Because It's WRONG!

It was a strange and unnatural sight. Here was the word "wrong" being used in an article in the "Guardian". It was seemingly being used in the sense of "morally wrong", not in the sense of getting the answer to a maths question "wrong". Indeed, the article was headed: "The return of morality". How could such an article be published in the temple of secularism and liberalism, "The Guardian"? And, to stretch the eyes wider, it was written by a Labour Member of Parliament, Tom Harris [picture at right].

He was rightly horrified by the spectacle of young women, barely out of childhood, giving birth to children out of wedlock and preparing for a lifetime on Social Security benefits. In short, a member of the Labour party was prepared to see the downside of the Welfare State which his party had promoted for over 60 years. And Tom Harris is a Scottish Member of Parliament; they don't come more hard-core traditional Labour than the Scottish variety.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/05/welfare-children

The very conservative writer Peter Hitchens [picture at right] went into understandable outpourings of joy over this apparent repentance by one member of the party of sinners. He declared:

I'd like to say a word in praise of the Labour MP Tom Harris, who this week very courageously spoke up for millions of respectable working-class people, long deprived of a voice by New Labour trendies who know nothing of real life.
He said: ‘Teenage girls shouldn’t be having underage sex. Why? Because it’s wrong. Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong. Parents shouldn’t teach their children that a lifetime on benefits is attractive or even acceptable. Why? Because it’s wrong.’

As he rightly says: ‘The most vociferous critics of the dependency culture and of deliberate worklessness have always been those who live in the same communities, those who resent paying their taxes to help other people waste their lives.’

Welcome, Mr Harris, to the ranks of the wild-eyed extremists. And good luck.

Peter's enthusiasm ran away with his normally sober brain, as I explain below. But it was forgivable; the sight of any British politician showing the smallest glimmer of sanity or courage is so rare that you tend to overreact in delight.

"Scotland on Sunday" on 8th March described one end result of multiple strands of the permissive society, aided and abetted by the Welfare State. The short and wretched life of Brandon Muir in the small city of Dundee came to a disgusting end just before his second birthday. With a junkie prostitute single mother who had just shacked up with a child-abusing paramour, his long term prospects were never promising. But to die in hours of lingering agony after a savage assault.....

It was a sobering reminder of the drugs underside of modern British life. Scotland's beautiful and prosperous capital, Edinburgh is famous for the biggest arts festival in the world. And its historic castle and other ancient buildings. And its Scottish Parliament. And its art galleries and film theatre. And the biggest theatre in Great Britain. (I saw "Les Miserables" there in the early 1990s). And the highest concentration of HIV sufferers in Britain, thanks to intravenous drug use.

You probably won't find any links to the Brandon Muir article on the Scottish Tourist Board's website (http://www.visitscotland.com).

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion/The-Forgotten-Children-How-society.5049981.jp

A few weeks ago Danny Boyle won the Best Director Oscar for "Slumdog Millionaire". I thought it was a grotesquely overpraised movie, especially in comparison with his earlier brilliant "Trainspotting", which depicted the lives of junkies in Edinburgh. Trainspotting's most unforgettable scenes appropriately featured a dead baby. [Picture at right: EWEN BREMNER the perpetually unfortunate druggie Spud in Danny Boyle's cult classic Trainspotting (1996)]

Now we had a real life dead baby coming out of the drugs underworld of central Scotland. Not the first and certainly not the last. One estimate puts the number of children living in the Edinburgh area with at least one junkie relative as 6,000. There are 143 social workers looking after families in the Edinburgh area. Doing simple maths, each vulnerable child might have as much as 20 minutes attention per week from a social worker, once each worker has spent hours on his/her laptop doing the electronic paperwork to cover his/her backside against the next Dead Child inquest. These children might as well rely on a paper napkin to protect them from armour piercing bullets. As one commentator noted after the death of yet another abused child in London, there was a perfect audit trail showing how the social workers had failed to protect the deceased.

All this ought to be good ammunition for any ardent social reformer seeking to arose public determination to reverse disastrous trends. Yet the limitations of Tom Harris' position become horribly obvious once you think about them for ten seconds. What particular moral authority has he? About as much as you or me or the resident bore propping up the bar who declares it is all "wrong" that these Poles are allowed to come over here and take British jobs.

Take his proclamation:

Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong.

Of course it's not wrong. This is a perfectly laudable and worthwhile ambition, as long as the teenager has a good husband to support her and the children. What is the glorious value of spending thousands of hours of your young life getting the transparently bogus British educational "qualifications", followed by years as a wage slave in some supermarket or call centre?

But, you protest, Mr Harris is merely objecting to such young women breeding at the taxpayers' expense. So what? Which paragon of moral authority decides that such actions are "wrong"? The British state pours about $150 billion per year down the toilet on wasted public expenditure of all kinds from useless defence equipment to useless computer projects to the 2012 Olympics. Who cares about a few billion spent on single parent families? As for ordinary people objecting to professional welfare claimants - who gives a **** about the opinions of our moronic tabloid reading masses?

And why is it "wrong" for underage girls to have sex, especially if they avoid pregnancy or seek an early abortion? The current age of consent (16) in Britain was imposed in the 19th century as part of the fight against child prostitution - and against the ferocious opposition of some senior politicians who wanted to continue breaking their sons in on child prostitutes. A girl's 16th birthday is a legal borderline as arbitrary as a tax percentage or a speed limit, with zero reference to objective morality. In other parts of the world, including Catholic areas, a girl can be married at 14. Tom Harris declares elsewhere in the article that he is not seeking to reimpose religious morality. So what basis of morality is he leaning on? The guy's a politician, after all. You can't help feeling that part of his Damascene conversion is down to the catastrophic recession - we just can't afford to fund a never ending stream of bastards out of the public purse. So is it just expedient to trumpet those fragments of "traditional" morality which assist public expenditure?

But surely some actions are visibly, indisputably wrong all the time, regardless of political ideology? Battering a little child like Brandon Muir to death is just plain "wrong". Well, at the moment, most people would agree. (What about the thousands of innocent Iraqi children killed horribly in an illegal war waged by a, er, Labour government? Er, well, er, that's different). But if Brandon had been two years younger many people would have reluctantly supported his termination right up to birth. What hope had he as a child of a junkie mother? Much better to eliminate him quickly and mercifully and avoid all the later pain and expense.

Tom Harris is notably silent on any other aspect of morality except the
is expensive moral failure of the underclass. But his confused and incoherent contribution is one hopeful sign that genuine moralists may have more public space and more sympathetic hearers for genuinely intelligent discussion than for decades past.

POST SCRIPT:

It was the Brandon Muir tragedy which sparked off Tom's article. On his website, Tom expressed his frustration that the Dundee child protection authorities hesitated about taking Brandon into care, even though his mother was a drug addicted prostitute with learning difficulties. But if he was taken into care, where would you stop? There are so many little children at varying degrees of risk from druggie parents; there aren't enough specialist social workers to supervise them or foster parents to care for them all. And there probably isn't enough capacity in the courts or legal profession to accommodate thousands of legal cases taking children into care and the resulting appeals....

[See following post for continuation of Bill's posts on this issue, and perhaps clarification of the problem facing all society.]