Why Ideas Matter

This posting is aimed at showing how wild, fringe ideas, which hardly anyone notices at the time they are first set out,  turn into British government policy. I must express my gratitude to the estimable and courageous Erin Pizzey, for kindly lending me her copy of ‘The Family Way’, a pamphlet written by that Terrifying Trinity of Harriet Harman, Anna Coote and Patricia Hewitt, and published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), at the end of September 1990. The excellent People’s History Museum in Manchester (famous for its prize exhibit, Michael Foot’s alleged donkey jacket) were, unusually, unable to find it in their archives).  

 

I was in Moscow at the time it came out, barely aware of the tunnelling and burrowing which the radical left were already doing beneath the apparently solid structure of British family life. I also had no idea that the reliably conservative newspaper for which I then worked would, within a few years, come into the ownership of a company whose chief was a keen supporter of the IPPR, and would support New Labour at the 1997 election. Thus is the astonishing future hidden from us in a fog of unknowing. All one can learn from this is that there are some surprises coming, and that normality is an illusion.

 

Even so, some changes can be observed as they gestate and form. I think the state’s increasingly keen  support for the unmarried family is such a  change.

 

In fact, before I spent my two and a bit years in Moscow, I was pitifully unaware of the nature, power, extent and speed of social, cultural and political change which was already changing this country. Although I was myself an ex-Marxist, I did not properly understand the extent and nature of my own abandoned beliefs, though by then I almost instinctively knew them to be dangerous and bad.  I still by and large accepted the clichés in thought which most people accepted, bowed to conventional wisdom on most matters, regarded the ‘West’ as a solid bloc of virtue and believed that the Conservative Party was still a reliable defender of institutions, morals and traditions. I thought that the defining issues between left and right were ownership of the means of production, trade union power and which side you took in the Cold War.

 

My education had been wholly inadequate until I went, as it were, out into the cold and dark and saw the bones and guts of the wounded world, exposed as they then were in that history-haunted, semi-devastated landscape.

 

So if I had seen ‘The Family Way – a new approach to policy-making’, in its dull pink-and white cover on the day it was published (a day when I was in fact moving into my sinister, magnificent Moscow flat overlooking the river) , I would probably have dismissed it as just another display of  utopian fantasy by a discredited and marginalised left.

 

I can find almost no reference to it in the newspaper files of the time. Robin Oakley, then political editor of the Daily Mail, was among the few who noticed it.

 

He wrote on 27th September 1990, under the headline ‘Parties urged to abandon “cosy family”’     

 

‘A LEFT-of-centre think-tank urged yesterday that parties should abandon the Victorian concept of the family as a private self-contained unit with a breadwinning father married to a non-employed caring mother. Politicians should accept instead that fewer people will marry and a greater proportion will divorce. Policies were needed to improve the working prospects of women and to encourage men to be more active parents. The Institute for Public Policy Research paper, The Family Way, by Anna Coote, Patricia Hewitt, Neil Kinnock's former policy co-ordinator, and Harriet Harman, Labour's health spokesman, called for men and women to be free to combine parenthood and paid work on an equal footing. More child-care facilities should be provided to help women to work and become financially independent. Paternity leave and other measures were demanded to encourage fathers not to be ``the Sunday male'', insulated from their children by working life. The report said that in families in which fathers had played an active role with the children, there were better prospects of a child maintaining a good relationship with both parents after a divorce.

 

At the Westminster launch of the document, Ms Harman accused the government of stigmatising 2.4 million children who did not live in traditional families with two married parents. ``The government is badly wrong on the family. Instead of a sensible public policy, it is whipping up public anxiety about the changes in family life. It is standing on the sidelines wringing its hands and saying `We wish these changes were not happening','' she said.

 

The document suggested that family structures were reacting to the shift to a service economy, the new phase of information technology, the declining birthrate, the expansion of higher education and the modern expectations of women. With marriage changing ``from social institution to private relationship'', couples placed more emphasis on the personal qualities of their partners, seeking companionship, communication and sexual compatibility. Women's lives were altering but there were few signs of men's lives undergoing compatible changes.

 

There was little evidence to support the idea that lone parenthood was a direct cause of children's under-achievement, or of juvenile delinquency. There was, however, ample evidence that lone parenthood was associated with poverty which hindered children's development emotionally and educationally. Public policy should encourage rather than coerce. The report put the emphasis on making men more responsible, changing their role in the household, encouraging women to work and forming strong bonds with their children.

 

Among measures suggested were tax relief or credits on child-care expenses, a local tax on businesses for councils to spend on child care, making planning approval conditional on the provision of nurseries, and creating consortia of businesses, local authorities and child-care companies to run nurseries.

 

On health, the report urged a choice of contraceptive services with a special focus on teenagers. Employed women should have the right to six weeks' paid maternity leave and men to ten days' paternity leave. Parental leave of a minimum three months was demanded, with an allowance paid out of public funds, possibly financed by contributions from employers. Workers should be allowed to return to work part-time for up to five years after parental leave.

 

The report urged quicker ``fault-free'' divorces without partners having to attribute blame for the breakdown. It also supported a comprehensive non-adversarial family court system.

 

Calls were rejected for the replacement of child benefit with tax allowances. Those would go in most cases to fathers who would not necessarily spend them on the children, the report said. Income tax should be increased to pay for much higher child benefit.’

 

This is , typically of Robin, a good, clear, concise account. But that is the limitation of news. What Erin Pizzey spotted, and has since drawn to our attention, is that the document was not just a series of policy suggestions made by marginal members of a beaten and powerless party. It contained a strong ideological current, to which we should have paid far more attention.

 

The paragraph to which Erin Pizzey draws attention is on page 26 . It comes after a lengthy passage on how mean are pretty dreadful. E.g.: ‘most domestic violence and child sexual abuse is perpetrated by married men against their own wives and children’. Can this still be true? The assertion is based on a study made between 1977 and 1982 by ‘Cleveland Refuge and Aid for Women and Children’ , studying 393 women who sought refuge to escape domestic violence, plus some ‘unpublished figures’ supplied to London Women’s Aid by the Metropolitan Police, plus a 1984 Journal study on the prevalence of abuse by stepfathers as opposed to natural fathers. My guess is that in the pre-1985 period most women with children were still married as a matter of course. What would be more interesting, now that cohabitation and non-marriage have become much more common, would be to survey this problem in comparable households among the married and the unmarried.

 

Then there’s ‘the great majority (84 per cent) of adults convicted of criminal offences are male, and men account for an even higher proportion(91 per cent) of those convicted of violent crimes. Many of these male convicted criminals are married men and it is undoubtedly the case that many boys larn to be violent and/or criminal by following the example of their own fathers’ etc etc etc.

 

‘Moreover, as we have noted, women do almost all the work involved in bringing up their children, whether or not they are living with the children’s father; this has remained unchanged for generations.’

 

In short, men are a thoroughly bad lot. And so we come to the key sentence:

‘It cannot therefore be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony or cohesion’.

 

This last bit is not just a description of existing circumstances. It is an actual battle-cry for the positive virtues of the fatherless family, though I doubt whether Ms Harman (married to a trades union official)  or Ms Hewitt  (married to a left-wing judge) would have said it as clearly and openly as they approached Cabinet office seven years later.

 

The figures in the report, written in the deepening twilight of the dying Thatcher period, are startling.

 

‘Between 1971 and 1987, lone parents as a proportion of all families with dependent children , rose from 8% to 14%’ though the figures were far higher for central London (26.6%) and other major cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Birmingham ( roughly 20% in each).

 

They had no idea how lucky they were. The *national* average of such families is now about to reach 24%, and they are almost universal in some of the harsher areas of our big cities, while cohabiting households (affecting one adult in six) have doubled in number since 1996 and are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the UK.

 

What’s also clear from the report is that much of this social change has been driven by the needs of business, which in the early 1990s began actively to want married women to go out to work (the authors correctly note this is a dilemma for Conservatives who seek to be pro-family and pro-business at the same time).

 

They note that, under external pressures ‘the traditional, Victorian model of family life is becoming a minority pursuit’.

 

How many of these pressures might have been avoided or mitigated by genuinely conservative social policies is hard to say.  Clearly these three authors are not social conservatives, and are far from dismayed by the developments they report. But the package outlined in Robin Oakley’s report is surely aimed at making it easier for the world to rub along *without* the Victorian model. And so it has.

 

Was this inevitable? Or was it just possible, and encouraged? Could we in fact have chosen another direction, had conservative thinkers been alert to the danger? I suspect so (Germany, for instance, has taken a very different path, as has Japan).

 

In any case, it is a warning to us all, to take seriously those tiny, diligent pressure groups and think tanks, and their worthy pamphlets.