STEPHEN GLOVER: For years the Left crushed debate on fatherless families. Now one man's dared to tell the truth

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools and social care, claimed that 100,000 children are being raised by people addicted to hard drugs

Has any senior official ever highlighted this country’s terrifying social problems as vividly as Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools and social care, did on Tuesday? I don’t believe so.

We are not used to hearing quango chiefs blame the ‘social breakdown’ of Britain on ‘fragmented families’ and parents who no longer ‘take responsibility’ for teaching their children ‘right and wrong’.



He said many children were ‘alienated’ from their natural fathers and that this lay at the heart of wider problems.

Nor are we accustomed to being told by such people that we shouldn’t only, or even primarily, blame social workers for overlooking extreme cases of child neglect and abuse. The problem, Sir Michael said, is not so much incompetent social services chiefs as the increasing number of dysfunctional families.

He claimed that 100,000 children are being raised by people addicted to hard drugs. The Ofsted report, which was published as he made his remarks, suggests that 700,000 youngsters are growing up in homes blighted by drug or alcohol addiction.

‘Some people will tell you that social breakdown is the result of material poverty,’ he said. ‘It’s more than this. These children lack more than money: they lack parents who take responsibility for seeing them raised well.’ Hear, hear.

Sir Michael’s robust analysis of these failing and hopeless families was illuminated yesterday by a little sliver of data from the Office for National Statistics.

This showed that the proportion of babies born to married couples has reached a new low, dropping to 53 per cent last year from 59 per cent a decade previously. In 1962, the figure was 93 per cent.

What is the connection with Sir Michael’s bleak description of modern Britain — one which has been long predicted by this newspaper? It is the spread of co-habitation at the expense of marriage. More than divorce, co-habitation is the main engine of family breakdown. If only Nick Clegg (for whom marriage appears a mere lifestyle choice) would write down those words and think about them.

According to a report published earlier this year by the Marriage Foundation, nearly nine out of ten babies born to co-habiting parents this year will have seen their family break up by the time they are 16. For babies born to married parents, the prospects are enormously better.

The Centre for Social Justice (which was founded by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith) maintains in another recent report that a million children are growing up without a father. It says that the number of single-parent families is increasing by 20,000 a year. And this Government has done nothing to stem the rise.



'Some people will tell you that social breakdown is the result of material poverty,' he said. 'It's more than this. These children lack more than money: they lack parents who take responsibility for seeing them raised well'

In parts of Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham, nearly three-quarters of households with dependent children are lone-parent families. The Centre for Social Justice claims that children from broken families are 50 per cent more likely to do badly at school or to have behavioural problems.

At this stage in the argument it must be pointed out that many single-parent families produce fine and successful children. We are talking here about averages, about outcomes which are more likely than less likely. The single-parent family can work, but it is surely not an ideal.

When more than 20 years ago an American social scientist called Charles Murray predicted the growth of a partly dysfunctional underclass in Britain, he was howled down by the Left. A major determining factor in the growth of the underclass was, according to Murray, the rise in the illegitimacy rate.

As recently as 1979, he argued, this had stood at 10.6 per cent of all births, one of the lowest rates in the Western World. By 1988 it had rocketed to 25.6 per cent. In 2010, according to a report by the OECD, it was 43 per cent. As we now know from this week’s startling figures, the proportion is now 47 per cent.

The Centre for Social Justice (which was founded by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith) maintains in another recent report that a million children are growing up without a father

The new Left — which I distinguish from the old Left, much influenced by Methodism — has two stock responses to these remarkably rapid developments. One is to say it is no business of governments to prefer one particular lifestyle over another.

If people prefer to adopt the sexual morals of the more outlandish members of the Bloomsbury group, they aver, politicians should not make judgments. Such views are especially hard to take seriously when they fall from the mouths of the rich.

I am thinking of people like the actress Kate Winslet, who expresses astonishment in the next issue of American Vogue magazine at the idea that her two children by two previous marriages might be victims of her divorces. Soon she will have a third child by husband number three. What may — I stress ‘may’ — work for the rich is even less likely to work for the poor.

The other response of many on the Left is to deny any correlation between rising rates of co-habitation and illegitimacy on the one hand and increasing social breakdown on the other. They continue to assert that our social ills are due almost entirely — if not entirely — to poverty.

There was a splendid example of such loopy thinking in a Guardian column by Polly Toynbee the other day. She appeared to blame recent cases of child abuse deaths on government cuts.

The online headline was: ‘It is the Baby Ps and Hamzah Khans who pay for this Tory vandalism.’ The headline writer, though perhaps not Ms Toynbee, was unaware that when Baby P and Hamzah Khan were killed by feckless parents, a Labour Government was in power.

No doubt poverty plays its part. But the fact remains that in the Fifties, when those doing unskilled work or receiving welfare were much poorer than their modern counterparts, there was very limited social breakdown. The main reason, of course, was that families were then much stronger.

Can anything be done? In the 20 or so years that this newspaper has been lamenting the loosening of family bonds, things have only got worse. A month ago the Government at last announced — though opposed by Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems — modest tax breaks for some married couples worth up to £200 a year.

This doesn’t amount to very much, though I suppose there is some symbolic value in the Tory Party in government flying the flag for marriage. Yet I won’t be surprised if in five years’ time the number of babies born to co-habiting couples are in the majority — and if social breakdown has got even worse.

All one can say is that such developments need not be inexorable. In the 19th century, reformers led by the Methodists did much to strengthen the institution of marriage, and to encourage temperance (though I can’t pretend I’m in favour of the latter).

Maybe politicians and churchmen and social reformers will one day finally address the growing curse of dysfunctional families. But they will only do so if they can agree on the causes, and they are still far from being able to do that.

The underclass which Charles Murray described has expanded just as he said it would. Sir Michael Wilshaw has given an alarming account of the terrible effects, though without offering very much in the way of a cure.