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Bad parents should be taught a lesson
Clichés often contain some truth; the well worn stereotype of the British as people who don’t much like children is, sadly, just. We hardly needed last week’s report from Unicef on the wellbeing of children in rich countries to tell us that we neglect our own quite shamefully. If neglect is abuse, then we are a nation of child abusers, both rich and poor. The children of the well-off suffer mildly from affluent neglect; the children of the poor suffer much more from the ordinary kind. They have no one to come home to, no one to look up to, nowhere to go except to hang out in the street.
Although I have some serious reservations about the report, the overall picture is so conclusively bleak, as far as a minority of British children goes, that we must accept some of its conclusions. In overall wellbeing, British children are the worst off in a list of 21 rich countries, and they are worst off, too, in the individual categories of relationships, behaviour and subjective wellbeing. Life is lonely, scary, unhealthy and dangerous for a large minority of British children.
Only 65% of British children eat the main meal of the day with their parents several times a week; thrown upon the company of other youngsters, only 42% of British children find them “kind and helpful”. In a survey by Britain’s National Family and Parenting Institute, quoted in the Unicef report, only 65% of children said they felt their parent(s) made them feel loved and cared for and only 76% said their parent(s) were always there when they needed them.
That makes a quarter or more of children who feel uncared for and neglected. When it comes to having an orderly, healthy breakfast before school, only about half of British secondary pupils say they get any. They may have been lying to shock the pollsters, but if not that means nearly half of all British parents cannot be bothered to ease their children into the day with breakfast.
Not surprisingly, British children are way ahead of others in the rich world in what are called risk behaviours. In plain English this means smoking, binge drinking, underage sex, eating junk food, obesity, teenage pregnancy, bullying, fighting and getting into trouble. In some cities the children are becoming feral. The recent shooting dead of two 15-year-old boys in the hellish estates of south London are the extreme manifestation of this terrible neglect.
What stands out from the Unicef report is that in this country parents either do not care enough about children to make time for them, or they cannot afford to make time for them. With high numbers of single parents and stepparents, with high numbers of irresponsible and absent fathers and full-time working mothers, that is understandable. All these things impose tremendous stresses on parents. Children get pushed out of their rightful time and place in their parents’ lives, more so here than in the rest of Europe. What can be done?
It would be a start to enable — if not to force — parents to spend more time with their children. It seems blindingly obvious that this government’s policy of driving as many women out to work as possible is counterproductive. The only acceptable reason for doing so is to control the welfare queens, who think having lots of babies will win them a meal ticket for decades — and that could surely be dealt with differently.
Most women want to stay home with their babies. Only 6% want to work full time and all mothers know that childcare is an expensive lottery. Yet 55% of working women are in full-time jobs. It is nonsense to shift money about to provide “affordable childcare”, which is neither good nor affordable; it is less good than what most mothers provide themselves and it costs more, all in, than letting her stay at home.
The result is that working mothers are harried and tired, especially if they are single, and short of the time their children — and their wider families — need. Part of the reason for so many women working such long hours, against their real wishes, is the high cost of housing. That is the root of many social evils and there is no question that a big housebuilding programme must be a top priority for the next government.
It also seems obvious to me that fathers should be held firmly accountable for their children, as David Cameron argued on Friday. I believe that process should start with dismantling the crazy benefits system which makes a man substantially better off — cash in hand at the end of the week — if he abandons his wife or girlfriend, and which enables a feckless never-married girl to be just as well off as a respectable abandoned wife or quasi-wife. Unfortunately the government has proved quite unable to run the Child Support Agency and there seems little reason for optimism about this.
What is needed — and it is something governments cannot and should not try to engineer — is cultural change. We need a lot more of what John Stuart Mill called moral disapprobation; these days it is called stigma. It is a good thing to show disapproval, even anger. It is wrong for men to abandon their children. It is wrong for a girl to have a baby without having another parent for it. It is wrong to have children whom you cannot afford to support. It is wrong to neglect your children, to fail even to give them breakfast and make sure they get to school.
In the past 30 years there has been a general horror of being judgmental, but why? These actions, wrong in themselves because they cause suffering to children, are also wrong because they cause serious social problems for the rest of us. Society should express disapprobation, forcefully.
Governments can follow in expressing such disapproval. They could deny irresponsible single mothers the privilege of independent housing and offer them educational care hostels only. They could try punishing irresponsible fathers in their pockets. They could order schools to provide after-school exercise and clubs and hobby groups, every day, year round. They could give massive tax breaks to stay-at-home mothers and to marriage. They could support charitable mentoring schemes.
Above all, they could scrap the laws that terrify responsible adults out of trying to control other people’s children. All this does, however, involve being judgmental so I don’t suppose it will happen.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 18, 2007 | Comments (0)
We’re far too nice to Muslim extremists
It is hard not to feel a desperate anger at last week’s news. Nine British Muslims have been arrested on suspicion of plotting to behead a British Muslim soldier, as a traitor to Islam, and to show a videotape of the act on the net to terrify us.
In the same week Policy Exchange, the think tank, has published a poll-based study that shows young British-born Muslims are far more alienated from mainstream society than their parents. Of British Muslims aged 16-24, 37% would prefer to live under sharia in Britain, 37% would like to send their children to Islamic state schools and — most incredibly — 36% think Muslims converting to another religion should be punished by death. Young British Muslims who say they “admire organisations like Al-Qaeda, which are prepared to fight the West” amount to 13%. For British Muslims aged over 55, the figures are much lower, at 17%, 19%, 19% and 3% respectively.
The usual immigrant experience of gradual integration has failed for more than a third of Muslims. All the exhaustive and intrusive efforts of the race relations industry have been counter-productive.
The Policy Exchange report argues that this alienation is largely due to more than 20 years of official multiculturalism. This benighted orthodoxy has emphasised differences and divisions and promoted a sense of grievance that is sometimes almost paranoid. This amounts to full-blown victimhood, whipped up not just by Muslim spokesmen but also by nonMuslim journalists and commentators and human rights activists in the victim industry, who complain, in defiance of the evidence, of growing Islamophobic attacks and persistent police harassment; they make comparisons with Nazi Germany. The mayor of London, no less, called at a recent conference for an end to the “media’s orgy of Islamophobia”.
These inflammatory accusations persist. For example, the supposedly moderate Dr Mohammad Naseem, a champion of interfaith dialogue, an honorary doctor of Birmingham University and chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, said last Thursday that he believed the government was “pursuing a policy of maintaining a perception of a [terrorist] threat to justify the draconian antiterror laws they have been passing”. It had, he said, embarked on “a campaign to strike terror into the hearts of the Muslim people”, and he compared Blair’s Britain with Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. He is encouraging people to disbelieve the police’s assurances last week that they are “not targeting faith communities but suspected criminals”. This is paranoia gone mainstream.
If this is what comes from a man supposed to be the voice of Islamic moderation, what can one feel but rage? However, unaccustomed though I am to looking on the bright side, I suppose I should try. There are some encouraging signs. This alleged plot to behead a British soldier was uncovered with the help of a brave Muslim soldier who allowed himself to be used as bait to draw out the suspected kidnappers. That was courage and patriotism well beyond the call of duty. We ought to be grateful, too, to the Muslim informants who give police and secret services invaluable information; a source told me last week that there is no lack of volunteers despite the intimidation.
The findings of the Policy Exchange report are not all negative. Despite the sense of victimhood that some Muslims feel and others try to excite, 84% said that on the whole they felt they had been treated fairly in this society, regardless of their beliefs. Even more strikingly, more Muslims (37%) than people in the general population (29%) feel that “one of the benefits of modern society is to criticise other people’s religious or political views, even when it causes offence”.
All the same, there remains a terrifying minority of disaffected young Muslims. What, if anything, can be done that isn’t already being done?
My counterterrorist wish list goes as follows. Silence all imams who break the law in their preaching with incitements to violence (the government’s record has been abysmal). Monitor all mosques; refuse visas to foreign imams who speak poor or no English (the government lost its nerve over this, as over so much). Control and monitor imams visiting prisons (the Prison Service is so shambolic that it is impossible to know whether all its 130 or so visiting imams have been security vetted). Segregate Islamist prisoners in jail (this is done in the best prisons but is out of control in the rest). Isolate radical Islamist prisoners (this is against the Human Rights Act). Stop them having internet access (not all prisons do).
More widely, recognise that the problem now lies with “self-radicalisation” in suburban front rooms. Stop the creation of religious schools (Blair sold the pass on this). Monitor madrasah schools. Restrain the practice of importing brides and bridegrooms in arranged marriages from the Third World (this is well known to inhibit integration, but the government abolished the “primary purpose” rules preventing such marriages, presumably for electoral advantage); this could be done by following the Danish example of strict entry requirements and a minimum age of 24, which enables young people to choose more freely. Spend much more money monitoring young dual-passport Britons’ trips to Pakistan and deport them for attending training camps (these routes are watched but it is expensive and the Pakistani government is unable to help).
Teach schoolchildren the facts about conditions in Muslim countries (as opposed to right-on grievances about the “black hole of Calcutta”). Teach them what happens in jails in Muslim states, compared with what has happened in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. Teach schoolchildren and young adults what sharia involves; stop listening to the so-called representative bodies of British Muslims, not least the Muslim Council of Britain. Require the government to reveal the names and CVs of its advisers on Islamic affairs. Censor the violent Islamist recruitment sites on the internet, including the insidious hip-hop and rap sites. America and even China manage it for different reasons.
But all this is too little, too late. How can one not feel a furious, frustrated rage at the betrayal of our civilisation and our safety?
| Sunday, February 04, 2007 | Comments (0)
