The Slime Factories were working overtime last week, as I once again dared to voice a dissenting opinion on the issue of marriage and parenthood. We have now reached a point where it is almost impossible to pronounce or write conservative opinions about this subject without being personally abused, misrepresented and intimidated. There is a reason for this, which I shall come to in time.
The chief dispenser of slime (though an army of righteous Twitterers stood, or rather yelled and squawked, behind her) was Emily Thornberry MP, member for Islington South and Finsbury, and the Shadow Attorney General. I will also say a little about her in a moment, but first a few general remarks.
Some contributors urge me to try to soften my position on fatherless families by hedging it around with tributes to the wondrous virtues of single mothers. This misses the point. It may well be that all single mothers in general are full of all the human virtues. I do not deny it. But even so they all face a problem. They must raise their children without a father to help them, which, however saintly, diligent and devoted they are, weighs them down with a disadvantage. The standard formula of ‘most/many single mothers do a great job’ always seems to me to be irrelevant to this question, and sounds apologetic over a position which needs no apology. I am simply not, as is always alleged against me, criticising the mothers themselves, as I repeatedly make perfectly, unequivocally clear in unambiguous language. I am criticising the politicians who encourage fatherless families, because the outcomes for the children of such families are in general worse than for those of stable married households (see below).
This discussion also raises the question of different types of ‘single mother’, a misleading category if ever there was one. There are the voluntary single mothers, the ones who have been recruited by the policies of successive governments for more than 40 years, who have become mothers without ever intending or seeking to marry the father of the child.
There are those who have initiated divorces (to be distinguished from those whose husbands have initiated them), who could also be said to have volunteered for the status of single parent, though some of them will plead urgent necessity, and none of us will be able to dispute their case, or want to. In the wilderness created by the Permissive Society, there are many miseries which aren’t really our fault, even though we take the decisions.
Then, quite distinct in my view, there are the wholly involuntary single mothers, deprived of husband and father by desertion or bereavement. And there are distinctions among these, between those who were married in the first place, and those who chose to embark on parenthood without the formal public declaration of permanence which is marriage.
As I discussed in my 1999 book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, a potent and successful campaign was fought in the 1960s to erase all these distinctions and treat all women bringing up children in the absence of a father as if they were the same. I believe the purpose of that campaign was to remove the social and moral barrier (known to its culturally revolutionary critics as ‘stigma’) against those adults who chose (or were encouraged by the state) to raise children outside marriage.
One long-term consequence of it (a fact which amazes many people) is that our welfare system no longer contains a specific widow’s pension. The state of widowhood is not, in itself, recognised as one in need of aid from the state. This change, which took place under Anthony Blair, is a break with almost all concepts of charity dating back thousands of years, under which widows and orphans were the first concern of any community. Interesting, eh?
The next question is ‘does it matter’? I would say that it does. One of the best summaries of the problem is to be found in a paper published by the think tank Civitas in September 2002, entitled ‘Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family’, by Rebecca O’Neill. It can be consulted here.
This paper was written to discuss the possible effects of the steep rise in births outside marriage, which began about ten years after the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, and after the welfare reforms of the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan governments.
I will list some of the characteristics it identifies. Lone mothers are twice as likely to live beneath the official poverty line as are two-parent families.
Lone parents have twice as much risk of experiencing persistent low income as couples with children.
They are twice as likely to have no savings, eight times as likely to live in a workless household and 12 times as likely to be receiving income support (as it then was).
I am not arguing here about whether these (or other) conditions are the simple direct *result* of being a single parent, a more complex question for another time. I am just stating them as facts.
Other selected facts: single mothers have poorer physical and mental health. Young people in lone-parent families were 30% more likely than those in two-parent families to report that their parents rarely or never knew where they were. Lone parents were significantly more likely than couples to have strained relations with their children. Between 20 and 30% of absent fathers have not seen their children in the last year. Between 20% and 40% see their children less than once a week. Children in lone-parent families are nearly three times as likely to describe themselves as unhappy as children raised by couples, have more trouble in school, worse physical health, and are at greater risk of all kinds of abuse.
Put simply, their lives in general are worse, and will be worse. A wise government would seek to discourage this form of household, for the good of the country as a whole – not by punishment or cruelty but at the very least by *ceasing to encourage it*. My favoured tools for achieving this are the end of subsidies for *future* single parent households (existing ones have been made a promise which must be kept until their children are grown), with a reasonable period of notice that this change is to take place, plus severe reforms of the divorce laws, making divorce considerably more difficult for couples with children than it is for those without them. I also seek moral and cultural changes, which would make parenthood outside wedlock less likely, and make marriage more difficult to begin, as well as harder to end.
By the way, as this touches on moral territory, I should mention that I am chided elsewhere for saying that my pleasures are private, when I have views on the pleasures of others. But my private pleasures are legal, and do not in any way influence me towards campaigning for changes in the law which would make illegal pleasures more common. And, as I have many times stated, I do not attack private individuals for their private moral decisions, though I might defend myself against their immoral actions. This is not because I don’t think people do many wrong things, or because I don’t disapprove of those wrong actions. I do. But above all I must disapprove of my own wrong actions. Morals are a matter for the individual, and God.
On the other hand, I attack politicians and their media and academic allies for pursuing polices designed (or predictably bound) to distort human behaviour in immoral (and therefore in my view unhappy or dangerous) directions.
I do not in any way blame the women who have chosen to raise children on their own, because they are subsidised by the welfare state to do so. Their decision is entirely rational (and morally far preferable to the abortion of the child, a choice which is, alas, open to all). It is also easy to see why young women, with a strong and good natural desire to become mothers of babies (a wonderful thing in itself, and easy to understand) wish to avoid entanglements with the often feckless and irresponsible young men created by our fractured families, our wrecked schools, our culture of drivel and our morally bankrupt society and state. Likewise, in a state where marriage is more easily ended than a car leasing agreement (and is very often so ended) it is hard to condemn those who entered into such a lax agreement, later deciding to end it.
How can any reasonable person, likewise, hold a woman responsible for having been deserted or – even more absurd - bereaved? I certainly don’t. The amazing thing is that I am accused of this by people who appear to be in possession of all their faculties.
Why do they do this? They do it because the nationalisation of childhood, and the marginalisation of strong independent families in which private life and free thought flourish, is one of the main projects of the modern radical state, just as it was one of the central policies of the Communist state in the USSR. Weak families are a necessary consequence of the strong parental state, and its desired aim.
Many of these statist radicals are extremely hypocritical, themselves maintaining traditional two-parent households while pursuing policies which tend to eradicate such households among the poor and weak. This, along with the hypocrisy of imposing egalitarian schools on others, while avoiding it for your own young, seems to me to be the crowning hypocrisy of leftism.
Which brings me to Emily Thornberry, with whom I clashed on BBC Question Time last Thursday, 14th June 2012. At the time of writing, this programme is still available on BBC i-player. But I have in any case transcribed the central exchange, which now follows:
The actual question was: ‘Do you agree with Community Secretary Eric Pickles that problem families have had it easy for too long?’
My answer was : ’I don’t think we’re entitled to sit here, any of us, and start saying anybody is having it easy in the poorer parts of our country. That’s not the point. The point is whether they are being given the sort of help they really need.
‘I don’t think that compassion should necessarily be expressed by throwing money at these people. I think that Eric Pickles probably feels the same way. But because this government is in effect a fraud which makes conservative statements and does no conservative things, nothing will come of this. But I think his general idea that what we need to do is to look at the reasons why we have so many problem families - which are fundamentally the destruction of the married family by the deliberate subsidising of fatherless families and an enormous welfare dependent class - then we might be able to do some good. But it doesn’t do any good being rude to people, except to politicians, who deserve it.
‘It doesn’t do any good being rude to people who are at the bottom end of society. Many of them are acting perfectly rationally. If you create an enormous welfare state, people will obviously go and collect the welfare which is offered to them and they will behave in the way which the welfare state persuades them to do. That is why we are in such a mess. And until we get serious welfare reform aimed at bringing back the solid family life which people used to enjoy in this country and which used to be particularly good for the upbringing of children, then these problems will persist, I just think Eric Pickles is showing off and pretending to be a conservative without actually being one, and offending people without doing any good.’
Emily Thornberry: ‘Before I came along today I was advised to do yoga deep breathing and to make sure that I didn’t get wound up by Peter Hitchens, but I just have already and we’re only on the second question. I suppose that given that my family that I was brought up was fatherless, and I suppose the fact that my mother was on benefits and that we lived in a council estate means that we were one of the problem families that you talk about, Peter. But actually, do you know what, we had a solid family life and we did well and me and my brothers did well and my mum struggled, and how dare you say that women, that single parents that live on council estates are therefore by definition problem families? How dare you?’
Thunderous applause. Stormy applause.
PH: ’Had I said any such thing your phoney outrage would be justified. But as I didn’t, it isn’t. And you really do need to do a bit better than that.’
ET : ‘I made a note. (PH ‘Yes...’).
ET ‘You talked about problem families being fatherless and you talked about them being on benefits and that describes the family life, that describes me as a child – and we were not a problem family.’
PH: ‘It’s the subject under discussion. I didn’t say anything about your family or anything of the kind. You are just engaging in phoney outrage for political propaganda purposes, which is what your Party always does... Pathetic rubbish.’
(I should note here that Grant Shapps MP, the ‘Conservative’ Party’s representative on the panel ‘absolutely agreed’ with Emily Thornberry that ‘this is nothing to do with people who have one or two parents, who are rich or poor or anything else’.)
Greg Dyke, my old university acquaintance and former Director General of the BBC, asked what could be done about it ‘without having this sort of banter.’
PH: ’If you try and suggest what you should do about it, you get buckets of slime chucked over you by Labour politicians, and there’s an end to it. There is a simple problem, almost all serious work on the problems of problem families, a phrase not introduced into this discussion by me, in any major country, any major advanced country, will tell you that these problems are concentrated where there are no fathers, and if you won’t do anything about that, then indeed, if you continue to pursue policies which create more and more fatherless families, you will get more of it. I’ll carry on saying it however many times people chuck buckets of slime over me for saying it, because it is important and needs to be addressed.’
I wonder if any of my critics (preferably the intelligent and coherent ones) can identify anything in my spoken, broadcast words above that justified Ms Thornberry’s outburst. If so, can they please say what it is?
I telephoned Miss Thornberry over the weekend and asked her if she would, telling her that I planned to blog about this, and giving her my e-mail and telephone details so that she could respond to this specific question. She has not yet done so.
I attempted to discover if Ms Thornberry (she is, by the way, married to a distinguished barrister, now a judge, and lives in an attractive part of the fashionable London quarter, Islington) had any coherent critique of what I had said, or indeed understood my general point. I found fairly quickly that we spoke a different moral and political language. But, while I was aware of the existence of her view and language, she was more or less unaware of mine. We were, as the old joke goes, arguing from different premises.
In fact, Emily Thornberry’s personal story is a good deal more interesting than her outburst would suggest. She did indeed grow up in a council house, in the absence of her father. But if anyone thought she was just an ordinary working-class girl made good, they were mistaken. Her mother Sallie, alas no longer with us, was a most courageous and distinguished person, and also much-loved by political allies and opponents alike. She was a teacher by profession, and an active and popular Labour councillor who became, despite the privations and difficulties of her life, Mayor of Guildford in Surrey, by no means a Labour town.
But the family was not fatherless in the sense that it had never had a father. Nor was Sallie Thornberry unmarried. On the contrary, she was married to a distinguished and talented academic lawyer, Cedric Thornberry, who lectured at the London School of Economics, and rose to become Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations. He is still active in the international human rights industry.
I do not know or seek to know exactly how he came to leave the family home, though he did so when his daughter was seven and his sons even younger. It is perhaps significant that Emily Thornberry omits all reference to him from her entry in ‘Who’s Who’ (those in Who’s Who’ write their own entries), though she does mention her mother. Whatever happened, Emily Thornberry has unpleasant, rather shocking Dickensian memories of bailiffs, and of going off to live in a council house in pretty sharply reduced circumstances.
To give you some idea of our differing responses to this episode, she believes it is an argument for better state childcare to allow women such as her mother to go out to work. I believe it is an argument for strengthening marriage, and placing a higher value upon fidelity and constancy, and upon promises.
She also, I believe, failed her eleven-plus, went to a secondary modern, and later to a comprehensive before studying law at the University of Kent and becoming a successful barrister.
This casts an interesting light on her decision to send one of her children to a partially selective state school (a very rare category), a dozen miles from her home. I asked her how she explained the divergence between her personal educational policy, in favour of selection, and of her party’s educational policy, implacably opposed to selection. And I’m afraid she went quiet, and then attempted to make it an issue of her children’s privacy. I have not named and will not name the child or the school. It is about her, a public figure who has sought and obtained public office and seeks to take part in the government of the country, as an acknowledged member of a political party which has endorsed her, and whose endorsement she has sought and accepted. That political party is opposed to academic selection in state schools.
It’s my belief that Emily Thornberry is a decent person (anyone with a mother like that has to be) but that she still has much to learn about principles and about civilised debate.
