have undoubtedly made our world less hazardous. But the harsh climate of Britain’s public domain has changed our relationship with error. The consequences can be buck-passing, spin, insincerity, waste and cynicism. Our aversion to risk poses risks of its own.
F is for Family
There’s an old saying that one should never discuss politics or religion in polite company. These are subjects regarded as simply too dangerous to bring up over dinner; passions are almost bound to be unleashed, with the distinct possibility of raised voices, broken crockery and severed friendships. I would, perhaps, add a third category, a subject that mixes the first two in a most combustible fashion: family.
Discussions about family quickly get personal because, well, it is personal. For better or worse, we all have a family and tend to regard ourselves as something of an expert on the topic. From often painful experience, we are convinced we know what works and what does not: we remember bitter Uncle Frank who ended up living alone; mad cousin Dorothy who was pushed into a most unsuitable marriage; and then there was sad Vera who, frankly, tarnished the family name in a manner best forgotten.
Every family has its cautionary tales, parables that reinforce our moral values and shape our political views. The family is seen as the building block of society, its composition and structure essential factors in preventing the collapse of our very way of life. It is a subject so contentious that, for a moment, I find myself questioning the wisdom of even continuing with this chapter. But I don’t have enough to say about flamingos or fezzes so… here goes with ‘F is for Family’.
There is a paradox about our attitudes to family life in Britain. According to a report by the Conservative Party’s policy advisors in 2007, ‘peculiarly high levels of family breakdown found in Britain are at the heart of the social breakdown which is devastating our most deprived communities and fracturing British society in general.’ It is a view that enjoys widespread public agreement. Yet, when one asks people about their own families, a rather different picture emerges.
A few years ago I helped commission a survey for the BBC on people’s experience of British family life, choosing questions that had been posed previously to see how attitudes had changed. In 1964, pollsters had asked whether people were optimistic about the future facing their family. It was the swinging sixties, we’d apparently never had it so good, and Britain was a nation excited about the promise held by the white heat of technology. Just over half of respondents (52 per cent) were positive about their family’s prospects. After four decades of what traditionalists describe as ‘continuous decline’ in family stability, how confident would Britain appear when we asked the same question again? The answer was unexpected: the proportion of people who were upbeat about their family had risen markedly — from half to three quarters (76 per cent) of respondents.
There were to be more surprises in our survey. In 1951, social scientists asked people whether their parents had done the best for them when growing up: nine out of ten (90 per cent) agreed their mother had; eight out often (80 per cent) said their father had done his bit. More than half a century of concerns over parenting later and the figures in our BBC poll showed that appreciation levels had gone up: mums scored 94 per cent and dads 86 per cent.
Are twenty-first-century men behaving badly — spending too much time down the pub with the lads? Back in 1957 one in five married women reported that their husband didn’t spend enough of his spare time with the family. Fifty years of family disintegration afterwards and the figure had fallen to one in twelve.
At first sight, this doesn’t make sense. Marriage levels in Britain are at an all time low and commitment seems to have become a dirty word. For every two weddings there is one divorce and cohabiting couples are even less likely to stay the course than those who have tied the knot. We have the highest proportion of lone parents in Europe — almost a quarter of UK children live with just Mum or Dad. It is a catalogue of marriage break-up and relationship breakdown that we know is associated with depression, delinquency, unemployment and poverty. Yet when asked in 2010 whether they were happy with their family life, a remarkable 97 per cent replied ‘yes’ — a more positive view than in any similar survey I have seen.
Much of the general anxiety about the British family relates to its changing structure, particularly a concern that we are moving away from the model family, whose uncomplicated life shaped the attitudes of the baby-boomer generation.
‘This is Janet. This is John.’ The
Hitler’s bombs had not just smashed the country’s buildings and bridges; war had torn families apart and left countless marriages wounded or doomed. There was genuine concern that the fabric of British life might have been damaged beyond repair. Into this anxiety walked John Bowlby, a psychologist whose own experiences of family life had inspired a fascination in child development.
Son of the king’s surgeon, John’s childhood was typical of an upper middle-class British boy at the opening of the twentieth century. In his earliest years, he saw his mother for only one hour a day, after teatime, and was looked after almost exclusively by a nanny. His parents shared a common belief that parental attention and affection would spoil a child. At the age of seven, John was dispatched to boarding school, later reflecting, ‘I wouldn’t send a dog away to boarding school at age seven.’
Driven by his personal traumas, Bowlby developed his ‘attachment theory’, the idea that an infant needs a close relationship with at least one parent or carer in order for social and emotional development to occur normally. It was a hypothesis that gained ground during the Second World War, as welfare officials tried to look after thousands of small children separated from their parents or orphaned.
When peace had been restored, Bowlby published a book that took the theory further and became influential in the development of family policy. Entitled
Bowlby later clarified his thinking, explaining that he had meant the cause was ‘broken mother-child relationships’, not necessarily broken marriages. Nevertheless, the report was seized upon by those who argued that marriage itself protected against criminality, that the nuclear family structure directly improved social outcomes, and that D.I.V.O.R.C.E spelled disaster.
They are theories that still dominate political debate about the family today. In the Conservative Party’s 2009 policy paper ‘Breakthrough Britain’, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith claimed to have evidence justifying government encouragement of marriage in the national interest. ‘You cannot mend Britain’s broken society unless you support and value the institution that is at the heart of a stable society.’
In the post-war years, the British government had also been persuaded that the social dangers associated with marriage breakdown required state intervention. The Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher rose in the House of Lords in March 1947 to say that each single divorce created ‘an area of poison and a centre of infection in the national life’. Government, he argued, should convince the ordinary level-headed citizen that marriage was an obligation and that adultery and fornication were deadly sins. ‘Divorce,’ he said, ‘is always the final record of a human disaster.’
With divorce rates having increased forty-fold in forty years, ministers agreed to set up state-funded Marriage Guidance Centres to try to stop the rot. A founder of the counselling movement, the Reverend David Mace, was invited to deliver a series of lectures on marital life and strife on the BBC’s Home Service. ‘Don’t let things drift on from bad to worse, and then come for help about your marriage after it has crashed in ruins at your feet,’ he told his audience. ‘There isn’t a minute to waste.’
As Britain rebuilt its infrastructure, the model of the ideal nuclear family was also being renovated to take account of the social legacy of war — particularly the changing ambitions of women. The traditional pre-war marriage assumed the man ruled the roost: wives undertook parenting and domestic duties while their husbands
