COMING hard on the heels of Tony Blair's declared drive for a "new moral purpose in Britain," the disclosure today that schoolchildren are to be taught the importance of marriage is clearly an attempt to add substance to the oratory.

And there is no doubt that millions of people, concerned at the collapse of the traditional family and marriage, both the glue of a stable society, will welcome the departure.

The accompanying urging of councils to use curfew orders to keep rowdy youngsters off the streets at night, and warnings to teenage fathers that they will be pursued by the Child Support Agency, will further emphasise the point.

Yet, if in harking back to John Major's "back to basics" campaign which collapsed amid ridicule of the less-than-exemplary morals of some Tory ministers, Tony Blair seems to be concentrating on improving the behaviour of young people - no bad thing - should not the government's drive examine the cause as well as the effects?

For in what is, admittedly, a complex and deep-seated problem, is not government a contributor to the collapse of moral purpose that now apparently concerns it?

The state has stood aside and let the laws on obscenity and decency wither to the point of ill-use, so that youngsters and adults alike are bombarded by sex on TV, in videos and even children's magazines.

It has also actively downgraded the value of marriage and, so, of sex and procreation within that institution, by a tax and benefits system that discriminates against wedlock and the stable family unit.

But it is hardly alone as a contributor to this decline. Religion, with the manifest exception of the faiths of the ethnic minorities in the community, has hardly lived up to its role as guardian of society's moral values since the 1960s.

Indeed, evidently so fearful of being regarded as reactionary or old-fashioned, the values religious leaders have been prepared to accept and even embrace are a prime example of the timidity of the Establishment to condemn.

This timidity is even further stressed by the warnings of the risk Tony Blair takes in taking the path on which John Major slipped up.

Yet, if government and church weakness has been an agent in the downfall of morality in Britain, what of those with whom the prime responsibility for the decline in community responsibility lies - parents and, in particular, the parents of today's young parents?

Have they not failed in their duty and are not the lessons in morality that the government is embarking on - with how much purpose we have yet to see - the ones they neglected in the home?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.