Issue 8, October - December 1988
by Christopher Winch
"The market is horrifically antifamily. The market is a world of competing equals in which children are a cost, not an asset."
This sounds like yet another left-winger sounding off against the iniquities of capitalism. But if you thought that the author was on the Left, you would be mistaken. There are few on the Left today who are prepared to defend the principle of the family and its value to working class life. Even those who believe in it have more important things on their mind, politically speaking. There are a few honourable exceptions, but only a few.
In fact the quote comes from Patricia Morgan. She is a writer for the Social Affairs Unit, a right-wing 'think tank'. She goes on to point out that families on low incomes are particularly badly affected by market forces.
"People have got to have the choice of being able to bring up young children on one wage. At low income levels, where small amounts matter, that is not now the case. The woman is better off being single than married." (The Independent, 13th June 1988).
The Left's failure
This is a matter that left-wing people need to think seriously about - though it is unlikely that anyone on the Left will be expressing any such serious thinking outside the pages of L&TUR. Sections of the Right are prepared to confront the unpalatable consequences of their policies. And they are prepared to advocate realistic measures to render those consequences less harmful.
In other words, they are doing the sort of thing that the Labour Party and the Trade Unions ought to be doing in order to present themselves as fighters in the working class interest. Yet there seems to be a lack of will to fight on this issue, as on so many other important political issues.
The standard response is "spend more". Yet previous Labour governments have spent more without solving anything, and then have had to make cuts as the economy got out of balance. Fundamental issues are left alone.
There are two important reasons why this is so. One of them is the tunnel vision of the Labour leadership, which seems incapable of looking beyond day-to-day politics and identifying issues that are important to working people. (And this is not necessarily the same as what is important to Westminster politicians and North London political salons).
The second reason is that the Labour Party is held hostage by ideological forces within it that are deeply antipathetic to families and family life. Here I am talking about that North American import called feminism which has so besotted the 'intelligent' left since the early 1970s. It induces among the rainbow variety of left politicians reflexes which are, in many respects, hostile to the working class.
In defence of the family
Government statistics suggest that the number of children born out of wedlock is rapidly increasing. Even when such children are born to couples, the chances of their ending up in single parent families are three times those of children born in wedlock. Children born outside marriage tend to suffer disproportionately both economically and emotionally.
One response to this might be to say that money directed to one-parent and low-income families will solve these ills. Indeed, inadequate financial support is one important factor which is contributing to the decline of family life.
It is an illusion, though, to think that it does not matter whether children are reared with mothers or with both parents, or even, as many feminists appear to think, that children are better off without their fathers.
Children need the different emotional, intellectual and disciplinary contributions that mothers and fathers bring to their upbringing. And they need to be acquainted closely with adult members of both sexes in order to achieve a proper maturity.
Child rearing is also a fraught and long term occupation which requires strong bonds of attachment. It needs reserves of physical energy and patience which are best supplied by a man and a woman in a happy relationship with each other.
There are unmarried couples who have planned and have happy families, but they are a tiny minority of all families. For most people, the visible sign of commitment through a marriage ceremony is a prerequisite for a lifelong attachment, even when such a commitment no longer has much of a religious significance.
The idealism of most young people, men and women, is invested in the idea of a happy family life. Not everyone can get excited about politics or wish to devote themselves to the community. But most people wish to devote themselves to someone other than themselves and to share their lives and possessions with someone else.
This is an important feature of life in a democratic society. People are not just a collection of atoms to be manipulated by the state, but genuine and spontaneous associations of people with their own perceptions and interests.
Thatcherism against the family
We all know of Thatcher's belief "that there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families" (L&TUR No.7). In fact families come in as an afterthought in her philosophy, as nine years of Thatcherite government show readily enough.
Not only are markets antifamily, as Patricia Morgan suggests, but families are not particularly pro-market either. They rely on deeper motivations than material advantage or personal ambition. They need connections with particular places and communities to thrive. And above all, they are long term projects which are not expected to stand or fall with the movement of market forces.
It is therefore not surprising that the worship of the market brings in its train policies which are indifferent or hostile to family life.
The record speaks for itself: the erosion in the value of child benefit (resisted more vigorously by family-minded Tories than by Labour), the indifference to a housing market boom which increasingly puts a home beyond the reach of young couples, and the poll tax, which reverses the fiscal bias towards families which is one of the virtues of the rate system. The poll tax is likely to encourages the break up of families with older children still in the household.
The cost of neglected children
If the upbringing of a child goes wrong, that is not only a disaster for the child. It is ultimately a disaster for society as well.
Even if we are not involved in bringing up children ourselves, self interest should make us see that a failure to do this job properly spells problems for everyone in society, including those without children, in the form of crime, social problems, unemployment and ultimately depressed economic performance.
Changing patterns of population, employment and morality are inevitable in a competitive economy in a state of rapid change. But they bring a heavy social cost in terms of disrupted communities (and the break up of the extended family and the invaluable support it gives to young and inexperienced child rearers), moral uncertainty and confusion and the desire to acquire more and more goods in order to maintain one's status and esteem in society to the exclusion of less tangible goals.
The socialist answer
These are precisely the sort of questions that the Labour Party should be addressing. Socialists cannot wave a wand and make everything right for the working class family, but they can adopt a commitment and policies which will begin to restore the prestige and fortunes of family life.
If the Labour Party does this, it will receive the thanks and votes of the people whose support it once had, and which it needs if it is ever to return to power.
Earlier this year, in L&TUR No.5, Angela Clifford traced the decline of the family wage and the rise of the movement for equal pay, and drew the consequences for a socialist family policy, which recognises and is prepared to pay for the cost to families of bringing up children. This involves increasing child benefit as the family element of the wage and, if necessary, taxing away part of a substantial child benefit when it goes to higher income earners.
These measures should be adopted and given a high priority by the Labour Party. As well as being progressive in themselves, they would prove highly embarrassing to the Conservatives, particularly in the light of recent tax changes which now put an even greater burden of taxation, proportionately, on low and middle income families than ever before.
Lifelines
I would wish to go further than Angela Clifford and advocate that those families who wish to devote one of their partners to the rearing of children, to the exclusion of participating in full-time work, should receive particular recognition and reward in the form of greater tax allowances and/or greater child benefit. This policy is recommended by Patricia Morgan as a lifeline, particularly for low income families where one of the partners wishes to opt out of full-time employment.
Margaret Thatcher is unlikely to implement such redistributive policies, for all her humbug about family life. This is an occasion for Labour to reappropriate socialist clothes which the Social Affairs Unit was happy enough to steal from socialist thinking in the first place. Jack Lane pointed out in the last issue of L&TUR that there are many opportunities for Labour to form alliances with traditional Tories as part of a strategy for defeating the real Thatcher agenda. Such a move will go some way towards helping working class families to realise some of their ideals.
More pragmatically, there is a social benefit in the form of early educational experiences which are difficult to reproduce in a school or nursery and which are of lasting value. There is evidence which suggests that all families make a large contribution to the knowledge and skill of young children through the strong emotional bond and sheer amount of time that is spent together in the years before school. A further benefit is that parents can do some educating away from the clutches of the educational 'experts' who have done so much harm to the educational system.
All parents deserve a break from their children, but they should be given the resources to decide for themselves how this should be organised. Municipally run nurseries may help to play this role, but their pretensions as educational establishments are hugely overrated. What would be of greater value to parents bringing up their children on a full time or part time basis would be further assistance and advice so that they can continue to do better what many already do well. This is an area where teachers rather than educational experts might be able to help.
Child sex abuse
Just how fragile the modern family can be has been illustrated recently by the horrific events in Cleveland which have been documented by the Labour MP Stuart Bell. Here is a Labour MP who has been courageous and devoted in his attention to his constituents and their children, and for his pains receives scorn from the "progressive" establishment within the Labour Party.
The events in Cleveland, which are probably taking place on a smaller scale in other parts of the country, show how fragile family life is in the face of attacks from the child care establishment.
Child sex abuse is a horrific crime which, where suspected, should be properly investigated and treated according to the criminal law. The great majority of the Cleveland families who had their children taken away from them, have had them returned with no proceedings brought against them.
The diagnostic technique used to detect sexual abuse in Cleveland is both inadequate in itself and inappropriate for what it was intended for. As Bell points out, anal reflex dilation, if it is taken as a sign of abuse, would suggest sadistic rather than sexual abuse of children.
The Cleveland social worker principally involved in the case apparently thinks that this sort of abuse is a natural by-product of power relations in the family, and something nearer the norm than the exception.
Wicked fathers?
If such views are anything like the norm among professional social workers, namely that as a matter of course a substantial minority of fathers sadistically abuse their children on a regular basis (there is of course no evidence for this view presented by its proponents), one is led to wonder about the suitability of mainstream social workers for dealing with this problem.
The problem has arisen out of a misplaced confidence in the views of experts who do not really have a body of expertise at their command, coupled with the feminist belief that men are innately wicked and unsuitable for the upbringing of children.
This opinion may be found in many academic departments of sociology and social work. It is an ideological, not a scientific, opinion and one which finds great favour in the milieus where social workers receive their education and professional training.
If many social workers hold such beliefs, then involving them on this issue seems about as helpful as leaving a fox in charge of the hen coop.
Alternatives
A better approach would be to set up a national investigative agency, independent of generic social work, which would provide specialist expertise for and assistance to the police in their work on sex abuse. Sex abuse is a very serious crime indeed, but false accusations are also no light matter. A national investigative agency would be better able to catch the guilty and to spare the innocent.
This is not, unfortunately, a recommendation made by the Butler-Sloss enquiry, and so a large part of the problem will remain.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the Cleveland scandal only came to light because parents and children were lodged together in the same hospital, and parents came to realise that they were there for the same reason. Where this condition does not obtain, parents will not have the opportunity of redress and will be presumed guilty of abuse until they can find some means of proving their innocence.
What the episode illustrates is the low esteem that family life now enjoys, especially among the highly educated professional elite, and the fragility of families in the face of ideologically motivate 'experts'. Stuart Bell writes:
"When these parents took their story on to the streets they began their own social revolution; a revolution that would swing power back to parents and their families, that would check social services, that would make consultant paediatricians and their employers more accountable to the public, and would restore to government and Parliament a proper interest in family life. Indeed, the government promised new child care legislation in 1988-9. Paradoxically, a proper balance between the family and the state would enhance rather than detract from the rooting out of child sexual abuse; for with the help of nationwide guidelines, applicable from John O'Groats to Land's End, with the help of multi-disciplinary proceedings, whereby police, social services and health authorities worked together by consensus rather than confrontation, children in need could reach out for protection; and families concerned with their children's health need not worry that a random check at the hospital would see their children taken from them."
One can only hope that Stuart Bell's optimism is justified and that the Labour Party will help to ensure that child abuse is stamped out while the rights of families are protected. One suspects that imported ideological baggage among the 'intellectuals' may make that difficult.
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