Family problems
Sir: One can’t help but admire Iain Duncan Smith’s determination to rethink conventional ideas on social policy (‘Gang War’, 20 August). However, it’s not clear what action he has in store for the ‘120,000 families who cause the greatest problems’.
The Family Intervention Project that he inherited from New Labour is, if the Department for Education website is to be believed, still in place — despite rather meagre evidence for its efficacy. Originally it was touted as a measure to move problem families into secure housing where their behaviour could be closely monitored. Yet when we examined this programme last year, we found that nearly all the scheme’s participants remained in the same housing. In any case, families could not be moved against their will.
The Family Intervention Project is emblematic of everything that is wrong with social policy provision in Britain. It is eye-wateringly complex, involving two government departments, 11 quangos, and countless agencies and charities in each local authority where it operates. It operates in parallel with existing provision, and it is impossible to even guess how much time is wasted in ‘inter-agency collaboration’. The principle of ‘integrated delivery’ ensures that responsibility is diluted to the vanishing point. When we contacted the quangos involved, we often had trouble finding anyone who even knew their organisation was involved in the project.
We concluded that New Labour’s entire ‘Think Family’ project — which included the training of ‘Expert Parenting Advisers’ — was little more than a job-creation scheme. Only an incurable optimist would think that a few hastily trained social workers could solve the problems of families that have never had to take responsibility for themselves.
Tom Burkard
Research Fellow, Centre for Policy Studies, London SW1
How lunacy takes hold
Sir: Your correspondent Allan Massie (20 August) clearly needs to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by W.A. Shirer. The Nazi party was built up as a national force in Germany not by Hitler, but by Gregor Strasser. Strasser, while a demagogue and anti-Semite, was a man of considerable ability, and it would be difficult to imagine someone more unlike Hitler. Also, Goering the politician was a very different matter from the comic-opera Reichsmarschall we all know and love.
The point I am making is that lunatic political philosophies only become mass movements when men of ability and integrity subscribe to them. I cannot see this happening in Britain today.
Andrew Hobbs
By email
Faith and works
Sir: Tom Wright’s ‘Keep the Faith’ (20 August) is a confused apologia for a Church that sees itself as part political pressure group and part branch of the social services. After listing many wonderful things the Church does, such as counselling distressed farmers and saving failing schools, he lists what’s wrong with society: ‘crooked politicians, bent coppers, bloated bankers, spying journalists’. No mention, you will notice, of rioters, looters and arsonists; lousy schools; welfare dependency; incompetent policing. What should the Church be doing? His answer seems to be, ‘get involved in international debt or the treatment of asylum seekers’.
Through its espousal of every (bankrupt) liberal and leftist trend, the Church has become more part of the problem than the solution. The Gospels contain nothing resembling a political programme for post-New Labour, post-bureaucratic Britain. The Christian religion has a hidden divine message that speaks heart knowledge to the heart. It’s not a programme for social reform. A Church that taught the true message of the Gospels would transform society in radical and unexpected ways. Do we have a Church that does not dare to speak its true name?
Dr Robin Brooke-Smith
Shrewsbury
Unanswered question
Sir: Having forgotten where I had banished Mr Hensher’s novel (Letters, 20 August), checking details was out of the question. Hiding behind this excuse, however, he fails to answer my question. Let me repeat it. Does not his shocking exposure of homosexual eroticism risk reawakening homophobic prejudices?
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
Buckinghamshire
Friends with Dave
Sir: Perhaps the most disturbing thing about James Delingpole’s article of 20 August is the revelation that David Cameron and he were close friends at Oxford. I doubt whether Mr Cameron will be as proud of this fact as Mr Delingpole clearly is.
Preston Witts
Warwickshire
Cretinous loyalty
Sir: Reading Jeffrey Meyers’s thoughts on Kim Philby (‘A traitor’s library’, 6 August), and whether Graham Greene was right to remain loyal to him or David Cornwell to detest him, I recalled an interview I did in Rome for the TLS many years ago with the Italian filmmaker Gilo Pontecorvo. Pontecorvo, director of what is probably the finest political film ever made, The Battle of Algiers, had a brother, Bruno, who was both a scientist and, like Philby, a clandestine servant of Joseph Stalin and his successors. Also like Philby, he fled to Moscow before his impending arrest. I asked Pontecorvo why his brother stood by the Kremlin through the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. As I recall now, his answer was, ‘It’s simple. My brother was a cretin.’
Charles Glass
Bonnieux, France
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