Michael Gove: In what nightmare world do children father children?

Orwell's vision of a surveillance society has some relevance, and Kafka's nightmare world of bureaucratic confusion has resonances too. But the truly uncanny predictions of how mankind would develop are all there in Aldous Huxley's greatest novel.

Brave New World depicts a society where social mobility has given way to rigid caste divisions, with a pampered elite living in a wholly different universe from those at the bottom. Yet while society is rigidly divided, members of every caste give themselves up to consumption and the pursuit of pleasure. Drugs are ubiquitous, morality fugitive and sex is seen as just another recreation, freely and guiltlessly indulged in by children.

It was Huxley's vision that came to my mind when I saw the tragically innocent baby face of Alfie Patten last week. Alfie is the child of separated parents. His own father has fathered nine children by different mothers. Alfie's girlfriend Chantelle, 15, is the mother of his child. Chantelle's parents have allowed Alfie to stay the night at their family home for months now, keeping a spare school uniform to make his mornings easier. Their baby was conceived when Alfie was just 12. He hopes, with transparent and heart-rending honesty, to be a good father. When asked, however, by a reporter how he would look after his daughter financially he could only reply: "What's financially?" Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it.

Of course, as Gordon Brown said, it is hard to comment on one case, however startling, without knowing all the facts. But how many facts do we need to ponder, how much background is it necessary to absorb, how many caveats do we have to enter, before we can state clearly that it is wrong, wrong in a way which should really need no explanation, for children to have children?

That we even have to argue the case is a sign of the real state we are in. For the principles by which generations have lived, the moral architecture in which we sheltered, now need urgent repair. What sort of parents help sustain a relationship between a 12 year old and a 15 year old, even if they insist they didn't think it was sexual? And what sort of parents can Chantelle and Alfie be when Alfie is scarcely out of primary school?

And this one case, while shockingly troubling, is just one vivid episode in a broader, unfolding story of accelerating social breakdown. Last year one of Britain's most senior judges, Paul Coleridge, offered his analysis of what a professional lifetime in our family courts had taught him. The story he told was bleaker than any politician would dare present.

In some of our cities, he explained: "Family life is, quite frankly, in meltdown or completely unrecognisable. Family life in the old sense no longer exists. I am not talking about some halcyon picture of husband, wife and 2.4 children. I am talking about simple, ordinary family life where children are brought up with a normal daily routine of getting up, eating, going to school and returning to a reasonably ordered home, presided over by a reasonably secure relationship.

"A large number of families now consist of children being brought up by mothers who have children by a number of different fathers, none of whom take any part in their children's lives or support or upbringing. These are not isolated, one-off cases. They are part of the stock in trade of the family courts. Day in and day out, we see these families in the proceedings brought by local authorities for care and/or adoption orders."

For those of us who think our country a much more civilised place than the one our grandparents were born into, the story Mr Justice Coleridge tells is a chilling one. Yes, we may no longer use ugly language that is cruel and insulting to those who differ from us; yes, we may have found the money, collectively, to provide cures for illnesses that would once have crippled or killed; and yes, more of us than ever before are enjoying all the opportunities of an education that extends to university. But we are also witnessing levels of neglect, cruelty and soul-wrenching pain which should shame us all.

Because the structures which provide the innocent and vulnerable with protection, the rules of restraint which family life should instil, are in a state of growing disrepair. We live in a culture of hedonism, a society which divorces sex from commitment and turns it into an alternative leisure activity to punctuate the hours between the PlayStation and oblivion. The consequence is children born, and raised, in an environment where their interests are always secondary to the whims and appetites of adults.

In a landscape shaped by moral relativism, in which it is impossible for authority to make judgments lest it be thought pious, hypocritical or harsh, we provide no consistent standard by which we expect people to live. Perhaps then, we shouldn't be surprised that in this world purged of puritan hang-ups we see children fathering children. But what future are we building for the next generation when there are so many parents now, whatever their age, who never really grow up?

Michael Gove is Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families