Everyone involved will deny this, but the people who pay the real price for this destruction of secure home life are the children.

Every statistical measure shows that the breaking of marriage harms them. But they have no voice. It is the adults, liberated from their responsibilities, who write articles in the papers, make the programmes on the radio and TV, and the speeches in Parliament, which claim everything will be fine.

It won’t be. Our monstrous taxes, and most of our worst social problems – from chaotic schools to crime and overstretched hospitals full of old, ill people – arise from the very expensive failure of the state to substitute for the stable, solid family which used to be held together by lifelong marriage, and now isn’t.