Dave Hill's Big Britain

Soft Right!

Who wrote this?

"Camila Batmanghelidj of the estimable Kids Company writes in the Telegraph this morning about how we have got into a situation where children kick a man to death. Batmanghelidj’s argument that those who have grown up in a brutal environment are more likely to behave brutally makes perfect sense to me...The extent to which we as a society fail these children is brought home by the fact that as, Batmanghelidj notes, 570,000 children a year are referred to child protection services but only 37,200 of them are actually offered help."

Only James Forsyth of The Spectator. Whatever next? Hugging hoodies? More decent, hard-working tax-payers' cash spent on "young thugs"? Smack his bottom, Mel!

Twelfth Day

And so that was Christmas. My kids and my mum on the day itself.

Dump Him, Ladies!

For several days someone has been calling me "Mr Fitzsimons". That is because my wife booked the hotel we will shortly be leaving and a (female) receptionist has been wrongly assuming that Sheila uses my surname. She has also been assuming that we are married at all. She's right in the latter case, of course, but it still surprises me that people leap to such conclusions in an age when cohabitation is common as is married women prefering to go on using what we still quaintly refer to as their maiden names. That said, the willingness of young women to take the surname of heir husbands upon tying the knot remains widespread. How depressing - it's as though feminism never happened.

Still a piece in today's Telegraph has cheered me up. Reporting that next Monday - being the start of the first full working week of the new year - is the busiest in the divorce lawyer's calendar, it discloses that:

"Three quarters of new year divorces are instigated by women who, by and large, are less willing to settle for an unsatisfactory relationship than they were in less emancipated times. A survey carried out by advice website InsideDivorce.com reveals that infidelity is the main cause, cited by 44 per cent of women, followed by abuse (40 per cent), boredom (29 per cent) and a lack of sex (22 per cent)."

Women have always sought divorce in greater numbers than have men, and it is indeed evidence that they they are less willing to be doormats than they once were. And that is the real reason why the seething classes want to divorce to become harder to obtain. Diddums, says "Mr Fitzsimons".

Icing On The Cake

I made this: well, the sugary surface (as you'd expect). Here's how.

Labour & Child Poverty

Tom Freeman:

"For me – and I glumly know I’m in a minority on this – child poverty is the single most important political issue there is. I’m proud of what Labour has achieved here, and I’m frustrated by what it hasn’t yet achieved. I don’t want to end up growing less and less proud, and more and more frustrated."

His excellent - and sobering - assessment of Labour's record is here.

Forces Families

I wrote the following for the Guardian's Family section. It features interviews with two British soldiers recently back from Afghanistan and their wives.

By now, Nicola Peach might be nearer finding out if her husband is the same man she said goodbye to in April. They’re having a few days away. Sergeant Major Jason Peach will have the opportunity to talk more about his time in Afghanistan. Both he and Nicola may start discovering what his experiences there mean for their relationship and their family. Neither expects the process to be easy.

“It might sound a bit cheesy, a bit of a cliché,” Nicola said when I visited her and Jason at their home in Stoke-on-Trent. “But to not get back the person I fell in love with and still love - that would be incredibly hard. I think we won’t know for a long time what this six months have done to us.”

Not cheesiness, not cliché, just candour. As Nicola spoke Jason played on the living room carpet with their two year-old, Joseph. Jason had returned from Helmand province only a week earlier. It was the third time he’d been posted to a battle zone and by far the most demanding. His enemy, Taliban fighters, were resourceful and ferocious. In combat situations Jason has a special responsibility for evacuating casualties. Not all those he helped went on to survive. Such encounters with mortality leave marks. How does a solider manage when he comes home?

Dump ContactPoint!

I wrote in detail on this subject, a database on England's children, a year ago. Now you can sign a Downing Street petition against it. My latest for the Guardian explains why you should:

"ContactPoint, formerly called the information sharing index, also known unofficially as the "children's index", is a government database-in-waiting that will hold information about all 11 million children in England. It had been due to go live next spring but on Tuesday, seemingly mindful of those disappearing child benefit discs, children's minister Kevin Brennan announced a five-month delay to "enable the independent assessment of security procedures". Not before time, some would say. But they and others would go further. They'd say ditch ContactPoint for good. This isn't simply because they don't believe ContactPoint will be secure. Last year, the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) produced a report for the information commissioner. Its experts in child protection, children's rights and IT security made a range of negative connections between the very existence of the database and the effectiveness of child welfare and protection strategies.

Happy Families? What, Here?

The other day, my five year-old said to me: "If you kiss and it's not a goodbye-ing sort if kiss, you have to get married, don't you?" Complicated thing, family life - but apparently, getting happier for most of us, a suggestion I examined for the Guardian:

"Not much notice has been taken of ICM's recent survey for the BBC of family life in Britain. The trouble was, it didn't bring bad news. The Beeb's home editor Mark Easton wrote: "I think our expectation was that we would be measuring the extent to which people's closest relationships were suffering as a result of the decline in traditional family structures. When the results came in, we had a surprise."

I'll bet they did. Ninety-three percent of us described our family lives as fairly or very happy. More of us considered that our parents did their best for us, thought of our families as close and are optimistic about their futures than felt those ways in previous polls going back decades. How can this be squared with ongoing anxieties, some of them backed empirically, about the damaging effects of overworked parents and family breakdown these days? Could it be that, in spite of the stresses and fragmentations, modern family life really is happier for more people than during the preceding half century?

Smacking Ban

There's a long tradition of child-hating in Britain, but at least we seem to be smacking, whacking and beating them less than we did. That's why I'm content that there won't be a new law against it, as I explained for The Guardian as follows:

"The government has been 'listening to the British people' again. We all know what that means: a cover for selective deafness or Gord code for sounding the retreat. No citizens' jury is going to change the PM's mind, and when the verdict of the polls suggests a need to stand and fight, recent history predicts panic under fire. Following the headlong flight before young Osborne's inheritance tax charge, we yesterday had two smaller examples.

One saw No 10 cry 'duck and cover' over refuge-collection charging because Middle England fears Big Brother lurking in its wheelie bins. And then there was the 'smacking ban' that's not to be: children's minister Kevin Brennan said a review of laws tightened three years ago to outlaw physical chastisement of children that leaves physical wounds had found that most parents - "about 70%" - didn't want it totally outlawed. Do I smell the familiar New Labour terror of someone screaming 'political correctness'? Probably. But in the case of smacking I think the right outcome has been achieved.

Children & Pocket Money

Yesterday, I wrote for the Guardian that...

"Startling statistics about kids and consumerism should always be approached with care. The latest, reported here, seems no exception. Compiled for MTV, its headline finding is that teenagers' annual incomes average over £900 a year and that most of this is spent on going out and looking good - often, presumably, at the same time. Quite a wedge, you might think, and in some ways you would be right.

Nine hundred quid is more than I, who haven't been a teenager for some time, have spent on clothes and "going out" - a term whose meaning I recall only hazily - so far this year; more than the difference between the new cooker I long to purchase and the sort it might be more prudent to buy; and almost as much as putative prime minister Cameron would reward grown-ups with for being married.

Look below the headline, though, and start to glean what that nearly four-figure sum can actually mean. It is an average that conceals wide variations: according to the survey, the best-off teens rake in close to £1,500 per annum while those at the other end of the range may receive as little as a tenth of that. This may well be a sad reflection of wealth inequalities, but there are other angles on the evidence too. A lot of kids, for example, augment pocket money and cash gifts at Christmas and birthdays by working - two-thirds of those asked, in fact. So it's not all handouts from mum and dad."