More sex education means more teenage pregnancies...always

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Sex education has failed. So the Establishment decrees that we must have more of it, and in fact that there shall be no escape from it.

What I don’t grasp is why the people of this country put up with so many separate insults to their intelligence in any given week. 

And why this particular blatantly obvious sequence comes round year by year and nobody even laughs, let alone draws the correct conclusion.

Despite the casual massacre of unborn babies in the abortion mills, and the free handouts of morning-after pills (originally developed for pedigree dogs which had been consorting improperly with mongrels), and the ready issue of condoms to anyone who asks, and the prescription of contraceptive devices to young girls behind the backs of their parents by smiling advice workers, and the invasion of school classrooms by supposedly educational smut, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.

In the week that figures clearly showed that the Government’s supposed target for cutting teen pregnancy by half is never going to be reached, compulsory smut education – a key part of this ‘strategy’ – was forced on all English schools by law for the first time.

There will be no opt-outs. The new liberal gospel of ‘do what thou wilt – but wear a condom while thou doest it’ will be taught by order of the State.

Some years ago, I wrote a short history of sex education in this country. I didn’t then know about its first invention, during the Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919, when Education Commissar George Lukacs ordered teachers to instruct children about sex in a deliberate effort to debauch Christian morality.

But what I found was this. That the people who want it are always militant Leftists who loathe conventional family life; that the pretext for it has always been the same – a supposed effort to reduce teen pregnancy and sexual disease; and that it has always been followed by the exact opposite.

It was introduced into schools against much parental resistance during the early Fifties. And, yes, the more of it there was, the more under-age and extramarital sex there seemed to be.

By 1963, in Norwich, parents were told that their young were to be instructed in sexual matters because the illegitimacy rate in that fine city had reached an alarming 7.7 per cent (compared with a national rate of 5.9 per cent). The national rate is now 46 per cent and climbing, so that was obviously a success, wasn’t it?

Well, yes it was, because the people who force these peculiar classes on our young are lying about their aims. You can see why.

Most of us, in any other circumstance, would be highly suspicious of adults who wanted to talk about sex to other people’s children.

But by this sleight of hand – that they are somehow being protected from disease and unwanted pregnancy – we are tricked into permitting it.

And our civilised society goes swirling down the plughole of moral chaos.

Nastiest of the nasty bullies? That would be you, Dave

The problem with Gordon Brown is not his character, his temper or his manners. It is his politics. If he were a good Prime Minister, we would forgive him his personal failings.

Which is why it was silly for David Cameron to call grandiosely for an inquiry into gossip about Mr Brown’s treatment of subordinates. This is not proper politics, and it demeans us.

I said on my blog on Monday that Mr Cameron had better watch out in case people started asking questions about his own actions.

And within hours, a person (whose identity I now know, though he has asked me to keep it confidential) posted the following comment: ‘Cameron is far from blameless.

I had the misfortune to work for him for a couple of months just after he was appointed to the Shadow Education brief in 2005.

‘Rudeness and inconsideration were his stock in trade with repeated attempts to humiliate me in front of others. Middle-of-the-night phone calls to pick up on adverse Press comment were not uncommon – much of it stemming from his own inability to clear a “line-to-take” in time for newspaper deadlines.

Several colleagues often asked why I put up with it. Being an ex-journalist myself, I’ve worked for some nasty types in the past . . . he was undoubtedly the nastiest.’

I think this might help us get the matter back into proportion.

* I also noted that Mr Brown was quoted as complaining that Comrade Dr John Reid, the menacing Brezhnev-era communist who somehow became a Cabinet Minister, was ‘far too Right-wing’ to be Premier. Golly. If Comrade Dr Reid was ‘too Right-wing’, where does Mr Brown think the ‘centre’ is?

The weirdo in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland gets better as you get older and understand the jokes more clearly.

With modern technology, you could actually make a film of it that was faithful to the text.

But no, we can’t have that. We live in the age of deconstruction and the post-modern, where nothing can be left as it is.

The serial weirdo Tim Burton has instead been let loose on this classic, and appears to have turned it into ‘Willy Wonka meets The Lord Of The Rings’. Who needs this? Does anyone really want to see it?

Swipe at the Tories hits right home

Stuart Wheeler, once the largest donor to the Tory Party, has been cast into outer darkness for supporting UKIP instead.

Now he has written an interesting and powerful study of the MPs’ expenses row, which among other things points out the terrifying centralised powers that party leaders now possess.

But I specially enjoyed this passage: ‘I have nothing against anyone who is fortunate enough to live in a nice house in the country. I do myself.

But I cannot for the life of me see why, were I an MP, you should have to help finance that.’

Quite so. Which rather well-off party leader could he possibly be referring to?

So where’s our De Gaulle?

Let's  stop pretending we have a ‘special relationship’ with the USA, and treat America the way France’s General de Gaulle used to.

They’ll respect us for it, as they respected him. Here’s the first thing we should do, which I am sure the great General would have done.

Washington refuses to back us against Latin America’s renewed campaign to make us hand over the Falklands and their people to the Banana Republic of Argentina.

Right then, we should immediately take all our troops and equipment out of Afghanistan, and put them on boats and planes to Port Stanley, leaving nothing behind but a few empty baked-bean tins.

Any politician willing to pledge this will win the Election, by the way. This one-sided ‘relationship’ is far more unpopular than they realise.

* Talking of Latin America, isn’t it interesting that all its leaders are willing to lecture us about the Falklands, where the people are free and happy. But most of them won’t dare criticise the disgusting prison island of Cuba, where a brave dissident, Orlando Zapata, has just died after an 86-day hunger strike.

Posted in Experience of partner sex