How egalitarian social policy has failed working class children

James Gubb, 16 April 2007

Britain’s children are the unhappiest in the developed world says UNICEF in its recent report, An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries. Britain came bottom not only in Subjective Well-being but also in Family and Peer Relationships and in Behaviours and Risks. United Nations research findings should generally be treated with some scepticism. Nevertheless I think we all know that there is at least a kernel of truth in this report, writes Graham Cunningham.

What makes our statistics compare so unfavourably with other rich nations however is probably not British youth as a whole but the troubled youth of the remnants of Britain’s working class. It is a bit like the favourite media cliché about how one in three marriages end in divorce. No they don’t. The divorce rate will vary greatly between different sections of society. In certain sections of society it will be nearer to one in one and this will significantly distort the overall picture. In this way media reporting of statistics routinely propagates a false picture of how ‘we as a nation’ behave. What the UNICEF report really highlights is the dire consequences of Britain’s failure to rescue and rehabilitate its underclass. This is not the whole story but it is what sets us apart in this particular hall of shame.
Some sources of misery will never go away. Unstable, capricious parenting can happen in all sections of society and will, in Philip Larkin’s words, **** you up.
Others will affect a wide spectrum of children. Almost all our children are reaping the consequences of the misguided educational policies of our recent past – particularly in the 1970’s. Educational theorists advanced the fatuous notion that the curriculum should be concerned only with matters that are – in education-speak – relevant to children today. And in order not to discriminate against the linguistically challenged they abandoned any attempt at proper intellectual development replacing it with a multiple-choice, tick-box culture. All this will have exacerbated illiteracy, diminished children’s ability to make sense of the world and stunted their curiosity about it. Another 1970’s intellectual fad – which held that all children were naturally wise and good and did not need educating, just freedom to express themselves – spread in diluted form throughout the system with disastrous consequences for discipline and well-being. In four decades of meddling with the school system you would be hard pressed to identify a single beneficial outcome. The cruel irony is that it is for the children of working-class families that these foolish theories have had their most poisonous consequences.
If, in addition to bad parenting, bad schooling and bad television, you also live in a deprived area in modern Britain, the quality of your life may well be one of severe poverty. However the true nature of that poverty has for decades been obscured by chattering class sentimentality and a refusal to face up to uncomfortable facts. It is not your parent or parents’ modest income that ruins your childhood (although it is true that if your parents lack ambition either for themselves or you this is likely to damage your chances in life). It is the morally confused and nihilistic culture around you that ruins your childhood.
Possibly the worst form of deprivation of all is having to live side-by-side with your intimidating out-of-control neighbours. A high proportion of council estates in Britain have long been blighted by teenage hooliganism. This need only be a small minority to still have a hugely corrosive effect on the neighbourhood as a whole. It is the same in the schools where a handful of seriously disturbed kids can wreck the education of all the rest. This is the genie that was let out of the bottle in the heyday of liberal guilt-trip politics. This is the real cycle of deprivation. Local opinion invariably cries out for strong action to be taken by the authorities but is always defeated by political correctness. In the conventional liberal-establishment analysis the culprit is unemployment and drugs etc whereas in the conventional right-of–centre analysis it is the absent father figure and drugs. Both analyses contain some truth but also a fallacy: Tackling unemployment and single motherhood might have gone some way towards preventing the problem in the first place but won’t solve it now. The collapse of moral and legal authority is the real culprit and re establishing it by whatever means – however apparently harsh – is the answer. The starting point would be to rehabilitate a police force that has sunk into a sorry and confused muddle, partly forced upon it by political correctness but also partly, it has to be said, of its own making.
A significant proportion of British youth now grow up in an urban jungle. The well-being statistics for these areas will be truly awful. Most children are not vicious little brutes but the impact on the social fabric of those that are is magnified a hundred-fold. Re-establishing the concept of respect for others and fear of consequences must be the paramount policy objective and essential pre-requisite of any tough-love progressive social policy. While the metropolitan elite have been indulging themselves in a self-absorbed guilt-trip about poverty, a ‘Lord of the Flies’ youth culture has grown up, dominated by nature’s most predatory personality-types. Excuses about European Union obligations or the Human Rights Act are just that – excuses, No other Western European country has anything like the youth lawlessness that we face and no other country would let its criminal justice system be so shackled if it did. Instead of facing up to this, money has simply been thrown at ‘the community’. Community projects are set up, new buildings put up with landscaping schemes that are quickly torn up by hooligan elements. All of it is justified by bogus ‘community consultation’ exercises that, for the most part are poorly and apathetically attended. With our much-cherished anti-discrimination ethic it is no longer possible to discriminate – in these ‘communities’ – between oppressors and their victims.
The publication of the UNICEF report was greeted with universal media condemnation of the Blair government for failing miserably on one of its key political promises. Well yes, up to a point, but the blame stretches much further back than that. Entirely bogus comparisons have also been made with the more successful social policies of other, better-adjusted European societies. Bogus in that these societies have not needed to get themselves out of this kind of mess because unlike us, they never got into it in the first place. And then of course there is the inevitable finger-pointing at the Thatcher years for creating the so-called me-society but this is also largely misplaced. The truth is that, if anything, Britain became a me-society in the 70’s and many of the clarion callers of that time are now the luminaries of the establishment today. They are in the educational, local government and legal establishment. They are even in the police. Some commentators are discovering that children need boundaries and that the more disciplinarian teachers are generally also the more popular. Well big surprise – wiser heads have been saying things like this all through these decades of crass ‘progressive’ social engineering.
The blame for the quality of life of our children lies with the folly of the liberal establishment as a whole over the past fifty years and more. There have been warnings from wiser heads all through that time. Ironically, as much as anywhere else, blame lies with parts of the media establishment who have lead the way in sneering at traditional values, getting off on designer violence and romanticising degenerate lifestyles. Pious media talking-head stuff about the need for ‘radical measures to deal with child poverty’ rarely contains any actual radical thinking. Quite the reverse; it comprises exactly the same old nostrums that have been trotted out for years and have led to this mess. It is truly astonishing how it never seems to occur to this kind of ’radical’ that their prescriptions manifestly do not work. With so many fools in so many high places I fear it will have to get much worse before a corner is turned.