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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Fatherless Nation.

It is fortunate that we do not get elephants in the Tavern. They take up a lot of room. But out there, in the Hilary Village that is supposed to be needed to raise a child, elephants sit indoors all day, ignored by the householders.

Just how one can raise a child when the elephants in the room take up all the space, their 'dropping's reeking, God the Father only knows.  It is certain that the general population has no clue but nevertheless they seem to encourage it at every opportunity.

Peter Hitchens has been around, sitting at our elephantless bar, speaking about the state of fatherlessness in Britain. Things have not improved since he started the same conversation elsewhere.

So Much for 'Father's Day' -  
in a Country Where Fatherhood is Dying Out

By the end of his or her childhood, a British boy or girl is much more likely to have a TV set in the bedroom than a father at home.

Our 45-year national war against traditional family life has been so successful that almost 50% of 15-year-olds no longer live with both their parents. At the same time we have indulged our neglected and abandoned young with electronics, so that 79% of children aged between 5 and 16 have bedroom TVs.

And as we soppily mark ‘Father’s Day’ with cards, socks, sentimentality and meals out, we should remember that in almost all cases the absent parent is the father.
By 'absent', Peter is being simply factual. But it is not just that Fathers have walked out or abandoned their fatherly responsibility en masse.  In the majority of instances they father has not even been consulted and more often than not rejected.

There is no doubt about the facts here. Let me list some of them. 
 
The cost of our wild, unprecedented national experiment in fatherlessness is now £49 billion each year, more than the defence budget. This figure, currently costing each taxpayer £1,541 per year, is rising all the time, and has gone up by almost a quarter since 2009.

The money partly goes on handouts and housing which an old-fashioned family with a working father would not have needed. Partly it goes on trying to cope with the crime, disorder, truancy, educational failure, physical and mental illness and general misery which are so much more common among the fatherless than in those from stable homes.

And there is more to come. One in three marriages ends in divorce, while many who would once have married never even bother.  Roughly 300,000 families of all kinds separate every year.
 
There are now three million children growing up in fatherless homes.  Another 58 fatherless families are launched every day.  And be in no doubt that it is the fathers who are, overwhelmingly, absent in these new-style modern households. Only 8% of single-parent homes are headed by a lone father.
 
The day the lunatic B.O.Bama  or any other Western Leader stands up and declares that there is a 'War On Fathers' I will eat an Elephant.

Four in ten children being brought up by their mothers – nearly 1.2 million - have no contact with their fathers at all.

Another 67,000 (In England alone) dwell in the organised despair and neglect which are cruelly misnamed ‘care’.

In the last 40 years the proportion of adults who are married has sunk from 70% to fewer than half.  The number of single adults has hugely increased (up 50%). A quarter of a million people each year spend Christmas alone. 
 
One in six adults now cohabits, compared to one in 50 in the 1960s.  Cohabiting households, which have doubled in number since 1996, are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the United Kingdom.

By 2015, there will be two million lone parents (up 120,000 since 2010); 
 
 more than 24% of children will be in lone-parent households. 

It matters. Young people from fractured homes are statistically twice as likely to have behaviour problems as those from stable households. They are more likely to be depressed, to abuse drugs or alcohol, to do badly at school, and end up living in relative poverty.
Girls with absent fathers (according to studies in the USA and New Zealand) have teenage pregnancy rates seven or eight times as high as those whose fathers have stayed in meaningful touch with them.

By contrast, the link between marriage and good health is so strong that one study showed the health gain achieved by marrying was as great as that received from giving up smoking.

In all these dismal statistics of marriage decline and failure, the United Kingdom is one of the worst afflicted among advanced nations.  
 
It has to be said that all over the western world a similar disaster is building.
And in many of the poorest and most desolate parts of the country, the problem is concentrated into certain areas where fathers in the home are an endangered species.

From Gosport in Hampshire, to Cardiff, Liverpool, Easington in County Durham, Inner London, Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield, there are whole city wards where at least 60% of the households are headed by a lone parent.      

And it is in such circumstances that a procession of serial boyfriends, a type of domestic arrangement closely associated with physical and sexual abuse of children, is most likely to exist.


This great fleet of hard truths is known in general to those who govern the country, and in hard detail to millions who suffer from their consequences.

How, as a country and a people can we manage to be so indifferent to them, when we claim to set fatherhood and fathers at the centre of our culture?
Well, the answer to that otherwise rhetorical question is that we manage quite well by being like ostriches, burying our heads in the sand. Or to change metaphor, we sit at home in our living rooms knee-deep in dung.
The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words  
‘Our Father’.  

Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’.  
The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

If he is gone, who takes his place ? 
 
Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfilment for man, woman and children.’
  
But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is,  fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.
  
And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.
  
I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which  published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’.
  
The CSJ is very close to the Tory party, to the government and to Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary. So it is startling to find that the report is coldly savage in its dismissal of the Cameron government’s efforts to fix this problem.
  
 ‘Conservatives say they would have been more radical on family policy had it not been for their Liberal Democrat colleagues, but even those commitments made in the Programme for Government have been ignored so far. ‘So for all of the promises the Conservatives made in Opposition, for all of the gimmick giveaways politicians have unveiled for middle-class families, and for all of the safe ‘families come in all shapes and sizes’ rhetoric ministers have used for decades, hardly anything has been done to resist the tsunami of family breakdown battering the United Kingdom’. The authors continue: ‘Saying that family form is irrelevant is inaccurate and ultimately counter-productive…’  

This is true. Someone ought to speak up for marriage. But is it entirely true to say that ‘Backing commitment and setting a goal of reducing instability does not equate to criticising or stigmatising lone parents.’?  
Doesn’t approval of the one inevitably stigmatise the other? And if you aren’t prepared to do that, will you get anywhere?
They also assert that ‘marriage is not a right-wing obsession’, though, speaking as a right-winger I rather think it is. It certainly isn’t a left-wing priority.  They argue : ‘People throughout society want to marry, but the cultural and financial barriers faced by those in the poorest communities thwart their aspirations’.
It is certainly true that some benefits actively discourage couples from being or staying married.
Again, I had to interject that 'right-wing' or Conservative governments attain power, they do damned all to reverse the policies of Government which have caused these dreadful societal changes.

But it is the ‘cultural’ barriers I want to talk about here. Anyone who dares to discuss this subject is quickly accused of ‘hating’ or wishing to persecute ‘single mothers’. Any article on the subject is supposed (maybe it is an EU regulation?) to contain a disclaimer saying that many single mothers do a great job.


Well, I neither hate single mothers nor wish to persecute them, and I am perfectly prepared to believe that many of them do a great job.
 
But it isn’t the point. The main problem with single mothers is that they are acting rationally, in a society which actively encourages them with money and approval. Who can blame them? 
That is generous on Peter's part and understandable. But ......
 
There is a lot of piety about this. Suggest that anyone deliberately gets pregnant (or rather, in this age of morning-after pills and abortion on demand, deliberately stays pregnant) to get a house and a handout, and you are angrily dismissed as some kind of snobbish hate-figure.

Well, mightn’t it be true? As far as I know, nobody has ever researched the motives of the young women who accept this sparse arrangement. I wish they would. 
 
But is it unreasonable to suggest that if you reward certain types of behaviour with money and housing, and with social approval, then that behaviour will increase?
It’s not just me. Adele Adkins once recalled ‘The ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government’, adding: ‘That ain’t cool.’ Perhaps successful singing stars can get away with saying what others only think.  

I don’t myself see that it is a particularly harsh view to hold. A baby is a wonderful thing, and many young women long to be mothers, and good luck to them. Many modern males are a pretty unattractive proposition, so why marry one, if the state will give you a home and an income on your own?

Meanwhile men have learned enough about the divorce courts to know that marriage is a big risk.
 
 
If it goes wrong, they are the ones who have to move out, and yet they will still have to pay. 
And then, of course, they are called 'absent', or worse, deadbeats.
 
Why not take advantage of the fact that the state - which once demanded the father’s name when any baby was registered, so he could be made to pay for his child - now happily allows us to leave this space blank? 

My guess is that doing anything really radical about this scares all politicians too much. For the War on Fatherhood is protected by a great taboo.

In every family, every workplace, every school, every pub, every weekend football or cricket team, every political party, every church congregation, 
 
there are now large numbers of people who signed up for the Great Cultural and Moral Revolution  
which was launched in the 1960s and swept through the land like a mighty rushing wind in the 1970s.

The fiery heart of this was the Divorce Law Reform Act of 1969.  This change was very popular. 
Portrayed at the time as a kindness to those trapped in loveless marriages, the new law made it much easier to end a troubled union than to fight to save it.

And once this had become general, marriage changed with amazing speed from a lifelong commitment into a lifestyle choice. And from a lifestyle choice it changed into a risky and often inconvenient contract.
 
Divorce wasn’t shameful or embarrassing any more.  
The country was littered with male divorcees complaining about the division of the property and the child support payments. 

Men began to calculate that marriage wasn’t worth it. 
 
And the Pill and easy abortion (other parts of the 1960s revolution) put an end to shotgun weddings.

Who, in such a society, could condemn the pregnant teenager without hypocrisy? 
 
Hardly anyone, especially rackety politicians and flexible churchmen
The middle classes had abandoned lifelong marriage with a sigh of relief. The aristocracy had never cared for it much. Even the Royal Family was riddled with divorce.


The housing-estate poor were simply following the same moral code as those who posed as their betters, and weren’t actually better at all. And the adults of the era have all had a lot of fun as a result. But everyone, throughout this great period of release and revolt, forgot one small thing. 
 
What was to become of the children?

Now we are finding out. 
 
And a generation which has never known fathers, or family life, or fidelity or constancy, is now busy begetting children of its own. What will become of them? How will boys who have never seen a father learn to be fathers?

I’d have a moral panic at this stage, if I thought it would do any good. But perhaps it will be the victims of this selfish generation, our children and grandchildren, who – having suffered its effects - will re-establish stable family life in our country.
 
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/06/so-much-for-fathers-day-in-a-country-where-fatherhood-is-dying-out.html 
Peter added:
"I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’."

This document is fully footnoted and can be found here :
http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/UserStorage/pdf/Pdf%20reports/CSJ_Fractured_Families_Report_WEB_13.06.13.pdf

As with many conversations in the Tavern, we get sidelined by large events like the Budget or Chinese spy-scares, or whatever sleight-of-hand we are fed by the media, and have to come back to these far more important topics from time to time. And thank people like Peter dropping by.

Pax.


10 comments:

  1. The crime against society in each nation - it's no accident.

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  2. The situation in Ireland is going the same way with the traditional family becoming an anomaly rather than the norm. Although their has been a lot of discussion about it, the solutions proposed in politics and in the media are always the same; how to make "deadbeat dads" pay; how to extort money from men and take the burden off the state.

    As the article pointed out, men not taking their responsibilities seriously seems to be only a small part of the problem. The problem is that when you incentivize women to see the state, rather than the family as the bedrock of society, then that's what many will do.

    There is unlikely to be any serious discussion about this because of course discussing the major issues in Ireland in an adult fashion has become a career killer for those people who might have the knowledge and influence to actually do anything.

    Any suggestion that anyone might even consider that two parent families are generally a more solid framework for raising kids than single mother households, will immediately result in howls of outrage from the politically correct lynch mob.

    Most of the people I know will instinctively join in without even stopping to think about it, even as many of them are being crushed by those elephants they refuse to see.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Lana. All across the western world, including many non-anglophile, the War on Fathers is raging. It is destroying the Family, displacing Faith, ruining our education and legal institutions. Most people just do not THINK or even see what is happening. The Princess of Lies is the Horsewoman leading the four presaged.

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  3. Another 67,000 (In England alone) dwell in the organised despair and neglect which are cruelly misnamed ‘care’.

    Taken into care from their Mothers/Families who were deemed not able able to cope with the child. Or placed into care (until the mother/family was deemed suitable for return of the child or when the mother felt able to cope with the child).

    Whilst in care (the uncaring system) the child is passed from one family to another. The young person has no grounding or 'love' and soon comes to learn that they are a source of money to the family they live with.

    The moral dilemma is should the child be put through all this for many years until the mother/family are ready or the authorities deem the mother suitable to have their child back...

    Or should the child have been allowed to be adopted by a couple who would love and look after the child in a family environment?

    I know which I would choose for the best interests of the child and for society in general.

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  4. It is indeed a problem. The 'governmental' attitude is that a problem taken aboard is a tax and a Departmental power opportunity rather than a solution to be found. Meanwhile support for 'Family' and the frail people within, father and mother both as well as the children, goes into the tax and handout bucket rather than an encouragement of raising them from their personal attitude and values problems. Along with that neglect goes a keen reduction in the responsibility and influence of good fathers - often removing them altogether - and mothers.

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  5. One of your finest pieces amfortas...the world is now fatherless...the war on men is part of the global New World Order.

    The damage that has been done by the Marxists is enough to make us all cry.

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  6. I found your blog via a link on Bill Muehlenberg's CultureWatch. To be succinct, I find these statistics on fatherlessness depressing.

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    Replies
    1. Indeed it is depressing, Ross. More, it is due to deliberate neglect and deliberate Government Policy to neglect.

      I am reminded of a tiny part of a film I saw. Lawrence of Arabia. The 'goodies' had won and soundly defeated the 'baddies', the remnants of which had been herded into a makeshift hospital with absolutely no facility for the wounded at all. A Medical Officer was sent to investigate. He took one look, shook like a volcano in distress and erupted with the most memorable one word line ever uttered on screen. "OUTRAGEOUS'

      Please pass my regards to Bill. He is a soldier fighting for men, women, children Families and God.

      Delete
  7. I love this Tavern and blog . Can whomever owns this page contact me her is my facebook address. .

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    Replies
    1. I am delighted to have you drop by Linda. Your work is much admired. I hope others 'click' on your name above and visit your page. They, too, might be enthused and assist.

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The Tavern gets rowdy visitors from time to time. Some are brain dead and some soul dead. They attack customers and the bar staff and piss on the carpets. Those people will not be allowed in anymore. So... Be Nice..