The opinions of John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper

GIVEN that graphic sex education in school was the stimulus for his behaviour, according to the teenage father of the child of the 12-year-old mother whose pregnancy led Tony Blair to call earlier this month for a "new moral purpose" in Britain, one would have thought that less of it and a toning down of it was what was needed now.

The kids, after all, have been bombarded with from all sides by titillating instruction - from their teachers, from the social workers dishing out free condoms to the under-aged, from filth-packed magazines for the teenies and almost non-stop from television programmes and videos - to the extent that Britain has been "educated" to the highest level of teenage pregnancies in Europe.

But, no - and at a time when it is disclosed that 12-year-old girls in East Lancashire have been turning up for pregnancy tests at sex advice centre in East Lancashire - we learn that your TV licence money is funding a "morality-free" BBC TV series designed for schools' sex-education classes, aimed at children aged five (honest!) to 16 and featuring such topics as oral sex, orgasms, homosexuality, masturbation and a girl who says "casual sex is fine if you can handle it." If hurling sex at children in this fashion fits in with Mr Blair's crusade for a new moral purpose in this country, I dread to think what kids would be being taught otherwise.

But, of course, Mr Blair's concern was evidently only a piece of political pantomime.

For it turns out that the BBC can get away with this filth and the government's own health minister, Tessa Jowell, speaking at a conference on teenage pregnancy, says that the government's job is not to say "Don't!" to these youngsters. Some moral crusade that is!

And just where is the morality in the public's money being used for the BBC to make programmes that add to the widespread encouragement - in the already existing deluge of "non-judgemental" sex advice hurled at children from all quarters - to dabble in casual sex that's "fine" if it suits them?

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