Wimbledon and the Family

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column:

"Nobody seems to have asked for it. No real reason was given for it. But female players at Wimbledon will no longer be referred to as 'Mrs' or 'Miss' by the umpires. It will just be bare, unadorned surnames. Why is this small thing so dispiriting? Because it is by a thousand such small things, imposed by faceless people, impossible to prevent, that our world is being changed beyond all recognition.

I will be told that it is trivial and that it does not matter. But if that is so, why did they bother to do it? Because it matters greatly to them, just as the incessant, relentless imposition of the metric system matters greatly to them. Oppose any of these things and you will be told that you are fussing about trivia.

But you didn't start it. They did. And see the expression that comes over their faces if you accuse them of obsessing over trifles. And that is why it should matter to you. These titles symbolise a great deal.

Wimbledon has done away with titles for women . Above all, they refer to the distinction, once enormously important but now more or less abolished, between those who were married and those who are not. The force behind this is the same force that caused the British State to seek out and destroy every possible mention of the words 'husband' and 'wife' from official forms and documents. You would have thought that this stately old practice might have been allowed to continue in picturesque, old-fashioned bits of biscuit-tin Britain such as Wimbledon, in so many ways a museum of pre-1939 middle-class suburbia. But no. The thing about totalitarians is that they have to control everything, that everything must be brought into line.Every last trace of the old regime must be discovered, erased, painted over, demolished or chiselled away.

 The process is still not quite complete. Marriage, that fortress of private life, has pretty much been destroyed in this country.It still has an official existence, but the authorities give it no privileges or help, and the law waits like a vulture to pounce on every united home, and impose a high-speed divorce at the first sign of trouble.The whole way in which we deal with each other has been transformed by this sort of change. The main beneficiary has been the all-powerful State, which now reaches into what were once our personal lives in ways that would have been quite shocking even in 1980. And the main sufferers, as always, are the abandoned, neglected, baffled, misled, miseducated children, so many thousands of them, with no secure place to turn to, just more freedom than they have ever been shown how to cope with."