Standpoint magazine opens with a robust editorial this month, discussing the spongiform amorality of an exclusively liberal elite sustained by the public purse, an intellectual class that has atrophied into a caste.
Indeed, and the ramifications are genuinely terrible, because the behaviour of that elite has been encouraged across society in order to normalise it. If you're a millionaire rock star, television celebrity or politician then having affairs, divorces, children with different partners and so forth really doesn't matter: you can afford to pay and to send the kids to good schools and support them. But for the rest of society it is devastating and it's the taxpayer who foots the bill. I really don't care how many children Mick Jagger has and by how many women -- good luck to him, since command over female fertility has been a goal of the "big man" since we came down from the trees -- but I do care about the countless near-feral children cast into these circumstances up and down the country.
I was thinking about this because of the case of Shannon Matthews. As you will remember, this is a truly terrible case that involved a woman with seven different children by five different fathers who social workers said was unable to prioritise the needs of her children above her own sexual needs. And yet they let her keep the children -- despite the risk of abuse of many kinds -- and didn't provide advice about contraception until she'd had her sixth child. The truly shaming aspect of the case is that...
"We see the kind of parenting Karen provided fairly commonly. We are looking at a fairly common problem."
[From Shannon Matthews inquiry clears social workers | UK news | The Guardian]
How come the liberal elite are enthusiastic supporters of three strikes and you're out for people who download pop songs but not for people who carry out sustained and deliberate child abuse? Surely people who can't provide their kids with a certain basic level of care have no right to keep them.
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