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BARONESS YOUNG DL THE 2000 CENTRE FOR POLICY STUDIES LECTURE AT THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE BY THE RT HON THE BARONESS YOUNG DL 4TH OCTOBER 2000 STANDING UP FOR THE FAMILY It is an honour to be asked to speak at this meeting organised by the Centre for Policy Studies. The CPS has a distinguished history. It was founded by Sir Keith Joseph, as he then was, and became immediately an important "think tank" for those with right of centre views. I feel it is particularly appropriate that I should be speaking on the topic of "the family" for it was Sir Keith Joseph, when Secretary of State for the Social Services in the early 1970s, who first identified what he called "the cycle of deprivation" - that is, that children who grow up in deprived circumstances, go on to perpetuate this cycle of deprivation, as their own children, are equally deprived. What Sir Keith said 30 years ago is still relevant today. At the risk of stating the obvious, may I start by saying what I mean by the family? I mean by a family a couple, consisting of a husband and wife, with or without children, living together throughout their lives. I include, too, the extended family, that is grandparents and other relatives. And throughout our history, this has been the accepted meaning of the word "family". It is a public commitment to marriage by both parties to a lasting relationship. That is what the marriage service, and indeed the civil ceremony in a Registry Office, is all about. It is not about anyone's rights. It is entirely about the duties and responsibilities of both parties. As the Prayer Book says, "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part"; an awesome promise. It clearly means an absolute responsibility and commitment by both husband and wife to the upbringing of children. I begin as I have because this definition of the family is now widely questioned, and the term "family" is used to cover all types of co-habitation, single parents (the single parent "family") and single sex relationships. The British are, I believe, a very tolerant people. It is one of their great strengths. But by their very tolerance, they have succeeded in, I believe, an unintended way of down-grading marriage to one of a series of equally valid alternative lifestyles. There is now a real possibility that marriage may at some date in the future, and the not-too-distant future at that, disappear altogether. The number of marriages has fallen each year. By 2020 it is estimated that married couples will be in the minority of the population for the first time ever. I am told that for an anthropologist the widespread unwillingness to marry is a sign of impending disaster. In defending the traditional family we are up against the strongly held views of many different people who occupy important positions in our national life. Brenda Hoggett QC (now Mrs. Justice Hale), when a member of the Faculty of Law of Manchester University wrote: Family law no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union. It has adopted principles for the protection of children and dependant spouses which could be made equally applicable to the unmarried. In such circumstances the piece meal erosion of the distinctions between marriage and non-marital co-habitation may be expected to continue. Logically we have already reached a point at which rather than discussing which remedies should be extended to the unmarried, we should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purpose. There has been the recent statement from Mary Macleod, Head of the Government's National Family and Parenting Institute, that: "homosexual marriage" is a human right and will be inevitable under the Human Rights Act. Anthony Giddens in his book The Third Way, assumes that marriage is probably on the way out and that recapturing the traditional family is a "non-starter". Anyone who watches TV, and that includes most of us, knows that almost anything, that is any relationship, goes. The views expressed are often supported by what William Hague has described as the "liberal intelligentsia" and indeed, the Liberal Democrats at their Party Conference actually advocated homosexual marriage. Then there is the whole sex education industry, which is active in all schools and youth groups, putting to children day by day, year by year, a value-free society, where all lifestyles are promoted as equally valid. Those of us who question these views are regarded as, at best "intolerant bigots" who do not believe either in equality or the right of the individual to maximise his or her happiness. Worried parents, who might expect both the law and the Church to help them, get little or nothing. The law has let them down and I am sorry to say that the Church speaks with an uncertain voice. Some Church leaders are very supportive of the traditional family, like the Bishop of Winchester, but others, I fear, are not: Section 28 prevents local authorities from promoting homosexuality in schools. When the vote to retain Section 28 was taken in the House of Lords, four Bishops voted against abolition, four voted for abolition. The trumpet certainly sounded an uncertain tune. This hardly gives the leadership that many feel they have a right to expect from the Church. How, then, are we to stand up for the family in today's climate? And what are we to say? The Conservative Party has traditionally been the party of the family, sometimes, I feel, with more conviction than at other times. The ill-fated policy of "Back to Basics" introduced by John Major when he was Prime Minister was right, in my opinion, but failed because it did not make clear that what was being proposed was an ideal. As a consequence, Conservatives have been hesitant to stand up for the family and some of our past policies have, in my view, been less than supportive of the traditional family. The fact is that the family as I have defined it is an ideal. The family never was and never will be perfect, because we are all imperfect individuals. But I see the family like democracy. Democracy is not perfect, but it is undoubtedly the best political system devised. So we must accept that not everyone will succeed. There are times when divorce is right and I am certainly not going round apportioning blame to anyone. But just as Beethoven remains a great composer, no matter how badly his music is played, so the traditional family remains the ideal, even if we can't all live up to our responsibilities and promises. And as politicians, surely we should state the ideal? This is especially important to the young. We can, then, at least know the direction in which we should be going, even if we stumble along the way. There is much that we can say as Conservatives. First of all, the family stands as a bulwark against the state. It has been described as the greatest fortress of human liberty. All serious tyrannies have tried to undermine it. The family stands for stability. It has stood the test of time. Indeed, as Patricia Morgan has said in her book Farewell to the Family: All societies that have survived have been built on marriage, and children have always been raised within traditional families. Even if some societies have had polygamy, and a few polyandry, while in others a number of married couples have lived in one household, it is still a truism that not only has there never been an open democratic society not based on the family, there has never been any society of any sort not based on the family. It is unquestionably the best place in which to bring up children, who need both a father and a mother. It is the best way to pass on traditional principles and beliefs from one generation to another. And the family is equally important in old age, and we are an ageing population, most of whom are over the age of 45. And now that the elderly have leapt - if that really is the right verb - to the top of the political agenda, it is essential to consider their needs too. All of us are living longer. The relationship between husband and wife nurtured over many years, often with grown up children, becomes even more important. As parents grow old they are more likely to be ill or incapacitated and need the support of each other and their children. And without the family, who is going to look after the elderly? I feel sorry for many people today who will inevitably find themselves old, possibly ill, and almost certainly on their own. As John Donne said "No man is an island unto himself". The fact is we are all dependant on one another from the moment of birth to the moment of death. What the breakdown of the traditional family has lead to is a world in which adults consider it their right to maximise their own choice in seeking happiness; they ask for their rights to marry, divorce, co-habit and have children in any one of these circumstances. But what of the children who cannot maximise their choice? As the weakest, they go to the wall. What has happened today is that adults are transferring their unhappiness on to children. There is therefore much, as Conservatives, we can say to support the family. And we have only to look at what has happened once society has abandoned the traditional family, and has gone into freefall as it has, in my opinion, today. Over the last 30 years, or perhaps as Peter Hitchens has put it in his book The Abolition of Britain, since the death of Churchill in 1965, society has changed beyond recognition. We have sailed into unchartered waters. It seems quite extraordinary that a Royal Commission in 1956 could say: ...to give people a right to divorce themselves
would be to foster a change in the attitude to marriage which would be
disastrous for the nation... marriage in the end would come to be regarded as a
temporary relationship with divorce as a normal incident of life... people have
good and bad impulses and we conceive it to be the function of the law to
strengthen the good and control the bad. This, within living memory of many of us, now sounds rather quaint. Now nearly 50% of marriages end in divorce. If there are fewer divorces, it is because there are fewer marriages. One in five children now come from a broken home. Some 40% of all live births are outside marriage, rising to 70% in some areas of the country. And we have the distinction of having the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the EU. The cost of all this had been variously estimated at between £4 billion and £10 billion annually. A new publication The Cost of Family Breakdown puts it at £16 billion and gives a detailed analysis of the way these figures have been reached. The break up of the traditional family has also lead to an increase in domestic violence and to an increase in crime. Is this view simply held by Conservatives? Let me quote you what Professor A H Halsey has said in his introduction to the important book by Norman Dennis and George Erdon (both left wing sociologists) in Families without Fathers: Children of parents who do not follow on the traditional norm (i.e., taking on personal, active and long terms responsibility for the social upbringing of the children they generate) are thereby disadvantaged in many major aspects of their chances of leading a successful life. On the evidence available, such children tend to die earlier, to have more illness, to do less well at school, to exist at a lower level of nutrition, comfort and conviviality, to suffer more unemployment, to be more prone to deviance and crime and finally, to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves have suffered. One of the curious knock-on effects of the world today, is what Melanie Phillips has described in her book The Sex Change Society, is that women are becoming like men and want men to become like women. Some women today want to do without men altogether (except for one purpose!). Many regard men as, at best, a liability and at worst, an irrelevance. A further consequence is that there is growing up what has been described as a "Warrior Class" of young men; boys who grow up childish in their attitude to life, who have not had fathers as role models, whose first experience of seeing a man taking responsibility is probably in his second year in a comprehensive school, when he is 12 or 13. He drops out of school, is unable to get a job, probably takes to crime, is totally irresponsible and is a singularly unattractive proposition to any girl as a husband. That is why he is regarded as irrelevant. It would be good to think this bleak outlook was coming to an end. What is required is a huge cultural shift. Just as it has taken 35 years to get where we are, I think it will take as long to change. But, in my more optimistic moments, I believe we have seen a shift recently. It is not impossible to read into the vote to keep Section 28, which suddenly became a bench mark, a change. Here was an issue which everyone could understand. I had over 5,000 letters of support from a huge cross-section of the population throughout the length and breadth of the UK - consultants, doctors, social workers, teachers, school governors and of course, very many parents and grandparents and young people. They were not a part of an organised protest. They were the voice of the silent majority. The people of Scotland showed in the extraordinarily interesting referendum organised by Brian Souter the same result. 1,000,000 people voted to keep Section 28 - a larger number than those who voted Labour for the Scottish Parliament. That is an amazing achievement. Referendums are not easy to organise, but the people of Scotland made their views clear. What have we, as a Party, said on all this at this important juncture? I greatly welcome the policies to which we are committed, which are set out in the Conservative Party publication Believing in Britain. All laws send a signal, and were these proposals to be implemented, they would send a message that we are serious about the traditional family and want to support it. So what are these policies? The first is to reintroduce a married couples' tax allowance. This is undoubtedly the most important stand we could take for the family. We are the only country in the EU not to have a marriage allowance and perhaps it is not insignificant that we also have the highest divorce rate. Secondly, it is proposed that there should be family scholarships. This is a new idea and one to be welcomed. These scholarships would help young mothers who wish to return to work once their children are older, to do so. Thirdly, we have pledged to extend invalid care allowance to new claimants over 65 - so many of the carers are members of the family. This should help families to stay together in old age. I hope we will go further to help responsible parents. I hope that we will make a definite commitment in our Manifesto not to repeal Section 28. As I have already said, Section 28 has come to symbolise for parents especially, but also for the overwhelming majority of the population, something about traditional values and family life. I hope we will also make a commitment not to lower the age of consent for homosexuals. Again, this is something that responsible parents do not want, particularly mothers of sons. It is not an argument about equality, but about the traditional family and the protection of children. And I think we should take a long and considered look at the whole sex education industry and accept that the guidelines for schools should be re-written, putting marriage at the centre. This means getting information to our colleagues in local government, and quite particularly to school governors. If a Conservative government did these things, it would be taking a number of right steps. One thing I have learned from the important debates that we have had in the House of Lords, is that by standing up for a principle, standing up for something which is right, then others will stand up too. It is not too late - indeed, on great cultural changes, it is never too late to speak out. And if we speak out we will find that others will speak out too. We must not only support the traditional family, but create a culture again where marriage is put first. I believe that as a country we stand at a crossroads. Our society has been based on the great Judeo Christian tradition for the last 1000 years. Now many want to make it a secular society. Some think it already is a secular society. The choice is before us all. It is up to Conservatives to stand up for the traditional family, which stands at the centre of our society. |
