Social justice and the family

Can I just say first of all that it is a great pleasure to be here. I thought I'd say a couple of words about what we do. I want to stress at the beginning that the Centre for Social Justice, as you said, Chairman, is not parti pris in the sense that I'm a Conservative, but I've no idea what pretty much everybody who works for me votes for. We are funded separately from the Conservative Party. I have to raise that money, and I raise it from people who are interested inwhat we do and are committed to the concept of social justice.

As you see, we've worked with the Smith Institute. We're in the process of discussing further work with some other think tanks that you would classically describe as on the left—IPPR, which is quite big. We've had plenty of invitations to work with others. And I've done a personal piece of work, a pamphlet on early years intervention, which I recommend. I'm happy to send the committee all of this stuff. I did that with a Labour MP named Graham Allen, who used to be a government minister. He's a very good friend of mine, but we also happen to fundamentally agree about development in children in the period of nought to three years—and I'll say something about that later, how that intervention should work.

By the way, you have a fantastic program here in Canada, which I've yet to see. The Roots of Empathy program, I think, is in that area, and whatever you are doing, I hope you do get to  see that particular program because it is one that I would like to see us take to the U.K.

The Centre for Social Justice was set up by me because I was rather tired of the stilted debate that goes on between—I'll be honest with you—the so-called social liberals and the so-called social conservatives, into which you can bat around the faith issues as well while you're at it. It struck me that this hasn't done anything for the debate about what's happening to our society in the U.K. in the last 25 to 30 years and almost under the noses of what has become a pretty high-level and rather pointless political debate.