 17 ^th Century France or 20 ^th Century Russia, marriage is denounced as a "mere piece of paper", a bourgeois institution, overlooking the subsequent and necessary restitution in both historical cases.

Traditionally it is the baby that is thrown out with the bathwater, and so, literally, we find it to be the case here.

Having worked as a Family lawyer for over 30 years, and much of it in the field of child protection, I can testify anecdotally to what is unquestionably the outcome of every academic study in the field at home and abroad. Marriage is good for children.

 

The breadth of evidence is staggering. Whether one looks at prisoners, drug addicts, the homeless, alcoholics, the truants, the unemployed, the mentally ill, the long term benefit dependent or any other cohort of people at the nastier end of society's spectrum, there you will find the children of the unmarried overwhelmingly and disproportionately represented.

 

This is not a co-incidence.

 

If marriage were a new miracle drug being offered to NIHCE for the cure of social ills, its demonstrable statistical efficacy would be so impressive that it would be passed without clinical trials!

 

It is worth supporting on compassionate grounds for children alone, however the argument runs deeper than that.

 

Every failed child inflicts a social and economic cost on society. Some will be simple life long non-contributors - a waste on both a personal and societal level. Many  others will be more malign, actively anti-social and perhaps exponentially inflicting costs through the necessity of more police, psychiatrists, counsellors, lawyers etc as they in their turn create further dysfunctional families and children, often serially.

There are of course those who are unmarried who bring children up well and successfully, but this is not unlike the proverbial man in the pub whose lifelong friend drives at speed with excess alcohol and smokes 60 cigarettes a day without harming himself or anyone else. It can be done, but statistically is best avoided.

If marriage is to be promoted however, we need to re-balance the current social account.

 

Founded as it was on mutual responsibilities as well as rights, successive legislators have undermined it by the regular application of the law of unintended consequences.

 

The tax and welfare benefits systems are heavily weighted against those who marry.

A two parent, two children marriage with one earner on average income of £24,000 pa will be only marginally better off than a similar lone parent on state benefit.

 

They pay £5,000 pa more in tax than they receive in benefits, yet were they to separate they would jointly be better off by some £7,000.

 

By allocating improved rights to co-habitees, we grant the benefits of marriage without the responsibilities. Marriage becomes less attractive in consequence, and we are all worse off, not least because through these economic disincentives, the reproductive rate of working families is lower than that of the dependent. Increasingly through a cock-eyed benefit system, those having most children are those least equipped to care for them.

 

From such examples it is clear that as a society we all have a vested interest in marriage between parents. If that means discriminating in favour of marriage then let us not be ashamed to say it and justify our stance.

 

Almost inevitably - and irrelevantly - we shall have to justify why we might discriminate against gay partnerships.This is not through any personal hostility or disapproval. Put simply however I have no "interest" in how a pair of adults conduct their lives. They are free to make their own self- interested arrangements without my blessing or censure.

 

Where family units are concerned however I do have a very real reason to take notice and wish to promote stability for the reasons described above.

 

Now I have little doubt that the Metropolitan elite will tell us that we cannot change society, overlooking the fact that they managed to do so within a forty year period.

 

Happily in the USA there is evidence that strengthening the family can be achieved together with a number of desirable objectives, including reducing family breakdown, abortion, lone parenthood and teenage pregnancy. For further details of this "It takes a Family" by Senator Rick Santorum is well worth a read.