Pull the other one. Whenever this Government has wanted to cut anything, then it has gone for things that benefit children, and the latest wheeze incentivises divorce. I'll say that again: it incentivises divorce. As befits Osborne, who voted to abolish fatherhood and to retain very late-term abortion, positions necessarily held by a frequenter of prostitutes. The "free" market in action, of course. Like cocaine.
Meanwhile, his fellow economically neoliberal, socially liberal foreign policy hawk, Michael Gove, has today announced that schools, arms of the State, are to have the final authority over their pupils even miles away, even out of school hours, and no doubt even out of term soon enough. As much as anything else, that will let parents off the hook.
The very real problem to which Gove refers as his excuse, and many other very real problems like it, would not arise if, and did not arise when, there were not CCTV cameras on the street corners, but conductors on the buses, guards on the trains, park keepers in the parks, and Police on the streets.
All forms of State action, in the better days before the privatisation of public transport and the contracting out of municipal services, which were also the better days before unruly children and unruly teenagers on their way to and from school. When the State understood its own proper sphere, then it understood and respected the proper sphere of the family.
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Very interesting, Mr. Lindsay. You really dash the idea that social democracy was anti-family. It really seems like the State is intruding into areas where it is best kept out, while exiting those areas where it can do good work. Certainly the opposite of what people like Reagan and Thatcher promised.
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