HYPOCRISY

Liberals who attack traditional families often have strong families themselves – because it works

THE liberal, governing classes never miss an opportunity to lecture the rest of us on what has become their iron orthodoxy: that modern parenting must be celebrated in all its various forms.

Now, Britain’s most senior family judge, Sir James Munby, has gone one step further and is actively calling on us to ‘welcome and applaud’ the demise of the nuclear family.

With all due respect to this esteemed judicial figure, I cannot join in his delight at the revolution that has engulfed our society.

The collapse of traditional family structures in Britain is a cause for concern rather than jubilation, given how it has undermined social cohesion, robbed children of security, and places ever greater demands on the public purse.

So many of the problems we face in 21st century Britain – such as urban street crime and worsening mental health – arise from dysfunctional families and a lack of parental role models, especially fathers for adolescent boys.

In one respect, however, Sir James is correct. It is absolutely right that our society no longer stigmatises lone parents or people who have been through divorce.

No one of compassion wants to return to a world where single mothers were punished or, worse, had their children taken into care simply for giving birth out of wedlock.

Similarly, there is nothing ethical about forcing people, through the law or financial penalties, to remain trapped in loveless marriages. Partners who despise each other are hardly likely to be good parents.

But what Sir James fails to recognise is that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Serious damage is being caused by the fashionable dogma that family structures don’t matter, that anything goes as long as it’s part of each individual’s personal quest for happiness.

In the process, the virtues of loyalty, commitment, duty, steadfastness and self-sacrifice have been jettisoned.

This runs counter to the social history of mankind. Every successful society has had at its bedrock a family unit, based on childrearing by a mother and a father who are committed to each other and their offspring. That has always proved the best way to provide security, to share burdens, to inculcate moral values and to establish respect for authority.

Whatever Sir James says – and given the distressing cases he must have presided over, he will surely know this to be the case – the plain fact is that children do better with two parents.

It is estimated that half of all children born today will experience family breakdown by the age of 16. Of course, any child will suffer from such a meltdown, but the price is most heavily paid by those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Cushioned by their affluence and status, the upper and middle classes can cope, on the whole, better with familial instability, but the loss of a breadwinner in workingclass households can be the start of a spiral of despair.

That is why the welfare system often has to step in. Those who welcome Sir James’s apparent delight in the end of the nuclear family – an institution that many millions still endorse and aspire to – should understand the burden of the social revolution.

According to a study by the Centre for Social Justice, the annual cost of family breakdown is no less than £47billion a year.

But the consequences go far beyond finance. They can be seen, too, in the terrifying inadequacy of too many parents.

As the Mail reported last week, the head of the schools inspectorate Ofsted warned that some children are now entering primary school without the ability to use the toilet, put on a coat or even speak properly.

It is no use bleating about ‘ lack of resources’, this is all down to a tragic failure in parental responsibility.

In the wake of educational failure, rising crime, mental illness, and widespread loneliness, liberals continually demand ever more Government intervention, more social programmes, more spending.

BUT it is my belief that we wouldn’t need half of this if we had retained and supported – and, yes, exalted the nuclear family. The hypocrisy of these liberals is astounding. Yes, they preach the virtues of anything goes, but I’ve often observed that in their own lives they stick to the family unit that has served mankind so well.

They want others to embrace change, but they don’t want it for themselves because, I would argue, they know it undermines the welfare of children. Take those apostles of familial liberalism – people like David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper. That’s not to mention Sir James Munby himself, who according to Who’s Who has been married since 1977.

All have used their own strong marriages to bring up their own children. They instinctively know the reality – even when it contradicts their own ideology and Sir James’s edict – that the traditional family works.