Granny’s love is binding enough – let’s not tie it up in legal knots

When grandparents are good they are very, very good but when they are bad they are horrid. It is sentimental to think otherwise. That is why it was alarming to see misleading headlines last week announcing that grandparents will soon get legal rights to see their grandchildren after the parents’ divorce under new parenting agreements.

Oddly enough, this news coincided with a BBC radio programme about the daft things grandmothers recommend to their daughters and daughters-in-law about the rearing of grandchildren. This brought to mind some of my late mother-in-law’s remarkable advice on the subject. “I hope you won’t even think of breastfeeding,” she said to me when her first grandchild was imminent. “I mean,” she said with her usual emphasis, waving a dry martini cocktail in the air, “it’s so unnatural.”

She herself had not had much to do with the upbringing of her own infant children, natural or not, but she gave me nanny’s baby book, carefully filled in with details of my husband’s progress, as an antidote to my trendy notions. His diet as a newborn was recorded as diluted cow’s milk with brown sugar, which hardly inspired confidence. A little later my mother-in-law recommended that my baby daughter should be circumcised, whatever she may have meant by that, if indeed she knew what she meant. Given her eccentricity, her frightening mood swings and her occasional violence, which made her the terror of the family and of certain parts of the shires, I was used to ignoring her advice without arguing.

One of her other foibles was to warn me that grandparents had rights. “Don’t for a moment think,” she used to say with a terrifying smile, “that if you get divorced you’ll be able to stop me seeing the children. I’ve got rights. Legal rights.” Naturally I checked and was relieved to find she was wrong: it wasn’t that I wanted to keep my children and her apart, but I wanted to be in control. She was given to whisking my baby off and having her hair cut horribly short, in the unscientific hope of making it grow thicker, and I didn’t want her circumcised.

I don’t think any of this was based on her objections to me personally. My very competent sister-in law suffered, too. Once, while staying with grandma, she discovered her new baby had suddenly disappeared. When she protested, my mother-in-law told her the child ought in her view to have a nanny and that she herself had therefore employed one, who had taken the infant out for the day. This exercise of grandparental power took place only about 15 years ago.

I mention these snapshots of our family life to make the obvious point that it would be entirely disastrous for all grandparents, automatically, to have rights of access to their grandchildren. Admittedly, grandparents can be wonderful. When they are, grandchildren adore them and parents often depend on them or wish they lived nearer so that they could.

My own mother was a wonderful grandmother. Being a loving and beloved grandparent is clearly one of life’s greatest joys, as is having one, and I know that in not having grandparents, apart from a few years of just one grandmother, I missed a great deal of childhood. Equally, some grandparents can be monstrous. Reading the internet responses to the news stories last week, I was struck by the large number of bloggers who wrote how dreadful their parents had been to them and how passionately they wanted to protect their own children from them.

Fortunately, on closer inspection it emerges that grandparents are not about to get legal rights of access to grandchildren. As so often, the headlines were exaggerating. What has actually happened is that a review of the family justice system, commissioned by the government, has just been issued. It is making recommendations before consultation and proposes that divorcing couples should make agreements allowing grandparents to see their grandchildren, with specific contact arrangements, “thereby reinforcing the importance of a relationship with grandparents and other relatives and friends who (sic) the child values”.

Such parenting agreements could then be used as evidence in court, if either parent goes back on the arrangement. However, the report does not recommend any such legal rights for grandparents or legal sanctions: the author, David Norgrove, a former civil servant, says the law is “too blunt an instrument”: giving grandparents such rights could damage the children concerned.

How true. This is the usual, maddening political combination of the obvious and the impossible. It is obvious that, generally speaking, grandparents are a good thing. That is so obvious that it really does not need enshrining in any kind of bureaucratic statement dreamt up by civil servants. When divorcing parents see the grandparents as a good thing, they will not need a bureaucratic statement to encourage them to include them in the children’s lives.

If the divorcing parents do not regard any of the grandparents with favour and feel inclined to exclude them for any reason, good or bad, it will be quite impossible for an optional parenting agreement, which is not backed by the blunt force of the law, however eloquently read out in court, to stop them. What can be the point of such verbiage? It is inexpressibly sad when grandparents lose contact with their grandchildren after divorce. Almost half of them do, according to recent research, and more often they are the parents of divorcing sons. They cannot all be monsters that have brought this on themselves. All too many of them lose their grandchildren simply because the parents are too vengeful or mean or lazy to let them see them: it would be understandable if they claimed legal rights.

All the same, even if there were a law enforcing grandparents’ rights, who is to say they would be any better off as a result than fathers are today? Divorced fathers do have legal rights of access to their children, often laid down in legally binding agreements, yet these are often broken by their ex-wives, deliberately and sometimes dishonestly. If the law, through repeated court hearings, cannot uphold fathers’ rights, there is little hope for grandparents. And if there is any solution to this intractable problem, this new report is not it or anything close to it.

However, at least Norgrove does not recommend the usual misguided solution of creating meaningless, unenforceable new rights. My mother-in-law would have been very cross with him.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Our immoral pretence at an ordinary life for people like Josie

Agood society should surely be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. Last week a small charity in the south of England was much taken aback by a request from a woman with a learning disability for money to pay off her debts.

According to her care worker, who wrote the request, her learning disability means that she cannot fully understand her finances or how to manage them; nor can she understand the implications of paying by credit card and of failing to keep payments up to date. Result, as Mr Micawber would have said, misery.

It is quite astonishing to me that a person with a learning disability should ever be put in a position where she faces all the terrible anxieties and hardships of debt. Protecting such a person from all of that should be one of the first duties of care of a good society.

That might be difficult in some cases, but this person — she could be called Josie — has a professional support worker who is employed by a learning disabilities charity, and you might imagine, unless you knew about current theories on learning disability, that such support workers would gently steer such people away from credit cards and protect them from running up debts. Not necessarily, it seems.

Josie has a serious problem: she has an outstanding debt with a well-known retailer of more than £1,000 and another debt owed to a utilities company. The retailer is threatening to take her to court, where she would face a fine on top of her debt. The utilities company is deducting money from Josie’s benefits. These — her only income — add up to £132 a week, about half of which is employment and support allowance and half is disability living allowance.

A few months ago Josie suffered a bad injury in an accident, and she has been living in a respite centre. Her normal weekly needs are only just covered by her income. She has no hope of ever paying off her debts without asking for charity.

It beggars belief that such a person with learning difficulties can be given a credit card and allowed to fall into debt. If this is commonplace, then policy makers need to do some serious rethinking; because if it is commonplace, then Josie and people like her are victims of political correctness, for lack of a better phrase. I mean a refusal, in the name of an equalities and inclusion agenda, to acknowledge the serious problems caused by learning disabilities and the way these problems vary unequally from person to person. It is a high-minded and wrong-headed state of denial.

People in the grip of this mindset argue that adults with learning disabilities (LDs) should be able to do everything normal people do — in fact many activists will be angered by my use of the word “normal”. They, including leaders in the field such as Mencap, firmly believe that people with LDs — once known as mental handicaps — should lead normal, independent lives and should marry, become parents, vote, sit on juries, become trustees, sign mortgages and have bank accounts like everyone else. This view is practically orthodox now.

Such beliefs have a long history, starting in America, where notions of normalisation were introduced by Dr Wolf Wolfensberger in the 1960s. Wolfensberger was passionately concerned that people with learning disabilities were undervalued and heartlessly excluded from normal life. He was entirely right: such people were put aside, often quite literally, and treated as “other”, their feelings and wishes regularly ignored.

I remember meeting a middle-aged community social worker in Dublin who had once worked in a vast establishment for people with LDs. It was a hospital, although the inmates were not ill, divided into large, many-bedded wards. People didn’t even have their own underwear; it was handed out randomly after each wash. In my own childhood I remember going to see countless secluded places for adults with learning disabilities that were nothing but soulless, smelly boarding schools, and it shocked me horribly. Ideas such as Wolfensberger’s were overdue and have hugely influenced public policy, both in the United States and here.

Anyone who, like me, has ever loved someone with an LD must sympathise with these ideas and want that person to live as normal a life as possible and to be valued and included socially as much as possible. But the crucial word is “possible”, as Wolfensberger himself said. What’s happened is that wishful thinking and an overreaction to the bad old days have blinded many professionals to the realities of the possible. It is not possible, surely, for someone who cannot understand money or the implications of credit cards to take responsibility for her own income, least of all if her income is small (as so often is the case with people with LDs). Yet people with LDs are routinely encouraged to have bank accounts and even to employ their own care workers with their personalised budgets.

I would go further: it is not possible or right for someone with a learning disability to sit on a jury or to be a trustee, rights for which Mencap and others have campaigned. It is wishful thinking.

A learning disability means a permanent intellectual impairment. It has nothing to do with a learning difficulty, such as dyslexia, which can be put right: it is a lifelong condition. By standard definitions it means an IQ of less than 70 and problems with conceptual skills, social skills or practical skills. An IQ of 50-70 would mean a mild disability, 35-50 a moderate one and below that a severe or profound disability.

With a lot of the right support and encouragement, a person with a learning disability can lead a satisfying life and achieve all sorts of things. The determination on all sides to include them in ordinary life as far as possible can only be right: it is what lies behind the official policy of “supported living” in independent flats and houses in the community. But that determination has been developed to a fault, to impractical extremes.

For one thing, there is a shortage of money and a shortage of highly skilled support workers. The real costs of proper supported living for everyone in need would be astronomical. Even more important, some people’s disabilities are just too disabling for all such aspirations — too disabling, at least, to take on credit cards or legal agreements or difficult legal questions.

To impose such burdens on people who cannot bear them, or to encourage them to take them on, seems to me both wrong and irresponsible. Think of Josie.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Our cupboard is bare, save for those wild fantasists on the left

Imagine that you were publicly accused by a well-known figure of deliberately trying to drive all the black, brown, poor and Muslim women out of your street, simply because you didn’t want them there. Presumably, through a red mist of fury, you would ring a solicitor at once and start legal proceedings. For that public figure would be accusing you of serious crimes as well as of racism itself — illegal racist and sexist discrimination — and putting you at serious risk of a police inquiry and public disgrace.

That accusation, astonishingly, is exactly what the frontbench Labour MP Karen Buck has just made. In a speech last week in Islington, that London left-wing haven, she suggested to a public Labour party meeting that the government’s proposed £400-a-week cap on housing benefit, which will come into force next month, is a politically motivated policy intended to drive Muslims and ethnic minorities out of London in a kind of social and ethnic cleansing.

Ministers, she said, “do not want lower-income women, families and children living in London. Above all, let us be very clear — because we know where the impact is hitting — they don’t want black women, they don’t want ethnic minority women and they don’t want Muslim women living in central London. They just don’t.”

This disgraceful outburst must, presumably, have been authorised by her political masters and their spin doctors, since she is shadow minister for work and pensions. If it wasn’t, they should immediately say so and distance themselves from her. It is disgraceful and wrong for an opposition frontbencher to accuse the government of deliberately doing such things (just as it was wrong and abominably disloyal of Boris Johnson to say something similar a few months ago). Understandably, there have been calls for her resignation. The Muslim Conservative peer Baroness Warsi demanded that Ed Miliband remove her from the front bench. He hasn’t.

It was irresponsible scaremongering and borders on incitement to racial or religious hatred. Buck has incited minorities to see their government as largely white, anti-minority and anti-Muslim. Highly inflammatory stuff. Her apology, saying she was wrong to impute such motives to the government, will not undo the harm she has done. David Cameron would have grounds to sue the woman.

One can only guess at what Buck really meant. Either she believed what she was saying or, in that weasel phrase, she “misspoke herself”, or else she was just trying in a particularly nasty and incompetent way to smear the government while sucking up to her own London voters.

If she was being at all sincere, one can only wonder, yet again, why the left so deeply loathes politicians to its right. Can it truly believe that all centre-right politicians (and now the entire government) are really heartless, self-interested and indifferent to other people’s hardships? There seems to be a general assumption in fashionable left-wing circles that people who think differently from them — people to the right of them politically — are not just wrong but also morally despicable.

I suspect this is because the left cannot understand real economic necessities. I suspect it does not, for example, really believe how very indebted and how very poor this country now is. No matter how often the figures are put before those on the left, they don’t believe the cupboard is bare. From that disbelief it follows that politicians who say, for instance, that generous housing top-ups or expensive new schools or better pensions cannot be afforded are not telling the truth: they must be making cuts for entirely different political reasons — some of them perhaps sinister.

In the case of housing benefit, it should be obvious that in a time of great austerity it is not possible (and it is not fair) to subsidise people to pay rent of more than £400 a week (nearly £21,000 a year) in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world. Apart from anything else, it inflates rents for those who otherwise could pay, without subsidy. This has nothing to do with what colour these tenants are, or how hard they work or how deserving they might be. It just isn’t affordable. The same is true of the huge number of public sector jobs. Whether or not they are non-jobs or politically correct jobs or useful jobs, this country cannot afford to pay for its bloated public sector and its bloated pensions, whether it wants to or not.

The same is true of the National Health Service. On Friday a study by the National Cancer Intelligence Network (set up by the Department of Health) revealed that thousands of older cancer patients are being denied surgery that might save their lives; this is because of a general reluctance, which varies across the country, to operate on the elderly and even on the middle-aged. It will come as a shock to most people that cancer surgery is being rationed in this ad hoc way, but in truth the only question for the future of advanced medical treatments on the NHS is how the rationing should be done.

It is impossible to give everyone all the new and sophisticated medical treatments that are available. Age is merely one way of rationing in a country with an exploding elderly population. I will never forget the terrible black comedy I saw in a well-run surgical ward: a very old and very sick lady, recovering from an intestinal operation in great pain and fear, was comforted by a kind nurse. “You’re doing so well now,” said the nurse, “that tomorrow you will be well enough to go back to the hospice.”

In a special report last week on the slimming of the state called Taming Leviathan, The Economist magazine argued that with an ageing population to care for and unlimited demands upon the state for all kinds of services, “many rich-world governments are on course for bankruptcy — unless they raise taxes to levels that would wreck their economies”. This is the economic reality facing this relatively rich country, whose cupboards are bare. The international banking scandal has merely helped to empty those cupboards more quickly.

It means the services demanded of, and offered by, the state will have to be cut back in this country and all over the developed world. It is a mystery to me why the supposedly brilliant Gordon Brown didn’t understand this obvious economic fact. Throwing around ignorant accusations of ethnic cleansing, as Buck has, will only add social disquiet to the economic hardship to come. That is what is contemptible.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Behold, the avenging angels of scrounging will claim us all

Avenging angels come in strange forms these days. Two of them appeared last week in the popular press, with — as the book of Daniel describes them — faces like lightning, eyes like flaming torches and words like the sound of a multitude. But one might easily have failed to recognise them because superficially they seem quite ordinary. One is Stanley Clifton, 31, of Darlington, and the other is Sorche Williams, 19, of west London.

Stanley Clifton is a perfect paradigm of welfare man. He has never worked in his life, he has produced four children with a woman who is too depressed to work and he is on incapacity benefit for alcoholism, even though he claims he has not had a drink for a year. All together, the family receives £18,000 a year in benefits, including £100 a week incapacity payment.

Last year Clifton was convicted of common assault and sentenced to 100 hours of community service, but he failed twice to turn up, at which point probation workers found him unfit for community service because he was on incapacity benefit. However, last Tuesday he found himself up before Judge John Walford at Teesside crown court. Sentencing Clifton to a three-month supervision order, the judge vented his indignation by accusing him of “sponging off others” and being “the embodiment of the welfare-dependent culture”. Clifton’s response was to demand to know how the “f****** radge [irritating] bastard” would like to look after his four children all day long.

Sorche Williams is, as she appeared in the press last week, a perfect paradigm of young welfare woman. Her face is angelic; her approach to life is anything but. With a criminal record for assaulting a policeman, she has never worked. “I get money from my mum and my dad and anyone else who has a job in Britain,” she says without the slightest shame. At the beginning of a BBC3 television documentary in the Working Girls series, she says she can’t be bothered to look for work — it’s “just like being a slave”. Nor can she be bothered to get up: she spends her benefit on drinking in bars and clubs.

Extreme cases though they are, Williams and Clifton stand like flaming emblems for the people who depend needlessly on welfare, and feel entitled to do so, at such overwhelming cost to the taxpayer. They are the angels who deliver the awful message that this country has brought upon itself the evils they stand for.

Forty years of decadent attitudes have undermined the culture of education, work, self-reliance and self-respect here, and as a result this country has produced a critical mass of people who won’t work and who feel not the slightest shame about it.

Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling some sympathy for Clifton and Williams. In exploiting the system as they do, they are each making a rational choice, to use a term sociologists like. So are countless people like them. If the choice is between a tiring, boring, low-paid job on the one hand and getting just as much money for doing nothing — with no blame attached — it is entirely reasonable to choose to take the money and sleep in, or to have lots of lovely babies that someone else will pay for. The welfare state has made it entirely possible for people to waste their own lives and exploit other people’s as a seemingly rational choice.

So has the education system. Quite apart from a failing system that leaves countless school-leavers unemployable, there are two ways in which pupils learn to be no-hopers.

In the first, they are taught that they are all creative, that they can achieve whatever they want and are entitled to fulfilling, interesting work from the start; therefore they are not obliged to do unfulfilling, uncreative or unsatisfactory jobs, not even as the first step on a ladder. Alternatively, children in the worst schools learn from a complete lack of guidance and encouragement that they might as well stop trying and give up on life early.

Only in the best schools are children taught about the rewards of self-discipline, hard work and, of course, deferred gratification — that well-worn sociologists’ term for what distinguishes the aspiring middle classes from everyone else.

Putting aside pleasure for later and getting up early to study for exams or train for a sport, or starting as a gofer at the bottom of a company, is the only way to get on. Even then, it’s not a guarantee. But success in anything is impossible without it. Somehow, just getting out from under the duvet seems to be a big problem for young unemployed Britons. No one has obliged them to accept authority, or to do things they don’t enjoy in the hope of achieving better things later on.

The excellent BBC3 programme in which Williams appeared made this very clear. Given interesting work placements in the fashion trade, she and another girl at first feel positively insulted when told severely that they must turn up on time and do whatever they’re asked. “F****** dickheads,” says Williams.

But, rather movingly, both girls are soon turned around by inspiring employers. They suddenly discover the fun and self-respect that goes with work, even modest work; they find out that they are far from useless, as they’ve always feared. Williams gives up the attitudes of which she was publicly accused last week. All this makes it clear how much could have been done for these girls, and millions like them, earlier in their lives. Encouragement works.

Unfortunately, though, there are very few inspiring people around, either at school or later. Good mentors are in short supply. The harsh truth, politically speaking, is that while carrot is best, stick is often unavoidable. The coalition’s plans to get as many people as possible off incapacity and other benefits are a start. But what’s needed is more in the way of sanctions. Just having benefits withdrawn is not the same as being punished for knowingly ripping off other taxpayers.

A change of public attitude might also help. It often seems that many people have little idea of where government money comes from. If everyone truly believed that someone scrounging benefits was ripping off you and me and their own hard-working neighbours, then the old censoriousness might return. It is high time it did.

For too long, the better-off have been rather relaxed about scrounging, seeing it as the price of a civilised state. In fact, welfare scrounging is quite likely to help bring down this civilised state altogether. That’s the message of Stanley Clifton and Sorche Williams, those unlikely angels.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Three royals only: an easy rule to save us from Andrew the buffoon

Deference is a dangerous drug. It is highly addictive. There are some people whom it cannot corrupt, such as the Queen or her father or, indeed, the great actor Paul Newman, but most people’s personalities are horribly disordered by deference. Think of poor Charlie Sheen. And Prince Andrew.

Under ordinary circumstances this unremarkable man might have been obliged to be polite, hard-working and aware of his limitations. As things are, because he is fourth in line to the throne, he has been surrounded all his life by deference and the excessive attentions of people half crazed by red carpet fever: it is said that Andrew has among his retinue a valet who travels with a 6ft ironing board, claiming that “no one knows how to iron His Royal Highness’s trousers like me”. Such stuff is beyond parody, almost guaranteed to turn a man of modest intelligence and weak character into a delinquent.

In his case, it has. Jetting about, often at public expense, Airmiles Andy spends his time with some of the worst of international kleptocrats, tyrants and sleazeballs, with shady financiers and dodgy Middle Easterners — the sort of people he ought to stay well clear of — and accepts freebies and hospitality from them. He is followed everywhere by the whiff of scandal, by stories of astonishing rudeness, self-indulgence and greed.

None of this might matter very much if he were just another idle playboy princeling. His antics are not good for the House of Windsor but, luckily for it and for us, there is little chance of his succeeding to the throne. Yet somehow — inappropriately, unaccountably, absurdly — 10 years ago he was given the sort of job that was tailor-made to encourage his weakness and almost bound to bring discredit on this country.

In 2001 the government got together with the Queen and let her appoint him Britain’s special representative for international trade and investment. How on earth they persuaded themselves that this was a good idea is one of life’s many mysteries. What can the Queen have been thinking of? In this role Andrew has, entirely predictably, been a bit of a disaster. It almost defies belief that a senior member of the royal family should openly slag off the Serious Fraud Office for its “idiocy” in its fight against international corruption — at a business brunch in Kyrgyzstan, no less, to add dramatic irony to injury. At the same time, the Duke of York laughed indulgently about corruption, insulted the French and famously stated that Americans don’t understand geography.

According to a watching US ambassador, this was rude “? la British” and it’s typical of the man. The duke was known among the British diplomatic community in the Gulf as HBH: His Buffoon Highness.

Much worse than all this are Prince Andrew’s personal associations. In his world, although he has to meet all kinds of dubious people — the poor Queen herself has to be nice to torturers and mass murderers in the course of her official duties as well — he does not have to associate with them privately. But he does, to the point of scandal, as if rules and morals were for lesser mortals. This has brought him to the disgrace of open criticism in the House of Commons. Last Wednesday, Chris Bryant MP asked: “Isn’t it especially difficult to explain the behaviour of the special ambassador for trade who is not only a close friend of Saif Gadaffi but is also a close friend of a convicted Libyan gun smuggler, Tarek Kaituni? Isn’t it about time we dispensed with the services of the Duke of York?” Even the most ardent of royalists would think so, surely. Prince Andrew is not merely an embarrassment to the monarchy; he is a threat to it, because he so obviously fails to understand the delicate constitutional deal that the monarchy did long ago with the public as the price of its survival, and the strict constraints imposed by that deal.

What can be done to protect the monarchy from rogue royals? Those of us who support it are all too aware that monarchy is fragile. If it is to survive its Andrews and its Fergies, as well as all its other challenges, I think it urgently needs to make certain changes.

First, and most important, none of the royal family — not a single one — should have an official government position of any kind, apart from the reigning monarch, and that role should be no greater than it is now. That would save a lot of embarrassment caused by rogue royals. It certainly would have forestalled the scandal created when Fergie tried to sell introductions to Prince Andrew, who does have saleable commercial clout, thanks to his official role.

The royal family should also slash the number of active members on its (and our) payroll. Only the three closest to the throne should be on the public stage, and only the next two should be waiting tactfully in the wings. Everyone except the three closest in line should cease to have any official roles or residences or public subsidies, though they could take on any ceremonial or unofficial roles they liked, if the monarch chose to subsidise them privately. Otherwise they should sink back into the pleasant anonymity of the lower upper classes.

Finally, there should be more openness about what the leading royal figures actually do and say in their official royal roles, for example in talking to ministers. The royal family and both the last government and the present coalition have resisted this, and ministers have firmly opposed requests made by the press under freedom of information laws. This is an error from the point of view of the family itself.

Prince Charles has a reputation for bombarding ministers with letters in his famous black-spider handwriting on all kinds of contentious subjects. There are many who think this is improper lobbying and who welcome last week’s decision by the Scottish information commissioner that ministers must reveal whether they have been lobbied by Prince Charles on environmental issues. Only with such openness is it possible for the public to feel confident that the royal family is staying within its constitutional confines, and that its members are not being seduced by all the deference around them into thinking they deserve more power and influence — and trying to get it and use it.

Finally, perhaps some true friend of the royal family might suggest to it that it reflects on the dangers of deference, especially to anyone with a weakness in that direction.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Public servants’ closed minds will thwart mixed-race adoption

Westminster may propose, but town halls dispose. Only if they are under the lash of the fiercest statutory requirements do local authorities have to do what they are told by the elected government of the day. This is, of course, what localisation is all about — not power to the people so much as power to the town hall. And it doesn’t always work for the best. Take adoption.

Last week Michael Gove, the education secretary, who was adopted as a child, issued new guidelines on adoption for social workers, which are intended to make it easier for couples to adopt children of different ethnic backgrounds from their own. For many years now this has been very difficult because social workers have clung to the astonishingly old-fashioned idea that people should be allowed to adopt children of a matching skin colour only. And they have used their formidable powers to impose this view, which in most other contexts would be seen as racist — discrimination against adults and children on the grounds of race.

In practice Gove’s new guidelines are primarily aimed at helping white couples, since there are a lot of darker-skinned children who need adoptive parents in Britain but a severe shortage of darker-skinned adults who want to adopt. So it is white couples, mainly, who are being denied the chance to adopt while many darker-skinned children are condemned to stay in the misery of so-called care.

Gove is entirely justified in trying to put all this right. But he might just as well be spitting in the wind. I remember Paul Boateng, health minister in the early months of the Blair regime, solemnly promising that he would do something about the political correctness surrounding adoption. I was sure at the time he meant it, but nothing happened.

There was some talk later of relaxing the rules on mixed-race adoption and there was even an adoption act in 2002, which didn’t address it. Still nothing changed. So I wonder whether Gove’s new guidelines will make the slightest difference: he is facing a deeply entrenched and reactionary mentality in public services.

The strange thing about this supposedly politically correct mentality in public services is how politically incorrect it is. To suggest that a white-skinned woman cannot be a good and loving mother to a dark-skinned child is to talk the language of apartheid in reverse. I am amazed it is legal in a multiracial society such as ours.

Of course it used to be true that a black child of white parents was an oddity and likely to be bullied at school. During my childhood in a West Country village there was one unlucky boy, the illegitimate son of a black GI, who was often mocked. But these days, with the rainbow mix of children and parents, that is less and less likely. As a result the social workers’ bullying argument is weakening every day in a mixed society, as is the identity argument.

Of course a child wants to identify with its parents, not least in looking like them, and social workers have traditionally been very concerned about this, with good reason. But that concern, too, is out of date now that there are so many mixed marriages and so many biological families of mixed ancestry. Because of the lottery of genetics and intermarriages over generations, simple racial resemblances between parents and offspring are disappearing and for that reason are considered much less important. Some close friends of mine are a prime example: the mother is very pale Nordic, the father very dark Indian and the children, who look Mediterranean, resemble neither. Social services today would not have placed them with their birth father.

Mixed-race adoption is unlikely to present any serious problems for a child. Society seems to have changed much faster than the mentality of social workers.

The other conventional objection to mixed-race adoptions is the cultural one — the idea that a child ought to be brought up within the ethnic culture of its biological parents. But why? Culture is not something inherited, something in the blood. Culture is acquired through one’s parents, family and social experiences.

Gove’s culture, no matter who his parents were, is the culture of his adoptive parents, and he often says how grateful he is to them. Nimmy March, the half black and half white baby of an Englishwoman and a South African, was adopted 40-odd years ago by the Duke and Duchess of Richmond and she has often talked movingly about how very happy she has been in her adoptive family.

“When I think that today, despite being half white British, my colour would probably dictate a ‘same race’ adoption, it makes me furious,” she once said. “The important things are love and acceptance.”

Culture is not genetically printed upon babies or children in the way their appearance is. It is a remarkably old-fashioned, National Geographic notion of identity to assume that what someone looks like determines his or her ethnic identity and the traditions he or she should adhere to. History and migration have overtaken that view; these days someone looking like a Masai warrior might easily be more British than I am, as I wasn’t born here.

It might be nice for adopted children to grow up with a sense of their biological parents’ cultures, if anyone knew them or could disentangle them, but equally well it might not be nice at all. It might be confusing and disruptive; there are some harrowing tales of children adopted from slum-dwellers or destitute drug addicts abroad going back and feeling shocked and alienated by what would have been their ethnic identity and guilty, too, that they so much prefer their adoptive identity.

Some adoptive people have every reason to be glad they have lost their birth culture: who would want to cherish a culture of inferior rights for women and the fear of female circumcision when she could grow up safely in suburbia? And why do adoptive children need to be schooled in the ethnic traditions of their birth parents, always assuming anyone can sort out what those are? Or sent on regular acculturation trips to Mogadishu, when and if it is safe to go? People are all of equal value, but the same cannot be said of cultures: not all cultures are desirable or admirable. Gove’s new rules say that families seeking to adopt a child of a different ethnic identity should not have obstacles put in their way, but “should be properly trained to cater for its cultural needs”. Oh dear. That sounds like more of the same old town hall political correctness.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Take heart, prime minister – the other lot want that big idea

David Cameron is right about the big society. He is right and brave to stake his reputation on it, despite all the scorn thrown at him. The big society is an idea that is easy to mock, easy to misrepresent and hard to define. It is a great shame that Cameron’s policy wonks did not come up with a less ridiculous name. It is also a great shame that people confuse it, both innocently and cynically, with cuts in state spending and with local authorities cutting funds to charities rather than axeing their own unnecessary non-jobs. Nonetheless, the big society is a great idea, an expression of what has traditionally been best in the Conservative party and in the human spirit.

The proof of this is that the left loves it, really. That is to say, the more thoughtful leftists pay the big society the compliment of claiming it for themselves. Jackie Ashley, a senior voice of The Guardian, warned her side last week to avoid partisan abuse of what is really their own: “The big society is out there, a vague but powerful notion, related to our deep desire to help our neighbours and be part of something greater than our own payslips — but it is an idea that properly belongs to the centre-left, not to the right.”

That weather vane Peter Mandelson committed himself to the view last October that with the big society the prime minister was “onto a good idea … we will have to find more of our solutions from within the communities that make our society”.

Jonathan Freedland also admitted in The Guardian last week that “there’s a good idea in there screaming to get out. Labour should grab it and claim it as its own”. Referring back to Labour’s roots, he points out that with the co-operative movement and friendly societies and trade unions, Labour had “an ethos of collective organisation and self-help which pre-dated the Fabian emphasis on central government and the later obsession with state ownership”.

He adds: “There is no reason for people on the left to be opposed to a society made up of neighbours who don’t wait for the council to clean up a needle-strewn park but do it themselves,” and warns that the Labour party will be making a big mistake if it opposes the idea at the heart of the big society, “for they will be offering an impoverished notion of what it is to be on the left, reducing it to mere statism”.

It is always encouraging when your own arguments are made by the other side.

None of this, however, really clarifies what the idea at the heart of the big society is. At an obvious level it is a Conservative reaction against the bloated big state — the intrusive state that has created welfare dependency, nationalised charity and undermined personal autonomy, while failing to do much about the broken society, as Cameron rightly calls it.

I think it has to do with a spirit of fellow feeling, a sense that everyone can, in smaller or greater ways, make life sweeter or more bearable for others and is to some extent responsible for other people. It’s a mentality that doesn’t turn to the state when embarking on a project; it doesn’t expect state solutions to everything, although it acknowledges the role of the state. It is a culture in which, despite different incomes and education, we are, except for some unregenerate plutocrats, “all in this together”.

There are many things that money and position cannot make better, any more than welfare and high taxes can, but that personal kindness can ease. There is in extreme difficulties only fraternity — the fraternity of the graveyard hour in a children’s hospital, for example. Suffering is a great leveller, and in such places people hold their hands out to one another in the brotherhood and sisterhood of unavoidable hardship. That kind of fraternity has nothing to do with funding. It cannot be created or imposed by the state, but it can grow strong in a society that openly values it.

The big society, as Cameron keeps saying, is intended to empower individuals and neighbourhood groups and communities to choose how to deal with their own affairs, as opposed to encouraging everyone to depend passively on local or central government solutions. This does not have anything conceptually to do with cutting or increasing benefits; it is bad luck that such a radical idea happens to coincide with the need for such radical reductions in public spending. But it does, or should, have to do with cutting back the obstacles in the way of the small platoons, those little groups of people who have for decades been trying to make life better. Those obstacles are legion and they have grown bigger during years of statism.

I am thinking of the enormous amounts of form-filling that even the tiniest charity has to do, state-supported or not. It would put most people off. I am thinking of the needless vetting and monitoring that drives volunteers away. And I am thinking of the controlling attitudes of social services, which have for decades imposed an orthodoxy on clients and the charities that serve them.

For instance, in the case of people with learning disabilities, the money they were entitled to has for years been controlled not by them and their families but by social services. And social services will often dictate where they live and what services they get, frequently paying only lip-service to choice. Charities serving such people find they cannot survive if they don’t follow the instructions of the local authority, even though there may be plenty of clients who want something different.

All that can be changed. The government has already done a lot to empower individuals and groups and to restrain the state. It has revealed Whitehall and council spending, publicised crime maps, offered elected police commissioners to give voters a direct say and made free schools possible. I am rather sceptical about the new big society bank to finance social enterprises, but it deserves the benefit of the doubt. All in all this does appear to be an attempt at a kind of social revolution, a rolling-forward of society combined with a rolling-back of the state.

The big society cannot but be a vague idea, which will need a long time to take hold and prove itself. If it works, it will mean that at a time of national debt council employees will be ashamed to clamour for pay rises while they cut frontline services. It will mean that nurses are ashamed to leave old people lying in pain on bedsores and faeces. It will, at the very least, mean that people try consciously to do as they would be done by.

If not a big society, that would certainly be a better society and well worth the huge political risk.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Pretending all poor students are up to university – that’s unfair

Access to university can never be fair, because life is not fair. Unless universities are to become places where absolutely everyone can go, regardless of their abilities or achievements, university access will always be unfair.

Of course you can call any establishment a university, but if by the word university you mean an institution of higher learning, designed for people capable of higher learning, because of their higher than average intelligence, higher than average interest in learning and higher than average experience of studying, then, by definition, a great many people will be excluded. The most demanding universities — those that are part of the global elite — will necessarily be closed to all but a small number.

Politicians and social reformers seem determined to ignore these truths, even the most intelligent of Conservatives such as David Willetts. Last week there was a panicky flurry of government initiatives to ensure what absolutely cannot be ensured — fair access to university. Governments cannot ensure that all children have attentive and literate parents who don’t starve their intelligence by feeding them junk food and ignoring them. Governments cannot ensure that all children have equal intelligence or interests; they cannot restrain pushy parents or drug addicts. Governments here have not even been able to ensure that all children fairly get a barely adequate education, let alone an equal one.

It is unrealistic to imagine that any good university, still less one of the world’s elite, can somehow wave a remedial wand at hopelessly undereducated teenagers who are not remotely ready for university education and instil in them the missing 13 years of learning and discipline. At 18, potential is not enough. The only certain result of letting weak candidates into a university will be to bring about the decline of that university and of this country’s place in international league tables.

Yet last week saw an outburst of furious attacks from ministers on universities and academic freedom, in the name of fairness. Nick Clegg angrily denounced them as “elite institutions”; a source close to him said that “universities should be the greatest agent of social mobility that we have, but too often instead they are serving as instruments of social segregation”.

He pointed out that while 18% of children are disadvantaged enough to be entitled to free school meals, they make up only 1% of Oxbridge students. Less well-off children tend to get into the less selective universities. He demanded that universities “throw open their doors” and make more “differential offers”: this is jargon for admitting underprivileged candidates with lower A-level grades than their more affluent competitors, on the basis of “contextual evidence” about their backgrounds and schools. Perhaps he is unaware that this happens a great deal already; many, if not most, university teachers are anxious to help clever children from bog-standard comps.

Meanwhile, Vince Cable and Willetts sent a sharp letter to the Office for Fair Access (Offa): they announced that leading universities will be forced, if they charge the maximum of £9,000 a year, to accept fixed quotas of students from state schools and ethnic minorities and those with disabilities, so that these groups are more fairly “represented”. They will have to sign an “access agreement” with Offa about how they will provide such places. Any university failing to meet its quota will lose its right to charge more than £6,000 a year.

All this makes Gordon Brown seem positively libertarian. It is astonishing to see a Conservative-led government behaving like old-fashioned, unreconstructed socialists. It is wishful thinking to imagine that any but a few poorly educated teenagers from deprived backgrounds can catch up in just three years.

To imagine so is to ignore the evidence; all discussions on high intelligence agree that constant, repetitive hard study from a young age is essential and universal among the most intellectually able.

Contrariwise, those who have not developed such habits, even the simple habit of conversation with their parents, are at a lifelong disadvantage. A new Department for Education study shows that 53% of boys have not “reached a good level of development” by the age of five in their teachers’ opinions, along with 35% of girls. Sir Michael Marmot, a professor of public health, said the impact of this was “horrendous”. It means “poorer levels of early school development and poorer performance at every school age”.

No amount of Offa access agreements can change this. It would be the most counterproductive kind of social engineering to imagine that such children ought to be included in fairer access quotas at good universities at 18; it would be a disaster for this country’s universities. Is that what Clegg has in mind? These children’s problems start with their parents and their family background.

They may also in some cases start with their basic intelligence. This is a contentious subject, but it is an unquestioned assumption these days that intelligence is equally distributed across all socioeconomic classes. That may be true, but it is only an assumption.

It is well documented that bright and successful young men and women tend to select each other, in a process bleakly called assortative mating, and tend to have bright children. The less bright tend to have children with others who are less bright and tend to produce corresponding children. Genetics is a lottery, of course, but it is conceivable that you would not, in fact, expect inherited intelligence to be equally distributed across all socioeconomic groups. If not, imposing university quotas on the opposite assumption would be a serious mistake and — incidentally — unfair as well.

Fairness is an elusive concept that has driven many good people to do bad or foolish things, which inevitably tend to unfairness of some other kind. This government’s fair access drive is an alarming case in point. If the coalition were truly interested in education and glaring social injustice, it should forget university access — a huge amount is being done about that already — and concentrate all its energies instead on this country’s failing school system.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk Making allowances, Message Board, page 27

Well, if unmarried couples do get a raw deal, there is an easy fix

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: things should not be multiplied any more than necessary. That is the law of Occam’s razor, dreamt up by William of Ockham, a 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, one of the few laws of any kind that appealed to me in my undergraduate youth. What it means in plain English, I think, is: keep it simple. If only people would.

I should like to take Occam’s razor to Lord Justice Wall, the High Court judge who is president of the Family Division. Last week Wall told The Times that he thought unmarried couples in England and Wales (more than 2m and rising fast, so that more than one in three children are born to unmarried parents) should be given legal rights to share property and money when they separate so as to make their lot more equal to the lot of married people who divorce.

Wall believes the situation is particularly unfair to unmarried women, because they do not have the same rights as married women or as gay couples in civil partnerships. Sixty per cent or more of unmarried people imagine they have legal rights as common-law spouses, but this is a myth. They do not and they often face nasty surprises and legal costs when they split up.

The solution that Wall and countless other judges, lawyers, pressure groups and liberals are agitating for is yet more legislation, on top of the civil partnership legislation of 2004, so that the legal benefits of the married can be extended to the unmarried. How the blood boils. Such legislation will certainly make lots more work for lawyers and others, but it is not necessary. It is not desirable. It is wrong.

There is already a simple way, for heterosexuals at least, to have all the legal privileges and protection of marriage. That is to get married. Nothing could be simpler. It needs only a trip to the local register office and a few signatures.

No vicars, no rabbis, no whiffs of incense or leaping over broomsticks, no big white frocks or raucous hen nights in Amsterdam need be involved. It can easily be done in a lunchtime break, with strangers as witnesses and dark glasses for discretion. Nobody need know.

Those who dislike the wider meaning of matrimony can truly regard their marriage as a purely civil contract, rather than a social or personal statement. But the resulting piece of paper will guarantee them all the rights that Wall feels unmarried couples should have. And it would save parliament, the courts and the taxpayer all the expensive fuss and bother of getting the same result the unnecessarily hard way.

Why are couples increasingly avoiding marriage? The reasons keep shifting. There was a time in my youth when matrimony was frowned on by progressives: it meant taking part in the patriarchal repression of bourgeois society, with its injustice to women, its suppression of sexuality, its nuclear family neurosis and so on.

I had some sympathy with this at the time, although I did notice that quite a few of my richer socialist friends found it convenient to avoid marriage for bourgeois-capitalist reasons.

In the 1970s housebuyers could get tax relief on mortgage interest payments: the allowance was up to £25,000 (at least £250,000 in today’s money) for a single person or a married couple. An unmarried couple, as two single people, got double — an allowance of £500,000 in today’s money — a powerful incentive for some of the richer trend-setters to avoid marriage, along with revolutionary reasons.

Those days are long gone. The repressive cultural mindset in which women were made to resign from their job on marriage, or were deliberately paid less or shown less respect as mere part-timers or housewives and dependants, has simply disappeared in what has been the greatest triumph of feminism.

However, the socialist-feminist habit of avoiding marriage on principle and the permissive refusal, which went along with it, to see sex and parenthood outside marriage as morally wrong have persisted.

What has compounded this aversion to marriage in recent years is the insanity of the couple penalty, brought about by Gordon Brown’s working families’ tax credit legislation of 1999. Even more than a couple penalty, it’s a marriage penalty.

Designed to help the swelling numbers of low-income single mothers, including the never-married, this and other Labour legislation mean that couples (married and unmarried) who live together receive substantially less tax credit and other benefits than they would if they lived apart. There is a perverse incentive to separate, which is of course easier for an unmarried couple to do or pretend to do. As a result, for people in lower income brackets it is simply not a rational choice to get married.

The Conservatives promised to end the ridiculous couple penalty but, under pressure from their coalition partners, that promise has been put on hold. The result is that more and more people avoid getting married, with the further result that more and more of them face the difficulties on splitting up that Wall wants to put right. It does make the fingers itch for Occam’s razor.

So, incidentally, did the unnecessary civil partnership legislation, which was aimed at homosexual couples who wanted to marry without actually letting them do so. Why not let them marry normally, on exactly the same legal terms as anybody else? Why the legal nonsense and social oddity of a “civil partnership”? Marriage should be open to all couples wishing to have all the legal protection it gives, and at the same time everyone should be made to understand from earliest youth, as clearly as they understand most other important benefits, that if they don’t get married they won’t have the legal protection of marriage. And if they do, they won’t suffer any marriage penalty of any kind.

This is not a moral or social argument. I don’t for one minute imagine that people will behave differently just because they have finally been convinced that they need a marriage licence, just as they need a passport to travel.

My argument is based on a simple-minded understanding of Occam’s razor and also on sod’s law and the law of unintended consequences: when it comes to the expense and delay of the law and the infinite varieties of family life, do not pile interference upon complexity. It is cheaper and clearer — and more just — to keep it simple.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

To save the World Service, first we need dynamite

Like the Irishman in the joke who was asked for directions, I feel more and more often like replying that I wouldn’t start from here. I certainly felt like that about the cuts to the BBC’s World Service that were announced last week.

In a rather sensational news release on Wednesday, the corporation revealed that it was to sack about 650 journalists — a quarter of the World Service’s staff — and would close five foreign-language services altogether: the Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa, Caribbean English and Serbian services.

It will also shortly end shortwave and medium-wave radio programmes in seven languages, including Mandarin Chinese and Russian, focusing instead on online and mobile telephone users.

The service plans then to phase out its remaining foreign-language broadcasts in shortwave and medium wave. After March 2014 there will be no World Service shortwave broadcasts in foreign languages at all, apart from what the BBC describes as a small number of “lifeline” services, such as those in Burmese and Somali.

These announcements were met with cries of outrage, as one would expect. Trade unionists, politicians on both left and right and almost all the press were united in protest. This particular arm of the BBC is the most priceless jewel in our battered crown, they said. It is the voice of democracy, a forum of reason and justice. It brings information to those who need it and to those who are denied it, and, if not quite a light unto the nations, it is at least, as the BBC’s motto claims, a way for nation to speak peace unto nation.

In particular it’s a way for our nation to speak English to other nations, promoting our extreme good luck in having an international language that most people want to speak. Britain may have lost an empire but it has gained a lingua franca, and it is certainly one of the many functions of the World Service to reinforce the economic and political power of global English.

No doubt some of all that is true, though most of us have little idea, probably, of what the BBC World Service actually does. But in these harsh times everyone in public life is trying to pass costs on to someone else, and last year the government decided that the Foreign Office should no longer pay for it. From 2014 the BBC will have to fund it out of its licence fee money.

This is particularly annoying for the BBC, because on the same day last year the government imposed a licence fee freeze for six years.

So the BBC’s announcement last week of its harsh cuts to the service might, on the face of it, seem to be a rude gesture to the government in retribution: see what you and your cuts have done to our national treasure. After all, the BBC could perfectly well afford to pay for it without even noticing from its vast, if frozen, wealth. At present, its total annual income is £3.45 billion, while the World Service costs only £272m a year.

But the same could be said of the Department for International Development (DfID), which really ought to pay for the service. Its annual budget is £7.8 billion and will rapidly rise to £11.3 billion in 2013. So a little handout for the jewel in our crown would hardly be noticed in the vast numbers of the department’s expensive enterprises and questionable schemes. One might say there is something of a punitive gesture in the government’s determination to make the bloated BBC cough up for it.

Whatever the truth of all that, it is surely clear that, in looking for cuts, both the BBC and the government are starting from the wrong place. The World Service does not need to be cut. It needs to be expanded. If cuts are needed — and they are — the BBC should be reducing other costs.

The corporation produces all kinds of unnecessary popular programming, which it ought to leave to the commercial sector. It could and should cut itself to the bone and save squillions, to spend on better things or to return to the licence fee payers.

Equally, the DfID should ask itself why, for example, it gives most of its foreign aid to India — a rapidly growing country full of exceptionally wealthy people, who ought to do more of their own charitable aid and development. By contrast there is almost no limit to the good the World Service could do, both to this country and to those who use it.

It should do much more of what we all imagine it does already — offer news, knowledge, a global forum and even a kind of liberation from ignorance and tyranny — in many different languages and in English, carefully targeted at those who need it, in media they can afford and can get.

No doubt there is a little fat in the service ripe for liposuction. And no doubt there are economies of scale in merging it, in effect, with the rest of the BBC and using the same reporters for all services — which already happens to some extent. Otherwise, surely more would be better.

However, I’m not sure I would start from where the service is today. I was astonished to discover that, of the 2,270 hours a week of English-language programmes it currently produces, only 80 are regional programming, aimed at specific audiences in Africa, the Caribbean, south Asia and America. How can this target more than a handful of the dispossessed or the oppressed? The rest is all general stuff, good perhaps, but how is it different from what the main BBC — the mothership — produces? I was also stunned to learn that the World Service broadcasts only around 720 hours a week of non-English-language programmes. Given that there are about 5,000 living languages in the world — India alone has several hundred, of which 22 are recognised by the government as official — that doesn’t seem very much for a world service.

Nor would I start from an emphasis on broadband, mobile-phone and digital-radio access to the service, which is the BBC’s policy in abandoning shortwave and medium-wave broadcasts. It’s true that information technology moves very fast, and more and more people are getting hold of it.

But vast swathes of the world — those who arguably most need the World Service — cannot hope to get broadband or mobile phones. Internet access in Saudi Arabia is 17.7 %, for example, in Indonesia 12.3%, in Laos 7.5%, in Sri Lanka 8.3% and across the whole of Africa, on average, only 10.9%.

To get a World Service of the kind we all imagine, the BBC should not be starting from here. Perhaps it should start all over again, from a new beginning.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk