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It is a truth universally acknowledged that children in Britain have more miserable or wretched childhoods than any others in Europe. This is in large part because of the population’s growing incompetence in the art of living, but it is also almost traditional that the British do not like their children very much. By the time they have finished bringing them up so badly, they are proved retrospectively right not to have liked them very much, because they grow into pretty awful young adults.

Such, at any rate, were my thoughts the other day when I observed and heard the children come out of the local school. One fat girl, for example, aged about 14, who looked as if it were her life’s ambition to develop into a fat slut (she was most of the way there already), who had squeezed her lumpen body into unsuitably tight clothes, was screaming at her friend about fifty yards away to “f—ing hurry up,” and “f—ing hurry, won’t you?” I gave her an old-fashioned look, but to no effect: She only screamed the louder. If we had gotten as far as discussing it, I have little doubt that she would before long (after insulting me) have said, “There’s no law against it”—as, indeed, there is not.

The law is thus the sole arbiter of what we can and cannot do. There is no common ground on which to base our daily conduct and intercourse with others; moral authority has been outsourced to that great assembly of philosopher kings, the legislature.

Of course, the young girl (we have as many words in England for unattractive young girls as the Eskimos were once said to have had for snow—sluts, slags, slatterns, slappers, scrubbers, to mention only a few) was not entirely to blame for her own profound vulgarity. Her parents were probably not much better than she, and she also had probably drunk deep from the fountain of contemporary British popular culture (manufactured by people who not only ought to, but do, know better), in which the slightest concession to refinement is regarded as tantamount to class treachery, snobbery, or worse.

One slut doesn’t make a brothel, of course, but the behavior of the girl was remarkable because it was not in the least remarkable and is to be encountered almost everywhere; on the contrary, it was what we now expect and what we are frightened to correct.

I did not set out to write this, but, as the murderer put it when he said, “I had to kill her doctor, or I don’t know what I would’ve done,” I felt that, once the memory of it crossed my mind, I had to get it off my chest, if that is not a mangled anatomical metaphor. What I had intended to write about was an article in The Washington Post that drew the attention of readers to rising child poverty in Britain.

The first problem with the article was with the definition of poverty; for the article’s purposes, poverty was defined (as it often is) as a household income less than 60 percent of the median income. This definition has the inescapable corollary that a society composed entirely of millionaires, even billionaires, could have a high rate of poverty, and a society in which everyone went hungry a low rate of poverty, provided only that the distribution of income was at a certain level of inequality.

But let us not quibble. There is no doubt that with high rents, rising prices, and childcare costs, life is very difficult for many families, in part because so many things that once would have been regarded as luxuries, if they existed at all, are now deemed necessities, and all of them are costly.

But the article in The Washington Post had one story that struck me as remarkable. It was of an American woman who moved to London twenty years ago. She has great difficulty making ends meet and has to resort to all kinds of expedients (going to food banks, charity stores, and so forth) to do so. She earns $3,684 net per month in salary and receives $4,398 in welfare payments a month.

She has three children, and the article tells us that she is separated from the father of her children. I do not doubt that life is a struggle for her, as it is for many of us, but there was surely one dog in this story that did not bark in the nighttime, namely the financial contribution of the father of her three children to her finances. As the story is written, he does not contribute a penny for the upkeep of his own children.

It is, of course, possible that he is unable to do so: Genuine inability to earn any money does, after all, exist. But let us take a bet, namely that in this case he simply refuses rather than is unable to contribute financially to the upkeep of his children. In other words, more than half the costs of those children’s upkeep fall on every taxpayer, but not disproportionately on him (assuming that he pays taxes at all).

What is remarkable in the article is that its writer does not even appear to notice this, perhaps because he is inattentive, or perhaps because he believes that the rearing of children is more the state’s responsibility than that of their parents. If I were trying to write an article about the inadequacy of the state’s prevention of child poverty, this is not the case I would have chosen.

Perhaps the author of the article did not notice the absence of the father’s contribution because he was afraid to do so, at least in public. One of the greatest fears of the modern intelligentsia is of appearing censorious, or at least censorious other than about climate change, racism, etc., about which any amount of censoriousness is permissible. But to suggest that a father might have some financial responsibility for his own children and that a mother has both the right and the duty to insist upon it (let alone that the ease with which couples break apart having had children is not necessarily a moral advance for humanity) is to risk being thought Dickensian, or at least like a character out of Dickens, such as the unctuous self-satisfied hypocrite Mr. Pecksniff, or the rigid and unfeeling Mr. Gradgrind, or the unctuous schemer Uriah Heep, or the pompous and jingoistic Mr. Podsnap. Faced thus by gross irresponsibility, it is safer, if you want to preserve a reputation for generous broad-mindedness, not merely to say nothing, but to notice nothing, and blame the government.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).