I divide single teenage females into two groups. Those who are pushing carriages, and those who are not. The first group has doomed itself to lifelong poverty. I met a good example at the beach yesterday. A gorgeous 18 year old blonde who had moved here from the heartland to live with her beachboy boyfriend. If she gets pregnant, forgeddaboutit! These beachboys are about as irresponsible as they come.
Breaking the spiritual poverty cycle
Melanie Phillips blog
A riveting seminar held yesterday by the Centre for Policy Studies in London on the subject of breaking the poverty cycle threw up some startling insights into social disintegration in Britain. The first notable contribution was made by the family researcher Jill Kirby. Observing that incentives for work and marriage — the two most important components of socialisation — had sharply diminished while benefits were being channelled principally into workless families, she made the telling if shocking point that while the very wealthiest could afford to have lots of children, the very poorest could not now afford not to have lots of children — while middle income couples are getting squeezed out of having children altogether.
The second revelation, by the economist Professor Bob Rowthorn, was the absolutely staggering size of the financial incentive for parents to separate. A couple on average earnings are taxed to the tune of £7,600 per year; but if the same couple live apart, they receive £400 in benefits. That’s an astounding £8,000 incentive for parents to split up — and yet the disintegration of the family, with the number of lone parents tripling over the past thirty years, is the single most important factor behind our culture of incivility, disorder and crime.
The third notable contribution was from Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, one of the most deprived areas in Britain. Field, who has spent his life campaigning for the poor, understands the most important point of all — that the poverty from which his constituents suffer so grievously is principally moral, spiritual and emotional. Discussing the complete collapse of civility and respectability which has taken place, Field suggested that seven major factors had contributed to the collapse of decent behaviour.
The first was the collapse of religion, the greatest force that had shaped the British character. The second was the disappearance of the strict rules of discipline enforced by British factories which had dispensed rough justice and thus tamed and civilised their workers. Third was the disappearance of manufacturing industry under Mrs Thatcher and the consequent wiping out of the ethos of work in areas where employment had collapsed. Fourth (this provoked some controversy) was that education had enabled potential community leaders to move away, thus denuding those communities of leadership. Fifth was the loss of the sense of duty to others, the ethical glue that inspired idealism and kept societies together. Sixth was the nationalisation of what should have been collective endeavour not under state control, such as pensions. And seventh was the welfare system, not the cause but the magnifier of other problems, not least because it had come to promote the raising of children in ways that were not in their best interests.
The fourth interesting contribution came from Ron Haskins of the American Brookings Institute, who played an important role in bringing in the great welfare reform bill that has got lone mothers off welfare. He told what was in its own terms a huge success story — a complete turnaround from the previous culture of dependency, in which lone mothers had moved out of poverty in huge numbers by being pushed out to work. However, although he did not agree with this analysis at all, there is a major flaw in this American welfare reform. For it was always aimed to do two things — get welfare mothers out to work and encourage more women to marry. But while it has succeeded triumphantly in the former, it has not had much success in the latter aim. Haskins says they’re working on the marriage component and it’s just taking a bit longer to get right.
But it seems to me that this is identifying the wrong problem. The main issue is not lone mothers on welfare. It’s the fact that they are lone mothers in the first place. The root problem is not welfare dependency; it’s fatherless families. For even if all these lone mothers are working, their children will still be at a severe disadvantage in many walks of life because they have no committed fathers. Many of these women, says Haskins, say they want to marry but the available men are hopeless prospects. Haskins says he agrees with them and comes close to saying that the men must therefore be written off.
This is tantamount to accepting a new social order consisting of a matriarchate at the bottom of the social ladder, with female-headed broken families instituted as a way of life on the basis that everything’s ok if mom is working. Well, it’s very much not ok. The core problem to be addressed is the exile of men from the family. The overriding task is not to get lone mothers out to work. It is to recalibrate these women’s interests so that marriage becomes once again to their advantage and having children outside marriage becomes very much not to their advantage. That means, among other things, concentrating on providing work in the first instance for men; and it means providing help for young unmarried mothers to enable them to become responsible mothers rather than setting up a system of incentives, as we have done in the UK, which makes a baby appear to be a passport to an independent life.
The US has had notable success in bringing down teen pregnancy because it saw this as a moral and cultural issue. The disintegration of the family —as Frank Field suggests — is similarly a moral and cultural issue first and foremost and must be tackled as such. Welfare economics, although obviously important, is a secondary factor, a symptom rather than the cause. The collapse of social order is a spiritual sickness, and it is the poverty of the human psyche which now needs urgent attention."
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