To the point...Our weekly columnist Beatrix Campbell thinks it might be appropriate to shoot the messenger this time about Sure Start

Sure Start is an expensive disaster? Or is the research into its outcome the expensive disaster? We can rely on Melanie Phillips and her coterie of grumpy old fogies - all singing the same old apocalyptic hymn about civilisation as we know it collapsing - to miss the point. They seize on the debacle over the Sure Start evaluation to show what they always thought - that the problem of disadvantaged children is feckless mothers and fatherless families; that the problems of childcare in Britain are not the legacy of historic dis-investment in public childcare, but crap parents in crap...