UK Politics
Fewer weddings? Blame the Tories
Published 22 May 2008
Who killed marriage? Not the left
Why has marriage declined? The usual explanation - on the right, at any rate - is that feminism and "the permissive society" were pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s by trendy lefties ideologically hostile to existing institutions. Using the media, education and government, these wicked folk brainwashed the masses into believing that marriage belonged in the dustbin of history.
Following the dictates of their betters, workers have succumbed to a feckless, hedonistic and short-termist lifestyle. Their children, condemned to emotional and economic poverty, are the victims.
This presumably explains why, on marriage and the family, the Tories are the social engineering party, which wishes to strengthen traditional marriage with tax breaks. Labour is the laissez-faire party, taking a neutral attitude. Talking to researchers from Civitas, which has just produced a report called Second Thoughts on the Family, Harriet Harman, Labour's deputy leader, argues that the growth of marital separation and divorce, far from being a social negative, is just an example of how people have more choice. She can afford to take that relaxed view, the Tories might say, because she and her like have successfully completed their engineering.
But it is the right, not the left, that has weakened marriage. True, middle-class feminists originally promoted the idea that marriage was a patriarchal institution which trapped women in unequal and often abusive relationships. However, as the Civitas report puts it, "marriage has been extricated from gender inequality". Women don't have to stay single in order to pursue careers. Indeed, potential female partners are now valued as highly for their earning power as their ancestors were for their home-making skills. Members of professional aristocracies, in the media, law and politics, for example, intermarry rather as the sons and daughters of the landed aristocracy did, and with motives not dissimilar. As Jane Austen teaches us, marriage is an economic union, not a romantic one.
Among parents in the higher social classes, therefore, marriage is alive and well. Further down the ladder, it has declined steeply. Of married women who had children in 2000, 43 per cent had a degree-level qualification, against 24 per cent of cohabiting women and just 10 per cent of single women. According to a survey of young people carried out for the Civitas report, nearly a third in social class E say they will never get married, against 10 per cent of ABs.
To understand why, we could do worse than look at Marx and Engels.
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . ." they wrote in the Communist Manifesto. "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their trains of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away." Marriage and the family were eventually among those "relations of society". In the UK, working-class marriage declined not in the 1960s and 1970s, but in the heyday of neoliberalism, under a government that supposedly favoured the traditional family.
Young people believe, according to the survey, that the main reason for marriage is "commitment". But Thatcherism drove the concept of commitment out of working-class lives: the commitment of employers to their workers, of workers to their unions, of skilled men and women to their trades, of citizens to local communities. A whole generation has been taught, in the words of the sociologist Richard Sennett, that "there are no long-term career narratives". Nor are there any long-term narratives for communities, as the fate of village pubs, post offices and small shops vividly illustrates. Is it so surprising that people struggle to establish narrative in their personal lives, too, and that, lacking models of commitment, they are reluctant to commit to spouses and children?
It is refreshing that much of this is recognised by Anastasia de Waal, author of the Civitas report. Although she works for a centre-right think tank, which usually specialises in "back to basics" stuff, she rejects the Tory attitude to marriage as firmly as Labour's.
"Successful family policy," she argues, "needs to circumvent both new Labour's avoidance of the significance of parenting structure . . . and the Conservatives' overattachment to structure for structure's sake."
Instead of worrying about the danger of couples separating, says de Waal, we should ensure the parenting structure remains intact.
But neoliberal capitalism, alongside globalisation and technological change, has, I fear, removed all kinds of structure from the lives of large sections of the population, and particularly the economic structure that once underpinned marriage and parenthood. Perhaps it was unavoidable and perhaps, as some would say, it is no bad thing.
However, it cannot be blamed on the left.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
