Worse still, the death of stigma means that half of all children are now born to unmarried mums. The welfare state has only made this worse, by taking over the breadwinner role and rendering fathers irrelevant.The people who pay the price for this growth in self-indulgence are children, they argue, who can no longer look to the family as a source of stability. If you keep teens at school – with some hope of a job and a life – they are far less likely to fill their wombs as a way of filling their lives.But – as so often with Blair – rather than sell his progressive policies, he chose to appease the right. When Paxman replied that “the bloke is clearly insane”, he was understating the case. There is something clearly insane about the whole institution.Yet there will be people this morning, as they relax at the start of a long weekend, who in their secret hearts will be wondering what exactly the fuss is about.

These readers will, almost certainly, work in an office.The moment has perhaps now arrived when we need to recognise that working in an office and under pressure sends people mad The symptoms, of course, may vary. They’d be better to invest in their own future with our help to get a better life.”There’s a hint here – just a hint – that the Government is quietly trying to stem the rise in single motherhood in a humane way. Rather than offer harsh moral bromides and threat of benefit cuts, the Government is giving poor 17-year-olds £70 a week to stay in education This is the only proven way to reduce teenage pregnancy. Some of what he said was unobjectionable: that “trying to bring up a family when you’re 16 or 17 is pretty miserable. But then – this week – the Prime Minister was asked by an audience of Christians about teenage mothers. Margaret Thatcher rose from her crypt to suggest that single mothers should live in Salvation Army hostels and give up their children for adoption if their families wouldn’t support them.
This issue never really died, but it did crawl away to the corners of the Tory benches and the right-wing press.

Back in 1993, the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, praised New Jersey for “bravely” deciding to stop giving benefits to single mothers. The last time The Family was a major issue in British politics was 12 years and an eternity ago. Douglas Hogg summed up the prosecution case, describing the Attorney General as “a good house lawyer” and his advice as “providing legal cover for a decision already taken for reasons other than those stated”.How strong need the evidence be to convict the Attorney General? It’s not beyond reasonable doubt he’s guilty. On the balance of probabilities you might feel he probably is.

But the “reasonable suspicion” is that he was certainly leant on. This last level of proof is how the Government prefers to judge others, as the recent terror Bill indicated, so let it be the way they are judged themselves.Claire Short called Mr Straw a liar from the floor of the House That doesn’t happen every day Not audibly. Mr Straw said the Attorney General had given his legal advice to Cabinet and took questions on it. Ms Short (who was there at the time) burst out: “He did not take questions! That’s not true!”She also suggested the Cabinet had been misled and thereby Parliament had been misled. When Owen Bennett Jones, a reporter for the World Service, questioned Mr Straw on the subject during a recorded interview the Foreign Secretary said: “I’m not fucking answering these fucking stupid questions.” He said the same in the House yesterday, although the phrasing was perhaps less spontaneous.simoncarr75 hotmail
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