A senior judge will deliver an outspoken attack on the Government today, declaring that “all of society’s social ills” can be traced to breakdown of the family.

Mr Justice Coleridge, a Family Division judge, will give warning of an epidemic of family failures, claiming that children born into broken homes are turning increasingly to drink, drugs and crime. He will argue that the collapse of the family is as potent a threat to the country as terrorism, crime, drugs or binge drinking.

In his speech to family lawyers, the judge will say that there has been a collapse of one of the building blocks of society, and that in urban areas family life is “in meltdown or completely unrecognisable”. He will lay the blame at the “neglect” of successive governments.

The judge, who is in charge of family courts across southwest England, will say: “In some of the more heavily populated urban areas of the country, family life is, quite frankly, in meltdown or completely unrecognisable. In some areas of the country, even including the more urban parts of the sleepy West in which I operate, family life in the old sense no longer exists. So I suggest that the general collapse of ordinary family life, because of the breakdown of families, in this country is on a scale, depth and“ breadth which few of us could have imagined even a decade ago.”

The judge has presided over cases of divorce, children in care and family break-up for eight years. Last year he supervised attempts in the courtroom to negotiate a voluntary divorce settlement between Heather Mills and Sir Paul McCartney.

He will argue that he is not criticising single parents. “I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children, but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family,” he says. “And what is government doing to recognise and face up to the emerging situation? What is it doing to halt the decline or even reverse it? The answer is very little, and nothing like enough. It is fiddling whilst Rome burns.”

The judge will give his speech to lawyers from Resolution, formerly the Solicitors’ Family Law Association, in Brighton.

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