Betrayal of a generation | the Daily Mail – The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Betrayal of a generation | the Daily Mail

Published by Tom

February 14, 2007

Link: Betrayal of a generation | the Daily Mail.

The basic unit of a healthy society is not the State. It is not “the community.” It is the family. For the whole of my life, the Labour Party has been the enemy of the family. Any arrangement for the raising of children is as good – in the eyes of our Left – as a mother and father living together and raising their children. Labour hates the family, because it is a place where children learn values. Labour wants children to learn their values only from State agencies.

If you are young and poor, Labour will pay you to reproduce fecklessly; so condemning yourself to lifelong poverty and dependence. If you are educated in the State sector, Labour’s policies ensure that your life is dominated by the worst elements of society and that nothing is done to help you if you want to learn. If your mother or father intervene to protect you from bullies or criminals, Labour’s police will charge your parents, not them, with assault. Labour teaches you, not by its words but by its actions, that no-one can protect you but the State. Your parents are nothing. The State is everything.

But Labour’s “Childrens Tsar” considers that it’s all our fault.

The Government-appointed Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, said: ‘We must acknowledge that these problems cannot be solved by policy and funding alone.

‘There is a crisis at the heart of our society and we must not continue to ignore the impact of our attitudes towards children and young people and the effect this has on their well-being.’

How infuriating that a Government which constantly acts as if it is the sole authority on every issue, accepts no responsibility when its policies cause such damage.

This UN report proves conclusively what I have known in my heart since Anthony Crosland closed my local Grammar School; that Labour is unfit to govern – now or ever. It is a morally-bankrupt movement, obsessed with centralising power and money in its own hands. It has undermined every social norm in a deliberate attempt to substitute State power for family life. In doing so, it has systematically wrecked the life chances of the nation’s young; creating a culture of dependence which leaves no room for moral guidance from any authority but the State.

Labour is fit neither to govern nor oppose. If our nation is ever to be healthy again, it must cut out this cancer.

6 responses to “Betrayal of a generation | the Daily Mail”

Nigel Sedgwick

February 14, 2007

This posting is fukl of excellent points with which I am very largely in agreement. Also, I would not like you to think that I am defending the Labour Party (new or otherwise).
Just one thing though: for just over half the period that I have had the vote, a political party other than Labour has been in power.
Is not the problem wider than just one political party. Is it not that we as a nation get the government we choose and the policies pretty much that one might expect from them?
Best regards

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Tom Paine

February 14, 2007

You make a good point and I won’t use the cheap retort that – functionally – the Heathites were, and the Camerooons are, “Labour” too.
Margaret Thatcher promised she would break the “ratchet effect” whereby whatever “reforms” Labour introduced during its terms of office were accepted as “given” when the Tories returned to power. She did a lot in terms of breaking trade unions and privatising the economy, but she failed completely to take on the left-wing educational establishment which has done far more damage, in the long run, than the Miners’ Union ever did. Presumably, her logic was that the economy needed reviving first and then she could turn to State services.
Now David Cameron asks to to “move” on from such issues as selection in education and shows no interest in returning the State curriculum to its academic roots. He could easily say that he would remove all “civics” and “ethics” courses from the curriculum, leaving morals to the family, Church etc. He could easily say that free education is a privilege not a right and that if parents can’t deliver well-behaved children ready to behave well and learn, Heads will have discretion to expel them, without appeal. Rather, he is reviving the “ratchet effect.” The State has usurped the role of the family and then failed to perform it. I am not asking it to do better. I am asking it to return responsibility to families and butt out of interfering with how they fulfil that responsibility.
Personally, I think Cameron could usefully promise to repeal every piece of legislation since Labour came to power. But that would still leave a lot to be done to restore both the vital public education system and parental rights. Some families will always make a mess of raising their chidren, but it has taken government -through the insane British state education system- to force every family to suffer for the failings of the few.

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raedwald

February 14, 2007

And the most proximate cause of this? The breakdown of the family. And this nuLab shambles has done more to destroy the family – with perverse tax and benefit incentives – than any other government. A quarter of families in the UK are lone parent – the highest rate anywhere in the EU. A benefit dependency culture in the UK where a 16 year old girl’s route to her own flat provided by the state and a decent income is to get pregnant by an unidentified father.
OK I don’t mean to sound like the Daily Wail. Before Christmas I was being shown around an area destined to become part of the Olympic site by a pragmatic young woman from the local council. She described significant numbers of kids starting primary school and not being able to speak. No, not speak English – I mean not speak any language at all. Isolated young inadequate parents using saturation kids TV as a substitute adult, but with no interaction, no encouragement, no smiles from mum at new words. Child mortality rates in that borough four times higher than a couple of miles to the West.
And this is the cradle-to-grave culture of Total Welfare Dependency that idiots on the left imagine to be some wonderful social utopia. It stinks.
Oh and I’ve no time for the paedo paranoia of the redtop rags either. We’ve got no scout leaders, no cadet force officers, no soccer training and an adult population terrified of engaging with unknown kids for fear of being branded ‘nonces’.
Root and Branch reform.
(excuse the ranty tendency – this one gets me frothy)

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wayne

February 14, 2007

You are absolutely right. The government has done everything it can to make us slaves of the state.

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GUTHRUM

February 15, 2007

I was disappointed that on some other blogs there was a perverse delight in just rubbishing the report, OK the authors are suspect,the data five years old the sampling suspect etc- but surely that does not mean we are living in a childs utopia. This morning another boy has been gunned down in London,the third, and we have the usual commentators talking utter drivel about social exclusion etc etc.
Gang culture usually springs up, as in Los Angeles and Paris when there is almost total social breakdown and there is a return to a Lord of the Flies situation, at the moment we have graffitti being defined as ‘street art’ and violent rap music lauded as street culture, rather than incitement. Moral bankruptcy is definately the word to describe this perverse thinking.

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bgprior

February 16, 2007

It’s important to criticise the report, Guthrum. Taken at face-value, it indicates strongly that the best solution to maximise welfare is the continental (and particularly Scandinavian), egalitarian, social-democratic, big-government model. Fortunately, one can show (as I have done at pickinglosers.com) that the analysis is heavily biased to achieve that result. But if you don’t show that, you are vulnerable in debates about how best to react to the conclusions of this report.
You can argue that this Government’s policies have failed the poor without relying on this report to prove it. And if the report is as flawed as I believe it to be, it is intellectually dishonest to rely on some parts of its conclusions that suit your case, simply because they are convenient, if you intend to reject those bits that do not suit your case, simply because they are inconvenient.

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