In August 2011
overnight looting took place in London leading to widespread rioting
across England. In a speech given in his own constituency the Prime
Minister, David Cameron, highlighted the role of families and in
particular fathers in dealing with the disturbances;
Let me start with
families.
Why aren't they
keeping the rioting kids indoors?
Tragically that's been
followed in some cases by judges rightly lamenting: "why don't
the parents even turn up when their children are in court?"
Well, join the dots
and you have a clear idea about why some of these young people were
behaving so terribly.
Either there was no
one at home, they didn't much care or they'd lost control.
Families matter.
I don't doubt that
many of the rioters out last week have no father at home.
Perhaps they come from
one of the neighbourhoods where it's standard for children to have a
mum and not a dad......where it's normal for young men to grow up
without a male role model, looking to the streets for their father
figures, filled up with rage and anger.
So if we want to have
any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where
we've got to start.
In her newspaper
column for the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips (Britain's liberal
intelligentsia has smashed virtually every social value, 11 August
2011) blamed not merely, 'feral children but feral parents'.
The causes of this
sickness are many and complex. But three things can be said with
certainty: every one of them is the fault of the liberal intelligentsia; every one of them was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government; and at the very heart of these problems lies the breakdown of the family.
certainty: every one of them is the fault of the liberal intelligentsia; every one of them was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government; and at the very heart of these problems lies the breakdown of the family.
For most of these
children come from lone-mother households. And the single most
crucial factor behind all this mayhem is the willed removal of the
most important thing that socialises children and turns them from
feral savages into civilised citizens: a father who is a fully
committed member of the family unit.
Of course there are
many lone parents who do a tremendous job. But we’re talking here
about widespread social collapse. And there are whole areas of
Britain, white as well as black, where committed fathers are a wholly
unknown phenomenon.
In such areas,
successive generations are being brought up only by mothers, through
whose houses pass transitory males by whom these women have yet more
children ― and who inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and
dysfunctional parenting.
The result is
fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate
emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing
out from infancy at everyone around them. Such children inhabit what
is effectively a different world from the rest of society. It’s a
world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and
physical chaos.
A world where a child
responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to
violence. A world where the parent is unwilling or incapable of
providing the loving and disciplined framework that a child needs in
order to thrive.
According to the
Office for National Statistics, one in three or 3.8 million
children live without their father and it was partly in response to
these riots that the Telegraph newspaper reported that 'Children win
legal right to see both parents after divorce' (2 February 2012).