BY KILLING lifelong marriage we are killing children. Liberal Britain cannot see this, but until somebody does, the tragedies will continue. Last week great publicity was rightly given to a report on children’s social care. It predicted that the number of children in care, now 80,000, would rise to 100,000 by 2032, costing taxpayers a colossal £15 billion a year.

Of course many terrible things happen to children in so-called ‘care’ apart from actual violence and death. The general outcomes for children deprived of what we would once have called stable family life, and deprived of fathers, are just not very good. No doubt plenty of social workers, foster parents and others do all they can, and I am not trying to criticise these individuals but they just cannot do what a loving, stable home can do.

The report does recognise that ‘it is loving relationships that hold the solutions for children and families overcoming adversity’. But how will they be created by bureaucracy and state cash – the solutions generally offered by those who run our society?

A long time ago the Blairites promised us ‘joined-up thinking’, but in fact modern dogmas, in which there is no right and wrong and the old Christian rules are spurned, often refuse to see vital connections.

The tragedy of care is a direct consequence of 50 years in which the law, and our culture, have encouraged the idea that lifelong marriage is dispensable – a cruel prison from which adults should be free to escape. The latest loosening of the marriage laws, effectively allowing divorce on demand, follows the same failed view.

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