AND ANOTHER THING
Blair's government will ultimately fail unless he rescues the family
PAUL JOHNSON
The undermining of the institution of marriage and the weakening of the family system stand right at the heart of Britain's problems. These evils, and the failure of government to tackle them — its propensi- ty, on the contrary, to aggravate them by foolish legislation and idiotic tax and wel- fare policies — are responsible for many of the cruellest blows, great and small, which rain on our suffering nation. Princess Diana was a victim not merely of the media but of two sick families. I do not blame Earl Spencer for the bitterness of his funeral address, for the dead girl had been the life- consoling elder sister of his childhood stricken by their parents' divorce, from which she too suffered. It is hard to believe that united and responsible parents would have permitted her marriage, at 19, to a man whose heart was already given. Then too, as Diana herself stressed, the fact that senior royals, such as the sovereign and the heir, have separate households, whose members engage in rival scheming and carry malicious tales to their principals, makes it 'difficult for these royal marriages to work well, or at all. She blamed the mul- tiple household system both for the alien- ation of the Duke of Edinburgh and for the fragility of her own marriage, which other- wise might have survived a mistress or two.
The decline of the monogamous family household, and of the ramifying, extended family it makes possible, are responsible for more unhappiness than any of the develop- ments of our odious century, total war alone excepted. It is true that some families generate unhappiness, as their wounded members believe. They are comparatively few but they produce a disproportionate amount of fuss, in novels and plays and in the columns of anti-family newspapers like the Guardian, the Independent and the Observer. Grievances against parents or sib- lings, or simply what happened in child- hood, make victims articulate as well as sour. But just as hard cases make bad law, so unhappy families make bad sociology. The overwhelming majority do not speak about their families because they take them for granted, like good health or the bless- ings of peace. The most common complaint now — it grows in volume and numbers yearly — is not of oppressive families but of the agonising emotional vacuum in the lives of those who grew up without any recognis- able family at all. Their envy of those who belong to close families is now, in my observation, stronger than their envy of wealth, though of course members of a functioning family are likely to be better off than those who have none.
It amazes me that governments do not put repair of the family right at the head of their preoccupations. We have achieved a lot in the last two decades. We have destroyed the evils of union power, returned most of our hopeless public sector to efficiency and profitability, reduced excessive taxation, recreated an entrepreneurial society and made our country one of the best places in the world in which to invest. We are now in the pro- cess of reforming welfare and education. But the problems which remain, and which we are not tackling at their roots, are most- ly related to the decline of the family. The fundamental causes of poverty are illegiti- macy and divorce. Shifting relationships outside marriage, and the break-up of mar- riages which have produced children, cause poverty in the present generation, and the offspring of these disasters are more likely to be under-educated and so poor, in turn.
The ugly truth is that we are segmenting our population into smaller units, each liv- ing apart, with its own home, its own car, its own unaided struggle to make ends meet without any of the pooling of resources which strong families make possible. Chop- ping society into thinner salami slices, quite apart from its obvious moral evils, makes no economic sense. We are duplicating, even triplicating countless goods and ser- vices. The cost and waste are prodigious. And it is quite literally destroying the coun- try, particularly the south of England. The vast majority of those 4.4 million extra homes which are to be built this decade and the next, the land for which will come mainly from virgin fields, are needed to house divorced couples and single-parent families. The cost of this addition to our housing stock will be enormous and the environmental disaster will be on a scale our country has never before experienced.
Moreover, the housing explosion is only one of the penalties we shall pay for weak- ening the family. Without a stronger family we shall never reduce crime rates to tolera- ble levels, and it is likely that Tony Blair's plan to put education at the top of his pri- orities will have only marginal results. Without a ubiquitous, functioning family system, we shall begin the new millennium in poor shape morally, socially, economical- ly, educationally, environmentally and spiri- tually. Why do not public men and women grasp this obvious fact and unite to do something about it? The last government actually made things worse by enacting a law to make divorce quicker, cheaper and easier, and to do so John Major employed all the resources of his one political skill forcing bad legislation through parliament. I begged Tony Blair to kill this destructive bill, which he could certainly have done, but he refused. He now knows better, as he in turn confronts the practical problems created by family disintegration. But he still does not grasp the centrality of the issue.
It is monstrous that all our plans to cele- brate the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ still lack a religious dimension. The event we honour was the creation of the Holy Family, the paradign nuclear family for all ages. What better way, then, to make the millennium meaningful — to make it useful and profitable as well as holy — than to bring vigorously to the attention of the nation the urgent need to re-establish the living family as the very bedrock of our society? Here is something on which both parties could unite, the Archbishop of Can- terbury, the Cardinal of Westminster and the Chief Rabbi make common cause, and the Muslims and Hindus, who operate the family system better than we do these days, provide exemplary backing. I wish that the Daily Telegraph and the Mail, instead of bickering embarrassingly, would unite round this theme, and induce the Murdoch papers to join them. There are many com- plaints that the Blair government, though wonderfully adept at getting results, lacks a central theme. Well, here is one. What a splendid title to lasting fame Blair could earn if he went down in history as the prime minister who restored the British family to health and strength.
Previous page
