Take Steve Webb for example. His views have been picked up in the Guardian

Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrats' Mr Wonk, said Britain had taken the American, not the Scandinavian road to "consumerist, fractured individualism" in the past 20 years, under Labour and Tory.

That might explain why Ireland gets lumped in with the US and UK in Unicef's rich-but-poor parenting bloc. "Dog eat dog societies," one Unicef author called them.

Like Unicef, Mr Webb notes that national wealth, government spending levels, unemployment, even single parenthood, do not necessarily condemn a nation's children, though they are all factors. "Perhaps the UK property market is partly to blame. You can't live in half the country without being a two-income family where the parents may not see much of the kids," he observed last night.

This doesn´t all appeal to me - some of my best friends and are Scandinavians, and they tend to see the downside of cultural norms that place much higher empasis on conformity. And - as I will discuss below - there are many ways in whch we are different from the Scandinavians.

Russell Eagling's piece for the Free Think blog seems to take a little distance from Steve´s reported remarks:

Steve Webb's positioning on this debate is interesting. He is the Lib Dem often seen to be asking for biggest tax rises. But he is also very much associated with the Christian wing of the party, the pet views of which this story rightly plays to.

The issue generally forces us to examine our own assumptions. No public-spirited liberals would say that the effects of children taking drugs, having sex, being unfit and spending virtually no time with their parents (amongst other sins) are a good thing. But what does the liberal Netherlands (at the top of the list) get right that so-called liberal England gets so wrong?

And Steve himself takes a slightly different line in his own blog. This is how he ends:

I certainly think that the Government should be looking much harder at how some of its policies make family life much more difficult, and also at some of its rhetoric which has regarded bringing up young children at home as somehow a second class activity. We already have a long-hours culture in this country which does little for family relationships, and I'm not convinced that plans to force more lone parents to look for paid work are a step in the right direction.

So should we be more Scandinavian?

The first thing to recognise is that some of the opposing rhetoric is questionable. The "long hours" culture is bandied about, but read this mornings Le Monde and you will find that the average worker in the UK works fewer hours than the average French worker. We have a lot of part-time jobs in this country (my wife has one of them). If you work full-time the likelihood is that you are working more hours than a full-time French worker - but we have more options here.

Steve´s point that the housing market rewards two-income units is of course correct. A large part of the answer would be to build more houses. It would be interesting too to look at whether a limitation on the income multiple used for calculating loans could be imposed, and would have some effect (we Brits spend too much on our housing and too little on the rest of our lives, in my view). I'm not over optimistic though.

Single parents are not a purely British phenomena of course. The Scandinavians have loads of them (and Scandinavian men tend to take their parental leave entitlements when the World Cup is on).

Where do we differ? First, the Scandinavians have worked hard to maintain their manufacturing sector. This is not entirely logical in pure economic terms, but one of the impacts is that they do not have the family stress that we have in some post-industrial areas.

A second issue is immigration: there are many immigrants in the Nordic countries, but a lot of them have simply crossed the nearest border. There are - I believe - only around 400 000 non-european immigrants in Sweden.

Immigration has and continues to bring a lot to the UK - in economic terms and in cultural terms. But it carries with it a certain level of social stress. The shootings in south London have brought the particular problems of the black British family into the headlines again, and Joseph Harden has a moving, almost despairing, piece in the Guardian.

Twenty years ago, as a journalist in the black press, I was optimistic about the future for black Britons, assuming as our presence here grew stronger we'd see our people prosper. Today, though, despite the progress of many, we have seen the growth of an underclass; and without breaking the cycle, it will become more entrenched and more desperate, with teenage pregnancies and ruined life chances becoming the norm.

Our schools throw information about sex and drugs at children from as young as seven. Isn't it time a greater priority was given to teaching youngsters about parenting, about families, and about making sure the next generation doesn't suffer the same traumas as this?

These are tough problems, and the answers are going to be tough too. Steve Webb´s social conservatism and concern for the family may well be part of the solution. But trying to emulate the Scandinavians is probably not going to get us very far.