Melanie Philips has a trenchant piece on the Daily Mail website in response to a call from the head of Barnardo’s UK, Martin Narey, for social workers to intervene earlier where families are clearly chronically dysfunctional. 

The tragic case that sparked both Narey’s call and Philips’ piece involved two young boys who viciously tortured two other young boys. 

The details behind the case are almost as shocking; the mother, Philips tells us, “has seven sons by three fathers, is an alcoholic and drug addict who left them to forage from rubbish bins and fed them cannabis to keep them quiet; their father is a drunken brute, who regularly beat them and forced them to watch violent horror films”. 

Philips’ argument is simple; society’s laissez faire attitude towards family breakdown, and positive celebration of “family diversity” creates the environment in which such outrages are increasingly likely.