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At the same time, that short-term benefit has to be acknowledged if this country's alarming statistics on underage pregnancy are ever to be brought down to the levels of other European countries. Phillips thundered about families in which "all standards of restraint and civilised behaviour have broken down". Actually, the young mothers seem to be quite fond of their offspring, which is not to say I am in favour of teenage pregnancy, but does suggest that members of the family have some sense of responsibility.Struggling out of this thicket of moral condemnation, it seems to me that the problems with underage and teenage pregnancy are not so much moral as practical. The Mail's case against families like that of Mrs Atkins fails not just on that count but also in its language, which is little more than standard puritan invective.
One Blairite told the House: "I became involved in politics because I believed passionately that we must try to end divisions in society and help to build a cohesive society. We should have a society in which all of us have an equal chance to get on, with an equal chance to get into the best schools and universities, to hold a rewarding job and to own our own homes." That was David T C Davies, the new Conservative member for Monmouth, with a name designed confuse him with the probable next leader of his party, proclaiming himself a one-nation Tory in the Disraeli tradition.Another Tory, Charles Walker, MP for Broxbourne, admitted - "although it pains me to say it" - that Blair belonged in the pantheon of great prime ministers after Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher. It's the Daily Mail's dream story, an insultingly-named "baby factory" - actually a council house in Derby - where a single mother lives with three teenage daughters, all of whom have become mothers themselves. Confirming the paper's prejudices, the teenage mothers have named their infants T-Jay, Lita and Amani, which clearly demonstrates the ignorance of the working classes.
But the new Tories were sharply divided in emphasis, even though there may be no necessary contradiction, between these one-nation Blairites and those, such as Adam Afriye, MP for Windsor, who declared that they had come to the House to defend its sovereignty against Europe.There were also hints of a greener Labour programme in several new MPs' concern with climate change.What is important about these speeches, though, is that they suggest that there are, among the expected quota of bores and cranks, new parliamentarians of quality coming through in all parties. Ultimately, I suspect this is more important for the future health of our democracy than changing the voting system or bringing in a written constitution. Those seem to me to be displaced obsessions with process at the expense of what really matters, which is the calibre of politicians that we elect to represent us More from John Rentoul. "I fear that the second woman MP for Bishop Auckland will not prove to be reliable in quite the same way."Most of the maiden speeches so far have been interesting less for the jokes than for the light they shed on emerging contours of politics after the Blair-Brown era. The younger Miliband recounted how a local newspaper in his Doncaster constituency had mistakenly used a photo of a brick wall instead of his picture, but ended with an account of how much his family owed to this country. "Our father left Belgium in 1940 on the last boat to Britain, the evening before the Nazis arrived," he said.
