Post by Teddy Bear on Jul 10, 2009 23:37:42 GMT
Perhaps one of the greatest indictments against the BBC is how it has contributed to the decline of family values in Britain while pushing its liberal agenda. A top judge has commented on a recent BBC decision to air a documentary about the decline of family at the 'dead time' of 11.20pm instead of it's original slot at 9pm on the basis it was 'too dark'.
What is 'dark' is the souless force for evil that the BBC has come to represent.
What is 'dark' is the souless force for evil that the BBC has come to represent.
Family breakdown IS behind broken Britain: Top judge says it is national tragedy and attacks BBC for suppressing debate
By John Ware
Last updated at 11:22 PM on 10th July 2009
Comments (0) Add to My Stories Last month, one of Britain's most senior Family Court judges described family breakdown as a national tragedy and argued marriage should be promoted by the Government to help stop 'social anarchy'.
Sir Paul Coleridge also took the extraordinary step of attacking the BBC for suppressing debate over the relationship between family breakdown and social ills by burying a TV series on the subject in a late-night slot.
The documentary series had already been put on hold until after May's local elections because of its sensitive political nature.
The Mail, which for 20 years has passionately argued that the breakdown of the family and marriage have been hugely damaging to society, invited the respected BBC journalist behind the series to reveal his findings. . .
Broken Britain: Is family breakdown behind the down fall of the country?
So is Britain 'broken'? David Cameron thinks so, while Gordon Brown disagrees, having claimed last autumn: 'This country has never been broken by anyone or anything.'
However, that's not how his predecessor Tony Blair saw it when Labour was in opposition. Back in 1995, he said: 'Look at the wreckage of our broken society. Drugs, violence, youngsters hanging around street corners with nothing to do. We have to have the courage to build a new civic society.'
Yet, after a decade as Prime Minister, Blair chose his words more carefully. Youth violence was no longer a 'metaphor for the state of British society' but a 'specific criminal culture among a specific group of people'.
So, is the concept of 'Broken Britain' simply the preserve of opportunist opposition leaders? Indeed, is the phrase simply a 'witless sobriquet', as one commentator says, or does it capture an essential truth about a decline in our social values?
It is proving hard to have a sensible debate about this important issue, which is why we at the BBC have tried to open up one with a programme to be shown next week.
Of course, every generation has its moral panic. Some commentators, such as the Guardian's Polly Toynbee, blame the Daily Mail for whipping us into a dangerously righteous frenzy.
But there are many on the political Left and Centre who also recognise that the phrase 'Broken Britain' reflects an essential truth about our society.
Family life at the centre of a happy society?
For example, there's Robert Reiner, professor of criminology at LSE, for whom I'd wager the Guardian has been a lifelong companion. He says: 'I think in many ways Britain has broken.'
Respected economist Paul Ormerod, founder of the Henley Forecasting Centre, says: 'In terms of pure scientific description, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that we are more fragmented and broken.'
And there's Martin Innes, professor of the Police Science Institute at Cardiff University, who argues: 'We are approaching a point where we can either come back from the brink,' he says, 'or we're sailing over the abyss.'
It surely doesn't much matter whether we say Britain is 'broken', 'breaking' or ' fragmenting around the edges'. What matters is whether we recognise there are trends in behaviour and values that are taking us in the wrong direction.
Britain is jostling for the dubious honour of the sickest lifestyle in Western Europe.
Government figures show our adults are the most obese, and 11 to 15-year-olds who drink, are drinking more - the average weekly intake being over six pints. According to The Children's Society charity, a higher percentage of youngsters are getting drunk than in any other OECD country.
Despite the evidence of marriage being generally best for children, government ministers have avoided debating its merits
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation says our 15 to 24-year-olds have a much higher incidence of syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia. And we still have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies - a recent downward trend has reversed upwards.
As for crime, ministers trumpet an overall fall from a mid-1990s peak, but fail to give a rounded view. A 2007 EU Crime and Safety survey said the UK 'remains a high-crime country in the EU' with 'higherthanaverage scores', including the highest for assaults and threats.
Although crime overall has fallen, violent youth crime is stubbornly high. The Youth Justice Board says robbery has increased by 29 per cent since 2004, violence against the person by 20 per cent, and drug offences and criminal damage by 12 per cent.
Furthermore, Britain's murder rate has doubled since the 1970s and is now one of the highest in Western Europe.
What about the division between rich and poor - a key driver of crime? By 1980, a map of Britain showed a fairly even distribution of areas of poverty. Today, those red areas denoting high levels of poverty make us look like we've got measles. Inequality is back to where it was in the 1950s.
Dr David Halpern, former director of the Cabinet Office's social exclusion unit, thinks the phrase 'Broken Britain' paints too bleak a picture. But he also says there is a deep cleavage that is inflicting great damage on the common good.
The chances, he says, of a child born into a family with an income in the top 50 per cent getting into trouble with the police is one in a thousand. For a child born into the bottom 5 per cent, it's one in five - two hundred times higher. Professor Innes believes our increasing ghettoisation is pushing us towards the 'abyss'.
So how did we get here? The answer seems to lie in the great social and economic upheavals of the past 50 years and - in particular - the rise of individualism. Back in the 1960s, the wartime idea that the country was pulling together in one direction was replaced by the understandable desire to get the most out of life as individuals.
But as each of us struggled to become richer, happier and more fulfilled, there were catastrophic consequences for society as a whole. For a start, we Britons seem to have used our wealth to avoid dealing with other people and are spending more time on solitary pursuits.
Recent statistical evidence suggesting that marriage is the most successful arrangement yet devised for raising stable, happy children is convincing
Whereas Gordon Brown doesn't think Britain's social values are changing for the worse, the Church of England does.
'We've stopped having celebrations in communities where the neighbours meet,' says Bishop Stephen Lowe of Hulme in Manchester, the Church's first Bishop for Urban Life and Faith. 'I know some of my neighbours. I might wave to them, but engage in a relationship with them? No. Frankly, that is a broken society.'
Such concerns are reinforced by Professor Danny Dorling of Sheffield University, who has devised 'loneliness indices' based on a formula that takes into account the proportion of singleperson households in an area, the number of people in private
rented accommodation and people who have lived there for less than a year. From this analysis, he says it is possible to identify where people have a 'feeling of not belonging'. By comparing the figures from the 1971 census with those from 2001, he has revealed a substantial increase in rootlessness, and concludes: 'Even the weakest communities in 1971 were stronger than any community now.'
Having established the problem, the task is now to reverse this fragmentation.
There may be someone called the Communities Secretary in Cabinet, but this issue is way beyond the reach of one lone government minister.
A better starting point might be to understand that in our rush to sweep away from the 1960s much that was bad - racism, obsessive deference and being buttoned up - we also abandoned much that was good, including the institution of marriage, now at its lowest ebb since the 1850s.
In striving to be nonjudgmental about different family structures, the socially liberal among us have found it hard to accept that the fragmentation of society is closely linked to the decline of marriage.
This started in the 1970s with the increase in unmarried parents, lone parents, cohabiting parents and step-parents. In its wake came generations of children who have been shifted from pillar to post.
Recent statistical evidence suggesting that marriage is the most successful arrangement yet devised for raising stable, happy children is convincing. Those growing up in lone-parent families (and step-families) are more likely to drop out of school, leave home early, be in poor health, possess few skills, earn little and, crucially, become involved in crime.
In view of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that an analysis of 4,000 offenders by the Youth Justice Board found that 70 per cent were from broken families.
Mr Justice Coleridge, a senior judge in the Family Division, said family break-ups have now reached 'epidemic proportions'
Also, The Children's Society has assessed that the risk of behavioural difficulties for children from broken families is at least 50 per cent higher than for families where both parents are still together.
The estimated £20bn annual bill to the public purse from such knockon effects of family breakdown is growing because of long-term damage.
Evidence that marriage is the most stable family structure comes from the Millennium Cohort Study (of more than 15,000 children born in 2000 and 2001), which showed that by the age of three, the children of cohabiting parents were generally three times more likely to have suffered the break-up of their families than the children of married parents.
By a child's fifth birthday, figures showed that only seven per cent of married parents had split up, compared with 25 per cent of cohabiting parents.
Of course, poverty can be another factor behind the break-up of couples and, in general, cohabiting parents are poorer than married couples.
Yet even when you compare married couples with cohabiting parents from the same lowest-income group, the research still shows cohabiting couples are twice as likely to split than their married counterparts.
So what is it about marriage that makes it more of a stable relationship than cohabitation?
Former Falklands War helicopter pilot Harry Benson, who set up Bristol Community Family Trust, holds classes on marital commitment.
He says that married couples generally 'have a stronger sense of identity as a couple' and will 'sacrifice other interests for the sake of the couple', whereas 'cohabiting couples tend to have much more of a sense of "me" and "you".'
Despite the evidence of marriage being generally best for children, government ministers have avoided debating its merits, even though we now have a Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families with a programme called the Children's Plan that acknowledges children's greatest need is the stable relationship between their parents.
Ed Miliband, the minister formerly responsible for 'social exclusion', refused to accept that marriage is the most stable structure for children - despite the decline in marriage leading to an increase in 'socially excluded' children.
Pushed on Radio 4's Today programme on the point that 'all the evidence shows that children do better if they are with two parents who are married to each other', Mr Miliband would only say: 'What the evidence shows is that children need stable family lives, and we all agree on that and marriage is one of the bedrocks of our society.'
He simply could not bring himself to say marriage was the most stable bedrock.
This fear of being regarded as judgmental has helped close down debate about the consequences of our lifestyle choices.
But Bishop Lowe argues: 'I don't think it's judgmental to give people the facts.
'If I were a politician I'd want to be saying: "Just look a minute, people of the UK: if we're going to have a happier society where there is greater well-being, the statistics are quite clear - you bring your children up in committed, loving relationships, and the best of those are marriages.'
Mr Justice Coleridge a senior judge in the Family Division agrees. To the discomfort of the Ministry of Justice and Lord Chief Justice, he said that promoting marriage as 'the gold standard' of family structures is long overdue.
Having witnessed the growth 'from a trickle of human misery to a torrent' through the family courts, he told me: 'I am saying that governments should not remain neutral about marriage.'
Family break-up, he says, has now reached 'epidemic proportions', adding: 'We should have blown the whistle on it ten years ago when the trajectory was clear for all to see.'
Despite such authoritative warnings, ministers and their advisers seem reconciled to the relentless rise in family breakdown and single parenthood, seeing this as an irreversible social trend whose expensive consequences we will just have to crisis manage.
Of course, just cheering the formal institution of marriage won't help much. It's the values and strong family ties embodied by marriage that need promoting.
It's often said this would stigmatise the children of lone and cohabiting parents. But when a sample of children were asked recently in a survey what they would do if they ruled the world, they answered: ban divorce.
No one is suggesting that couples should always stay together and it's entirely understandable that those in their 20s and 30s should be jaundiced about marriage.
The truth is that my generation of baby boomers from the Fifties and Sixties messed it up.
But unless we find a better way of rediscovering the value of a couple's commitments to each other when children are involved, what's wrong with calling this arrangement by its traditional name - marriage?
Security through a feeling of belonging is what we humans crave most, the very thing our post-war experiment in individualism has eroded.
Rebuilding our sense of community - from the family at its most intimate, to the values of neighbourliness at its most local - is as important as rebuilding our broken economy.
• John Ware presents The Death Of Respect on BBC2 on Thursday at 11.20pm - the first of two programmes about how changing social values have influenced behaviour
By John Ware
Last updated at 11:22 PM on 10th July 2009
Comments (0) Add to My Stories Last month, one of Britain's most senior Family Court judges described family breakdown as a national tragedy and argued marriage should be promoted by the Government to help stop 'social anarchy'.
Sir Paul Coleridge also took the extraordinary step of attacking the BBC for suppressing debate over the relationship between family breakdown and social ills by burying a TV series on the subject in a late-night slot.
The documentary series had already been put on hold until after May's local elections because of its sensitive political nature.
The Mail, which for 20 years has passionately argued that the breakdown of the family and marriage have been hugely damaging to society, invited the respected BBC journalist behind the series to reveal his findings. . .
Broken Britain: Is family breakdown behind the down fall of the country?
So is Britain 'broken'? David Cameron thinks so, while Gordon Brown disagrees, having claimed last autumn: 'This country has never been broken by anyone or anything.'
However, that's not how his predecessor Tony Blair saw it when Labour was in opposition. Back in 1995, he said: 'Look at the wreckage of our broken society. Drugs, violence, youngsters hanging around street corners with nothing to do. We have to have the courage to build a new civic society.'
Yet, after a decade as Prime Minister, Blair chose his words more carefully. Youth violence was no longer a 'metaphor for the state of British society' but a 'specific criminal culture among a specific group of people'.
So, is the concept of 'Broken Britain' simply the preserve of opportunist opposition leaders? Indeed, is the phrase simply a 'witless sobriquet', as one commentator says, or does it capture an essential truth about a decline in our social values?
It is proving hard to have a sensible debate about this important issue, which is why we at the BBC have tried to open up one with a programme to be shown next week.
Of course, every generation has its moral panic. Some commentators, such as the Guardian's Polly Toynbee, blame the Daily Mail for whipping us into a dangerously righteous frenzy.
But there are many on the political Left and Centre who also recognise that the phrase 'Broken Britain' reflects an essential truth about our society.
Family life at the centre of a happy society?
For example, there's Robert Reiner, professor of criminology at LSE, for whom I'd wager the Guardian has been a lifelong companion. He says: 'I think in many ways Britain has broken.'
Respected economist Paul Ormerod, founder of the Henley Forecasting Centre, says: 'In terms of pure scientific description, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that we are more fragmented and broken.'
And there's Martin Innes, professor of the Police Science Institute at Cardiff University, who argues: 'We are approaching a point where we can either come back from the brink,' he says, 'or we're sailing over the abyss.'
It surely doesn't much matter whether we say Britain is 'broken', 'breaking' or ' fragmenting around the edges'. What matters is whether we recognise there are trends in behaviour and values that are taking us in the wrong direction.
Britain is jostling for the dubious honour of the sickest lifestyle in Western Europe.
Government figures show our adults are the most obese, and 11 to 15-year-olds who drink, are drinking more - the average weekly intake being over six pints. According to The Children's Society charity, a higher percentage of youngsters are getting drunk than in any other OECD country.
Despite the evidence of marriage being generally best for children, government ministers have avoided debating its merits
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation says our 15 to 24-year-olds have a much higher incidence of syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia. And we still have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies - a recent downward trend has reversed upwards.
As for crime, ministers trumpet an overall fall from a mid-1990s peak, but fail to give a rounded view. A 2007 EU Crime and Safety survey said the UK 'remains a high-crime country in the EU' with 'higherthanaverage scores', including the highest for assaults and threats.
Although crime overall has fallen, violent youth crime is stubbornly high. The Youth Justice Board says robbery has increased by 29 per cent since 2004, violence against the person by 20 per cent, and drug offences and criminal damage by 12 per cent.
Furthermore, Britain's murder rate has doubled since the 1970s and is now one of the highest in Western Europe.
What about the division between rich and poor - a key driver of crime? By 1980, a map of Britain showed a fairly even distribution of areas of poverty. Today, those red areas denoting high levels of poverty make us look like we've got measles. Inequality is back to where it was in the 1950s.
Dr David Halpern, former director of the Cabinet Office's social exclusion unit, thinks the phrase 'Broken Britain' paints too bleak a picture. But he also says there is a deep cleavage that is inflicting great damage on the common good.
The chances, he says, of a child born into a family with an income in the top 50 per cent getting into trouble with the police is one in a thousand. For a child born into the bottom 5 per cent, it's one in five - two hundred times higher. Professor Innes believes our increasing ghettoisation is pushing us towards the 'abyss'.
So how did we get here? The answer seems to lie in the great social and economic upheavals of the past 50 years and - in particular - the rise of individualism. Back in the 1960s, the wartime idea that the country was pulling together in one direction was replaced by the understandable desire to get the most out of life as individuals.
But as each of us struggled to become richer, happier and more fulfilled, there were catastrophic consequences for society as a whole. For a start, we Britons seem to have used our wealth to avoid dealing with other people and are spending more time on solitary pursuits.
Recent statistical evidence suggesting that marriage is the most successful arrangement yet devised for raising stable, happy children is convincing
Whereas Gordon Brown doesn't think Britain's social values are changing for the worse, the Church of England does.
'We've stopped having celebrations in communities where the neighbours meet,' says Bishop Stephen Lowe of Hulme in Manchester, the Church's first Bishop for Urban Life and Faith. 'I know some of my neighbours. I might wave to them, but engage in a relationship with them? No. Frankly, that is a broken society.'
Such concerns are reinforced by Professor Danny Dorling of Sheffield University, who has devised 'loneliness indices' based on a formula that takes into account the proportion of singleperson households in an area, the number of people in private
rented accommodation and people who have lived there for less than a year. From this analysis, he says it is possible to identify where people have a 'feeling of not belonging'. By comparing the figures from the 1971 census with those from 2001, he has revealed a substantial increase in rootlessness, and concludes: 'Even the weakest communities in 1971 were stronger than any community now.'
Having established the problem, the task is now to reverse this fragmentation.
There may be someone called the Communities Secretary in Cabinet, but this issue is way beyond the reach of one lone government minister.
A better starting point might be to understand that in our rush to sweep away from the 1960s much that was bad - racism, obsessive deference and being buttoned up - we also abandoned much that was good, including the institution of marriage, now at its lowest ebb since the 1850s.
In striving to be nonjudgmental about different family structures, the socially liberal among us have found it hard to accept that the fragmentation of society is closely linked to the decline of marriage.
This started in the 1970s with the increase in unmarried parents, lone parents, cohabiting parents and step-parents. In its wake came generations of children who have been shifted from pillar to post.
Recent statistical evidence suggesting that marriage is the most successful arrangement yet devised for raising stable, happy children is convincing. Those growing up in lone-parent families (and step-families) are more likely to drop out of school, leave home early, be in poor health, possess few skills, earn little and, crucially, become involved in crime.
In view of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that an analysis of 4,000 offenders by the Youth Justice Board found that 70 per cent were from broken families.
Mr Justice Coleridge, a senior judge in the Family Division, said family break-ups have now reached 'epidemic proportions'
Also, The Children's Society has assessed that the risk of behavioural difficulties for children from broken families is at least 50 per cent higher than for families where both parents are still together.
The estimated £20bn annual bill to the public purse from such knockon effects of family breakdown is growing because of long-term damage.
Evidence that marriage is the most stable family structure comes from the Millennium Cohort Study (of more than 15,000 children born in 2000 and 2001), which showed that by the age of three, the children of cohabiting parents were generally three times more likely to have suffered the break-up of their families than the children of married parents.
By a child's fifth birthday, figures showed that only seven per cent of married parents had split up, compared with 25 per cent of cohabiting parents.
Of course, poverty can be another factor behind the break-up of couples and, in general, cohabiting parents are poorer than married couples.
Yet even when you compare married couples with cohabiting parents from the same lowest-income group, the research still shows cohabiting couples are twice as likely to split than their married counterparts.
So what is it about marriage that makes it more of a stable relationship than cohabitation?
Former Falklands War helicopter pilot Harry Benson, who set up Bristol Community Family Trust, holds classes on marital commitment.
He says that married couples generally 'have a stronger sense of identity as a couple' and will 'sacrifice other interests for the sake of the couple', whereas 'cohabiting couples tend to have much more of a sense of "me" and "you".'
Despite the evidence of marriage being generally best for children, government ministers have avoided debating its merits, even though we now have a Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families with a programme called the Children's Plan that acknowledges children's greatest need is the stable relationship between their parents.
Ed Miliband, the minister formerly responsible for 'social exclusion', refused to accept that marriage is the most stable structure for children - despite the decline in marriage leading to an increase in 'socially excluded' children.
Pushed on Radio 4's Today programme on the point that 'all the evidence shows that children do better if they are with two parents who are married to each other', Mr Miliband would only say: 'What the evidence shows is that children need stable family lives, and we all agree on that and marriage is one of the bedrocks of our society.'
He simply could not bring himself to say marriage was the most stable bedrock.
This fear of being regarded as judgmental has helped close down debate about the consequences of our lifestyle choices.
But Bishop Lowe argues: 'I don't think it's judgmental to give people the facts.
'If I were a politician I'd want to be saying: "Just look a minute, people of the UK: if we're going to have a happier society where there is greater well-being, the statistics are quite clear - you bring your children up in committed, loving relationships, and the best of those are marriages.'
Mr Justice Coleridge a senior judge in the Family Division agrees. To the discomfort of the Ministry of Justice and Lord Chief Justice, he said that promoting marriage as 'the gold standard' of family structures is long overdue.
Having witnessed the growth 'from a trickle of human misery to a torrent' through the family courts, he told me: 'I am saying that governments should not remain neutral about marriage.'
Family break-up, he says, has now reached 'epidemic proportions', adding: 'We should have blown the whistle on it ten years ago when the trajectory was clear for all to see.'
Despite such authoritative warnings, ministers and their advisers seem reconciled to the relentless rise in family breakdown and single parenthood, seeing this as an irreversible social trend whose expensive consequences we will just have to crisis manage.
Of course, just cheering the formal institution of marriage won't help much. It's the values and strong family ties embodied by marriage that need promoting.
It's often said this would stigmatise the children of lone and cohabiting parents. But when a sample of children were asked recently in a survey what they would do if they ruled the world, they answered: ban divorce.
No one is suggesting that couples should always stay together and it's entirely understandable that those in their 20s and 30s should be jaundiced about marriage.
The truth is that my generation of baby boomers from the Fifties and Sixties messed it up.
But unless we find a better way of rediscovering the value of a couple's commitments to each other when children are involved, what's wrong with calling this arrangement by its traditional name - marriage?
Security through a feeling of belonging is what we humans crave most, the very thing our post-war experiment in individualism has eroded.
Rebuilding our sense of community - from the family at its most intimate, to the values of neighbourliness at its most local - is as important as rebuilding our broken economy.
• John Ware presents The Death Of Respect on BBC2 on Thursday at 11.20pm - the first of two programmes about how changing social values have influenced behaviour