Politics
How the left hijacked the family
Published 27 November 1998
Children matter, but their parents' marital status does not. That's the third way view and it's won the argument. John Lloyd reports
The moral high ground on the family, once a preserve of the right because of its perceived greater respect for the institution of marriage, has now been appropriated by new Labour. The right is mad and squawking.
The main role in this hijacking has been played by Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, and shows that this least flamboyant of ministers provides the most apt example of the Third Way. His consultation paper on the family, published this month, has dished the moralists of the right, and made it clear that the Conservatives can only hope to win by moving on to its ground. A green paper is expected in the spring, and then a bill to create a framework within which marriages are supported but placed on a moral equivalence with other forms of family life and child rearing - exactly the conclusion the right most hates.
For the right, the family is a bitter battle to lose. All parties of the right claim hegemony over hearth and home, seeking to represent the parties of the left as light on morals and heavy on intervention into the private sphere via the state. This has not been difficult to sustain: communist governments have been hugely destructive of the family, and even democratic socialists have been prone to social engineering at families' expense.
But not now. Straw's consultation paper pitched itself firmly for the family - "Families are at the heart of our society" is the opening sentence - and firmly for marriage: "Marriage is still the surest foundation for raising children." Mindful of hubris, it casts itself as a humble adviser, certainly not a moral exemplar: "We must not give the impression that members of the government are any better than the rest of the population in meeting the challenge of family life. They are not." Looking round his colleagues gathered at the cabinet table, Straw, himself divorced and now remarried, would have seen more divorcees, singles and gays than he would married men and women.
The right claims that the left refuses to take a principled stance - that it says in one breath that marriage is best, and in another that everything else is best. Straw's paper expresses its own preferences, but is tolerant of others'; if the prose is at times pious, the paper constantly, even obsessively, disclaims the intention to intervene. "Family policy has suffered from the misguided view that there are large levers that government can pull to affect how families behave. Families are and will always be mainly shaped by private choices." When it proposes strengthening marriage, it is quick to issue the disclaimer that "this does not mean trying to make people marry, or criticising or penalising people who choose not to. We do not believe that government should interfere in people's lives in this way." It then gives a list of new and borrowed ideas - encouraging registrars to make civil marriage more of a celebration; providing more pre-marriage counselling and guidance for threatened marriages; and making pre-nuptial financial settlements justiciable.
The paper has excited the contempt of the foremost UK campaigner for "traditional" families, Patricia Morgan of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). In a response to the consultation paper, Morgan said its avidity to refute any notion that it held large levers was a "fatalistic excuse for inaction". Melanie Phillips, by far the most prominent of the conservative commentators on social and especially family issues, called its even-handedness between married and non-married lifestyles "timidity". This is remarkable because the neoliberal right, of which the IEA was such an inspired begetter, held state intervention to be its major foe. Helen Wilkinson, the Demos researcher who has emerged as a major commentator of the left on the family, says that "this was the main contradiction of the Thatcher years; that between a liberal economics and a traditionalist family. But you cannot have one with the other. Men and women have to cope with the pressures of a freed-up economic system in ways which work against the view of family which Patricia Morgan supports."
Yet Morgan and those who stand with her, like Charles Murray in the US, progenitor and father figure of much of conservative family thinking, have gained respect for two contentions. First, that the trend of tax policy over the past three decades has tended to reduce or even cancel the preferences given to marriage; the tax structure, instead, has treated men and women as single agents and presupposes that both work.
Second, that the rise in juvenile crime and disruptive behaviour seems to be in some way related to greatly increased family breakdown - in particular the lack of fathers. "Juvenile violent crime has increased sixfold [in the US], from 16,000 arrests in 1960 to 96,000 in 1992," writes David Popenoe, a conservative US sociologist in his essay Life without Father. "Teen suicide has tripled. Alcohol and drug abuse among teenagers . . . continues at a very high rate . . . The evidence is now strong that the absence of fathers from the lives of children is one of the most important causes."
Ceridwen Roberts, a former civil servant who now runs the Family Policy Studies Centre, thinks that Morgan is right about tax disincentives to marriage, but also thinks that this government is giving mixed signals on marriage through the fiscal structure. She does not believe that simple messages like tax benefit for married couples would necessarily have the required effect. She also thinks that marital break-ups make things worse for the kids - though she draws some distinctions here. Quoting a recent book by the American social scientists Paul Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk, Roberts says that "children in a very bad marriage, where there's violence and high tension, are better off when there's a divorce".
However, the real battle is over whether or not government policy of any kind can recreate the ubiquity of a family structure which the conservatives want: that is, a man who works, a woman who looks after the children, married for life. Morgan and Phillips show revulsion at other forms of families - unmarried, remarried, gay couples who adopt; they believe, with Popenoe, that progressive ideology and feminism seek to destroy the family in many ways, but especially by marginalising and demonising the father. Popenoe, too, is a social engineer: "In order to restore marriage and reinstate fathers in the lives of their children, we are somehow going to have to undo the cultural shift of the past few decades towards radical individualism."
The right claims that the left has lost the war; indeed, that there has been a white flag of surrender, raised in the liberal US monthly the Atlantic. In an article in 1993 named "Dan Quayle was right", the writer Barbara Whitehead sought to rehabilitate an ogre of the left, the former vice-president Dan Quayle, who had criticised the single-mother TV character Murphy Brown for sowing examples of irresponsibility. "The social science evidence is in," wrote Whitehead. "Though it may benefit the adults involved, the dissolution of two-parent families is harmful to large numbers of children."
But what happened has not been a capitulation to the traditionalism of the right. Instead, it has been a classic engagement of the Third Way kind; both the new Democrats in the US and new Labour in the UK have absorbed some of the incontrovertible evidence of family anomie and decided that they would concentrate, not on rebuilding marriage, but on safeguarding the child in a diversity of relationships.
"New Labour in power," writes Wilkinson in her essay The Family Way, "has been keen to distance itself from top-down moralising about family forms and values . . . It avoids retracing the fault line between traditionalists and liberals."
Most of the surveys taken in the past ten years show that women do not, in the main, want to give up a job for child rearing (though a significant minority do). Many want time out, or part-time work, when their child is very young; fewer dedicate themselves to motherhood. The differences between men and women, especially in the younger groups, are now less than they ever were; both men and women are partaking of each other's styles, including in their attitudes to the family.
The breakdown of the family on which the traditionalists focus is too narrow, their critics argue. Aminatta Forna, a feminist writer whose book Mother of all Myths is regarded by Phillips as one of the more hateful products of the anti-marriage, anti-father brigade, says that "we have lost the communities and extended families within which the nuclear family used to locate itself, and in some countries still does. It leaves the nuclear family very isolated - and when that cracks, there's mum left holding the baby."
Phillips writes of Forna that she claims the "maternal ideal was invented after the second world war". In fact, Forna is more interesting than that; she claims that an idealised motherhood is a cultural product and reached its "height" in the two and a half decades after the war. Her book shows that motherhood and fatherhood have changed greatly in their nature across time and culture. Popenoe, by contrast, believes that "marriage and the nuclear family are the most universal social institutions in existence".
Both sides claim to wish to rescue mothers from despair and fathers from uselessness. But the conservatives believe this can only really happen within marriage. The left believes it can happen in a variety of ways, as long as men can be persuaded to put children first.
The left claims it is in tune with the ways of the world, and can improve it with careful assistance and a concentration on children. The right wants the world engineered back to its ideal. It is a stunning reversal of roles, and one which renders the right increasingly irrelevant in a field it once commanded.
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