The Next Generation Of Fatherless Boys

IT ISN’T MUCH fun, but someone has to report on the pestilence unleashed by the culture war, the plague of fatherless boys. So here’s a report from England by Shaun Bailey, a youth worker in London.

Bailey lives and works in a neighborhood where a lawyer, Thomas ap Rhys Price, was recently robbed and then brutally murdered.

The individuals concerned bear total moral responsibility for their crime. No one made them do it. But we should also look at the failure of our society. For I witness every day a generation of young people who live in a culture that celebrates violence openly. They - and many other young adults - have grown up in a world where there is little censure, where no one - no teacher, no parent, no friendly face in the community - tells them what is right and what is wrong.

What is wrong? Well, we conservatives already know. Single parenthood, for a start. A generation ago, Bailey writes, young women were positively encouraged to venture into single-parenthood. But of course, then they find out just how hard and discouraging it is to raise children on your own.

The government encourages it. Young girls know that if they get pregnant and have a baby, “they will get a flat.” So single motherhood is an opportunity. In the United States, the sixteenth birthday of a young woman, the day she could qualify for a government-subsidized apartment, was called “liberation day,” according to George Gilder in Men and Marriage. It was the day she could get liberation from the chaotic household of her mother and the dangerous young men there and get her own place, and her own baby.

It is the same with benefits. These people are not stupid. If the state offers them money for doing something, they will do it. It is as simple as that. I hear them talking about it, I hear them discussing how much they can get. And I see them change their behaviour. Why have the father move in with you if it means that you will get less from the Government?

You have to feel that people are not stupid. The people ensnared in the welfare trap are eventually going to do something to get out of it. And the people who have built the welfare system are going to realize that it was all a dreadful mistake.

Aren’t they?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.