Paying lip service to family values?

TONY BLAIR tells us the values of a decent society are in many ways the value of the family unit. And I am sure that the vast majority of the country agrees with that.

But are not their moral standards being once again ignored by our political leaders?

For, if the Tories' much-vaunted embrace of family values was soon made to look hollow when its famous Back To Basics campaign was undermined by a string of bed-hopping MPs, does not New Labour's look even more false - by its championing of gays and people living in sin?

Take the newspaper interview last week with the long-term lover of Culture Minister Chris Smith. It had obviously been cleared by No.10.

Yet would not a leader with a true concern for family values have put the kibosh on it? And would he have not done the same over Labour MP Angela Eagle's decision the week before to "come out" as a lesbian.

True, Mr Blair is not alone in his silent approval for such departures. Mr Smith and his partner of almost 10 years have even been invited as a couple to a reception at Buckingham Palace. But though tacit consent is one thing, is not active encouragement for the opposite of traditional family values quite another?

The Government has already lowered the age of homosexual consent and is planning to let the foreign gay lovers of British subjects into the country.

And gay MPs have achieved the same parliamentary privileges for their partners as their heterosexual colleagues who claim a Commons' pass for their wives.

Now, the Government is to officially give gay relationships and living in sin the same status as marriage by letting civil servants receive pension rights for their gay lovers or cohabiting partners.

And when that move receives the Government's stamp of approval, it won't be long before other public sector workers, such as police and teachers, demand the same blessing for their relationship - hammering yet another nail in the coffin of the family and the decent society values of which Mr Blair speaks so fondly.

Of course, the root of all this is the political-correctness endemic in New Labour - of not wanting to discriminate against cohabiting or same-sex couples. Nonetheless, it discriminates against the traditional family values that most voters still cherish as the bedrock of a decent society. And, as such, Mr Blair's endorsement of them looks only like lip-service.

Not that we can look elsewhere for higher standards - what with silly Willie Hague speaking up in favour of gay marriage and him booking a double bed for himself and his fiance for next month's Tory party conference at Blackpool.

"We are living in 1997," he explains. Alas, we are.

Rough justice when dishonesty's the best policy

PENSIONERS Doug and Doreen Osborn are obviously a bloody-minded pair.

They were each sent down for seven days by the beak at Swindon last week for refusing to pay a poll tax levy. Poll tax? Surely, that's been done away with, I hear you say. So it has, but not the debt councils are lumbered with by those who dodged it. They are passing it on to honest folk like Doug and Doreen who did pay their poll tax bill.

It was their stubborn refusal to pay the extra - in effect, a subsidy for those cheats - that put them in the jug.

And I wouldn't be surprised if their time inside cost more than the £115.35 levy they each jibbed at.

Yet, if they are a pair of chumps in believing that their principles are served by breaking the law, should not the situation that led them to do so be altered in the name of natural justice?

Why should anyone be forced to pay the poll tax that others wouldn't? It was parliament that brought in the hated tax and central government - even if it is now run by another lot - is morally obliged to pick up the tab for the aftermath of widespread non-payment that has councils sending poll tax bills to honest folk.

Cough up, Tony, and take the borough treasurers' mitts out of the pockets of soft targets like Doug and Doreen.

Stink over ministers' pay rise decision

EPISODE two of the ministerial pay row gives a telling insight into the petty-mindedness of those who rule us.

For a furious row broke out in the Cabinet when Chancellor Gordon Brown followed suit with Tony Blair and said he would not take a pay rise either.

Those with less concern for the political impact of them pocketing £16,000-a-year, 18 per cent, pay rises while the Government is telling public sector workers to expect peanuts went ballistic because Mr Brown had "bounced" them into copying him for appearances' sake.

The upshot, we hear, is that some will draw the increase but give it to charity rather than return it to Mr Brown's Treasury.

The spite is one thing, but doesn't the financing of it with taxpayers' money stink to high heaven?

Old system rules OK!

IN the light of the disclosure that, while an MP, he was paid nearly £94,000 - for one and a half to two days' work a week over 18 months - to campaign in favour of fox-hunting, former Liberal Democrat leader David Steel insists he had done nothing wrong. Nor did he. According to the parliamentary rules at the time, that is.

Now, of course, if he was still an MP and not Lord Steel, he would not only have to declare he was paid by the pro-hunting Countryside Movement, but he would also have to disclose by how much to the nearest £5,000 and he would be barred from speaking on fox-hunting in the Commons.

Yet if Lord Steel can wave the old rule book in his defence, ought he not be clobbered by the one Joe Public carries in his back pocket?

The one that says MPs are paid handsomely to look full-time after the concerns of their constituents and not those of some interest group on the side.

But when, as Paddy Ashdown informs us, Lord Steel is against hunting personally, his confirmation that his work on behalf of the bloodsports bunch was a "well-paid job" does his reputation even fewer favours.

The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper.

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