The Coalition Must Not Be Sucked Into The 'Progressive' Left' War On The Family
by Ian R Thorpe.
2011-04-16
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: family, families, marriage society, social, parents, child, children, labour, conservative, coalition, parents, grandparents, relationships, state, control, instituions, left, fascist, communist, christianity, marx, communist, ideological, tax, taxation, common sense, individual, freedom
Cameron Caved In To Lefty War Against The Family
I am sure others have noticed as I have that those political movements eager to label themselves 'progressive' are uniformly eager to demolish the very institutions that give human societies their stability, starting with the family. Go back to the early days of Christianity and we see the basic family unit of pagan tribes being pushed aside by a drive towards monastic communities and an emphsis on the sinfulness of sex.In the first two hudred years after the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as it's official religion the Church's teaching was that a Christian's aim was to remain free of sin and thus be resurrected into a better life. Fortunately the secular and monastic branches of the church went their separate ways. In the twentieth century Russia's Bolsheviks and Hitler's Nazis, have been hostile to the family unit, both favouring children being separated from their parents, grandparents and extended family and cared for in state controlled institutions. That was the plan anyway, in reality none of the fascist or communist tyrannies managed to pull it off. The urge to procreate has proved too strong.
People might be questioning my sanity now, thinking perhaps, "But Christianity is all about family values."
Is it? The most troubling part of the gospels are the verses where Jesus’s tells his followers: “I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.”
Christians I have tried to discuss the matter with find these comments very hard to explain. (To be fair to Jesus - and I'm writing as a non believer -, this sounds very much like something the woman hating fanatic Paul might have added later. ) The family values we associate with Christianity either survived from older traditions or emerged after the Protestant reformation. When The Vatican was unchallenged the Church overrode everything.
Eighteen centuries after the gospels were complied, Karl Marx viciously condemned in "The Communist Manifesto" what he called “the bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed relationship of parent and child”. All this, he grimly predicted, “will vanish as a matter of course” come the revolution.
When Lenin’s Bolsheviks were turning Marx's visions into reality the Soviet commissar for education, Anatoly Lunacharsky said, “Our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children.”
Less than two decades later Hitler was demonising the family in order to enforce his vile beliefs.
There is a sound reason why religious leaders and revolutionaries alike a fear the family so much. It has always represented an alternative source of authority to state, party or church, a bulwark of common sense against the ideological blethering of those who would control our thoughts.
The Conservative intellectual Ferdinand Mount demonstrated 20 years ago in his study of social dynamics, the nuclear family is not the tool of the establishment which critics say it is. It is actually a subversive institution which poses a primary obstacle to the successful encroachment of state power or religious oppression on individual freedom.
For this reason, the nuclear family has normally been supported by the Conservative Party – and, of course, hated by 'progressives' who want to advance the agenda of those who believe in big government, central control and small degrees of personal liberty. From 1997 onwards, New Labour waged war against the family. Gordon Brown (in a financial statement deceitfully tagged “a budget for the family”) abolished the married couple’s tax allowance, replacing it with a system of tax credits which viciously punished couples who insisted on going through a traditional marriage ceremony.
While a move to give co - habiting couples a similar allowance could have been justified in the name of fairness what Brown, supported by that other champion of oppression and state control, the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair completed what Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives had started and made it virtually impossible for a woman to be a full time mother if the family desired a reasonable standard of living. Thatcher's move favoured the rich of course. At the time I was making a lot of money and because of my self employed status as a consultant was able to opt for separate taxation for myself and my wife and by paying her for being my PA, basically doing a bit of basic book keeping and filing, gain a substantial tax break
Last time I mentioned doing anything like this I earned some hate messages from 'liberals' (in reality the most illiberal people in the world) who accused me of cheating the government, killing the children of the poor and sundry other crimes that only the fervid imagination of a self righteous idiot could dream up. Everything I did was perfectly legal, my accounts were scrutinized by a chartered accountant and were always passed by the Tax Inspector with only minor adjustments. Were I a sensitive soul I might have been hurt by the kind of criticisms made by those who are very good at imposing all sorts of moral strictures on others but see no reason to apply the same rules to themselves.
The efforts of bureaucrats and social engineers to create a 'fair' society inevitably end up achieving the opposite of what was intended, probably because such people are driven by ideology rather than empirical experience. This leads to complete estrangement from reality.
After Labour's 2001 general election victory which gave them a second term in power, 'New' Labour (the 'progressive' label they gave themselves) proclaimed themselves as the natural party of government and felt confident enough to obliterate marriage as an official social position. The term “marital status” suddenly ceased to appear on official forms. It was a move that went unnoticed at the time but the consequences have been felt ever since. Thereafter, the British state no longer acknowledged the institution of marriage as being in any way different from other kinds of connection between couples. Words like spouse and partnernd replaced husbaand and wife.
This move was not merely symbolic. Looking back over several decades there was a mass of evidence to show that the institution of marriage tended to produce children who were far less likely to become drug addicts, criminals, drop-outs etc. The social policy implications of this were obvious. Now, however, the great majority of social research commissioned by the Government only refers with what officialdom likes to label “couple parent families” – and ministers find themselves incapable of accessing up-to-date evidence about the social consequences of marriage.
“The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had
actually been destroyed. For how could you establish, even
the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside
your own memory?”…George Orwell, “1984?
The sustained attack on marriage reflected the orthodoxy of the left's Populist Authoritarianism that it is politically incorrect to distinguish between different kinds of relationship. This dogma, like the others of the Politically Correct Thought Police has become so powerful its adherents are going to the length of writing the nuclear family out of British history just as they have all the glorious episodes in our nation's past. An interesting example of this phenomenon concerns the British Academy, once a famous institution celebrated for the independence and rigour of its historical research, which in recent decades has been hajacked by a rabble of state-funded, left wing academics.
Last autumn, the Academy published "Happy Families?", which challenged the idea that there was a breakdown of family life in the 1960s. This study (which, needless to say, was granted plenty of publicity by the increasingly left wing, pro Muslim, pro minority, anti-family, anti - British BBC) inculcated the idea that the strict codes of behaviour in the 1950s were abnormal. It is at best debatable whether Happy Families? is a serious work of historical research or a political pamphlet in support of the left's agenda. Future scholars are more likely to view it, in so far as they consider it at all, as an important manifestation of the antipathy felt by the intellectual elite towards the traditional family unit at the start of the 21st century.
Children brought up by a couple of shirt lifters or rug munchers? Fine. Children brought up by woman and man who were married in a church? Stanism!
Yes, it is true that for all their professions of concern about the injustices of capitalism and the plight of the poor, the elistists of the progressive left despise the working classes more than they despise conservatives.
One of the most impressive things about David Cameron's time as as leader of the Opposition was his readiness to stand against this kind of trendy, right - on, politically correct nonsense. He aligned himself with the traditional family, both in his public comments and even more in private conversation. When speaking to his party’s spring conference in February 2010 Mr. Cameron said: “We’re going to start with the most family-friendly manifesto that any party has produced in British political history. We’re going to set out how we’re going to recognise marriage in the tax system [and] how we’re going to support couples in the benefits system.”
This statement was based on the rigorous research carried out by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a Conservative think tank founded by the former party leader Iain Duncan Smith. Its central achievement was to challenge the conventional wisdom that marriage was a lifestyle choice which had no implications for public policy. It demonstrated that, regardless of moral or religious considerations, the state had a potent interest in maintaining the institution of marriage. First, the CSJ provided evidence that showed the devastating impact family breakdown had a on adults and even more on children. Second, it showed that marriage had a massive effect on protecting family stability.
The figures produced by the project speak very eloquently for themselves. Children who do not grow up in a two-parent family are 75 per cent more likely to fail at school, 70 per cent more likely to be a drug addict, 50 per cent more likely to become an alcoholic and 35 per cent more likely to sink into welfare dependency.
Now consider this: the data suggest that scarcely one in 12 married couples splits up by their child’s fifth birthday, while half of all parents who are cohabiting do so. Of course, these findings are still sneered at and dismissed by elitist left institutions such as the British Academy and the BBC.
Not all children whose parents split at a very early stage are as lucky as my Grandaughter Becky. She never knew her biological Dad, he cleared off before she was one. And before she was two her mother had met my son. Despite being something of a maverick all his adult life he took to fatherhood like a duck to water. So Becky will grow up with the only father she has known, two natural grandparents and two she has adopted. She has a little brother now too and is developing into a very bright child, reading already though only four and not at school yet.
If only the other Becky's in the country, and there are many thousands, had a champion in government to support the cause of stable relationships and provide some incentives for couples to stay together and work at the ultimately rewarding task of building a relationship and bringing up children. This is not to suggest a return to the strait jacket of 1950s society. My own family was very unconventional a my wifnde is as off the wall as I. It is wrong to dismiss the 1950s as completely socially repressive however. There were many unconventional families then, they simply kept their unconventional attitudes private.
Unfortunately since becoming Prime Minister Cameron has become as clueless about promoting social values other than selfishness as his socialist predecessors were about ... ... everything. The Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition (the ConDems) has as yet done nothing about rebalancing the bias against marriage in the tax system, while the strike against child benefit announced by George Osborne at last year’s autumn conference will make life far more difficult for millions of married couples. Cameron has not even restored the official status of marriage, which was abolished by New Labour. Like Tony Blair, he has talked the talk about family values but in the face of fanatical opposition from gay and lesbian 'rights'' groups and left wing academics and commentators, he has not been able to walk the walk.
Insiders say that Cameron continues to care about the issue, but is inhibited by two problems. One is his Chancellor, who couldn’t give a toss. The other is his Coalition partner Nick Clegg, who is actively hostile. The brutal truth is that David Cameron has given up on the family and capitulated to Britain’s very powerful "progressive" establishment. Clegg is already finished as a politician and can only hope for a career as Britain's EU commissioner or Ambassador to the United Nations when he is booted out of Parliament at the next election. Cameron would do well to gauge the depth of public anger at the high handed approach of bureaucrats and minor officials, doctors and legal professions if he fancies a second term as Prime Minister.
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