This aesthetically and socially meritless pile of old tut, funded to the tune of £100,000 by Birmingham Council, Arts Council England and something called Ikon's Friends of the Family (the Birmingham Mail says it was commissioned by the Ikon Gallery) now stands in front of Birmingham Library. The people of England's second city were asked to put themselves forward as the subjects of a sculpture to represent the most "real" family in Birmingham, and this is the "family" chosen by Turner Prize-winning sculptor Gillian Wearing (or by a panel of judges, depending on which paper your read). The grouping depicts two mixed-race sisters who live separately, and their children - one boy each. (Either one of the sisters has been overdoing the baltis or she's pregnant again.)
What role the fathers of the boys play in their lives hasn't been revealed, but we can take a wild guess: oddly, the sisters were happy to be immortalised in bronze, but refuse to reveal any details of their familial arrangements. What has been revealed is the sculptor's (or panel's) scoail-engineering motive for choosing them rather than, say, Bert and Ethel Scoggins and their two children, Ivy and Reginald, of 42 Mandela Drive (370 families put themselves forward):
"A nuclear family is one reality but it is one of many and this work celebrates the idea that what constitutes a family should not be fixed."So important did Wearing consider this Harriet Harmanesque slogan that it appears on the explanatory plaque affixed to her sculpture.
There are 14.8m single couple households in the UK. Half of these households - 7.5m - also contain children. Meanwhile, there are 2.8m lone-parent households. (I have no idea how many of these parents are single by choice, rather than due to the death of a partner or divorce or desertion etc.) It appears that roughly a quarter of all households with children are single-parent, so, unfortunately, the idea of what constitutes a family already appears to have been triumphantly unfixed.
Our liberal left elite has engineered this destructive transformation in attitudes, and, as uaual, taxpayers are paying through the nose via the welfare system, state education bills (children in single parent homes are more likely to fail at school) and through the increased cost of the criminal justice system (kids from single-parent households tend to commit more crime). Of course, as always, working class communities suffer most from the social dysfunctionality created by the implementation of rich liberals' masturbatory feel-good fantasies.
There's a reason why nuclear families became the norm: they generally work better for those who belong to them, and for society as a whole. There are reasons why left-wingers don't support the concept of the traditional family to the same degree that conservatives and right-wingers do: traditional families tend to be less dependent on the state, are less likely to belong to liberals' pet victim groups, and are less inclined to vote for left-wing parties.
If the numbnuts involved in putting up this sculpture ever think of wasting public money on a similar exercise, maybe they'd consider putting up a statue acknowledging the existence of the sort of father who lives with his wife and kids; is a supportive, loving husband; works hard to look after his children financially; is there for bath-times; reads them stories at bed-time; helps monitor what they watch on TV and what they're doing online; takes an interest in their education; passes on valuable lessons he's learned - often painfully - in life; helps keep them on the straight and narrow; helps keep an eye on who they're hanging out with; attends parents' evenings and stands up to the school when it's wrong; ferries his little darlings to and from parties; picks up the pieces when they screw up; and does his (often inadequate) best to provide some sort of role model for them. That's what the vast majority of dads do. Yes, of course, mums do all that stuff as well - and a lot more besides - but we fathers are getting a bit tired of urban liberal-lefties demonising us all as brutal, selfish, emotionally-repressed patriarchs or as clueless, incompetent joke figures. And we're getting a trifle browned off with constant attempts to downplay the contribution most of us make to our children's development.
I'm not for a moment suggesting that many single-parents don't provide a goodupbringing for their children, or denying the plain fact that some fathers are really nothing more than sperm donors whose families would be better off without them, or than some married couples are rotten parents. But all the available research suggests that, on the whole, children do better growing up with a mother and a father in situ: in which case, why would our liberal elite not do absolutely everything in its power to encourage rather than undermine the concept of the nuclear family?
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