Families, Community Cohesion and Social Action

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 1:24 pm on 28 February 2008.

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Photo of Lord Giddens Lord Giddens Labour 1:24, 28 February 2008

My Lords, I am speaking towards the end of a long list of distinguished contributors, but I should like also to join the queue to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, for setting up a debate on this manifestly significant topic and for her elegant introduction to it, even though I do not agree completely with everything she said. It is quite difficult to speak with wit and verve at the end of such a debate and that reminds me of a story about this place. I do not know whether other noble Lords have heard it. Apparently the Earl of Montrose once declared, "I fell asleep and dreamed I was giving a speech in the House of Lords. Then I woke up and by God I was!". Well, I hope that at least I will be able to stir some attention with what I have to say.

My starting point is that a lot of writing and speaking on the study of the family and marriage is flawed by an historical misunderstanding of past times. The idea that the breakdown of the family is threatening the social cohesion of the wider society is one that every generation entertains. For anyone who doubts that, I suggest they read The Way We Never Were, a book by Stephanie Coontz, which interestingly goes back generation by generation. We learn that each generation thinks that the time before that one was a golden age for the family, but when you go back generation by generation, in every case this is wrong. There never was a golden age of the family and it is therefore a mistake to contrast the issues that we have to deal with today with such a mythical golden age. I would include in this the 1950s as well as previous periods which the author also studies in detail.

The noble Baroness was right to avoid this. We should have no truck with those who say that our aim in family policy should be a return to the traditional family, by which I mean the family up until the threshold of the 1950s. That traditional family might have had virtues—indeed it did—but it also had a serious set of downsides. It was based on the dominance of men over women. Women were the chattels of men in English law until well into the 20th century, the last residue of which, so far as I know, is the law about the impossibility of rape in marriage. I believe that it was repealed as late as the 1960s. The traditional family also did not admit the rights of children. Historians and social scientists have uncovered just how big the dark side of the experience of childhood in the traditional family was, again right into the 20th and to some extent the 21st century. Levels of sexual and physical abuse of children were much higher than anyone conceived possible until intensive research on this topic revealed them a few years ago. Finally, the traditional family set a double standard in which married women were supposed to be pure and other women were regarded as fallen. In the mean time, men could get on with their philandering. So we certainly should not hold up the traditional family as a model for the past. At the minimum, we should be cautious about the idea that the family is breaking down and as a consequence the wider structures of our society are threatened.

Some of the homilies about the breakdown of the family are to be found in the report by Iain Duncan Smith, mentioned by the noble Baroness. He says famously:

"We are living in a broken society", caused for the most part by the undermining of family life. Noble Lords will forgive me if I say that that is pretty much nonsense, and I say that as a social scientist rather than as a Labour Party member. Iain Duncan Smith also states:

"Family breakdown trends are being driven entirely by the increase in unstable cohabiting relationships".

Hence his support for tax breaks to favour marriage as a core part of the policy programme he suggests. But these arguments do not stand up to a moment's examination or scrutiny.

One of the key things to change in the nature of marriage and the family over the past 40 or 50 years is a tremendous increase in the age at which first marriage occurs. About 30 years ago, age at first marriage was 22 for women and 24 for men; now it is about 29 for women and around 30 or over for men. This means that co-habitation now quite normally precedes marriage and it is quite wrong to cast the two as alternatives. Cohabitation is an important learning lead-up often to the taking of marriage vows and many people get married when expecting a child or a child arrives.

The idea that the rise of cohabitation as such signals the breakdown of society is falsified by the experience of the Scandinavian countries, which have easily the highest levels of cohabitation in Europe. Nobody thinks that those societies are on the verge of breakdown. On the contrary, those societies have dealt best with the social changes affecting the family.

So we are not living in a broken society but in one struggling to adapt to large-scale change. Just as in the sphere of work—here I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, who is not in her place—a great deal of the strength of the family today has to come from adaptability to change. We cannot expect the family simply to provide a stability which other institutions have largely forgone. Just as it applies elsewhere, the process of having an adaptable outlook to the world and being able to cope with change and diversity applies in the sphere of the family.

It is not true that the family, on the whole, is experiencing breakdown. There are many aspects of family life which are manifestly superior to what they were 30 or 40 years ago, let alone a long time before that. For example—I shall just quote one statistic—a recent study by sociologists has shown that the average amount of time spent by fathers with their children is much higher today than it was in the 1950s, even including the fact that there is a higher rate of divorce today than in that period. There are many other examples of that.

So, to my mind, it is not right to suggest that tax breaks should be given to strengthen marriage. On the contrary, the best way to strengthen marriage is to strengthen cohabitation because it is so often an avenue into marriage.

In conclusion, I should like to suggest to the Minister that the best family policy has three characteristics and ask him to endorse them. First, we have to concentrate on families of multiple deprivation, which is easily the biggest source of family breakdown; secondly, we have to recognise and endorse the diversity of family life; and, thirdly, we also should expect family life to reflect wider democratic principles, above all the equality of men and women. The equality of men and women should be a structural part of family life for the future and we should find ways of ensuring that family life adapts to that democratic principle.