The Labour Family | Outside In

The family. Not something the contemporary left is terribly good at talking about, the family. Mere mention of the word can bring about fits of blushes in the more timid whilst raising the hackles of an energetic few just waiting to pounce on anything that smacks of judgement or prejudice. When, in the occasional burst of courage, the left does advance and broach the subject of the family, the words that come out of its mouth are often so vague and platitudinous as to verge on the worthless. They don?t say anything in particular, and they purposely don?t say anything in particular because they think not saying anything in particular is the safest thing to say. Or, which is worse, they believe that not saying anything in particular is the right thing to say.

The reasons for this are myriad, though to start with political calculation, one of the main problems is that there are so many people one can potentially upset, or at least presume to upset, which is not quite the same thing. So many identities and ideologies, so many lifestyles and life choices, all of which must be respected if we are to fulfil what has become the ultimate and overriding goal: remaining inclusive. The logic of this is circular, as we shall see, but for now suffice it to say that talk of the family can appear such a toxic issue because, save for the release of saccharine niceties laden with innumerable caveats so as to avoid all possible offence, it is just so hard to get right. Politicians, terrified of appearing moralistic before an electorate who know all too well the shortcomings of the political classes, instead choose silence for fear their appeal to accounts of the good to which we can all aspire might instead appear as diatribe delivered disdainfully from upon high to those living on the truly sharp edge of such realities.

For those who disregard the taboos, who earnestly appeal to the values of the Labour Party they grew up with, the values of their parents and grandparents before them, who speak honestly and unambiguously about the family, its importance to society, its breakdown, the state?s role in its breakdown, and the consequences of that breakdown ? for those courageous souls the political collateral is significant.? If their ideas are tolerated then their presence within positions of prominence with which to enact their dangerous delusions and/or outdated prejudices most certainly is not. Such speakers are banished to the fringes, since in daring to say something particular they also sound exclusionary, thereby abandoning (their opponents would claim) those vulnerable people whom the aim of Labour it is to champion.

Yet it must be recognised that the left have not always placed themselves in this position. There was once a time when it was quite able to talk openly and freely on the subject of the family, primarily because it was quite able to talk openly and freely about moral imperatives and the common good without the constraints of relativism and reticence that so besets the contemporary left. Which leads us to the single biggest reason, more pervasive than those offered above, why the contemporary left does not and often cannot talk effectively about the family: because it has embraced an ideology that mitigates its ability to do so.

This creed, the unchallengeable orthodoxy of an activist core (which shall hereafter be referred to as the New Left) but not of many others, is proving both a political and philosophical stumbling block. The contemporary left, dominated by its middle-class urban intelligentsia, have adopted an account of self and social more consistent with the free-marketeering logic they claim to despise than the mutualistic Labour tradition under whose banner they earnestly march. Or, put differently, ideas supposedly shunned (or at least mitigated) in the economic sphere are the same ideas warmly embraced in the social. In the words of John Millbank,

?Politics has become a shadow play. In reality, economic and cultural liberalism go together and increase together. The left has won the cultural war, and the right has won the economic war. But of course, they are really both on the same side.?[1]

As such, the contemporary left has wandered down a logical and political blind-alley. Fully cognisant of the ways in which liberalism in the economic markets has ravaged communities, it refuses to explore ways liberalism in the social markets has produced the same. Able to give coherent accounts of how economic capital, and the lack of it, can have such corrosive effects on family life, it nonetheless stumbles and stutters when confronted with ways social capital, and the lack of it, has proven every bit as insidious. The contemporary left will acknowledge the family was the traditional bulwark against the aching poverty suffered by our forebears, more acute than that suffered by most today, though refuse to countenance ways in which the ?progress? championed by Labour Mum, to use Maurice Glasman?s terms, has often come through jettisoning those protective customs and conventions once upheld by now-cowed Labour Dad.[2]

In what follows I shall try to give an account of how these ideas inhibit the left?s ability to talk meaningfully about the family, a dereliction that has harmed its core constituency more than any other. The evidential argument is not one that I seek to offer. To my mind, evidence pertaining to the superiority of the traditional family for producing positive life outcomes for children is so overwhelming that it seems tedious to reproduce it here. Besides, such an argument is unlikely to convince those that have set their face against it, precisely because they have set their face against it primarily on non-evidential terms. The questions I shall attempt to address, then, are these: how has this situation come pass? And what form has it taken?

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To tell the tale of the rise of the revolutionary New Left is actually to tell the tale of the gradual triumph of radically right-wing accounts of the social sphere. Or, rather more accurately, it is document the gradual triumph of a fundamentally asocial ideology, able to manifest itself in the language and thought of both wings of the political spectrum. Indeed, it is for precisely this reason that the saga is not restricted to the political left, even whilst we can readily admit that the political left is where the culture and thought of which we speak originally found its most obliging host. Rather, documented here is the broad advance of an idea, a habit of thought, which gradually commanded loyalty across the political spectrum. The left?s role as recounted here, therefore, was as much through contribution to the evolution of this doctrine as through the pursuit of particular legislation, be it their own or that of others.

The key word that frames the entire movement here described is that of ?liberty?, the cherished goal that runs through the very DNA of the New Left. The liberty of the revolution, however, was not constructed from within relational frameworks drawing upon notions of virtue to define civic and social freedoms, but was instead portrayed as the autonomous individual empowered to freely contract relationships of consensual exchange. Liberty so defined was predicated precisely upon a rejection of the social: the founding principle was that agents should have freedom to enter the social marketplace as autonomous actors, liberated of all unwarrantable restraints spread horizontally throughout the community and/or imposed vertically through the levers of the state.

Thus, the organic interweaving of civitas and societas that traditionally constructed the ?social conscience? within which the individual operated as one interconnecting link in a living chain encompassing the whole of society, was gradually decried as imposing upon the individual illegitimate restrictions to the reasonable pursuit of self-interest. Norman Dennis, himself in the tradition of English ethical socialism, commented on the similarities between free-market thinking and the post-1960s social and sexual revolution championed primarily by a middle-class intelligentsia. For him, the common feature was the primacy of self-interest over ?the irrational restrictions of socially inculcated ?conscience? and rules of conduct regarded as being absolutely binding regardless of the wishes or welfare of the particular individual?[3]. In other words, potentially restrictive claims of family, custom, community or tradition were out, and the pursuit of self-interest was in. In this sense, social revolutionaries really were constitutionally anti-social, the ASBO generation of their time. They elevated ?I? over ?us?, promoted the pursuit of individual goals over claims of communal interest, and used the reasoning they would later claim to eschew in order to achieve it. Laissez-faire liberalism was embraced in the personal sphere even whilst denounced in the economic. Or put rather more glibly, what the New Left claimed to reject in the boardroom they demanded in the bedroom.

The problem was, as Phillip Blond has argued[4], this deified not choice but rather the act of choosing, such that the left?s accounts of autonomy no longer consisted in a particular vision of the good life, based firmly upon unambiguous distinctions between good and bad choices, but instead on an illusory ?neutrality? that offered only the guarantee of the narcissistic freedom to choose. Refusal to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful attempts at the art of living well left politicians using libertarian means to pursue libertine ends, such that fashionable political mantras focussed exclusively on the (wholly noble) ideal of giving people more power, without ever indulging discussion on what people ought properly to do with it. The role of the state was not to cajole citizens into making the kind of life choices that the chief custodians of relational politics, tradition and community, had long decreed were best for both individual and society as a whole, but rather to remove potential impediments to self-fulfilment and secure the capacity of the individual to act as an autonomous agent within the social marketplace. Here, then, the source of much spittle-flecked disdain against those primary heresies to the progressive creed, social and moral conservatism (on both the political left and the political right), traditions that articulated fixed ideas on behavioural and social standards in satisfaction of the obligations one owes principally toward not oneself, but others.

As such, the advance of the New Left established the near wholesale acceptance within the Labour Party of the language and logic of absolutised individual sovereignty, the belief (tempered by occasional outbursts of communitarianism originating from within the rapidly dwindling Old Labour element of the party) that society, custom, convention, ritual, duty, responsibility, taboo and tradition held no legitimate transcending claim over individual action ? they were arbitrary, unreasonable and illegitimate, remnants of a romanticism that the new rationalism could not permit.? Individuals were competitors in markets, and so long as interactions were conducted upon lines of mutual consent then good government consisted in guaranteeing the freedom necessary for that exchange. Whilst this constituted a departure from certain classical liberal thinkers, who upheld the importance of social restraints even if they could not adequately explain why, this triumph of coldly contractual accounts of the social revealed the Rousseauian ancestry from which it derived, such that the idea that commitments should pertain beyond the collapse of mutual consent was anathema. Liberal economic dogma was gradually producing an army of free-marketeers on the political right who maintained that two independent agents should be allowed to enter freely into contracts of exchange without external interference; preceding it was an army of free-marketeers using much the same arguments to break open the social markets.

Accordingly, the left became stultified by non-judgmentalism, an illusory neutrality that neutered its once distinctive ability to articulate the moral instincts of the many, choosing instead to level down all life choices as equally valid and tarring those who challenged such accounts of freedom as moralistic, judgmental or prejudiced. In so doing, the left ceased to communicate what its tradition instinctively knew: that true and authentic freedom comes not through liberation of choice, but rather through the act of choosing wisely.

State apparatus was gradually conscripted to mirror this new policy of ?neutrality?, with policies redolent of the old moral order slowly eroded. After all, for this new liberty to flourish the state had to remain neutral toward the conduct of those residing within it. It could dispense justice where contracts were unjustly breached, naturally, but the manner in which they were drawn, the manner in which they ended, and the manner in which they affected third parties and society as a whole remained outside the purview of the state. This new account of liberty, atoms unencumbered by the ?social conscience? that could hinder personal fulfilment and gratification, required vigorous state protection. In addition to removing potential obstacles to its procession, this practically meant the commitment to mitigate the fallout from such radically self-centred accounts of freedom. Ironically, this mitigation further contributed to the dissolution of that organic web of relationships that traditionally protected both individual and society from precisely these pernicious consequences, both by regulating individual behaviour as well as through the provision of myriad networks with which to absorb such consequences when they did present themselves. In severing these networks, in rendering associative, reciprocal, mutualistic society no longer at the core of individual progress and preservation, the state had begun to monopolise the space where society used to be.

The principal manner in which this was achieved was through welfare provision. Originally erected upon the presumption of reciprocal and mutual networks of living relationships, the new order demanded that the sanitised individual which informed contemporary accounts of liberty become the model for welfare provision. Emphasis gradually became fixated upon facilitating freedom rather than demanding responsibility. Consistent with the sterile universalisms within which metropolitan theorists had constructed accounts of individual freedom, so state welfare began to be shaped only by universalised accounts of need, freed of contextual detail. Welfare, it was increasingly deemed, was not a system with which to direct or nudge individual life choices, but was rather the impartial distribution of resources informed primarily by the particular need of a given individual at any particular point in time[5]. The root relativism inherent to the ?freedom? of the New Left thus helped construct a morally-neutral welfare system that offered assistance according not to personal behaviour, but according to personal need. On such terms the state sought to alleviate only material deprivation, this being a morally-neutral scale that did not impinge upon the free agency of the individual. The result was a system that increasingly bore the cost of family breakdown rather than challenging it. Mitigation soon resembled facilitation.[6]

Welfare, then, slowly corroded those behavioural norms and expectations that once constituted the social conscience and helped keep people from making the sorts of life choices neither conducive to nor consistent with the art of living well. ?Before long welfare assistance was rendered a ?right? quite distinct from any authentic notion of reciprocity, precisely because the commonly held moral framework within which reciprocity might have held meaning was denied by the relativism inherent to the system. As such, welfare provision became disconnected from the lived realities of its recipients, no longer reflecting situated concepts of fairness or justice. It became detached, distant, bureaucratic, unreflective of the moral framework within which most people still operated, at times even agitating against it, leading more and more people to denounce the system as rewarding the ?undeserving? at the expense of those who try to do things right. Old networks underpinning community and place, family and friendships, had fallen prey to the flourishing doctrine of social isolationism among our newly nihilistic elites.

This ?ber-inclusive system challenged the primacy of the family unit as the fundamental social (and socialising) institution, the unit that had consistently proved the most effective safety net and ladder for the most vulnerable. For in making neediness the primary criterion for state assistance so the state of neediness itself was incentivised, thus implicitly encouraging the abandonment of those relational bonds through which the individual was historically supported but that could now render one less eligible for state assistance (this was particularly true with housing, for example). The state had, in effect, bypassed lateral relations and set up a direct relationship between the individual agent and the central authority ? creating what John Milbank has termed the ?simple space?. Accordingly, the combination of strict non-judgmentalism and universalised categories of need lead to the financial incentivisation of those very life choices that had helped bring many claimants to such a juncture. Since the family was the principal unit that historically performed the function of socialising and supporting the individual, so the essentially condition-free support of the state provided an easy alternative that undermined the authority and the behaviour-influencing capacities of the family. Obligations proper to kith and kin, commitments spread horizontally throughout the community, had been negated as inhibitors of personal freedom, whilst the capacity to inculcate the behavioural norms and social values that served as a protective measure for the most vulnerable were rendered not only impotent, but increasingly disadvantageous.

Far from being an unforeseen circumstance, such a development was the logical outcome of the marketization of personal and social relationships, since if the aim of the state was to preserve freedom of contract then it also had to accept the freedom of individuals to break contract. Or put more starkly, two individuals could legitimately separate simply because they no longer wished to be together, regardless of third party commitments. Obligations beyond the pursuit of individual happiness, such as the presence of children in the family home, no longer had the moral gravity to trump the pursuit of self- interest of those adults that had entered into the original agreement. Divorce law began to reflect this change. Research bodies and charitable organisations, their pockets stuffed with government funding, celebrated the new diverse family forms that began to take shape and disparaged the notion that the old model was best[7]. Government funded more and more schemes to advise, support and help pay for divorce and separation, through legal aid, whilst remaining strictly indifferent to whether divorce or separation was the desirable outcome. Mitigation unwittingly resembled, yet again, facilitation.

The extended family unit, so often appealed to as the saving grace by those seeking to stress the non-primacy of the traditional nuclear family model around which extended ties spread organically through ties of blood and bond, became harder to establish since the strong and closely-knit extended family grew around the stability of the founding unit, that being the mutual creation shared by mother and father of the child. The blood and guts realities of such freedoms, the significant statistical deterioration of potential life outcomes for children growing up in such circumstances, or the significant increase in the likelihood of child abuse in non-traditional family structures, was brushed aside through a mixture of what Norman Dennis has neatly referred to as Social Micawberism and the habit of treating genuinely heartbreaking exceptions to the rules as the normative policy by which to proceed.

Just as the singular pursuit of self-interest lay at the heart of this new philosophy, so one could hardly feign surprise that its adherents remained unable to confront the consequences of its abandonment of relational accounts of the individual, demonstrating with clarity the old clich? that there are none so blind as those who refuse to see. Intellectually tidy accounts of freedom formulated by a class of upwardly mobile and privileged theorists displaced genuinely social accounts of how concepts such as freedom are actually lived out in the complex and messy world of social relationships, with heretics denounced as prejudiced throwbacks to a previous uncivilised age. In a world in which the term ?progressive? was the apotheosis of epithets this was a particularly egregious insult. Yet, as Tristram Hunt noted when writing of the metropolitan left?s hostility to marriage, opposition to sexism meant ?many on the metropolitan left embraced a Marxist hostility to marriage and the family as a political end in itself. As it did so, it aligned itself with an ethos of social hedonism with profoundly unprogressive consequences for the offspring of generations of unstable households.?[8] Swathes of evidence mapping the significant statistical deterioration of life chances for those experiencing family breakdown, data illustrating the disastrous effects on the poorest communities, even the impassioned testimonies of those living on the sharp edge of such realities, was routinely rebuffed with manufactured ambiguities and smear: this was really just a right-wing attack on single-mothers, or the outrageous imposition of the right-wing bigotry of a previous age, or the chauvinistic right-wing assumption that women need men in child-rearing. That the consequences most acutely affected the poorest allowed the professional left to convince themselves, in a neat non-sequitur, that the sole enemy was poverty, even whilst its own tradition held that impoverishment could be caused by and expressed through more than just the material.

In short, the central dogma had to be protected because the relatively empowered New Left set that had dominated the left-wing landscape for so long were the very people who benefitted most from the tilting of the social markets further toward the already empowered: ?as with economic free-marketeers, cries of ?freedom? rang most loudly from that already empowered bloc (in this instance the middle-class intelligentsia) that had the greatest to gain from it. The poorest, increasingly without the networks that once sustained and propelled them, living the consequences of this new ?freedom?, were increasingly less competitive in the markets. Or, in the words of Chesterton, ?Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else. It was meant to benefit the rich; and meant to benefit nobody else.?

As such, the wider cultural erosion of the family in fact hastened the triumph of the free marketeers, who asserted the natural right to independent action, an account of liberty more structured toward removing restraints on the powerful than enhancing the life chances of the vulnerable. The result, more often than not, was the same: the poorest, without the resources to absorb the consequences of this latest revolution, more reliant than their empowered comrades on those institutions and safety nets that the new philosophy corroded, became most entrapped by the pernicious consequences of it. The most vulnerable were more enchained by circumstance, all in the name of making them more free. One could find sympathy for Hilaire Belloc, in writing

?it is always to the advantage of the wealthy to deny general conceptions of right and wrong, to question a popular philosophy and to weaken the drastic and immediate power of the human will, organised throughout the whole community. It is always in the nature of great wealth? to push on to more and more domination over the bodies of men ? and they do so best by attacking fixed social constraints?[9]

As the family unit remains the principal barrier against the outright monopoly of both state and market, so little wonder it should become chief victim when these two institutions colluded to assert one another. Unsurprising, then, that so many ?progressive? mantras spoke of the triumph of a free-market ideology that vigorously elevated pursuit of private interest over and above all relational accounts of the common good. Hedonistic consumerism penetrated the very heart of contemporary political ideology; the left unwittingly participated in the dismantling of the very institution that most effectively resisted it.

Indeed, so complete was the triumph that Labour even pursued the dissolution of those charitable institutions that maintained the primacy of the traditional family unit as the framework within which to provide loving and stable family homes for vulnerable children. The traditional family unit was no longer a protected model, and had to be opened up to free-market competition. Indeed, any political move to suggest otherwise was fiercely rejected[10]. Those who refused the move, who elevated one model over another, who practiced market protectionism, soon found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Outlaw status was bestowed not because of any sense that harm might come to children helped by such agencies, but rather because the refusal to embrace neutralism collided with the dogmas of the new open-market morality. The language within which such action proceeded perhaps provides the best view of the phenomenon I am attempting to describe; adoption agencies were closed down, even whilst the pool of adoptive parents was (and has continued) in an alarming downward spiral, since it was deemed they contravened Equality laws constructed to prevent discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in the provision of ?goods and services.? Goods and services. Whilst Catholic adoption agencies spoke of vulnerable orphans needing mothers and fathers, Labour was theorising equality through universal access to markets, pursuing an absolutist affirmation of consumerist appeals to the provision of ?goods and services.? Those now more likely to spend their childhood in institutional care might be for forgiven for doubting Labour?s claims to have been working to protect the interests of the vulnerable.

Liberty understood through an isolationist prism also found economic expression, chiefly through accounts of autonomy that coalesced around the idea that monetary independence was the principal guarantor of individual sovereignty. Not genuine independence, with individuals owning the means or fruits of their production, but instead relational independence, visualised as freedom from monetary reliance upon others within the immediate circle of relationships. To be free, the individual had to be able to be alone. For most this independence presented itself through paid labour, but the alternative came through welfare provision. Mothers were offered freedom from financial reliance on the father of their child, with the state assuming the role of surrogate parent in the provision of resources to the family unit, an incentive all the more potent the further one descended down the economic scale as the potential financial contribution of the father decreased. This constituted no less than the rejection of the collective interdependence of the family home and parenting, a corrosion of the dignity of fatherhood all the more powerful in the most vulnerable communities. Put simply, fathers were deemed less than necessary, both financially and developmentally[11], optional extras whose presence in some cases even proved financially undesirable. Young mothers were sold an isolationist account of independence and the state provided the resources necessary to make this so. ?Or, in the words of Frank Field, responding to the testimony of a young father detailing from personal experience what the Centre for Social Justice have termed ?the couples? penalty?[12], ?if you were devising a crazy system in which to mess up kids, you?d come up with the system we?ve got now, wouldn?t you??[13].

As such, fathers were rendered increasingly redundant. Young men were made the beneficiaries of a philosophy that dissolved traditional accounts of obligation and duty, eradicating social obligations and expectations toward those civilising and socialising responsibilities traditionally bestowed by the advent of fatherhood. All financial implications of fatherhood could be met by the state, whilst the idea was slowly sown that children endured no developmental or emotional impairment, let alone social fallout, from the lack of a father-figure within the family home[14]. Thus the vicious circle continued, as mothers were convinced they need not rely upon men, whereupon more and more young males became the kind of men that women really could not rely upon. Those communities that resisted such tides, that most forcefully underlined the transcending obligations placed upon the male through marriage and parenting, were often faith communities that dissented from the social orthodoxies of the New Left, being both socially conservative and insisting on the reality of obligation beyond the enactment of personal choice. The New Left, its materialistic rationalism naturally chaffing against religion and faith, gave little quarter.

Whilst the state rendered monetary autonomy attainable through welfare provision, for most financial sovereignty came through labouring for a wage. Or, put another way, people were most free when they worked, which for the vast majority meant when they worked for someone else. Such logic was untouched by older mystical insights on the spiritual and moral value of work, insights that both transcended and informed a once widespread critique of capitalism, but focussed instead on a consumerist account of autonomy that made freedom synonymous with the capacity to labour for a wage in order to prevent dependence on others. Thus, in a neat irony, subjugation to capitalist interest was all of a sudden a legitimate means of securing autonomy, rather than the chief impediment against it. This distinctly anti-social autonomy was still, for the majority, framed in terms of reliance, only now reliance was spread outside of the immediate relationship circle and toward distant agencies, thus freeing the individual from dependence upon those within the immediate vicinity.

Being created within the tidy minds of academics, this new translation of independence was based largely on theories and hypotheses unconcerned with lived realities and was therefore essentially asexual. Since men had always been dominant in the labouring marketplace, however, the narrative proved most radical for females, and was both instructed by and instructive of the creeds of an empowered and privileged middle-class feminist movement trading on the theories of a certain nineteenth-century factory owner that the domestic was the most intimate site of the exploitative capitalistic economy. This freedom could best be achieved through economic independence, since relying on the income of a spouse was an affront to authentic autonomy rather than the enabler of it.? Thus the ?progressive? march of this particular brand of feminism set about removing all obstacles to entry into the workplace: the irony did not register that in securing such victories one saw eliminated all those competing loyalties and commitments that might traditionally have prevented women from being co-opted into a lifetime on the factory floor.

Thus, in a neat twist, the left increasingly treated mothers as absentees from the marketplace, a truancy that dovetailed with a flourishing economic utilitarianism that viewed mothers as independent economic units, not yet fulfilling their potential, to be re-entered into the markets as soon as the opportunity presented itself. The freedom to choose stay-at-home parenting was increasingly remote, an unproductive and optional ?lifestyle choice?, a non-essential role less desirable than re-entry into the GDP generating workplace. Government rhetoric and programme reinforced the drive, providing ever widening support systems abrogating to the state responsibilities once undertaken within the family home, intertwining nudge welfare designed to bring new mothers back into the workplace with a promised increase in benefits should they assent to do so.

The outcome was a left-wing politics that thought it best represented women by demanding they enter the workplace, thereby zealously seeking to alleviate all obstacles, biological and familial, to the attainment of that goal. In reality, an already empowered group were raising to the status of universal progress that which best coalesced round their own interests, desires and priorities. The ?equality? narrative took on a distinctly middle-class air, such that progress focussed on the relative lack of females in the boardrooms of top companies and corporations and rarely addressed the changing economic landscape that, over the decades, had made stay-at-home motherhood a privilege exclusive to the wealthy classes. Clearly discernible was the latent prejudice which deemed domesticity unable to secure either empowerment or autonomy, so that those seeking independence must either forsake one or juggle both. In short, Labour fought for females to have freedom from the family, but rarely fought for those who preferred to exercise their freedom within the family, for those who wanted to stay at home and raise their children, for those who desired policies to support the family they were trying so very hard to keep together, or for those who wished, against the zeitgeist, to resist the call of the factory floor. In the guise of freedom to work, Labour increasingly demanded that all did so, a demand that fell much more heavily on the poorest, more susceptible to welfare inducement, than it ever did on the wealthy.

The net result of all of the above was the emergence of a left-wing politics incapable of speaking in the language of the family. The embrace and pursuit of the free-market social sphere dissolved historic obligations to protect the family over and above alternative models, and indeed impressed upon the revolutionaries every reason not to do so. The left became enthralled with a narrative that both lessened the role and importance of the family, whilst simultaneously trumpeting the benefits of alternative arrangements, usually focussed exclusively on ?relationships?, these being the linguistic manifestation of that underlying commitment to independent atoms contracting treaties of mutual exchange. The family, buffeted by the economic markets, now also buffeted by the social markets, began to dissolve. And its dissolution has destabilised more than anyone else that very constituency that Labour historically fought the hardest to protect.

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Looking round, it would seem the landscape is changing. Emboldened by opportunities presented by the political dislocation of recent years, more and more dare question the zeitgeist. They wonder, contrary to progressive presumption, whether sophistication of thought and practice derives from something more complex than the happy accident of being born later than our forebears. Additionally, the cumulative effect of austerity measures and a stagnant economy has rendered neutrality an increasingly costly option. The slow revivification of mutualism and reciprocity in the conversation of the left has meant old revolutionary orthodoxies are beginning to crumble. People look round at the society it has delivered and sense something is wrong. They think the agenda pursued so single-mindedly looks distinctly like a slavery, the more so for those who most needed liberating. People are asking fundamental questions and find contemporary responses inadequate: what has the breakdown of the family achieved? How has it happened? Who has it really set free? How do we make things better? A left-wing tradition capable of permitting the conversation, let alone pursuing it, is one that will find itself connecting with the innermost anxieties and concerns of those it wishes to represent. It will ditch its off-the-peg nihilism and once again find fluency in the language of life, of love, of liberty.

And so it should. With a revivified critique of New Left liberalism, the left will find renewed those reserves of strength and vision it needs to fight the unjust pressure being exerted upon those most susceptible to social and economic libertarianism. If, on the contrary, isolationist neutrality renders it speechless on the good, the virtuous, even (dare one say it) the moral, then lost is a narrative lens through which to articulate and determine such fuzzy concepts as ?social justice.? After all, if one eschews talk of moral and virtuous action, then one can no more deride the selfish pursuit of self-interest that breaks up economies any more than one can deride the selfish pursuit of self-interest that breaks up families ? they share the same moral roots. In which case what frameworks, other than mere subjectivistic outrage, does the morally-neutral left have available to critique such conduct? By critiquing liberalism, the left will not only refind its voice, it will refind its radicalism.

Whilst it will upset the theoreticians hypothesising from a distance the variations of ?relationships? that can be co-opted seamlessly into new and progressive family models, the left nonetheless needs to arch its neck and be willing to look once again toward the gold standard, the common good, to recognise that to embrace everything is, after all, to embrace nothing. The left has to re-articulate one of its most original and most important insights: that disempowerment is perpetuated through the fracture of living social relationships, that we are weaker when we cease to live and stand together, and that fixing this trumps the bloodless theorems that have systematically weakened the basis for such solidarity.

The left needs to offer a vision based on more than the freedom to choose, more than the pursuit of self-interest, a vision rooted in the insight that freedom comes through the act of choosing wisely.? The embrace of the social revolution, the political commitment to protecting asocial private libertinism, the nihilistic neutrality of the non-judgemental state; all these are a weeping wound in the side of the left, a tradition that once boldly enunciated its own account of the Common Good, of the life lived well, a moral commitment to social justice and authentic freedom of which the state was a part, even when this occasioned restrictions on private liberty (restrictions that, counter to liberalism, sought to restrain the powerful precisely to protect the vulnerable). That this needs stating is an indication of just how far the New Left retreated from the roots of the tradition it came to inhabit. The abandonment of authentically relational accounts of the good life has become an impediment to the pursuit of that vision, surrendering to the political right the capacity to articulate this moral vision without competition from the political left. Nervous of offering a vision that might seem in any sense exclusionary, the left has instead ceased to offer a vision, itself a much more exclusionary act since it fails to offer to any that which should be extended to all.

The left has within its tradition the tools to critique the external pressures placed on the family and the wider community by the advances of global capital systems. With this it offers something unique to the political milieu, allowing it to talk with clarity and wisdom on the pernicious outcomes delivered by economic liberalism, most explicit during Thatcher?s reign though embraced further by the New Labour project[15]. The left also has within its tradition the tools to critique the pressures placed on family and community by the drastic draining of social capital from our communities. This also offers something unique to the political milieu, something genuinely ordered toward the protection of the most vulnerable. Each of these analyses need each other if they are to be truly holistic, truly penetrative in insight. The left seeks to offer the former, but fails in its articulation of the latter, unable to speak in the gritty language of lived relationships, incapable of verbalising what most instinctively feel, of taking its insights on vertical systems and institutions and spreading them horizontally through communities and individuals.

Impassive shrugs or resolute indifference is inadequate. Such responses are of little use to a party who would wish to extend to all a vision of the good life, of the life lived well, a vision that ought to be at the very heart of the reason why anybody should vote Labour rather than anyone else. And if the left needs anything, it is to convince an at best apathetic electorate quite why they should vote Labour rather than anyone else.

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[1] Milbank, J. Three Questions on Modern Atheism [Interview]. The Other Journal with Ben Suriano. 4^th June, 2008.

[2] Glasman, M. (2011). Labour as a Radical Tradition [Online]. The Oxford London Seminars. Available from: www.soundings.org.uk

[3] Dennis, N. (1992). Families Without Fatherhood. London: IEA

[4] Blond, P. (2010) Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It. London: Faber and Faber.

[5] An issue usefully explored by Dench et al. (2006) The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict. London: Profile Books

[6] See Breakthrough Britain: Dynamic Benefits. (2009). London: The Centre for Social Justice

[7] See the Family and Parenting Institute, for example.

[8] Hunt, T. (2010). Divorced from reality. The Guardian. 9^th January. p. 30.

[9] Belloc, H. (2007). Europe and the Faith. Gloucester: Dodo Press

[10] For example, economic utilitarianism and detached neutralism was evident in the responses of certain senior Labour figures to the proposed Marriage Tax Allowance, criticised for being ?expensive? and guilty of ?social engineering?. That the status-quo was both expensive and served to socially engineer was less the point, more that such priorities clearly outranked consideration of what pursuit of the Common Good might look like, and what means might be needed to advance toward it.

[11] The vote against a clause in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill requiring those undergoing fertility treatment to take into account the need for a father-figure when considering the future welfare of their child is a good example of how fathers had become an optional extra.

[12] Breakthrough Britain: Dynamic Benefits. (2009). London: The Centre for Social Justice

[13] Panorama: Britain?s Missing Dads. BBC One, 17 Jan 2011. 20:30

[14] Pamphlets such as The Family Way, co-authored by Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Anna Coote, were bathed in such prejudices, such that Erin Pizzey, founder of the first battered wives? refuge in 1971, could criticise the aforementioned as being part of an anti-male and anti-family politico-cultural agenda.

[15] Jon Cruddas, amongst others, has continued to develop this account, employing a recognisably left-wing social conservatism to critique the destruction wrought on our communities by the uncritical embrace of globalisation and economic liberalism.

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Source: http://michaeltmerrick.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/the-labour-family/

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