There is no doubt that the children removed from the foster care of a UKIP supporting couple are just the latest victims of the culture war being waged by so-called “progressives”. Marxists and Fabians have long waged war on the traditional family since the days of George Bernard Shaw when he wrote in “Socialism and the Family” that socialism…

…intervenes between the children and the parents, claiming to support them, protect them, and educate them for its own ampler purposes. Socialism, in fact, is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it, just as the old water works of private enterprise, or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it. Socialism assails the rampant egotism of the family today… So far as English Socialism is concerned … I must confess that the assault has displayed a quite extraordinary instinct for taking cover, but that is a question of tactics rather than of essential antagonism.

The antagonism between progressive ideologues and traditional families continues to this day, the obsessive efforts to normalise and celebrate non-traditional family structures, the relentless drive to have the state takeover the bringing up of young children so that both parents can be expected to work. The perverse incentives of the tax and welfare system undermining marriage not to mention the rendering of the concept of marriage legally meaningless by legislating for same-sex marriages which can not produce children. All these policies are part and parcel of a progressive imperative stemming from a mindset which understands consciously or unconsciously that the traditional family is the fundamental building block of societies which are incompatible with progressive values. Today’s progressives have changed their language not their essential antagonism to the family.

How is this relevant to the UKIP foster parents having the children in their care removed? Rotherham Social Services said “We would not have placed these children with you had we known you were members of UKP because it wouldn’t have been the right cultural match.” If the implicitly small ‘c’ conservative nature of a family antagonises progressives, how much more horrifying for them are parents openly opposed to progressive values. Joyce Thacker, who had a car-crash interview on the Today programme this morning, is the council’s Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services. Thacker is yet another graduate of the Common Purpose organisation which pursues a “we know best” Fabian-style progressive agenda in the public sector. She was a project advisor for a pilot programme, run by Common Purpose, that was concerned with diversity issues in the West Yorkshire area. Something tells Guido she has an axe to grind in this and is not a neutral public servant…