The Daily Mail - fount of all knowledge

It’s been a while since my last post.  It’s not that nothing’s been happening.  It’s more a case of slacking on my part.

Back in early May, Melanie Phillips dropped a rock into the fatherhood pond when she wrote about her own father’s failings, and how these showed her the toxic legacy of inadequate parents.   “By the late Eighties (there was) mounting evidence that family disintegration and the subsequent creation of step-families or households with no father figure at all did incalculable damage to children.”  She described how fathers were vital to the emotional health of children, adding that “Fatherless families were also at least partly responsible for a national breakdown in authority and rising levels of crime.”  She quoted research in the early nineties that concluded that “children in fractured families tend to suffer more ill-health, do less well at school, are more likely to be unemployed, more prone to criminal behaviour and to repeat as adults the same cycle of unstable parenting.”

Those of us who have worked with such families won’t find much to disagree with here, but Ms Phillips found her views being attacked by her fellow Left wingers - she was a Guardian journalist at the time so it’s no surprise that she moved to the Daily Mail.   At this point I should say that I’m no particular fan of Mr Dacre’s newspaper, and that I don’t always agree with some of Ms Phillips’ more robust views.  But I think this article of hers expresses some uncomfortable truths and deserves a wider audience.

It may be no coincidence that the same edition of the Mail carried a story about a young girl from a fractured family who, by the age of 15, had two children.  Her teenage ‘sperm donor’ had no subsequent involvement with his children.  So it goes.  This sort of story is familiar to Mail readers and plays into the ”Broken Britain” narrative which the paper likes to relate.  I would feel more positive about the Mail if it espoused some strategies for addressing the issues which it merely reports in order to wind up its readership.  Its dig at Ed Miliband  today through his father is in example of the Mail’s skill at unpleasant provocation.