At last, a political battle about the family. And not a moment too soon

Since Labour came to power, there has been a hugely important social trend that almost no one mentions. The institution of the two-parent family — whether married or unmarried — has been disintegrating at a speed seen nowhere else in Europe. The proportion of children living with lone parents was 19 per cent when Tony Blair first entered Downing Street. Today it stands at 24 per cent. Between these two statistics lies a social revolution, in an area that no party has dared to talk about. Until now.

Mention the family, and trouble soon follows. It is a political minefield, strewn with the body parts of John Major’s government and a handful of reformist Labour ministers. Yet in the dying days of his premiership, the Prime Minister wishes to cross what he regards as a final frontier for the government. It is time for the state to identify bad parents, to correct them forcibly, to intervene and look after their children.

‘For me, it is not a question of whether the state should intrude in family life,’ declared Margaret Hodge when she was children’s minister, ‘but how and when.’ It has taken two years for the Prime Minister to show what this means: a new agenda of early intervention. ‘Supernannies’ will be dispatched to 77 parts of England, teaching parents how to raise their children. There will be obligatory classes, a new wave of Sure Start ‘super-nurseries’. Labour is unabashed in its plan for the state-as-parent.

‘Give me a child,’ runs the apocryphal Jesuit saying, ‘and by the age of seven he will be mine for life.’ On Monday Beverley Hughes, the children’s minister, told MPs that she has the age of two in mind. This is when she proposes that children from deprived backgrounds be taken to the more ‘stimulating’ environment of the classroom.