To adapt Macaulay, there is no spectacle so ridiculous as the Labour party in one of its periodic fits of ideology. While the heir-presumptive, Gordon Brown, has remained in old-fashioned purdah about his plans as prime minister, the jostling candidates to be his deputy leader have engaged in a shrill and often juvenile battle to win the favour of the Labour movement.
Peter Hain has railed against the ‘super-rich class’, conveniently forgetting that it is the generation of wealth, rather than socialist conviction, that subsidises the welfare state. Harriet Harman promises a ‘living link’ with the trade unions, which sounds more like a dead hand upon competitiveness. Hilary Benn, Jack Straw and Hazel Blears have added to the cacophony. Only Jon Cruddas has sounded like a man with a plan rather than a pleading supplicant.
Now Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, has chipped in with a defence of single mothers and an insistence that marriage should not be favoured by government policy. It is not true, he said in a speech on Monday, that ‘all children from married couples fare well nor that every other kind of alternate family structure is irretrievably doomed to fail. Our family policy must be bias-free …It’s not who or what the parents are, it’s what they do.’
This is wearyingly familiar stuff. It is quite true that many lone parents do a magnificent job in raising their children in conditions of considerable adversity: widows have a particularly fine record. It is no less obvious that many married couples are terrible parents. But so what? The question for the policymaker is what structure is statistically likely to give children the best chance in life. Here, the evidence is indisputable, voluminous and entirely inimical to Mr Johnson’s position: what Al Gore would call ‘an inconvenient truth’.
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