The Commentary

At the beginning of December, Michael Donovan and Karen Matthews were convicted at Leeds Crown Court of kidnapping and falsely imprisoning Karen Matthews’ daughter Shannon at Donovan’s flat a mile or so from her home in Dewsbury.

The search for Shannon had cost £3.2 million and many people kindly volunteered their time in looking. Donovan later told the police that he planned to release Shannon and to pretend to have found her, so claiming the £50,000 reward money which he would later share with Shannon’s mother. The idea for this scam seems to have had two sources. First, the pair had seen the media interest and reward money offered in the case of Madeleine McCann who disappeared in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz in May 2007. Second, an identical plot had featured in an episode of the Channel 4 series Shameless, which is set on a sink estate in Manchester.

What drives such people?

The media accused Karen Matthews of moral bankruptcy for using her daughter in this way. ‘From the day Shannon was born,’ commented The Daily Telegraph, ‘her mother appeared to regard her in the same light as her other six children by five different men: as a means of claiming money from the state.’ Radio 4’s John Humphries intimated on the Today programme that he could not understand the outlook and values of such people.

Without in any way wishing to deny the heinous crime of the mother, I wanted to say to John Humphries that probably what drives Karen Matthews is much the same as drives most people in this country — materialistic hedonism. She wanted the money. She wanted it so that she could have a ‘good time’. That is the only purpose in life which secular society has on offer. Those who can get enough money by legitimate means stay within the law, and those that can’t may stoop to atrocious measures to get what they desire. But secularism tells them they only have this life so they had better do whatever is necessary to enjoy it.

Parenting and the recession

Paul’s warning about the love of money in 1 Timothy 6.10 finds a number of other echoes in our land currently. At the end of November the Labour MP Frank Field gave a speech at Leicester University in which he said that the 1950s had been the most peaceful time for British society which was now being ruined by violent crime caused by bad parenting. There were more violent crimes recorded by the police in the last 12 months than between 1900 and 1977. Isn’t it strange that the crumbling of moral values in Britain has come about as we have become more prosperous and materialistic? What signals do parents give to their children about what is most important in life, I wonder? Mr. Field said he believed that Britain was entering a ‘social crisis every bit as dramatic as the economic recession’.

And that leads us to the causes of the economic troubles in which the country now finds itself. Isn’t this to do with the love of money too? I am no economist, but it does not take a genius to see that our incredible borrowing beyond our means from banks and building societies was about the love of what money can buy. And again the deregulated markets were so keen to make money that the old system of checking whether borrowers could afford the repayments went out of the window and they were prepared to contemplate enormous risks. It has all now come home to roost.

Root of all our evils?

What drives such people?

Parenting and the recession

John Benton

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