The solution in some peoples' eyes is to put over the message in ever stronger terms how the nuclear family consists of a monogamous couple, rearing their brood of children with a little help from the state; and as the statistics for such aberration from the narrow path of monogamous wedlock increase, so do the shrill cries from moralists that more drastic steps should be taken to shepherd people back into the time-honoured practices.

This is a mistaken approach, which is unlikely to yield significant results. The current variety of choice when Europeans come to select the family form that might suit their individual requirements the best, is all a part of the liberalisation in values which started as a result of the social upheaval from two World Wars. It also results from the diminution of significance in a man's traditional role as breadwinner for his family, with that role already partially transferred into the hands of the welfare state - plus the attention that may now be given to a woman's preferences concerning such questions of family lifestyle.

I am suggesting that we are reaching a point in the social evolution of our Western society where the law will need to be changed - at the European level, if our Regional Assembles are not yet functioning by then. Our legislators should cease their endeavours to prop up the monogamous family unit at the expense of all others, and concern themselves instead with the relationship between mother and child - no matter what the marital bonding she may (or may not) have chosen for herself. That is where the future stability of society can be doctored to its improved welfare. Parliament should legislate to ensure that a mother has all that she might require for the upbringing of her children, (food, housing, clothing, schooling, medicare and social counselling,) free of charge without heavy questioning concerning the nature of the family form that she may have chosen to adopt.

The day that Parliament legislates to make it illegal for the officials of state to make public record of a mother's marital (or non-marital) status will perhaps mark the initiation of the Polymorphous Society. Monogamous society was a thing of the past, and it will eventually be recognised that the marital format for our emergent society is multi-faceted or `many-shaped'. I am certainly not suggesting that Parliament will ever be concerned to legislate, with deliberation, in order to make things easier for the serial monogamists, or for the polygynists and polyandrists in our midst. But they will eventually feel obliged to remove the stigma of illegitimacy from any child: a stigma that was placed there because of how the parents chose to behave, rather than as a result of any fault that could be attributable to the child himself.

The suggestions I am making would indeed constitute a significant increase to the running cost of our Welfare State, with a consequently heavier burden upon the shoulders of the taxpayer. But I am contending that, once this system is fully operative, the taxpayer may expect to break even on his ultimate cost of living. What he pays out in higher taxes, he will recuperate in terms of the saving in family expenditure, which formerly had to come from out of the breadwinner's earnings. (Subsidised rent, or even direct grant, for the housing of his children and for their clothing too - in addition to all other back-up services which will reduce the cost to any parent.) It will be a case of people finally insisting that our Welfare State should recognise its responsibilities in these matters, rather than spending time and money in the unrewarding endeavour to fix that responsibility upon the shoulders of errant fathers and the like.

If it is protested that some of us might regard it as unfair that their contributions to the Inland Revenue should support the children of others, when they themselves may have opted for a bachelor or spinster lifestyle, then I would point out that they too have advantages to gain from our Welfare State - not least in its provision for a thriving younger generation, (raised in fine health by these methods,) who will themselves perform the services to sustain such taxpayers through ill health or old age. It involves a system where we all take good care of one another, in the knowledge that our own special needs will be addressed by others within the system, which is manned by the young people whom our taxes once supported.