Labour offers support, not symbolism, for families and couples

(C) Joe Shlabotnik

I’ve previously written about  Cameron and Demos’ proposals for SureStart, New Labour’s flagship childcare initiative. Their consensus was that SureStart ought to cease providing a vast array of support for families and focus simply on providing early childcare interventions for the poorest families.

While these reflections attracted not one but two articles from the BBC, the Labour Government’s expansive Green Paper on Families and Relationships seems to have slipped by without mention. In fact, if you aren’t involved with the work of charities in this area or an obsessive political nerd (guilty on both counts), you may have missed it entirely. This is unfortunate, because the paper serves as an extensive reply to Cameron’s arguments, spelling out Labour’s vision for supporting families in great detail.

Labour’s vision for family life is encapsulated in the title of the paper, Support for All, standing in stark contrast to Cameron’s focus on the most disadvantaged children;  Support for All represents the very essence of the “big government“ that Cameron publicly reviles. Labour’s paper sets out “what families can expect…at crucial stages in life – during pregnancy and birth of a child, in the period up to a child’s fifth birthday, and from the age of 5–19.”  This is a fundamentally holistic picture and could not be more different from Cameron’s narrow, causal picture. Rather than simply asserting ‘some parents are parenting badly, so we should teach them to parent better,’ the premise of Labour’s policy is that:
“Having a job, a stable income, a solid education, a decent home and good health are the fundamental foundations on which all thriving families are built.”

The importance of this is clear. One cannot isolate family-centred policies like budgeting advice, dietary information and outdoor play schemes from explicitly better parenting policies. A sophisticated view of the area shows that all these factors are interrelated: making life easier for families in the mundane ‘bread and butter ways’ such as helping them to make ends meet, put healthy food on the table and arrange family life allows families to function better.

Ironically, it is not Labour here who can be accused of advancing the ‘nanny state’. While Labour’s provision of support for families might be far more extensive, it is the Conservatives who are proposing the nannying. Indeed, the paper becomes almost wearying after the fiftieth reassertion by Ed Balls that: “It is parents, not government who raise children” and that the government must not “intrude into the privacy of family life.” Where Labour’s policies fit into the long, liberal tradition of the state providing an environment where individuals can freely live out their lives as best they can, the Tory formula for better families is telling the poorest parents how to do it better.

The sheer variety of ways in which the Green Paper offers support for families is startling (at least four pages of bullet points detailing initiatives for Early Years alone),  given that most of these policies never attract any attention at all. The government’s Parent Know How scheme has provided information for over 2.5million parents, yet one suspects that most members of the political commentariat have never heard of it. The Green Paper’s section on relationships outlines a gamut of specific policies, which have been well received by those working in the area, such as Relate. Again, these are precisely the policies most likely to be over-looked: 150,000 people per year use Relate counselling, assisted by £1.6million of government grants, but how many people will talk publicly about how vital their relationship counselling was? It is far easier to sell the (empty but appealing) idea that things were better in the old days, when men were men and marriage was forever. It’s also striking how much this policy of funding Relate and other similar organisations until 2011 looks suspiciously similar to Cameron’s big idea of the “big society“ and his proposed “multi-year funding settlements.”

The Green Paper also steers clear of Conservative moralising about marriage, instead asserting: “marriage is a personal and private decision… with which politicians should not interfere.” The government’s figures essentially undermine the foundations of Cameron’s ‘Broken Britain’ story, observing that although divorce rates are higher than in the early 1970s, since 1985 they have remained relatively stable. In fact, in 2007 the divorce rate was at its lowest level since 1981. If Britain is facing massive social breakdown it cannot be due to any supposed rupture in the “traditional family unit” or our (falling) teenage pregnancy rates. Indeed, a wide-ranging review finds there is no evidence that parenting is degrading in terms of parental involvement, instead finding that parental supervision is actually improving.

The paper identifies one of the main risk factors for divorce as unexpected change in a family’s circumstances (precisely the sort of insecurity that the expanded SureStart tackles) and that financial worries outnumber fear of divorce as reasons for couples not to marry. While the Tories might be (traditionally) tough on divorce, it is Labour’s social policies that are tough on the causes of divorce.

Of course, comprehensively comparing this paper to Tory policy would require nothing less than listing Labour’s myriad actions to help families, then pointing at the Tories’ paper and noting that it is devoid of any of this substance. This would not convince anyone who holds that the state cannot intervene effectively to support families, but the Tories have ceded to this anti-statist strategy: they are now ostensibly the champions of the family. If these are the terms of the debate it is difficult to feel the force of the Conservative’s criticisms. Certainly it is impossible, given the comprehensive plans to support families outlined in the government paper to agree that Labour are “ignoring the importance of strong families.”