"The man who would be Gordon's guru"

Fraser Nelson of the Spectator talks to libertarian author Charles Murray.

"Here's what I don't understand. Gordon Brown is very well-read, including books he doesn't agree with. He will have noticed things are getting worse. Things have not just failed to improve as welfare has increased; civil society in lower-income Britain is going off a cliff. So why doesn't he ask whether there could possibly be a relationship between the welfare efforts he is making, and the deterioration observed?"

"Cruelty consists of a glib assumption that government support for children can compensate for the absence of the father. That is an assumption which is now refuted by a mountain of data. In the United States, unlike Britain, there has been a wealth of studies on children in different marital situations. You can control for income, race, all the usual suspects. Again and again the same findings come out: children do best raised by both biological parents, whether you measure depinquency, truancy, psychological development, anything."

"A divorced mother is next best. Doesn't really matter if she remarries or not, step-fathers don't do much good. And way down the ladder, right at the bottom, are the outcomes of children born to single women. This has been proven again and again, yet when I go over the England and talk, scholars over there are not even aware that this literature exists in the United States. It's a kind of head-in-the-sand thing, yet what we are talking about is empirical fact, with which Britain refuses to come to grips."

"I think the Left finds it very difficult to give up its power to stage-manage the lives of the people it is trying to help. Allowing people to do what they want causes them deep distress. Gordon Brown seems to show this as much as anybody."

But will Murray's thinking shape the Conservatives? Murray holds out little hope.

"Just look at the Tories, including my dear friend David Willetts, calling for a softer, kinder Conservative Party. It's hopeless. For some reason, in England you still cannot say,'I want to slash all those welfare programmes because they are screwing poor people to the wall.'"

My note. You can't say it in New Zealand either.