This speech was given by Dr Tony Rucinski, chair of the Family Education Trust, at the Trust’s London conference last weekend. Yesterday TCW reported the speech to the conference by Suella Braverman.
BEFORE I say anything else, I want to thank you for being here. Every one of you in this room has, somewhere along the line, made a decision that the family is worth defending. That decision costs something. It costs reputation. It costs friendships. In some cases it has cost careers. So thank you for paying the cost. Thank you for being people who, when they were told to look away, kept looking. When they were told to keep quiet, kept speaking. When they were told to move on, refused to move on. You are the reason this charity exists.
Strong and free societies are not built on certainty about every question. They are built on people who can disagree on much and still work together on what matters most – the best version of the next generation. That is our argument with this country. And friends, it is the argument that matters.
The King delivered his speech to Parliament on Wednesday. Thirty-seven bills. Among them, once again, a Draft Conversion Practices Bill, this time trans-inclusive, as the Government confirmed in writing. The Tories first promised a conversion therapy ban back in 2018 meaning that lesbian, gay and bisexual people would no longer be able to seek treatment to change their sexual preferences. Regardless of their wishes. Labour’s pledges to include a trans-inclusive ban into the general ban on conversion therapy.
Let me tell you what that means in plain English. It means that a Christian parent in Cardiff, a Muslim parent in Manchester, a Hindu parent in Hemel Hempstead, a Jewish parent in Golders Green, who tells their distressed 13-year-old daughter, ‘Darling, you are not a boy, you are my beautiful girl, and we are going to walk through this together’ – that parent will be looking nervously over their shoulder to see whether the Crown Prosecution Service agrees.
The same speech heralds an Education for All Bill that will reform the SEND tribunal and require schools to write an individual support plan for every SEND child. Bridget Phillipson has admitted that the system is failing. The Government’s response is to give itself more discretion, and to strip parents of the enforceable rights that have been the only thing holding the system to account for the last two decades.
‘Being a parent is a privilege, not a right.’ Those are the words of Baroness Levitt KC, the Justice Minister, last October, setting up Clause 17 of the Courts and Tribunals Bill which repeals the legal presumption that a child benefits from the involvement of both her parents. Read those words again. A privilege, not a right. That is not a tweak. That is a redefinition of the relationship between citizen, child, and state. And in nine cases out of ten, the parent for whom that relationship is being downgraded from a right to a privilege will be the father.
The same week, Ofcom imposed its largest fine to date under the Online Safety Act, on a suicide forum linked to more than 130 deaths in the United Kingdom. The NSPCC reported a 36 per cent rise in Childline counselling sessions about online child sexual abuse and exploitation. The European Commission moved to press all 27 member states to ban conversion therapy as incompatible with European values. Warsaw, the capital of Catholic Poland whose constitution defines marriage as between one man and one woman, registered, for the first time in Polish history, a same-sex marriage performed abroad, under an order from the European Court of Justice. And Eurostat confirmed the European fertility rate at 1.34 children per woman, the lowest on Eurostat record.
That is one week, friends. One week.
So here is the question I want to put to you this morning. In a week like that – in a season like this – what is the Family Education Trust for?
I have been asked this question by serious people in serious places. By MPs and peers. By donors who want to know their money is well spent. By academics who ask whether we are a campaign or a charity. By journalists who ask whether we are conservatives or something stranger. By Christians who want to know whether they can stand with us, and by people who are not Christians at all but who can see what is happening to their grandchildren.
Let me answer it.
The Family Education Trust exists because somebody has to do the patient, unglamorous, unfashionable work of telling the truth about the family. Somebody has to read the consultation documents. Somebody has to file the responses. Somebody has to commission the research. Somebody has to write the reports that ministers pick up. Somebody has to be in the room when the trade unions and the activists and the consultancies have all been in the room for years. And somebody, frankly, has to be willing to be unfashionable for as long as it takes to become fashionable again.
That is us. That has been us since 1971. And, God willing, that will be us for many decades to come.
We are not the loudest organisation in this space. We are not the richest. We do not have a chief executive on two hundred thousand pounds. We do not have a glossy media operation. What we have is something rather rarer. We have credibility.
When a peer wants a brief on keeping children safe in education, they ring us. When a journalist needs a quote on the social transitioning of children in primary schools, they ring us. When a parent in Doncaster discovers their daughter has been calling herself Jack at school for six months without anyone telling them, they ring us. When a hard-pressed teacher is terrified of losing her job for using the wrong pronoun, she rings us.
And when the next government, whichever colour it is, sits down to write a serious family policy, we intend to be in the room. Not on the fringes. In the room.
One last word.
I lost my mother in my mid-teens. She died of alcoholism. She raised me alone, and not very well, and she did her best, and her best was not enough. It was only ever horrible, all the time. I tell you this for one reason only. Everything I have done in my adult life, and everything this charity does on your behalf, is built on a single conviction. Children deserve better than my mother could give me. They deserve a mother. They deserve a father. They deserve a home that does not fall apart on them. And they deserve a country whose laws make that easier, not harder, to achieve.
That is what the Family Education Trust is for. That is why you are in this room. And that is why today matters.
Thank you for being here. Now let us get to work.
