The law of unintended consequences has rarely been so evidently at work than in the century-old attempt to engineer UK society into a new mould. In the opening sentence of English History 1914-1945, OUP 1965, the historian A.J.P.Taylor, wrote that “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.” Forty years on, “imperial greatness, Taylor concluded, was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in”, and the country, “allied to the USA and the USSR in the war, looked forward with optimism to a better life for all.”
Yet over the subsequent decades, as the intelligentsia came to set the tone in the aristocratic husk of the British constitution, key features of British particularism were challenged: militant secularisers gnawed at the religious roots of British politics; permanent tinkering with the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1689 loosened the bonds between governed and governors; old ways were disguarded; new laws weakened marriage, and unbound Dionysius, the god of lust; toleration became the leitmotif for permissiveness; education was transformed into a battle ground of the culture wars; racialism was reintroduced through the backdoor of identity politics; restrictions on immigration were lifted; criminality soared, and government expenditure with it. By 2018, the evidence of an hereditary underclass was all around. Let us start with the inheritance of 1945, both religious and constitutional.
The inheritance
One of the many reasons why the UK is different from its continental neighbours is that the Glorious Revolution of 1689- which laid the foundations for the constitutional monarchy, entrenched habeas corpus, confirmed trial by jury, and sanctioned a free press- confirmed the religious divisions of the civil war of 1640 to 1649. The Tories stood for King and Country, a social hierarchy, and a state church; the Whigs stood closer to the non-conformist opposition, founded on Dissent (to the Church of England), with strong reinforcement in Wales and Scotland. The “good old cause of Cromwell’s Commonwealth men” lived on through the Whigs, then the Liberals and finally Labour. Their aim for four centuries was always the same: to bring down the Establishment as a matter of principle, or failing that, to join it. It is in this sense that the UK’s ongoing revolution is home grown, with some foreign ideas imported to add novelty and kudos.
The religious landscape of England assumed its present form in the seventeenth century, with an Anglican established church occupying the middle ground, and Roman Catholics and those Puritans who dissented from the establishment, too strong to be suppressed altogether, existing outside the national church rather than controlling it.It is a reasonable assertion to make that, following the collapse of the Puritan dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, there has been a strong streak in UK political culture to wear religion lightly. The Toleration Act of 1689 allowed nonconformists to have their own chapels, teachers and preachers, but the Catholics-suspect of divided allegiance- continued to suffer under the Test Acts, excluding them from public office, until their repeal in 1828. Cromwell had re-admitted Jews to England in 1656, in order to further business relations with Amsterdam and for doctrinal reasons, as Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel put it in a letter to Cromwell, because the Puritans adore the “one only God of Israel, together with us”http://cf.uba.uva.nl/en/collections/rosenthaliana/menasseh/19f5/index.html
Britain was still a Christian country in 1945. Polls showed an overwhelming belief in the truth of Christianity, a high respect for its precepts and a strong association between it and moral behaviour. [1]The Church of England vicar, and the non-conformist divine, had done much during the preceding century to spread the gospel to the expanding cities, promote civilities among the population, proclaim the importance of learning, and provide schooling for millions. But there were blemishes. Charles Darwin‘s book, The Origin of the Species, published in 1859, dealt a hammer blow to literalist interpretations of the bible; the upper classes acted often as if religion was for the servants and the workers; the blood-letting of 1914-18 prompted further questioning about received religion; and a militantly secularist intelligentsia nestled in to the nooks and crannies of the universities, the new London-based think-tanks, the BBC, and the newspapers. This liberal-oriented intelligentsia proved as dismissive of the unreconstructed faith of lay people,[2]as it was convinced that the days of the nation-state were over.[3]
The ancient constitution of the British people had developed over centuries, and as Peter Hitchens has written, [4]was not “merely made up of written rules, but of habits of mind.” “Long before Isaiah Berlin told us, the people of Britain knew that there was no perfect solution to earthly problems, that different traditions and opinions must live side by side for civilised life to take place…”This “British system did not only enshrine habeas corpus, trial by jury, common law and parliamentary democracy. It demanded freedom of speech and thought, protected inheritance and secured property. It gave every citizen a private life, every family its own small kingdom. It made each police officer the embodiment of the citizens’ will, rather than a gendarme sent from above. It made liberty the property of the subject, to be lent to government between elections….It decreed that everything was permitted, unless specifically prohibited. It honoured dissent, loved eccentricity, and despised conformity. It refused to make windows into men’s souls, punishing them for what they did, not for what they were, let alone for what they thought or said. Above all, it relied upon its laws being written in the hearts of the British people, who both respected authority and guarded liberty…”.
Tradition was engraved in the mind of a very conservative working class. Divorce was rare; traditional marriage was prized; patriotism was widespread; Empire was appreciated as a force for good; corporal punishment was meted out in school and home, and the death penalty sanctioned as a vital corollary to the criminal code. The colour bar in the US armed forces during the second world war was not appreciated, and Labour’s supporters welcomed India’s independence in 1947. As Gillian Duffy said in her famous exchange with Gordon Brown in 2010, “We had it drummed in when I was a child … it was education, health service and looking after the people who are vulnerable.”[5]Drummed in was no doubt a very accurate description.
The long march.
Patriotism though was not what the British intelligentsia did. As George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941 “The English intelligentsia are Europeanised. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow… England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed by their own nationality.” Here for instance is Shirley Williams , the Labour politician, remembering being evacuated to Minnesota during the second world war, and discovering a” a classless society, whose members all shared the same accent and the same values”.[6]Abroad, in short, was where others did things better-sometimes true enough, but not always; Lyndon B. Johnson, the champion of the Great Society programmes in the 1960s had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, an integral component of Dixieland Democrats.
There were many factors which fed into a postwar sense of British inadequacy. Not least was Britain’s straightened circumstances after the war, the debt it owed to the US and to India, the rapid end of empire and the sense of a loss in status on the world stage. After the debacle of the Suez operation in 1956, when President Eisenhower opposed the Franco-British expedition to re-establish control over the canal, successive UK governments scaled back their technological ambitions inherited from the world war, dealt half-heartedly with the new industrial challenges from Japan, and a revived Germany, and limped towards accommodation with France over the EEC-on French terms.
US influence had left a much deeper imprint on the UK than did the USSR. Following the Red Army’s crushing of the Hungarian revolt in October 1956, the small Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) sought survival in alliance with the left of the Labour movement, and redoubled efforts to acquire influence in the trade union movement. By contrast, the UK absorbed the sexual revolution through the Kinsey reports, the spread of contraception, Elvis Presley’s sexualization of music, Hollywood films, and the easing of censorship. The new Zeitgeist is encapsulated by the intervention of Bishop John Robinson, who commented in the 1960 trial of D.H.Lawrence book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that sexual intercourse could be compared in “ a real sense” to the taking of Holy Communion. The toffs, in short, no longer believed what they had previously preached.
The culture wars were particularly important to a Labour party, whose favoured prescription of nationalization during the 1945-51 governments had not yielded the dividends hoped for. With social conservatives on the defensive, the empire on the way out, and the war retreating into a recent past, the space opened up for satire, in shows such as Beyond the Fringe-whose success has been hailed as the real starting point of the UK’s cultural revolution-and That Was the Week That Was. Anti-establishment comedy took flight; the BBC became a vehicle for progressivism(Edward Leach’s in the 1967 Reith Lectures identified the family as the source of society’s ills); and the Beetles sang their song “Imagine”: no religion, no countries, nothing to die for, no possessions, just “the people sharing all the world”. The template in short for globalization. (https://genius.com/John-lennon-imagine-lyrics):
The two leading intellectuals of 1950s Labour were Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins. Rather than have Labour in government focus on economics, the two former lovers from Balliol, Oxford, proposed that the new heights to be conquered would be cultural. The idea was derivative of thinking in the western European Communist parties, riven-as was the CPGB-by opposition to Moscow’s version of socialism. In his Prison Notebooks, which he had written while languishing in Mussolini’s jails, Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political leader, had argued against Lenin’s view of culture as “ancillary” to political objectives. The achievement of political power could only be attained through cultural hegemony.
A class could not dominate, Gramsci maintained, by imposing its economic preferences through coercion. Rather, it had to set the tone of intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a “historic bloc”, in which the bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order. The social order in turn re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations and ideas.
What Crosland and Jenkins proposed for British consumption was simply a post-Christian humanism, which aimed to make a heavenly kingdom on earth, rather than govern the United Kingdom on the pre-supposition that we were a country of sinners-arguably the principle of the Victorian era. In his 1959 Penguin special, Jenkins asked the rhetorical question in his title, Is Britain civilized? No, he answered; not until sin , in its Christian sense, had been abolished, the death penalty repealed, marriage made readily dissoluble, sodomy laws repealed, and obscenity legalized as an expression of art. In his best selling book In Pursuit of Socialism, Crosland dubbed his vision as one of “socialist hedonism”.
Unlike many intellectuals, Jenkins was able to put his ideas into practice. As Home Secretary in 1966-67, he pushed through his plans, in the face of widespread opposition from Labour’s white working class base. “Jenkins, writes his biographer, always believed the direction of advance was more important than spelling out a precise goal”.[7]On his watch, he decriminalized homosexuality; legalized abortion; abolished the death penalty; centralized the police force; made fault-free marriage breakdown the main ground for divorce; altered the ancient requirement of unanimous verdicts by juries. He also was instrumental in setting up the Race Relations Board, of which more below.
The Blairite synthesis.
Jenkins’ method was not just to set the direction of advance, but to do so with cross-party support. That is how Edward Heath, in conjunction with Labour’s Jenkinsites had parliament vote the 1972 European Communities Act. Section 2.1. was the heart of the Act:[8]it endorsed the ECJ’s claim that EU law took “direct effect” in each one of the member states. It was only in 1989, that France and the Federal Republic agreed so to tweak their legislation in the direction of acknowledging the ECJ’s power grab, and both of them did so with reservations. The UK thus became with Jenkins’ and Heath’s enthusiastic support, the champion among the large member states of the principle of EEC/EU supranationalism.
The Act was passed over the heads of fierce opposition from the Conservative backbenches, and from the broader Labour movement, which looked on the EEC as a capitalist club . So did the Soviet Union. Many trade union leaders of the time were either known to have been members of the CPGB; to sympathise with its hostility to the EEC; to be suspect of being in Moscow’s pay; or later to be revealed as Soviet agents in the pay of the KGB .
The list of senior union leaders from the 1970s with communist affiliations was long: Hugh Scanlon; Jack Jones; Arthur Scargill; Mick McGahey; Ernie Roberts, Ted Hill. The idea was to transform the UK into a worker’s state, and the means was penetration of the Labour movement via the trade unions, the holding of industrial action, and increasingly the domination by the far left of Labour’s parliamentary list for the 1979 elections. During the 1974-79 Labour governments, the UK became an economic basket case, an object of derision. As Douglas Eden has written, had Prime Minister Callaghan won the general elections of April 1979, he would have been ditched by the radicals, and extreme policies adopted.[9]Instead, Labour went into the political wilderness for eighteen long years.
There was some overlap between Labour’s hard left of the 1970s, and the Jenkinsites of the 1960s. The various Marxist factions , as well as the CPGB, came round to embracing Gramsci, feminism, gay rights, and the Beetles. The New Labour, which emerged with Tony’s Blair’s accession to the leadership of the party, represented a synthesis of the two. What united them all was a rapacious hunger for power. In the New Labour leadership’s view this entailed accepting Thatcher’s economic reforms, but implementing a Gramscian strategy.
This was less difficult than asking old Labour to suppress its instincts to nationalize anything that moved. Significant numbers of the New Labour government’s senior figures had belonged to the CPGB or been active in its Marxist-Leninist penumbra. [10] Blair-“briefly a Trot”, in his own words[11],declared himself to be “a pretty straight sort of guy”,[12]but as soon as he got into office, he reached immediately for institutional and constitutional change, and did so through the exercise of democratic centralism over his party; the reduction of the House of Commons; the emasculation of the House of Lords; the attempt to create single Labour party states in Scotland and Wales; achievement of New Labour hegemony in Westminster; the transformation of the UK into a multi-cultural country, and an end to a thousand year tradition whereby an accused was innocent until proven guilty. All in the name of “modernisation”. Blair’s was a slow motion coup d’Etat. His only failure, from his own perspective, was not to have taken the UK into a USE.
Patronage was the tool of his success. Public sector employment rose from 1998 to 2010- the span of the New Labour governments- by nearly 700,000 to reach a high-point of 5.8 million at the start of 2010.[13] This translated into the education workforce growing from 1.4 million in 2000 to reach 1.7 million in 2010; the NHS workforce grew from 1.2 to 1.6 million during the same period. There was less growth in the number of employees in public administration, which remained around 1.2 to 1.3 million during the 2000s. Public employment was expanded in local government The 463 “quangos” provided tax-payer funded employment for 273 thousand employees, and top appointments went to eager candidates, with a suitable political orientation. Charities, and voluntary organisations-in what was labelled “the third sector”(public, private, third)-became adjuncts to public policy and more dependent on the public purse. [14]Favoured journalists were fed; critics were starved.
These were the years when New Labour’s news was centrally managed, political correctness entered into daily practice, and spin became an artform. There were also appointments to the House of Lords, and the distribution of knighthoods, medals and visits to the Palace. As John Prescott, Blair’s deputy PM, knew only too well, playing the radical was one thing, but seeing the Queen was quite another. Reminiscing on the Queen’s visit to Hull in 1970, Prescott said, “so we lined up, with Pauline, (his long suffering spouse) a convinced monarchist, doing her curtsey.” [15]
The secularist wave.
There are two categories of explanation why religion is on the backfoot in the United Kingdom and Europe. One is the determinist theory whereby technologically-driven changes in the economic infrastructure feed through to social values and then into politics. [16]Like much of the literature on democratization, this explanation maintains that the richer you get, the more you are likely to embrace individual autonomy, gender equality, democracy, and change your religious behavior, or ditch religion altogether. The theory predicts that we all tend towards an end of history, the time when the era of humanity’s childhood ends.[17] In short, the theory derives from Marx’s idea of religion as the opium of the people-presumably as compared to real drugs, because these have boomed in Europe as religion has receded.
The other explanation is that there has been a forceful alliance of militant secularists who have taken to heart the teachings of Marx and of Freud. “The abolition of religion, writes Marx in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness”. Freud developed the idea in The Future of an Illusion,where religion is presented as a wish of people to escape death: “where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor”. [18]
A particular example of a militant secularist was Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) , the American campaigner for contraception, and founder of Planned Parenthood. She was very hostile to the Christian churches, and wished-as did many geneticists of her time-to separate the sex urge from reproduction. She spelt out some of her ideas in a a speech in 1921 entitled “The Morality of Birth Control”. In it, she divided society into three groups: the “educated and informed” class that regulated the size of their families, the “intelligent and responsible” who desired to control their families in spite of lacking the means or the knowledge, and the “irresponsible and reckless people” whose religious scruples “prevent their exercising control over their numbers.” Sanger concludes, “There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”[19]What she meant was the “negroes”, who bred too fast. The politics of sex and racialism have always coexisted comfortably.
The militant secularist alliance in the UK as across Europe has gathered strength since 1945 with ever wider popular access to education, the view that teaching of any religion is indoctrination, the establishment of Gramscian beachheads in the media and universities, and the intellectual hegemony of the scientific method. A further factor was the collapse of the Soviet Union in the years 1989-92, ending the divisions among the factions of social democracy that opened up in 1914-18, and the formation of the Comintern in 1920, when Lenin in his letter to social democratic parties demanded that all organize along democratic centralist lines, ie under Moscow’s tutelage.
The resulting divisions, which lasted over seventy years, have been largely overcome in the European Parliament’s umbrella movement, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. The Alliance, with other parties of the European left, turned down Rocco Buttiglione as prospective Commissioner for Justice in 2004 on account of his Catholic views on family and homosexuality. As Italy’s Justice Minister Roberto Castelli observed, the incident revealed the fundamentalist face of Europe.[20]Any reference to Christianity was excluded from the Constitutional Treaty of that year, an omission that was carried over to the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, where the preamble referred to the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe”.
A remarkable feature of the determinist view is how much of it is linked to partisanship. In the Inglehart/Weizel tome, the authors do not declare their own beliefs, but there can be little doubt that they endorse the trends and processes that they observe. The same may be said of the British Social Attitudes (BSA) report, Religion: Losing Faith?[21]The study records that 25.7% of respondents declare no religion, and that nearly all those without religion were from white background. Two thirds of 18-24 year olds did not consider themselves as belonging to any religion. The conclusion followed that “Britain is becoming less religious, with the numbers who affiliate with a religion or attend religious services experiencing a long-term decline. And this trend seems set to continue; not only as older, more religious generations are replaced by younger, less religious ones, but also as the younger generations increasingly opt not to bring up their children in a religion – a factor shown to strongly link with religious affiliation and attendance later in life.”
So far, so scholarly. Then the question: “What does this decline mean for society and social policy more generally?” The answer to the rhetorical question runs: “On the one hand, we can expect to see a continued increase in liberal attitudes towards a range of issues such as abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia, as the influence of considerations grounded in religion declines. Moreover, we may see an increased reluctance, particularly among the younger age groups, for matters of faith to enter the social and public spheres at all.” We may call this the advocacy of utilitarianism, disguised in academic clothing.
A host of studies record the precipitous decline in religious affiliation in the main churches-Anglican, Catholic, Protestant-, and the fall in the number of churches, the number of parish clergy, church attendance, church marriages and membership as a proportion of the population. Predictions are current that Christianity in the UKwill be extinct in a few decades. The worst hit of all has been the Church of England, whose leaders -disguarding their inheritance of the 1662 Prayer Book and the King James Bible, both treasures of the English language-have become obsessed with politics (the “bomb”, the NHS, Brexit), and riven by debates about homosexuality, abortion or the ordination of women.
These same reports record the rise in charismatic Christian Churches, as well as the rapid rise of other faiths, notably Islam, whose adherents in the 2011 census stood at 5% of the population and growing fast. The prediction is that Islam will become-thanks to Moslem males’ ability to have four wives, and multiple children, all on the NHS- the UK’s prime religion sometime in the 2030s. In other words, the secularist wave applies to Christianity, the inherited religion of the British isles, not to religions previously alien to them.
Where does the secularist wave intersect with White Trash?
The answer is simple: at multiple points. Let us evoke some of them:
- The most important is the collapse in traditional marriage. At the time of Winston Churchill’s funeral in 1965, 93% of marriages in the UK endured to the grave. Following 1971, when the Divorce Reform Act came into effect, divorces shot up. Changes in the tax system benefitted divorcees; illegitimate children were granted equal inheritance rights; abortions multiplied; morning after pills came cheap; as sex education was ramped up in schools, so did the sexual activity of underage children. In 2016, 42% of marriages end in divorce; last for a median of 12 years; and family breakdown is associated with drugs, alcohol addiction, and limited education and skills.
- There has been a huge rise in the number of unmarried mothers. As studies show clearly,single motherhood is associated with poverty, low skills, and with negative outcomes for children.[22]The UK holds the highest incidence of single mothers-9% of all mothers- in the OECD rich world. The poverty trap they fall into tends to become hereditary. Welfare incentives encourage single motherhood and divorce. Single mothers are likely to have mental health problems. Their children are at a notable disadvantage at school to children from traditional families. And the public is very sceptical that the government can do much about the situation.
- If traditional Christian marriage is under severe attack, polygamy is booming. As Dame Louise Casey phrased it in her report on immigration,[23]“Rates of integration in some communities may have been undermined by high levels of transnational marriage – with subsequent generations being joined by a foreign-born partner, creating a ‘first generation in every generation’ phenomenon in which each new generation grows up with a foreign-born parent. This seems particularly prevalent in South Asian communities. We were told on one visit to a northern town that all except one of the Asian Councillors had married a wife from Pakistan. And in a cohort study at the Bradford Royal Infirmary, 80% of babies of Pakistani ethnicity in the area had at least one parent born outside the UK.” Put simply, polygamy is outlawed in the UK, but not if you marry your next wife in a country where polygamy is legitimate.
- The law has been fundamentally changed on all matters sexual. The expression used to hold that “my home is my castle”. No longer. New Labour had legislated for civil partnership between same sex couples in 2004. In 2008, Mr and Mrs Bull refused to allow civil partners Steven Preddy and Martyn Hall to stay in a double room at their B&B in Cornwall, on the grounds that they regarded any sex outside marriage as a sin. The Supreme Court found against Mr and Mrs Bull. Lady Hale, the activist Supreme Court judge opined: “Sexual orientation, she said, is a core component of a person’s identity which requires fulfilment through relationships with others of the same orientation.” In other words, Mr and Mrs Bull’s house is a public place, and gay rights trumps Christian consciousness in modern Britain.
- The breakdown in traditional marriage is a major cause of child poverty. Studies show that 56% of child poverty is due to family breakdown. Parents will have been out of work for a long period of time, and may have given up bothering to look. Time devoted to bringing children up to know how to read and write, or to distinguish between right and wrong, or to simply teach how to speak is absent. Not least, drug taking is common. There were an estimated 182,828 crack users in England in 2014/5.. As the NHS reported, “Six cent of 11 year olds said they had tried drugs at least once, compared with 24 per cent of 15 year olds.”[24]Forty five per cent of shoplifting, thefts, robberies and burglaries are committed by heroin and crack cocaine users. Drug peddlars live unhindered. In Singapore, they are executed the day after being caught. Unlike modern UK, Singapore’s schools are drug-free zones.
[1]Peter G. Forster, ” Secularization in the English Context : Some Conceptual and Empirical Problems”, Sociological Review 20 (1972): 153-68.
[2]Virginia Woolf on T.S. Eliot becoming a Christian, “there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God”. Quoted in Peter Hitchens, The Rage against God, p.24.
[3]See for instance Arthur Salter, a close colleague of Monnet, The United States of Europe and other papers, New York, London, Reynold and Hitchcock, Unwin, 1933.
[4]Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: The British Cultural Revolution from Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair, Quartet Books, 1999.
[5]The Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy transcript”, The Guardian, April 28, 2010.
[6]Shirley Williams, Climbing the Bookshelves,Virago, 2009, p. 35.
[7]John Campbell, Roy Jenkins : A Well-Rounded Life, London, Jonathan Cape, 2014. P.138.
[8]Section 2.1. states: All such rights, powers, liabilities, obligations and restrictions from time to time created or arising by or under the Treaties, and all such remedies and procedures from time to time a provided for by or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the Treaties are without further enactment to be given legal effect or used in the United Kingdom shall be recognised and available in law, and be enforced, allowed and followed accordingly ; and the expression ” enforceable Community right” and similar expressions shall be read as referring to one to which this subsection applies.https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1972/68/section/2/enacted
[9]Douglas Eden, “We came close to losing our parliamentary democracy in 1979”, The Spectator, June 3, 2009.
[10]Peter Oborne, “The Old Communists of New Labour”, The GuardianAugust 25, 2002.
[11]“Here’s this guy Trotsky who was so inspired by all of this that he went out to create a Russian revolution and changed the world. I think it’s a very odd thing – just literally it was like a light going on,” said Blair to Peter Hennessy, in “Blair reveals he toyed with Marxism after reading book on Trotsky”, The Guardian,August 10, 2017. He read the first volume of Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy on Trotsky, the founder of the Soviet gulag.
[12]Trevor Kavanagh, “Blair: My big blunder”, The Sun, 17 November 1997.
[13]Jonathan Cribb, Richard Disney, Luke Sibieta, The Public sector workforce: past, present, future.IFS Briefing Note 145. Institute for Fiscal Studies. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. 2014.
[14] Helen Haugh, Michael Kiston, “ The Third Way and the third sector. New Labour’s economic policy and the social economy”, The Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2007, 31, pp. 973-994.
[15]Craig Brown, « And the MP most easily duped by the Queen is… », Mail Online, May 23, 2012.
[16]Ronald Inglehart, Christian Weizel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence, Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2005.
[17]In God Is Not Great, Atlantic Books, 2007, Christopher Hitchens recounts how, at the age of nine, he was appalled by his scripture teacher’s simplemindedness.pp.20-21.
[18] Quoted in Hitchens, pp.9, 103, 155.
[19]http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/margaretsangermoralityofbirthcontrol.htm
[20]« Italians affronted by EU official row », BBC News, October 13, 2004.
[21]http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/38958/bsa28_12religion.pdf
[22]Libertad Gonzalez, “The Determinant of the Prevalence of single Mothers : A Cross-Country Analysis,” July 2005. IZA DP No.1677; The Equality Trust: Family., https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/family; ONS, Divorces in England and Wales2016; BSA 28, Child Poverty, Fewer Children in Poverty? Is it a public priority?
[23]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-casey-review-a-review-into-opportunity-and-integration
[24]http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20180328135520/http://digital.nhs.uk/catalogue/PUB23442
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