Certainly, when children are removed from families and looked after by the state, the record has been appalling. No legislation, no pep talks issued by the arranged marriage of Jack Straw and Margaret Hodge, are going to do a damn thing about it.Actually, something is being done this week which I think will be of far more benefit to children in need than all this illogical and sanctimonious twaddle. You can grow up amid conflict as the child of two lesbians or two cardboard cut-out heterosexuals. Your parents may be an exhausted single mother and her dopey boyfriend, or divorcing middle-class professionals involved in marriage guidance counselling, and there can still be conflict.

In spite of all the waffle about divorce being the end of civilisation as we know it, we do in fact understand what damages children: boring old material deprivation, poverty if we want to be old- fashioned about it, and conflict. Those at the bottom of society routinely have their privacy invaded. To be on benefit, to apply for a grant, to be old and frail, to be mentally ill, to be homeless, means that all sorts of people feel they have the right to know all sorts of details about your life.For when precious families do break down, and the state truly has to intervene in the form of social services, then invasion of privacy becomes the least of our concerns. This is exactly how it should be, because we all know that the higher up the social scale you go, the less likely you are to have your privacy invaded. Which families? Which values? The attempt by New Labour to put a liberal and contemporary gloss on a set of ideals that are often reactionary, and in denial about the enormous changes that have taken place in women’s lives over the last 50 years, is bound to irritate.The knee-jerk distaste for government intruding into the private and intimate life of the electorate is completely legitimate.

This is why I never really know what the phrase “family values” means. I know exactly who my family are not because of some biological accident a couple of generations ago, but because we have chosen each other. Blood is thicker than water? That must be why it is full of clots and never flows easily. Clearly, families are havens for some, hell-holes for others They liberate and oppress in equal measure. I am a statistic that proves what ever it is that you want it to prove. I am, though, statistically normal in that I feel this is no one’s business but my own.I don’t think that family life has changed I know it has.