What the state funds...

What the state funds, the state encourages.

It's a simple enough formula, but the left-wing consensus that dominates UK politics still doesn't get it. Take, for example, pre-school breakfast clubs. The state observes that too many parents don't give their children a good enough meal before the day starts. So, being secularists who find it really hard to think much beyond "the man with the big stick telling people what to do", they decide to make it their problem - and encourage schools to start laying on breakfast for pupils.

What's the effect of that likely to be?

a) The parents who didn't take care to give their children breakfast are shamed into doing so, or...

b) Those parents are now even less likely to take responsibility, because someone's doing it for them now.

And of course, what about those parents who were only just managing to take responsibility when no other provision was available - what will they do now that someone else is offering to do some of their task for them? Obviously, when the state comes along and says "I'll do that for you" whereas before it had been saying "that's your responsibility - not mine", the net effect will be that more people let them, take less and less personal responsibility, and make the original problem much worse.

Over the last generation, successive governments in the UK, in the good liberal cause of not wanting to seem like they (the horror!) disapprove of people who don't want to take their responsibility to get married seriously or who would prefer just to indulge whatever perverse sexual cravings seize them, have increasingly removed the privileged status that marriage has enjoyed in society, and handed the same privileges to anyone and his dog who wants to go make whoppee together. All the while, of course, whilst re-assuring us that they are "family-friendly" politicians, and making sure that lots of publicity shots of them standing outside Number 10 smiling with their children get into the papers. You know who I mean!

The result? Not very hard to predict: "Marriage rate hits lowest point since records began". Over recent history and particularly the last decade, the state has been aggressively funding homosexuality and single parent families, because it felt like the nice thing to do. And what the state funds...