This isn’t about the collapse of society because of ‘liberalism’ as the Right claim but its fuck all to do with Thatcher putting the lads grandfather out of work decades ago, its about the fact that putting your willy into something soft and wet is a lot of fun.

And the emphasis on the payments made to the family AFTER the fact is suspiciously close to the traditional complaint that teenage mums get pregnant to get council housing.

Would you prefer the father raise the kids on benefits?

Some truth there, Dave, but when you conclude about the left holding a future tory administration to account for much of this social malaise, what will the vehicle or measn for doing this be, given that at you say, “New Labour thraldom to the free market prevent[s] it from fixing matters”. The New Labour mindset is possibly strongest in the younger, very Thatcher-admiring types like Purnell and Burnham, and they won’t cede control of their party easily, so you can write off even a left-turning labour party for 5-10 years.It either desperately restructures and sheds the vile rightists which that would be a metaphorical bloodbath and take some recuperation nperiod afterwards, or, God forbid, it becomes Purnell/Burnham -ist, and tries to outflank the tories on the right.
Either way, they have to drop the authoritarian, “no need to really listen,we know best” line, as that’s been shown to be utter nonsense

Alfie & Chantelle’s child was conceived because of Thatcher’s economic policies ?
We might be able to blame her for the Belgrano but not this, surely ?

Anyway, why does have to be somebody else’s fault ?

Even asking what this tells about Britain brings to mind the final scene of ‘Burn After Reading’: there’s no lesson here, its just a series of comically tragic events.

A thought-provoking post. I would just say though, I don’t think Hayek or any other neo-classicists would suggest having a child at 13 a rational maximisation of one’s utilities. It is financially unviable and socially prohibitive; totally irrational in every way, and that’s before you deal with the moral side of things.

Sorry, but this is just a re-hash of a hundred Guardian columns.

Let’s look at the philosophy first of all “the morality of the free market” as you put it. In what way is left-wing philosophy less materialistic? In what way was 70s trade union anarchy and 60s hedonism any less selfish thatn 80s consumerism. Get some perspective.

You are undoubtledly right, unemployment did rise massively in some areas during the 80s, but that process has already started, and proceeded to happen, and become more enduring, in other countries.

But let’s face the real issue: solutions, I see none here, and little appetite for looking at them. There is nothing on the structure of the welfare state, nothing about the role of state spending in crowding out real economic activity in deprived regions, nothing about the enduring problem of skills: a field in which the left has repeatedly been driven by ideology over results, from teaching methods to control of schools. The left has always backed power and vested interests over the individual.

Unchanged attitude? You have been in opposition 30 years to your way of thinking but have nothing new to say.

Whoops, mis-read that paragraph Dave, ignore above comment.

I don’t agree with all of Dave’s argument, but I like this point: “If Britain does have a structural morality problem, it essentially emerged during the hey-day of Thatcherism.”

Do you remember when Keith Best, Tory MP for Ynys Mon, got banged up for four months after attempting to buy BT privatisation shares using multiple identities? His supporters argued that he was not doing anything unusual. Thus we should assume that by that point in time, personal honesty and morality had become “whatever you can get away with”.

La Toynbee:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/17/alfie-new-labour

All this story tells us is that some 13 year old boys are capable of fathering children. That’s it. If no 13 year olds were fathering children then I would start to worry.

If there were 10000 couples like them it would mean something. As it is it means nothing to the country at large.

Isn’t Alfie’s father responsible for eight other children by different partners ?

It seems there is a predictable pattern of trans-generational dysfunction, not least because Alfie’s Dad does not work, so presumably must rely on benefits to support his burgeoning family ?

Similar sort of pattern in Chantelle’s family, allegedly – surely we can’t blame a dementing former Tory leader for this unholy mess ?

Twenty years ago the pregnant girl would have ‘gone to visit relatives’ with her mother for a few weeks and come back with a ‘sister’.

The fact that a girl can have a child without having to lie about it is progress.

Yes, everything is going to pot and everything was briiliant in the old days. blah blah blah

Just goes to confirm by belief in abortion. But we must not say that because The Daily Mail will get all upset.

“yes, the case of Alfie Patten, Chantelle Steadman and the daughter born of their one-off adolescent legover does tell us much about morality in Britain today”

Not really.

Thatcher rode a popular tide of jingoism (and I use the word correctly here ) in the wake of the Falklands War, and her economic ideology was widely accepted by those who benefitted from it, but it certainly had no appeal among its victims.

Thatcher is hated by throughout the council estates of the UK to this day: to suggest that Thatcherite greed is now somehow the dominant ideology among the communities it decimated is absurd.

I was younger than Alfie when I lost my virginity; I had the sense to use a condom. THAT’S the real scandal. Not that they did what teenagers have done since time immemorial, but that they were too dumb to use protection.

I didn’t get any sex when I was 13 and it pisses me off that other people did.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/weekend/review/weekending-200902141578/

Right-wingers don’t tend to favour sex education for children, and on the whole also tend to be elitist, so the thought of their tax money going to educate ‘scum’ like Alfie Patten gets them up in arms. So sex ed doesn’t get improved like it should, and you get things like this happening. I guess that makes this:

every aspect of contemporary British culture is of rightist provenance.

true, but as to the Thatcher stuff… hmmm, that seems a bit much like over-extrapolation to me.

Meanwhile, nothing was allowed to stand in the way of the promotion of consumerism, and visual imagery from advertisements to pop videos has become saturated with blatantly commoditised sexuality.

Aye, I don’t think the whole movement towards using sex to sell everything-in-the-world-ever has helped!

The Labour Party ran an entire election campaign on the back of children killing children so as far as moral queasiness is concerned they can go forth and become baby mothers and fathers
I agree with Lee Griffin , it tells us little . – Because we already knew .People have children for tax payers cash , because we knew no-one gets married because it costs them tax payers cash and because we knew the traditional family was under attack from New Labour who hate it as a sub state organisation and have tried to replace it with soviet crèches and social workers . We knew this is what keeps the army of parasites ion the bloated public sector employed , why would they stop it

I agree Thatcher deliberately ran a high unemployment economy to a small extent . This was because the Unions were sucking us dry , could only be beaten that way as history had shown . Without this necessity the 80s would have been kinder . Without Callaghan and Scargill Thatcher would have had more options

The zoo animal atmosphere of Labour`s fatherless workless estates is well known .Le Griffin is right this tell us nothing new

No shame in not knowing what financial means Gordon Brown does not know what debt means

the traditional complaint that teenage mums get pregnant to get council housing.

This is quite true . Whats your point ?

Amit – Alfie’s family need much more than sex education from the state.

We must also fund:
Housing.
Welfare benefits.
Medical costs.
Social services ?

As well as police, or court time (according to Inspector Gadget)
http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/the-customer-is-always-right/

But if Britain is indeed broken, the left needs to make sure that Cameron is not allowed to forget who broke it in the first place, and to ask why New Labour thraldom to the free market preventing it from fixing matters.

And what would that fix have consisted of, precisely?
What exactly would you have the government do?

I think it is also safe to say that the promotion of “individualism” as a cultural phenomenon started in the early 60′s, as Larkin wrote:

“Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.”

Nearly 20 years before Thatcherism.

Anyone who’s ever had sex will know that you don’t need ‘the media’ or ‘Thatcherism’ to make it seem attractive, and if this lad got his girlfriend up the duff for tax reasons he’s an accounting prodigy and should be drafted in to solve the credit crunch forthwith.

Oh, I see, so you use this incident for a bit of Tory bashing. How on earth can you make the connection between a child who has been brought up under a Labour government and Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister? Talk about tenuous.

“deliberately-generated mass unemployment the Tories caused in the early 1980s”

Surely you mean inevitable impact of globalisation on the totally uncompetitive heavy industry in the UK? Have you noticed that Labour have not managed to reverse the decline of heavy industry in this country? Could that be anything to do with the fact that we cannot compete with other nations and that our industrial base was already being undermined long before Thatcher turned up?

I’ve written a letter on my blog this morning about Alfie Patten which thankfully manages to avoid all this petty name-calling and political posturing: http://www.lettersfromatory.com/2009/02/18/the-media-frenzy-over-13-year-old-alfie-pattens-fatherhood-is-getting-out-of-control/

I think the biggest scandal is that no one seems to care that Chantelle herself has stated she’s only had sex with one boy. No, we have to have those paternity tests, because Richard’s Mum think the baby looks like her son.

But the lack of sex education is a very close second.

Interesting article in The Independent on teenage pregnancy. The UK leeeds in the percentage of live births to mothers under the age of 20. I would suggest poor sex education, the increasing sexual exploitation of people combined with a large uneducated , unskilled and semi -literate at best, population are the causes. As the Dutch point there is plenty of sexual images in the public domain in the Netherlands. Is it not time we looked at sex and relationship education in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries ?

I never realised Eastbourne suffered such cata strophic job losses from the closure of mines,factories , shipyards and steel mills in the 80s. About the only frm of employment Eastbourne is famous for, is prep schools. Perhaps there has been a closure of large numbers of prep schools in the area. Is there anything Thatcher cannot be blamed for?

“Is it not time we looked at sex and relationship education in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries ?”

It was time 20 years ago.

a&e charge nurse:

That’s Amrit. And agreed, they do NOW need much more, but if Alfie and Chantelle had had proper sex ed in the first place, I can’t help thinking a fair bit of that public money would’ve been saved…

Totally agree with Lee Griffin above.

At what age do you receive sex education? How much would Alfie have received, fo example? And this story does put a strange perspective on the tabloid phenomenon of paedophilia. If a 40 year old man has sex with a 12 year old, he is a paedophile – but it’s ok for a 15 year old girl.

Slightly off topic but Warrington Bank Quay railway station has banned kissing outside designated areas.

The fact that the railway service has anything at all in common with the Taliban worries me more than the fact that kids are doing what kids have always done.

Shatterface,

What constitutes a ‘designated area’ at Warrington Bank Quay Railway Station? I’d imagine it’s the tea bar, like in Brief Encounter.

Kissing bans?

What’s next?

Is there no limit to bureaucratic meddling?

Apologies for the typo, Amrit.

Sex education should begin at home – although it appears the parents (in this case) have not set much of an example, thus increasing the RISK of further transgenerational family problems.

We are fortunate to live in a society where schooling is both universal and free, while sex education IS already provided to every child.

According to the Education Act (1996)
The sex education elements of the National Curriculum Science Order continued to be MANDATORY for all primary and secondary school pupils.
These covered anatomy, puberty, biological aspects of sexual reproduction and use of hormones to control and promote fertility.
Sex education (including education about HIV, AIDS and STDs), continued to be statutory in secondary and special schools, but it was not included in the National Curriculum. [Section 352]

The right of parents to withdraw their children from sex education was upheld.
Essentially, this meant that parents could withdraw their children completely from learning about the non-biological side of sexual health and relationships, even if they were over the age of consent. [Section 405].

Sex education should be provided in such a way that it encourages pupils “to have due regard to moral considerations and family life ”. [Section 403]

I imagine a recurring problem for many teachers is the fact that (some) children do not engage with the education system, perhaps because there is little, or no support in the adult family network ?

Quite frankly, if I was 13 and living in an area with no jobs, no prospects and no change in that reality since before I was born, all I’d be interested in would be lager ‘n labia.

Then again, as I have the face that’s only suited for a broken radio, I strongly doubt that I would have succeeded even in that paltry ambition…

Alfie has joined the group ‘Fathers 4 justice’.In an interview he said “..it made sense as I already had a Spiderman Outfit”. I’ll get me coat…

33. A and e charge nurse. ” imagine a recurring problem for many teachers is the fact that (some) children do not engage with the education system, perhaps because there is little, or no support in the adult family network ?”
Excellent comment. I would’nt be surprised if 10-20% of children fall into this category.

Douglas (32): the station even has a sign up with a silhoetted couple kissing with a red diagonal line through it.

And the guy’s wearing a hat, which suggests it was Trevor Howard they had in mind.

“I was younger than Alfie when I lost my virginity; I had the sense to use a condom. THAT’S the real scandal. Not that they did what teenagers have done since time immemorial, but that they were too dumb to use protection.”

Bullshit. 13 and 14 year old children have not been having sex since time immemorial. Where is your evidence for this statement? There were almost no underage pregnancies in the 1940s and yet then there was no access to contraception for adolescents, no sexual education, no access to abortion, no access to welfare benefits for unmarried mothers. Whatever it’s main cause, the 1960s or the 1980s (quite clearly it’s both) Britain is today a moral and cultural slum of which Alfie is just one product. This story on it’s own doesn’t tell us anything new about the state of society in Britain. If you really want to a useful opinion on the moral and cultural condition of modern Britons – read or listen to what foreigners say or write about it. The really amazing thing is that British people are not fully aware of how lowly they are regarded nowadays. Everywhere on the continent Britons (of all classes) are seen as vulgar, violent, sexually incontinent philistines. This was the complete opposite of the case 40 or 50 years ago when Britons were well known for their restraint and gentleness. Countries may go backward but if they don’t acknowledge how fast and how far they are going backwards then they’re beyond hope.

I dunno Piotr, there was a hell of a lot more adoption going on back then than now. I imagine there was a lot less, but there certainly was plenty of underage sex and pregnancy happening. A lot more hidden, of course.

Nobody worked around many places, because there were not any jobs; often there are still not. The legacy has been social corrosion on a previously unimaginable scale.

Ah yes, the ‘poverty leads to sexual incontinence’ argument. That’s not insulting to the poor at all is it?

38. Piotr. Unfortunately you are too often correct. A Spanish lady said more less the same to me many years ago.

For the sake of closure:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510791,00.html

We’ll catch them on Jeremy Kyle playing “Whose your daddy?”