Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s (pictured) has written about the London riots and to judge from a headline The Guardian put on his analysis you could be forgiven for thinking Blair rejected David Cameron’s “broken society” rhetoric in its entirety. It’s true that Blair seemed to reject suggestions that there was an overall moral crisis,...
Recently I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the first time. I was reminded of it the other day when reading about a sex education kit being handed out to young children in Switzerland. In Brave New World, the children who are ‘decanted’ in baby factories are raised by the State, not parents, and...
The cover story of The Economist last week was called ‘Asia’s lonely hearts: Why Asian women are rejecting marriage and what that means’. The picture on the front was of a lovelorn Asian man, rose in hand, and a woman striding purposefully away from him. The story was really about East Asian women. It told...
One of Britain’s most acute and insightful thinkers today is Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (pictured). Dr Sacks has written about the UK looting and arson for a number of publications, including in this article from the Wall Street Journal. In it he makes the point that the West has been spending its moral capital as fast...
The topic of this year’s Merriman Summer School in Co Clare is ‘Changing Irish Childhoods’. It ends on Sunday. So far it has been addressed by such people as Children’s Minister, Frances Fitzgerald (pictured), Norah Gibbons of Bernardos, and Mary O’Rourke. To judge from the reports of their speeches in The Irish Times, one very...
David Cameron was the most prominent figure who suggested that fatherlessness and general moral breakdown were behind last week’s riots, but he wasn’t on his own. David Lammy (pictured), The Labour MP for the Tottenham area, where the riots started said that the lack of male role models in young men’s lives was one of...
Monday’s speech by Prime Minister David Cameron used some of the strongest language heard from any politician anywhere in Britain or Ireland in a very long time to describe the extent of the moral collapse which led to the anarchy and looting in British cities last week. Mr Cameron spoke of “people showing indifference to...
A growing GDP is generally considered to be a very healthy and desirable thing for a country, but in fact as a measure of economic, much less social well-being, it is a very blunt instrument which for one thing ill-serves the family. Here is a useful article by Robert W. Patterson of the Family in...
The looting and arson in Britain have many causes, but who can seriously doubt that one of the causes is the collapse of traditional morality and the traditional family in large parts of Britain. Notably, Indians were not among the rioters. Why not? Almost certainly the chief reason is that they have not destroyed their...
Many factors are to blame for the riots in London and other English cities. One of them has to be the absence of a father-figure from the lives of so many of the rioters. There is a well established link between father-absence and juvenile delinquency. In her blog, British commentator, Christine Odone, makes the same...
