In my last post I laid into the BBC for aiding and orchestrating the dominant social-liberal agenda. Now the BBC has bitten back. TV journalist John Ware has produced a couple of BBC 2 programmes, The Death of Respect (here), the first of which was broadcast last Thursday. In them he tracks changes to British values and behaviour over the past 50 years.Ware distances himself from the easy cost-free optimism of the liberals: “You may be one of those who pats the nation on the head and says, ‘There there, don’t panic. We’re not all going to hell in a handcart’,” he said before stating emphatically, “I am not.”

There was lots of informative stuff in the first programme, including highlighting the shame of increased poverty for many despite our apparently growing national prosperity. But what interested me on this occasion was how the melt-down of the family is clearly shown to be the cause of so much social dysfunction.

Listen to these conclusions from the programme: “Marriage is the most successful arrangement we have yet discovered for raising children” and “The consequence of children growing up in single parent families have been profound – a huge increase in emotional and behavioural problems and a welfare bill that just keeps growing.” And this from the BBC! And from John Ware, himself a divorcee he tells us.

The Christian Peoples Alliance has been saying exactly the same for years of course and I ran in the London Mayor election last year on such a platform: “Promoting marriage and the stable family as a long-term solution to youth crime, educational under-achievement and child poverty” was our top policy priority. The evidence for marriage is utterly overwhelming for those with eyes to see. But policy-makers at the Home Office and elsewhere are so locked into their blinkered liberal mindset that they cannot acknowledge the truth when it hits them on the nose.

However it seems the Beeb has now done us a public service and helped get the story out.

Or has it? Ware’s programmes are broadcast on Thursday evenings – at 11.20pm. Yup, the BBC has given these quality programmes a graveyard slot. Now I’m not naturally cynical or suspicious, but maybe my original strictures about BBC bias were not too far wrong after all. The programme schedulers have effectively buried The Death of Respect.

So it’ll have to be another late night for me on Thursday.

We have to admit it. For the time being the social liberals have won the culture and media wars and, aided and orchestrated by the trendy politically-correct metro-nanny BBC (no longer our spinster Auntie), they completely dominate public discussion.This doesn’t make them right, and I’d certainly lay at their door responsibility for the destruction of the family – the glue of society – which has resulted in so much dysfunction amongst our emotionally-deprived and troubled youngsters. However there are achievements of the left-liberal PC brigade which I reckon are wholly praiseworthy. See for instance how our public attitudes towards disability have changed for the better over the past two decades.

But now this PC dominance has become suffocating and unhealthy. Like Harriet Harman, political-correctness lectures, hectors and handbags us into line. It promotes blandness and conformity, suffers from post-imperial guilt and self-loathing, talks in empty elastic management-speak, dismisses independence and character, and stifles real debate. And, appallingly, it plays directly into the hands of the BNP which, rising from the grass roots, is a growing protest against such top-down elitist control of debate and policy.

But what’s this? Into the politically-correct public arena steps the gentle, saintly and scholarly figure of the Rt Revd Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester and member of the House of Lords.

Instead of resting in the comfy armchairs and imbibing at the cocktail parties of the great and good like the Oxbridge don he yearns to be, this Pakistani refugee from persecuting Islam strides into both church synod and peers chamber uttering orthodox 2,000-year-old Christian truth.

Its explosive stuff of course, the sort of stuff that got Jesus Christ murdered by the religious and political establishment of his day. Inevitably the current Church of England establishment is embarrassed. “Christian truth?” murmur liberal bishops. “Please don’t talk about that.”

Over recent days gays have dominated the airwaves of the gay-obsessed BBC, run at senior levels by a lesbian mafia according to insiders. The programming was prompted by the 40th anniversary on 28th June of the Stonewall riots in New York and by last weekend’s huge Gay Pride march in central London. Much of the discussion has been inconsequential, reflecting perhaps that the homosexual agenda is now so mainstream it has nothing new to offer. See for instance the vacuous political squabble between the gays of the two front benches (here).

But Bishop Michael spoilt the party. He threw a rock into the pool. He told the Sunday Telegraph that gays ought to repent (here) – a universally applicable idea he borrowed from the Founder of Christianity and Saviour of the World (Matt 4:17, etc).

Of course the balloon went up with the usual suspects queuing to heap opprobrium onto the Bishop’s balding head. The often admirable Peter Tatchell called on Dr Nazir-Ali to repent of his sins (here). And even some unknown Tory frontbencher called Nick Herbert who claims to be gay (“me too, me too”) had a go, ludicrously lumping together gentle bishops like Dr Nazir-Ali (and perhaps the equally gentle and scholarly Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright) with homophobic bullies at home and gay persecution abroad (here). Really?

It’s probably inevitable that Bp Michael should have decided to resign (here) from the Bishops’ Bench – the C of E cannot contain a senior man of character and courage like him. It seems backbones of jelly are required for leaders of our national church, and this mild-mannered courteous man refuses to fit that bill.

He’s a true scholar and gentle-man as well as a true Christian leader. I honour him.

Sally and I attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Westminster Hall this morning, and I immediately came to understand why many Tory MPs voted against their own John Bercow for Speaker of the House of Commons.Greeting us as host, his speech to this packed and vibrant event was both offensively patronising and emptily formulaic as he referred woodenly to the “welcome tradition” of the Breakfast like it’s some sort of dusty museum piece. No spiritual insight there, just a misjudgement of the purpose and misunderstanding of the power of the event. It looks like we have a Speaker who’ll exactly match the bumbling Brown government.

We also listened to Lord Ahmed of Rotherham who has managed recently to (a) get the next Dutch prime minister banned from Britain by apparently threatening to call 10,000 protesting Muslims onto London’s streets (here) - “a victory for the Muslim community” he called the ban; and (b) get himself the unusual but not unknown record of being one of Her Majesty’s serving Peers of the Realm who has also been a jailbird (here). We were reminded of course that His Lordship has saved an English teacher from the explosive effects of innocently naming a child’s teddy bear ‘Muhammad’ in the Islamic north of Sudan (here). He also informed us that due to his status as a Peer he is now viewed by Muslims as the UK’s Grand Mufti who is called in to resolve tricky situations within the wider Islamic community.

Unfortunately his contributions at today’s seminar on ‘Leadership for change in the Middle East’ were banal, contradictory and devoid of positive leadership qualities.

If the contributions from the two politicians were unsatisfactory, those from two others were inspirational.

The colourful Camila Batmanghelidjh set up the outstanding Kids Company (here)  for vulnerable children 13 years ago in south London. She told us about the lone children she helps who live in chronic deprivation with little or no support from parents or other adults. Some are themselves young carers struggling to support siblings and many are forced into drugs, gangs and/or prostitution in order to survive. Appallingly we haven’t moved on from the shame of 19th century Dickensian London.

What struck me is the emphasis Camila puts on the devastating emotional deprivation of children who lack families. She is willing to talk openly about ‘love’ – a word that has long been erased from professional social workers’ lexicon. ‘Love is all it takes’ proclaims her website. In other words it’s not just about material deprivation or lack of education.

The social effects of the destruction of the family have not only been highlighted by Family Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge (here) and (here) but they also go a long way to explaining why, infamously, the UK is at the bottom of the Unicef table of children’s wellbeing in developed countries (here). We need to listen to people like Camila.

The other star was Indian-born evangelist and apologist Dr Ravi Zacharias who converted to Christianity after a suicide attempt aged 17. In a riveting anecdote-studded address he talked about our vertical accountability to God. Where this is lacking there is a horizontal bending of the rules – as amply illustrated by the expenses scandal in the Palace of Westminster where Dr Zacharias spoke.

I’ve been to four National Prayer Breakfasts and this was the most stimulating. It gave us many people and issues to pray about.

For Parliament’s sake we ought to start with John Bercow.