Frank Field is a British MP, the Labour MP representing Birkenhead, who was once sacked by Tony Blair for his ideas.

Once again now he is challenging established ideas: many people think that the answer to single mothers’ poverty is to compensate them for the loss of a male breadwinner when the children are young and then to provide them with incentives to get them out to work.

Mr Field disagrees with all this: the real problem, he says, (for which we thank Jenni Russel of last Sunday’s Sunday Times) is not the mothers, but the young, unemployed, absent fathers who are the ones that need to be pushed to get back to work and to be made to feel responsible for the children they have created.

“Forty per cent of Britain’s 1.9 million single parents are living on benefits because, in the absence of a second breadwinner, they can’t support themselves. Most mothers would prefer to live as a couple, but don’t because they can’t find reliable, solvent partners. They prefer the security of being kept by the State to living with badly-paid or non-working men,” says Ms Russel.

The consequences, according to Mr Field, are socially disastrous. Men are facing a lifetime of aimlessness and emotional isolation without the ties of work or family to give them meaning; women are exhausted and often dispirited by parenting alone, and children are growing up without the security and joy that being loved by a second parent can bring. The answer, according to Mr Field, is to make sure these men are marriageable once again.

Looking around him in Birkenhead, Mr Field sees men without the jobs their fathers used to have at the dockyards around them. “Thousands of young men have been disenfranchised by shifts in the economy and the pointlessness of the education system. Huge numbers are turning out of schools more or less innumerate and illiterate. … Women don’t want these men, except as creators of babies: the market has no use for them as long as they have no skills… They have been left to rot on the dole. They divert themselves with petty crime or drugs, and cover up their insecurity about their lives with bravado.”

All this long quotation from Ms Russell’s article aims at provoking reflection in our country. It is a known and an accepted fact that trends in Britain tend to be repeated in Malta at a distance of some years. While there are obvious differences, the trend line is the same. Besides, much of our social welfare system has been copied from British models.

So are we destined too to witness the same social fragmentation, the same emergence of flaky fathers and over-stressed mothers, trying to cope on their own with life, children and poverty? You only have to look around you, on our streets and in our squares to realise we are well on our way even though we do not have the influx of people from foreign countries as they have in the UK.

It is always high time to keep the situation under review so as not to allow the trend to become irreversible. We must have the figures, the analysis. Like what is happening in the UK, there must be a thorough search for other social models which maybe did not lead to such social disasters. Given that the over-arching trendline is repeated from country to country, there are, there must be countries where the welfare system encourages couples to stay together and does not serve as a disincentive on all sides.

We cannot afford a lost generation. We have had some lost generations in the past years and that has perhaps stopped us from moving on and up. We must tackle those lost generations without creating new ones.