Affinities comment: 'Family breakdown and hysterical nonsense'

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Wednesday, 18, Jul 2007 12:00

Polly Toynbee [Tuesday 10 July, 2007 – The Guardian] claims “This broken society rhetoric leaves Cameron marooned….. Cameron says married parents are far more likely to stay together, but it doesn't need a professor of logic to spot the flaw: making cohabitees marry to collect a bonus is unlikely to sprinkle fairy dust and turn them into the same people as those who are already married. Almost everyone wants a lifelong good relationship, yet many fail. Now the small-state party that says governments can't run a whelk stall suddenly imagines the state can control the most wayward of human behaviours and superglue parents together for ever.”

That is a travesty of the position outlined by the Conservatives’ Social Justice Policy Group in ‘Breakthrough Britain’. The lack of logic resides with Polly Toynbee whose assertion belies the experience of the US where a Democratic administration instituted sweeping changes to welfare programmes in 1996 with the result that “the most wayward of human behaviours” are changing. What she says makes no sense. It is hysterical nonsense.

Joan Bakewell [13 July 2007 – The Independent] agrees with Polly Toynbee that, “A £20-a-week tax credit isn't going to save marriage” but does not agree with her that “Almost everyone wants a lifelong good relationship”. Joan Bakewell says, “Society has moved on, and many people prefer to organise their lives in different ways…….. Being married shouldn't come into it. Those in need will also qualify for the whole raft of benefits. But the thing women have in common - being mothers - should be equated across the board. How nice it would be if they also met up in the same maternity ward, the same child clinic, the same playgroups. Women of all classes and incomes have loads in common when weighing babies and talking nappies. It is this bond of motherhood that policies should seek to encourage. At last we have an issue with clear blue water between the parties. It's time we all joined the debate.”

So it is ok for the State to be fostering the “bond of motherhood”, but not the bond of marriage? Joan Bakewell is also talking hysterical nonsense.

Madeleine Bunting [Monday 16 July, 2007 – The Guardian] pleads, “In this grand family squabble, let us at least agree to put the children first - The state's only concern must be the longterm wellbeing of a couple's offspring - the marriage stuff is a great red herring…….. Six weeks ago, 30 organisations wrote to Gordon Brown asking him to set up a cross-government body to look at what could be done to support families - he is yet to reply, but here's hoping he's bold enough to shift the punitive British debate about family breakdown into a new vein in which the state recognises its own inability to reverse deep cultural trends…….”

Madeleine Bunting is as hysterical as Joan Bakewell and Polly Toynbee with, “the marriage stuff is a great red herring”. She fails to understand it is not a function of the State “to shift the punitive British debate about family breakdown” – which in any case Joan Bakewell wants us all to join – but to improve the chances of all people enjoying better family relationships. Trying to lay down a ground rule for the debate that the State must first acknowledge “its own inability to reverse deep cultural trends” is absurd. Over the centuries in countless different countries cultural trends have been changed, the State playing a significant part in the changes, both for good and ill.