The London riots last week was a wake up call for the British Government but is also a warning to all Western governments. The tragic scenes in London are an example of what happens to a society when all the youth learn is about "rights" and nothing about responsibilty.
Prime Minister David Cameron's analysis of the reasons for the breakdown in society is very important and an extract dealing with family breakdown is included below.
See also this link for full text of the Cameron speech as it appeared in the Telegraph
Families and Parenting"Let me start with families. The question people asked over and over again last week was ‘where are the parents? Why aren’t they keeping the rioting kids indoors?’Tragically that’s been followed in some cases by judges rightly lamenting: “why don’t the parents even turn up when their children are in court?”
Well, join the dots and you have a clear idea about why some of these young people were behaving so terribly. Either there was no one at home, they didn’t much care or they’d lost control.
Families matter.I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home.Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it’s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad……where it’s normal for young men to grow up without a male role model, looking to the streets for their father figures, filled up with rage and anger.
So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start.I’ve been saying this for years, since before I was Prime Minister, since before I was leader of the Conservative Party.
So: from here on I want a family test applied to all domestic policy.If it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it tramples over the values that keeps people together, or stops families from being together, then we shouldn’t do it.
More than that, we’ve got to get out there and make a positive difference to the way families work, the way people bring up their children……and we’ve got to be less sensitive to the charge that this is about interfering or nannying.
We are working on ways to help improve parenting – well now I want that work accelerated, expanded and implemented as quickly as possible.This has got to be right at the top of our priority list."
