PETER HITCHENS: Fast, pain-free divorces? They are slow agony for our children 

Fail to keep up payments on a house or car, or break your employment contract, and see what happens to you.

The courts will take the side of the person or company you have wronged, force you to pay up and probably throw in a punishment too.

But break a marriage contract and the courts will now take your side and punish anyone who gets in your way, especially anyone who wants to abide by the contract.

The person who wants to stay married and refuses to accept the end of the pact, can – if he or she resists – be dragged by force from the family home, under the ultimate threat of prison.

The supposedly Conservative government last week revealed that it is to strip away the last shred of legal protection from the former institution of marriage. You may have said all kinds of things about sticking around, but from now you just need to say ‘It doesn’t suit me anymore’, and in six months the marriage will be dissolved, no delay.

This strikes me as amazing in itself – that there is one unique area of law where the delinquent person is rewarded and the dutiful person punished.

You’d have thought more people would be interested. But, as so often when really strange things happen in our revolutionary society, nobody notices or cares.

The supposedly Conservative government last week revealed that it is to strip away the last shred of legal protection from the former institution of marriage.

You may have said all kinds of things about sticking around, but from now you just need to say ‘It doesn’t suit me anymore’, and in six months the marriage will be dissolved, no delay.

The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton is not a friend or an ally of mine. I greatly disagree with him, for instance, about his Cold War view of Russia. And I thought he was foolish to accept even an unpaid post from a Tory government that only wanted to use him as window-dressing. 

But his sacking from that post, by the Housing Minister James Brokenshire, because of remarks attributed to him by the Left-wing New Statesman, is still shocking. 

Did Mr Brokenshire (who similarly sacked a conservative doctor from a government body in 2011) call for and obtain a full recording or transcript before acting? Or did he just run away? 

Sir Roger is unworldly and sometimes obscure, but the idea that he is an anti-Semite, or any other kind of racial bigot, is absurd. 

I understand that some people think this is a good idea, but isn’t it a pity that there’s no major political organisation in the country which is prepared to stand up for the other point of view?

Well, there you are, if you like anything traditional and British, you have no friends at Westminster. Get used to it.

Everyone involved will deny this, but the people who pay the real price for this destruction of secure home life are the children.

Every statistical measure shows that the breaking of marriage harms them. But they have no voice. It is the adults, liberated from their responsibilities, who write articles in the papers, make the programmes on the radio and TV, and the speeches in Parliament, which claim everything will be fine.

It won’t be. Our monstrous taxes, and most of our worst social problems – from chaotic schools to crime and overstretched hospitals full of old, ill people – arise from the very expensive failure of the state to substitute for the stable, solid family which used to be held together by lifelong marriage, and now isn’t.

Perhaps the simplest, most graphic way of showing that neglect of children is now an epidemic, is last week’s news from Walsall, where an infant school has designated a staff member to change the nappies of five-year-old children because so many pupils are not toilet-trained.

These poor children also cannot communicate or hold a pencil properly, let alone use cutlery or dress themselves.

What else have they not learned in these vital years? What sort of adults are they going to be? I am not sure I want to be around to find out. 

A wonderful revolt took place last week against the miserable dumbing-up of the once-entertaining TV quiz programme University Challenge.  

Instead of asking questions which every educated person might be able to answer, the show now spends an immense amount of time asking highly specialised questions about science, which take ages to read out and which only about one person in 100,000 could even guess at.

In the semi-final between Durham and Edinburgh, presenter Jeremy Paxman (whose knowledge of science is, I guess, sketchy) enquired sternly of the Durham team: ‘Give the two-word name of the bacteria from which the following thermo-stable polymerases were first isolated.’

Eh? I bet he understood that.

The Durham team simply refused to pretend they even cared they didn’t know, and wisely responded ‘Pass’. If others would only do the same thing, the programme might become fun to watch again.

In the semi-final between Durham and Edinburgh, presenter Jeremy Paxman (whose knowledge of science is, I guess, sketchy) enquired sternly of the Durham team: ¿Give the two-word name of the bacteria from which the following thermo-stable polymerases were first isolated.¿

In the semi-final between Durham and Edinburgh, presenter Jeremy Paxman (whose knowledge of science is, I guess, sketchy) enquired sternly of the Durham team: ‘Give the two-word name of the bacteria from which the following thermo-stable polymerases were first isolated.’

A miserable attempt to rewrite the past

I used to love museums. I prefer quiet to noise, and enjoy the way old things communicate the real nature of the past. As Thomas Hardy wrote in his marvellous poem Old Furniture: ‘I see the hands of the generations, that owned each shiny familiar thing.’ They were like huge attics. Nobody was trying to tell you anything. You could just dream a bit.

One of my favourites was the Ashmolean in Oxford, which displayed Guy Fawkes’s lantern, and the overpoweringly lovely Alfred Jewel, once owned by that great King. They’re still there, but modernisers are hard at work, turning this great collection into a politically correct nursery of equality and diversity.

A sad employee has sent me a miserable document, Ashmolean For All, which the museum tells me is genuine. It opens by saying it is ‘central to the Museum’s Strategic Plan 2018-23’ – and if that does not make your heart sink, it adds: ‘It is a new policy focused on equity and inclusion.

It aims to improve the way the Ashmolean serves, represents and includes diverse communities and individuals.’ It must ‘evolve to remain relevant to all its potential audiences’.

Oh, and it’s all ‘in response to a changing political landscape and awareness of new thinking about the current role of cultural organisations around the world’.

There’ll be ‘decolonisation’ and searches for ‘coded racial harassment’ and ‘systemic racism’. Go soon, if I were you, before the project’s finished.

No old, beloved, established thing is now safe from the commissars of political correctness. We are in a slow-motion version of China’s cultural revolution, and at the end of it hardly anyone will remember who we used to be.

This drama is brilliant – as a spotlight on failing Britain

When Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong is assigned to a missing persons investigation, at first it seems like any other. As a Family Liaison Officer, she's trained never to get emotionally involved. But  there's something very different about this particular case. With horror Lisa realises she's got a personal connection with this family; one that could compromise her and the investigation. As she grapples to get justice for the grieving family, Lisa discovers it could come at a cost.

When Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong is assigned to a missing persons investigation, at first it seems like any other. As a Family Liaison Officer, she’s trained never to get emotionally involved. But  there’s something very different about this particular case. With horror Lisa realises she’s got a personal connection with this family; one that could compromise her and the investigation. As she grapples to get justice for the grieving family, Lisa discovers it could come at a cost. 

The plot of ITV’s police drama The Bay is ludicrous. I can’t even begin to work out who has killed whom or why, though for once it doesn’t seem to be all based on child abuse.

But the series, which is filmed in Morecambe, is a wonderful spotlight on modern Britain as it actually is – the casual swearing, the dreadful schools in which the young endure fear and are corrupted by all kinds of moral slurry on their computers, the expensive new Blair-era public buildings with their nursery colour-schemes.

The sort-of heroine (played by Morven Christie, left), a senior police officer, engages in knee-tremblers in alleyways with people she’s hardly met.

It is also a world in which the old professional middle class has almost completely vanished.

Only one minor character speaks in the authoritative BBC tones once associated with this class. And he is a pensioner running the food bank. To me, this gives a sense that there’s really nothing underneath any more, and if you fall through a gap, you’ll fall for ever.   

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