Compulsory sex education won't reduce teenage pregnancy

Sex education campaigners remind me of Marxists around the time of the fall of the Berlin wall. As one communist regime after another collapsed towards the end of 1989, they told us that communism hadn't failed, it simply hadn't been implemented properly. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, if something has failed so miserably, maybe there is something inherently wrong with it.

Over the last 20 years, sex education has become ever more explicit, and is taught to an ever larger number of schoolchildren, yet the rates of teenage pregnancy have skyrocketed. And what's the response of sexual health campaigners? Even more explicit sex education, and make it compulsory (currently only one in 2,500 parents withdraws children from sex education classes).

The Times reports that sexual health charities have warned that allowing parents to opt out, even if it involved only a small number, was an infringement of young people’s rights - in other words, your children do not belong to you, but belong to the State.

Sex education isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as there is some emphasis on abstinence, but heaven forbid we "prevent young people from making informed choices". To quote Simon Blake, national director of the sexual health charity Brook: “Young people need to understand the law – that you can get contraception, that you can have an abortion – and understand the health benefits of practising safer sex. It would not be right for anyone to tell them that this is wrong, but it is OK for them to be told that some people believe it is wrong.”- So let's follow the logic of his argument - Maybe I shouldn't tell my children that child abuse and child exploitation is wrong. After all, it's just that I believe it's wrong and they need to make their own mind up on the subject.

We have no problem telling people that it's wrong to drive fast, that they should abstain from smoking, and that they should drink less, so why are we so squemish about telling people to abstain from sex?

It hasn't yet dawned on Labour that the era of big government is over

When you see how rapidly the New Labour project is disintegrating, you start to realise what a house of cards the whole thing was. In their heart of hearts, how many Labour MPs truly believed in Blairism? Sure, there were enough of them who were happy to go along with Blair because they were hungry for power, but after 12 years in office, they seem to have forgotten why they were returned to power in the first place.

Labour MPs were never great fans of the free market, but as long as the city was booming and the tax receipts were flowing in, they were prepared to tolerate it. Then came the financial crisis and money dried up. Now Labour are biting the hand that has fed it for the last 12 years.

Whilst there is widespread revulsion about the greed of bankers, there is no evidence that the electorate has lurched to the left. The financial crisis of the last eighteen months has not closed the chapter of Reaganism/Thatcherism, but on the contrary is likely to reopen it - Millions of voters have seen their tax bills rise and corresponding rises in public spending without any tangible results. Now to cap it all, they are saddled with decades of debt that their children and grandchildren will inherit. We may not see a return to the Thatcherite policies of deregulating the financial markets, but sooner or later, we will have to address, as Thatcher did, the public sector spending that has spiralled out of control.

The 2009 budget was a golden opportunity for Gordon Brown to seize the agenda and salvage his (and New Labour's) reputation for prudence. He could accept (to quote Tony Blair) "that the rules of the game have changed" - that the money has run out and the State needs to live within its means like the rest of us. But instead of asking himself why the Tories are leading in the polls, he and his fellow MPs he have drawn all the wrong conclusions: Namely, that capitalism has failed and that the rich are responsible for our debt. That the state can keep on growing and the rich can pay for it.

Reputations take years to build but only months to unravel. After Thatcher became Prime Minister, it took nearly two decades for Labour to become electable. Gordon Brown seems determined to undo all that progress in a mere matter of weeks and drag Labour back to where it was in the early 80s. Labour is beginning to look and sound more and more like it was in the days of Michael Foot - Controlling, statist, anti-business and anti-aspiration. Tony Blair once said of John Major's government: "I lead my party, he follows his" - the same could be said about Gordon Brown.