Tim Worstall points to this Grauniad piece by Woy Hattersley. When I started reading it I assumed it was a serious claim that the government has the right to tell parents how to look after their children.
Last Friday, I switched on The World at One when it was half over. So I do not know the name of the egregious ass who announced that the government plans "to nationalise the family".
Then, in the next few sentences, when he started digging at Margaret Hodge I assumed it was satire.
... It was Margaret Hodge, commissar emeritus of Islington, more recently super-Blairite and now children's minister. To my delight and surprise, I agreed with almost every word she said.
Ms Hodge may regard my support as worthless. Years ago, she told the parliamentary Labour party that, since I had no children, I was not qualified to voice an opinion on the iniquities of 11-plus selection. But I insist on showering my, probably unwelcome, praise upon her. At last a member of the government has described the "state" - which is no more than the collective will of the people - as "a force for good". It was a mistake to use the verb "intrude" to describe the help that the community can give to families, but that was a minor flaw in an otherwise impeccable performance, and must be excused on the grounds that Ms Hodge did not enjoy the benefits of a comprehensive education.
Then I wondered when he was going to stop the damning with faint praise and get out the stilleto but he continued to heap scorn on the alternatives
A common complaint - voiced most vociferously by the newspapers that also glory in the good old cliche about the nanny state - is that the authorities do too little to protect desperately vulnerable children. I agree. Perhaps Ms Hodge's critics forget that the constant defence of social workers who fail in their jobs is the claim that they did not want to intrude into family relationships. Some of the children who were left to rot were victims of the prejudice against public intervention that has been promoted by neo-liberal fanatics.
Now I've got to the bottom and I think he is actually serious.
How much more sensible it would have been to proselytise about healthy diets 20 years ago. Failed families add to the tax bills. That, I suspect, is the argument most likely to convince Ms Hodge's critics of what the reasonable rightly regard as no more than common sense.
He truly believes that the average British parent is too stupid to bring up his(her) child without handholding and training by the state. Given that cildren have been brought up for centuries, if not millennia, without the intervention of the state one wonders just why this has suddenly become a problem. But (ha!) look at that bit in the concluding paragraph - "Failed families add to tax bills". What we see here is a government inspired problem. Up until 50 years ago families, failed or otherwise, didn't get anything from the government. Hence (duh) parents had a fairly large incentive to bring up their children properly becuase they were the ones who would pay if they didn't. Heck up until 100 years ago bringing up children was a large part of a parent's pension scheme - if you brought up ungrateful snots or layabouts you starved in short order when you become old and decrepit - but thanks to the wonders of government inspired social security all the risks of "bad" childrearing have been outsourced to the state. Indeed what with HMG passing laws about how hard you may smack your child and with EU pieties about the rights of the child to express him(her)self and not be repressed the risk would seem greater to actually try and bring up a disciplined child.
Is it any surprise that with the incentive skewed away from bringing up children responsibly parents don't?