Repairing the Moral Fabric Seminar

This is to take place this Thursday 19th September from 10am – 3.30pm at the RICS Westminister Conference Centre on Great George Street.

The seminar will be attended by academics, MPs, peers, doctors, company directors and Church leaders.

Places are available for members of the press. We ask that you telephone (0191) 281 5664 beforehand to reserve a place. A buffet lunch is available for places which are reserved before 4pm on Tuesday 19th.

SPEAKERS

John Burn

Member of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, Principal of Emnanuel College, Gateshead, former Commissioner on Faith in the City.

Norman Dennis

Former Reader in Social Studies and currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Author of Ethical Socialism (with Prof AH Halsey) and the influential Families without Fatherhood which has been widely quoted across the political spectrum.

David Holloway

Vicar of Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne. Author and former member of the General Synod’s Standing Committee and Board for Social Respponsibility.

The seminar will be chaired by Baroness Young of Farnworth

Seminar theme

With the crime rate ten times that of 1955, with nearly 40% of marriages ending in divorce and 32% of children born outside of marriage, there is growing public concern about crime and the breakdown in family life.

It suits politicians to focus on political and economic issues. Solve these they say and all will be well. The one exception in recent years has been

concern about ‘green issues’. Campaigners have been forced this on to the political agenda.

There is now growing public concern about our nation’s social and moral ecology. Here the research is very conclusive. There have been quite obvious and gross changes for the worse in the social system with the breakdown in family life and rocketing crime rates. In the United States, concern about family life and moral values is firmly on the political agenda. How long will it be before politicians will be forced to listen to public unease?

John Burn will talk about the crisis of values in education and how an elite of teacher trainers and LEA advisers are determined to secularize Britain’s schools.

Norman Dennis will highlight the problems of rising crime and the breakdown of the family. He will attack those who to seek to explain away these problems in terms of poverty and unemployment. The facts contradict these explantions but point to a breakdown of moral constraints – particularly on young men. Dr Dennis will launch an attack on the Church of England’s ‘Something to Celebrate’ report on the family. He will accuse the Church of promoting family breakup.

David Holloway, will define the roots of decadence in the Britain. As with the United States a re-moralising consciousness is emerging. In this country it is being led not so much by Church leaders as by economists, social scientists and health researchers. He sees resistance to change in the ‘new class’ of those who currently control the transmission of values – the educational empire, the media and therapeutic industry.

Repairing the Moral Fabric Seminar

On Thursday 19th September the Christian Institute is holding a seminar entitled Repairing the Moral Fabric. The day will be chaired by Baroness Young.

Three papers will be presented:

Education at the Crossroads

John Burn and Nigel McQuoid

Respectively Principal and Vice Principal of Emmanuel College, Gateshead

Social Irresponsibility – How the social affairs intelligentsia have undermined morality

Norman Dennis, Sociologist, The University of Newcastle upon Tyne

The Crown and the Courts

David Holloway, Vicar of Jesmond and former member of the Church of England’s General Synod Standing Committee.

The Christian Institute : (0191) 281 5664