The Times - UK (2021-12-21)

30 Tuesday December 21 2021 | the times

Comment

cloves, its weight in bay leaves and a

sticker reading “Aldi price watch”.

Next to it, on a grimy white platter,

is a shiny, clove-studded flesh

cylinder with half a dozen pink slices

already carved off — a boiled

toddler? A card next to it reads “Nan”,

but it looks too bouncy to be a side

of grandparent. Alongside is a tray of

bendy carrots scattered with grass

cuttings, parsnips rolled in some sort

of cat litter, a school

sauceboat full of Bisto

and a guarantee that your

Sainsbury’s veg will cost

no more than 19p a pack,

so happy Christmas to all

you farmers out there.

Written above this

gustatory hellscape is the

slogan “Winner

winner Christmas

dinner” which I’ll bet

Sainsbury’s were well

pleased with until they

clocked all the Tesco

adverts, featuring a

waffle-skinned bird

the colour of Simon

Cowell, served on bits

of old Christmas tree,

with the headline ...

wait for it ... “Winner

winner Christmas

dinner”. Truly,

advertising is the

British fine art.

Not that I fancy the

Co-op ad much more, which appears

to be recommending a sunburnt

builder’s arse with two manky orange

segments between the cheeks for your

festive table, or the Asda bird at £3.49

a kilo (your vegan daughter is starting

to win the argument here), shown in

the traditional “biopsy” pose, with a

small, round surgical slice taken off, to

show that beneath its rusty carapace

this turd-basted spacehopper boasts

a flesh of pure wonderloaf.

So here’s a bit of festive catering

advice: simply collect as many

Christmas dinner ads as you can

over the next few days and strew

them across your Christmas table

on the 25th, because however dismal

the meal you serve up, it’s going

to look delicious by

comparison.

Cleaning crisis

O

ur Russian

cleaner

went back

to Russia to

get her

booster jab

three weeks

ago, because she

doesn’t trust

English doctors.

On the day she

returned, she called to

say she’d had an NHS

Omicron ping and had to

isolate for ten days. On the

H

owever much you’re
dreading your Christmas
dinner this year, you can
be thankful for one thing:
whoever is cooking it,
whether an inept but enthusiastic
husband, a doddering but terribly
insistent grandma or a blue-haired
vegan daughter back from her first
term at college with all sorts of
thrilling new ideas about nutrition, at
least you won’t be eating one of
those supermarket turkey dinners
from the ads.
What is it with Christmas feast
photography? Have those people
never seen food before? The biggest
gross-out is probably the Sainsbury’s
one, lit like a petrol station forecourt,
with a “crown” of turkey (whatever
the hell that is, you can be sure the
Queen has never seen one) for £6.89
a kilo (which is roughly the price of
firewood round my way and no sort
of budget to raise an animal on)
garnished with three raw garlic

Family fragmentation comes at a tragic cost

With ‘lifestyle choice’ trumping the interests of children, abuse and neglect are out of control

respectable and was treated as such.

Head teachers there told me that

children were highly sexualised at

the ages of five or six, and that their

reflexive instinct whenever thwarted

was violence. Many of those children

became parents and grandparents.

Other welfare professionals speak

repeatedly of young mothers who,

having themselves been deprived of

love and care and two biological

parents, are incapable of caring for

their own children. They may think

they love and care for their kids, but

in fact they expect their children to

love and care for them.

The dismal fact is that so systemic

is this cultural meltdown that there

are vanishingly few young people in

social work or anywhere else who

have a clue that there’s anything

wrong with the “lifestyle choice” they

assume is a given of western society.

Of course there are lone parents

who do the very best for their

children, just as there are step-parents

who are conscientious and loving.

And equally, there are traditional

families that incubate abuse and

worse. But in general, the dislocation

of biology from parenthood has been

an exponential catastrophe for untold

numbers of children and women.

It is the greatest cause of social

inequalities, through educational

underachievement, crime and

juvenile psychological disorders. At

its most extreme, it leads to

neglected, abused and dead children.

Yet this has become unsayable in the

upper reaches of government and

cultural life. So what we have instead

are unspeakable acts of cruelty and

degradation — and nauseating

crocodile tears.

Research over many decades

overwhelmingly shows that children

in fragmented families do worse in

every area of life than those brought

up in traditional households. Data

cited by the Lords and Commons

Family and Child Protection Group

in the 1990s showed that a child was

33 times more at risk of abuse where

his or her natural mother cohabited

with a boyfriend. In Canada in 1994,

research by the academics Martin

Daly and Margo Wilson found that

children under two “incurred about

100 times greater risk at the hands of

step-parents than of genetic parents”

and that for children up to age five

the “homicide risk from stepfathers

was approximately 60 times higher

than from genetic fathers”.

Yet around this time Whitehall

stopped collecting statistics that

distinguished between married

biological parents and others. With so

many at the lower end of the social

scale displaying the worst effects of

all this, any attempt to stop the rise

of mass fatherlessness — which was

encouraged by those cushioned by

money and privilege — was attacked

as “blaming the poor”. Speak to black

community leaders, however, and

many will tell you that the single most

important reason for the murderous

gang warfare that is claiming the

lives of so many of their boys is the

absence of committed fathers.

When he was a Labour MP, Lord

Field related how mainly white

children in school playgrounds in his

Birkenhead constituency would touch

him in wonderment to find out if he

was real. Many of them, lacking the

presence of committed fathers, had

never before seen a man who looked

T

wo recent cases of children
who were sadistically
ill-treated and eventually
killed by members of their
fractured families have
revealed details of suffering that
have been unbearable to read.
In Solihull, six-year-old Arthur
Labinjo-Hughes was tortured and
killed after weeks of abuse. His
father, Thomas Hughes, was
convicted of his manslaughter, and
his stepmother, Emma Tustin, was
found guilty of murder. In Bradford,
16-month-old Star Hobson was
beaten to death by her mother’s
girlfriend, Savannah Brockhill, who
was convicted of murder. Star’s
mother, Frankie Smith, was found
guilty of causing or allowing the
death of her child.
The two cases have led to a
predictable outcry at the failings
of social workers. Five referrals
were made to social services
about Star, including one by her
great-grandmother. Worried
members of Arthur’s family alerted
social services after discovering
bruises on his body, but a home visit
found “no safeguarding concerns”.
This is a story we’ve heard
repeated for decades. A child is
abused and killed; after public
outrage there’s an inquiry into the
welfare services; this identifies a

blizzard of professional failings and

makes recommendations; the same

sequence of events then takes place

again. And again, and again.

Undoubtedly there are failings in

child protection. What’s never

acknowledged, however, is the reason

social workers are overwhelmed by

an enormous rise in child neglect

and abuse. For the root cause is the

willed disintegration of the traditional

nuclear family — and the suppression

of the evidence that, whatever its

failings, it is still by far the safest

environment in which to raise a child.

Those of us who tried pointing this

out were trashed as heartless

reactionaries who wanted to prevent

people from finding happiness in

their own way. The mantra of

“lifestyle choice” meant no domestic

arrangement could be deemed better

or worse than any other. Family

fragmentation, which should surely

be viewed as a misfortune best

avoided, became transformed into an

adjunct of women’s liberation.

Elective lone parenthood became

viewed as an entitlement.

With marriage downgraded,

cohabitation took off; but cohabitants

are far more likely than married

couples to break up, particularly if

they have children. As fatherlessness

went through the roof, so did the

number of transient men, and then

female partners, passing through the

lives of women and their children.

This has all become

unsayable in the upper

reaches of government

ninth day, just as the dust bunnies

round the wainscots were planning

their Christmas party, she called to

say she had Omicron herself and

wouldn’t be coming back till January.

Now, it’s 25 years since I cleaned a

house myself. At this stage I’m

wondering, do I roll up my sleeves

and get it shipshape for Christmas, or

work on the basis that, like a

teenager’s hair, after another week

the house will start cleaning itself?

Magic transformation

E

nraged by JK Rowling’s

continued reluctance to accept

the miracle of biological gender

swap by self-declaration, the world’s

quidditch players have decided to

change the name of the game they

play — which involves chasing a

tennis ball “snitch” strapped to a

human’s bum, while holding a

broomstick between their legs — to

“quadball” or “quidstrike”, so as to

distance themselves from the author

who invented it. But the thing is,

much like a man who says he is a

woman, quidditch, for all it’s looking

a bit like quidditch, isn’t quidditch.

And I rather wonder how useful it

will be for the brave warriors on the

front line of the trans war to have

their key proposition — that if you

think you are a woman, you are a

woman — supported by the players

of a game which requires its

participants to believe they are flying.

Giles Coren Notebook

Feast your

eyes on a

Christmas

hellscape

We need a global

panel on fake news

Sheldon Himelfarb

and Philip Howard

W

ith the rapid spread

of the new Omicron

variant comes the

spread of another

deadly social disease:

misinformation. Conspiracy theories

and inaccurate news abound, again

threatening to exacerbate the death

toll and undermine management of

the pandemic.

Yet Covid is only one of the

planetary threats that misinformation

compounds. Misinformation itself is

an existential threat because it

impedes action on virtually every

global problem. It has stymied efforts

to address climate change and

caused mob violence in India and

Myanmar. It has produced election

violence in the US and attacks on

minorities around the world. It has

led young people to think that many

vaccines threaten their fertility.

Which has led us to this conclusion:

we need an Intergovernmental Panel

for the Information Environment

(IPIE), and we need it now. This was

the recommendation of a group of

experts at the Nobel Prize

Foundation Summit this year, who

suggested it be modelled on the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC).

We have researched the

relationship between communication

technologies and social wellbeing for

25 years and know that truth is the

first victim in conflicts. What is

different today, and unprecedented

in human history, is the volume and

the velocity with which anyone can

spread misinformation globally.

We have considered the full range

of proposed solutions to the crisis,

from antitrust action against social

media companies, to redesigning the

architecture of the internet itself, but

none are as comprehensive and

actionable as one based on the IPCC.

The IPCC was set up to determine

the state of knowledge on climate

change and provide regular scientific

assessments on its implications. Like

climate change, misinformation is a

global problem which demands a

co-ordinated global response. The

IPIE would gather scientific evidence

on misinformation, establish

standards for a healthy information

environment, evaluate potential

policy responses and create the

multilateral framework needed for a

global approach.

The UK government already leads

on technology issues in the G20 and

other international forums. With the

UK’s backing, an IPIE could begin to

address this crisis. Helping

governments and the platforms to

co-ordinate on misinformation is the

only way forward. We must take this

vital step to save our information

environment.

Sheldon Himelfarb is founding CEO of

the PeaceTech Lab at the US Institute

of Peace. Philip Howard is the director

of Oxford University’s Programme on

Democracy and Technology

Melanie

Phillips

ur

t

k,

all

he

a flesh of pure wonderl

So here’s a bit of festi

advice: simply collect a

Christmas dinner ads

over the next few day

them across your Chri

on the 25th, because ho

the meal you serve

to look delici

compariso

Clean

t

ag

doe

Eng

On th

returned

say she’d ha

Omicron ping

isolate for ten

@melanielatest