In an interview contained in this week’s issue of the Spectator, former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, delivers a coruscating attack on the style of government of the present administration. Of especial concern to Lord Butler has been the way Prime Minister Blair’s almost Presidential approach towards his job has steadily eroded the sovereignty of Parliament,… [Read More]
Abigail is mother of two year old, Adam, and also the best friend of her neighbour, Brenda, also the mother of a toddler, Boris. Both mothers have temporarily suspended paid work to stay home to raise a family. Currently, neither receives any government financial help to do so. Under government proposals announced today, both mothers… [Read More]
No one seems to have a good word to say for prison at the moment. The Prison Reform Trust has published a report today criticising the criminal justice system for sending so many parents to prison, which causes problems for their children. In her foreword to the report Cherie Blair says that ‘we should examine… [Read More]
Sociology until the nineteen sixties was greatly interested in “understanding” how people behaved socially. “Understanding”, though he retained much of its ordinary meaning, was defined with painstaking exactness by Max Weber. One of his basic ideas was the common-sense one, that people can’t act on the basis of what all the facts of the situation… [Read More]
‘Creating stronger families’ was an explicit objective of the Home Secretary’s recent Five-Year Plan. ‘Families’ were allegedly placed ‘at the heart’ of his policy to combat crime. (Confident Communities, Cm 6287, July 2004.) In the document, however, the word ‘family’ appears only when it means any household arrangement whatsoever. ‘A family’, to the Home Secretary… [Read More]
I rarely listen to Radio 5, but I happened to turn it on just before midnight last Saturday (4 December) to see if I could catch the score for the Sunderland v West Ham game. The announcer was just letting people know what the next discussion would be. His exact words were: “Does anybody in… [Read More]
The most important effect of the Blunkett affair could well be the hitherto most neglected, namely, the astonishing twist he has given to the old legal question, Who is a child’s father? From at least as far back as the twelfth century the legal rule has been that if a mother of the child is… [Read More]
David Blunkett is daily exhibiting a startling obtuseness about a distinction that lies at the heart of government–that between the public and the private. It is this, more than anything else, that has exposed his incapacity as a senior politician at the heart of national affairs, whatever his past achievements or present merits. Religion and… [Read More]
Despite all the manifold problems of rising levels of violent crime to have beset Britain since 1997, life has not been too bad for the vast majority of its citizens. In many ways, the period of sustained growth and rising living standards most of them have enjoyed was the legacy of sound public finance that… [Read More]
Today’s papers contain the results of tests in English and mathematics carried out last summer on 11 years olds in England’s primary schools. They establish beyond doubt that, on the whole, faith schools achieve much better results than so-called ‘community’ schools which have no denominational affiliation and at which religious education and collective acts of… [Read More]