Nevertheless, the niceness movement has powerfully changed family life. Sixties' liberation detested the frustrating conventions by which (to put it crudely) sex had to be traded for commitment. Commitment is painful, especially to individuals with little talent for controlling impulse. Many restrictive conventions were abandoned so that the young should be free to follow wherever their impulses might lead. Divorce became easier - yet the number of couples getting married dramatically declined. This left many of the resulting children in an unstable world, especially if they belonged to what was euphemistically called a "single-parent family". Single parenthood often resulted from misfortune, and could work well, but public concern has lately focused on one cohort of such abbreviated families: that of teenage pregnancy. In the past, the pregnant teenager faced painful options: the shotgun marriage, adoption or the back-street abortionist. The state responded compassionately by providing accommodation and financial support to these young people. But many of the children of such relationships grew up to be no less feckless and impulsive than their mothers. In the 1990s, the Government made a late start in trying to identify the fathers of these children, partly to pay for child support and partly to involve men as well as women in these problems. They have not had much success. The children of such unions have been prominent in the annals of gangland and delinquency. This is a classic case of compassion in one generation leading to misery in the next.

Politicised compassion leads to multiple absurdities. One such is the belief these young mothers "lack parental skills". The term "skill" in our narrowly practical times means knowledge that gives you power. The Government is very keen on having everybody taught skills - parental, relationship, cooking - and successive ministers have "guided" schools into providing courses to supply the deficiencies. But this whole manner of speaking is obviously corrupt. The ordinary person, for example, who is on terms with many people, ranging from acquaintances and colleagues to friends and lover(s) does not have "relationship skills". Such a person has a particular kind of character, one that is capable of valuably relating to other people on many levels, and such a life only very marginally involves the exercise of teachable skills. A talent for love and friendship is generally acquired early in life. It results from involvement in the disciplines of family life. To talk, then, as if "relating" were a form of skill to be acquired in some training programme is not only absurd: it is to cheat people by suggesting that the world is a great deal more manageable than it actually is. So-called "parental skills" are similarly elusive. They are learned in family life, and no amount of teaching in schools or drip-drip of peer group communication can create them.

My argument is, then, that the collapse of family and school discipline largely results from a dominant moral sentiment that we may call "the niceness movement". Niceness as a political sentiment has many departments-political correctness is one, for example - but I am concerned largely with its sentimental undermining of authority in family and classroom. The selling point of this niceness was, as it were, that pupils would become a nicer, gentler generation, but in fact the disorderly tendencies which teachers soon lost the power to check have now spilled over into the playground, where bullying has long been increasing. And from the playground, of course, this disorder has spread into the streets. Thus can politicised compassion lead to misery.