It’s not easy being a child in Britain today. The United Nations, with its unerring ability to ignore the obvious, at least gets that conclusion right. The government-appointed Children’s Commissioners of England, Scotland, and Wales, who report to the UN, released a report on Monday blaming a raft of liberal obsessions–the low age of criminal responsibility, discrimination, exam stress, and the pressures of marketing–for the fact that British children are more likely to drink alcohol, use drugs, and have sex young than their counterparts in Europe. Couple all this with a daily drumbeat of knife murders committed by and against children, and you have the familiar symptoms of the continuing rise of the underclass.
The government’s response has been to announce that juveniles who carry a knife illegally will be ranked with child murderers and rapists as automatically charged offenders, not ones who can be let off with a warning. That may be sensible, but it obviously treats only the symptoms of the problem. And those symptoms are politically damaging for Labour: the socio-economic news of the last week in Britain was Tuesday’s announcement that both income inequality and child poverty have risen for the second year in a row. The Guardian‘s predictable response was to demand the government throw even more money at the problem, but even if they do, there is now virtually no chance that Labour will meet its manifesto commitment to halve child poverty by 2010. As Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes admitted, Britain is trying “to run up an escalator that’s going down.”
The important question is why the escalator is going down. Income inequality and child poverty are, of course, both profoundly flawed measures of social well-being: inequality is a sin only if you were born a jealous redistributionist, and it is families, not children, who are poor. But that is the problem: there are few too families to go around. In 1997, 37% of children in the UK were born outside of marriage. Now, it’s up to 44%. If you strip out children born to immigrants and focus only on the Anglo-Saxons, it’s just over 50%. Sick rates have also risen alarmingly, in large part because, as a 2003 study in the British Medical Journal put it, there is “important deliberate misuse of the system by general practitioners” who believe it is their job to pander to patients who do not want to work. The result is that, though the headline figures are good, Britain has a lot of disguised unemployment. And then there’s the knife crime. Illegitimacy, unemployed young men, and violent crime: that sums up Charles Murray’s tests for an underclass. No wonder it costs so much to try to run up that down escalator.
But this is not really about money. What is at stake here is the existence of a society that can, or wants to, exist as anything other than the government’s client, and the rise of a state that has the duty only of providing sustenance without conditions. And with a media that is resolutely on the side of social disintegration, the situation is bleak. The Guardian‘s “Case Study: The Single Mother” response to the child poverty report was heartbreaking, not because of what it reported but because of its resolute failure to notice the obvious. Jodie Devlin, age 24, has two daughters, ages 2 and seven months. She lives entirely on government benefits, having left the father. She enjoyed the regular holidays her parents–both of them–took her on as a child, but her own children enjoy no such luxuries, nor are they ever likely to do so.
As Ms. Devlin’s case illustrates, coming from a two-parent family is no cure-all. What is most striking is that she expressed no awareness that having a child out of marriage at the age of 22 was in any way irresponsible, and the Guardian, predictably, managed to produce several thousand words on the subject of child poverty without suggesting it either. If no one is ever to be ashamed of, or embarrassed by, their conduct, there is simply no way that the situation will do anything but get worse.
And it’s not just a problem on the home front. On Wednesday, the government published a report asserting that the reason why low-skilled British workers are losing out to foreign migrants–the now famous “Polish plumber”–is because they are “unemployable and lack the motivation to work,” preferring to pretend to look for a job and collect benefits all the while. The report’s conclusion that the influx of foreign workers has not lowered wages or increased competition on the job market is dubious, and mostly intended to cover Labour’s failed immigration policies. But it does give the lie to the often-heard claim that Britain, like the rest of Europe, needs younger immigrants to rescue its benefits system. On the contrary: the benefits system encourages many Britons not to work, which creates openings in the job market that are filled by the immigrants.
So, for once, the UN has it right: it’s not easy to be a child in Britain today. If Beverley Hughes, and the government, are dismayed at their failures, as they should be, the only question they need to answer is a simple one: why does spending more money not make the down escalator go up? From clarity on that problem would flow many politically difficult but socially vital answers.
