region and professional services - are mediating structures between the individual and central government. Politics tends to offer either a sole commitment to the individual or to the community, at the exclusion of the other. Narrow individualism and our abandonment of mediating structures based on Judaeo-Christian ideals are why our country is in such a mess. Imagine then the BBC's political staff compiling a summary of the latest British statistics, not simply regurgitated from the Stock Exchange, the money markets and the World Bank, but assessing the state of Britain's social ecology. They might quickly discover that a filled filofax doesn't necessarily mean a fulfilled life; that, for millions, personal worth and self-respect have reached a low ebb; and that there are deep fissures beneath the surface of our seemingly prosperous society. Here, then, is the bad news.
The State of the Nation
Marriage breakdown is over 600 per cent higher than in 1961 and involves over 150,000 couples each year. One in three marriages now ends in divorce and we are fast approaching the American norm, where fifty per cent of marriages break up. Three million people will experience a broken marriage during this decade. 150,000 children under sixteen are caught up in divorces every year. One in five British children can now except to experience the divorce of their parents before they are sixteen. In their document, 'Family Change and Future Policy', the Family Policy Studies Centre predicts that by the year 2000 only one out of every two children will grow up in a 'conventional' family. The number of single parents abandoned and left to shoulder all the responsibility for rearing their child has risen inexorably: one in ten children in 1979, one in four now. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 children go missing in Britain each year, and although more than half return home safely within twenty-four hours, some simply vanish. In lieu of official statistics (because Government's preoccupation with economic statistics means that no national computerised register of missing children is kept) the best estimate of the scale of the problem comes from the Children's Society. They say that 98,000 children went missing in England and Wales last year. Police records show that more than a third of these young people were in Local Authority care. A hard core of those who run away may be lured into prostitution or drug abuse.