Which brings us to the D-word – yet another abject failure. Though officially committed to shared parenting after separation and divorce, and fully aware that our family court system is a disaster – exacerbating conflicts between parents, creating conflicts where none existed, and often permanently excluding one parent, generally the father, for reasons anybody who was not a judge or a family court welfare officer would call capricious – the government has changed nothing. It has commissioned a few reports and pilot projects and left it at that. Meanwhile, families continue to travel through this discredited system at the rate of 80,000 a year.
If we calculate that the average family includes two children, we can see that family courts affect the lives of a quarter of a million men, women and children annually, and often adversely.
Not a very good deal, then, this family business. In a poll of over 2,000 adults last October, the EOC found that nearly three out of five thought it was harder for working women to balance work and family life than 30 years ago. Over half of men aged 35-44 thought it was harder for men. This may explain why our birth rate is falling. At 1.8 per woman, it is not at its lowest point ever, and is by no means the lowest in Europe (that honour goes to Germany, where only 700,000 babies were born last year, in a population of around 80m), but is well below replacement rate. Half a century ago, only 10% of women reached the end of their fertile lives without bearing children. Now that has doubled. It is sure to rise.
A recent Guardian/ICM poll found that 64% of men and 51% of women thought that it was more important for women to “enjoy themselves” than to have children. Only 32% said bringing up children was more important than material success. Sixty-one per cent of men and women said that living comfortably was more important than having children. When asked what put them off the idea of having children, 63% cited the career demands and the difficulty of balancing these with family life, and 54% cited the high and rising costs. These views are in line with those measured in other European countries with declining birth rates. Wherever it is hard for parents to combine work and family, fewer and fewer even want to try.
But even the men and women who decide to forgo families may find themselves obliged to care for their parents. And if they don’t? For one thing, they should give up all hope of inheriting the family home. The government will want it sold to pay for the substandard care it will provide in their stead. The government’s record on elder-care is even worse than it is on childcare. But if you asked me where its greatest failure is, I would have to say education.
I say this even though two of my children went through the system during the 1980s and 90s, and were not (in my view) well served by the Tories. But I have two younger children who started school around the same time Blair came into office. And I teach at Warwick University, where for 10 years now I have been asked to bend and twist as the government exercises its will from on high. I see the same patterns in my children’s schools. Blair inherited a system fraught with problems, and his policies have exacerbated all of them, first by bombarding teachers at every level of the system with targets that do not take into account what we actually do, then by forcing us to assess our students and ourselves by quality-assurance standards that were designed – and I mean it literally this time – for factories. If we fail to fashion ourselves into the right sort of worker, turning out the right sort of product, we are severely punished.
But at least I’m never asked to turn around and punish my students’ parents. This is what teachers at primary and secondary level are now expected to do. It began in the late 1990s with home-school contracts. Before long, parents were being prosecuted and even jailed for failing to stop their children playing truant. Under the new education bill, parents who fail to keep children excluded for five days or less, under lock and key at home, even if they are single and in employment, will face the same sanctions.
This government has vastly expanded its repertoire of punishments for parents it deems to be substandard. It has at the same time convinced people that such parents must be dealt with harshly because they refused earlier offers of help. In fact, and contrary to the spin generated by an endless parade of initiatives, pilots and taskforces, there are huge swathes of the country where there is no help whatsover for parents struggling with difficult or distressed children.
Here we come to new Labour’s strangest and most fatal flaw: it trashes its own programmes. By this I mean it sets up or underwrites parent-support organisations which it presents to the nation at glitzy launches, then forgets. Or if it doesn’t forget them, it grossly underfunds them, so all they can do is operate a modest website. Let me describe a few of these for you. Since its inception seven years ago, the government-funded National Family and Parenting Institute (NFPI) has been working hard to gather together all academics, professionals, and activists concerned with family policy to discuss best practice. It has fostered and disseminated research, so anything the government does, it can do on the basis of solid evidence. It has also engaged with parents, reflecting their views back to government, and arguing for policies that meet parents’ needs. During the same period, the EOC has campaigned tirelessly for an end to the pay gap, mothers’ and fathers’ rights at home as well as in the workplace, and pension reform.
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The Parenting Education and Support Forum, recently renamed Parenting UK, has developed structures for the training and certification of parent educators, and is ready to launch a fledgling national network. But at present there is nothing like a national network, and though a parenting academy was launched recently to great fanfare, the details remain sketchy.
Parentline Plus has established a much-lauded if little-known national helpline, offering confidential, non-judgmental help for parents under stress. It, too, reflects back parents’ concerns to government. Since its inception in 1999, most of its calls have consistently come from parents of teenagers. A constellation of other charities are also working closely with government, usually on behalf of specific-interest groups like lone parents, fathers or working mothers, or issues like emotional literacy or family court reform. Increasingly these groups have formed alliances to put more pressure on the government to stop its target-mad, piecemeal approach to family policy.
Recently the NFPI called for a revamped national family policy that dispensed with targeted assistance in favour of a basic income, a right to flexible work with time off for children, a guarantee of top-quality childcare, and an acknowledgment that parents need to combine earning a living with caring well for their children. It also called for the proper and equitable provision of parent-support services. Instead of “parachuting in experts who claim to fix things and go away again”, Parentline Plus called for parent services that were rooted in communities, concerning themselves not just with families but with social networks. These services would, according to Parenting UK, connect with parents at the antenatal stage, fanning out to provide a sort of GP service for parents seeking advice thereafter. Such a service would be open to all, and therefore without stigma. It would be there when you needed it, but only when you needed it. It could be a movable feast – available some days at the local school and others at the surgery, so it need not be hugely expensive. It would be cost-effective because it would allow parents to see to little problems before they got out of hand, while also serving as a gateway for those seeking help with serious problems. It could certainly fit in with the government’s big but still very sketchy new policy initiative: Every Child Matters.
Like the Mental Heath Foundation, Young Minds and other organisations concerned with mental health, the NFPI and its partners want parents to be able to access quick, professional, non-judgmental help when they or their children encounter serious problems like bullying, depression, self-harm or drugs and alcohol. As opposed to now, when there is next to nothing. Anywhere.
Most if not all the above-mentioned groups are seriously concerned about the punitive rhetoric about failing parents, and even more concerned about the punitive legislation. They are very disturbed by the way the government sees parent services as tools in the punishment and re-education of “failing families” – especially when it is implied that these failing families were offered help and then refused it. They argue that most parents who get parenting orders have spent years desperately seeking help and getting nowhere. To force them into parenting courses, one expert said it was “like force-feeding someone who’s been starving”.
Groups like Parentline Plus are also concerned about the lack of parental input into education policy, and the new onus on schools to police their pupils’ parents. They say that while most families want schools that are academically strong, they have serious concerns about the sidelining of pastoral care, which they feel is key to a child thriving academically. Groups like Antidote have produced evidence-based research to prove this point, but back at the DfES the exam-driven ticking of boxes continues.
Although weakened in the past by gender splits, there is now an alliance of almost 40 charities calling for the government to replace the present divisive conflict-driven system with one that would aim to provide guidance and support for parents and children as they go through the separation process.. The highly effective Fathers Direct (never to be confused with Fathers 4 Justice) has proposed a system based on Australian and Scandinavian models that encourages shared parenting and addresses problems like domestic violence that can, without proper assistance, make it impossible.
All these organisations have a hard time publicising themselves, which is why you probably don’t know their names, let alone what they stand for. It is not just that they have shoestring budgets and depend on government funding. If they don’t shout louder, it may also be because they remember that the Family Policy Studies Centre (which did shout loud once upon a time) had its funding slashed and is no longer. This brings us to one thing this government has been very good at: quelling internal dissent and controlling the flow of information.
But there are whispers nonetheless. My friends in the family-policy world inform me that David Cameron has been in touch with many of the organisations that Blair has been ignoring. He knows the issues and has begun to talk about families under stress, and the need for work-life balance. He has said that he wants to see less emphasis on the “work ethic” and more on the “ethical workplace”. That we should measure our success not just by the GDP, he says, but by a newer, family-friendlier acronym, the GWB, or “general wellbeing”. It is all rather vague, and all rather designed not to Upset Business. But perhaps, when he goes back to do more homework, he’ll see that there are other constituencies in need of attention.
Seven out of 10 people in another recent EOC poll said that they were concerned about the sort of society we were leaving for our children. Almost half said that they were very concerned. Three out of four respondents said they would be more likely to listen to politicians who talked about work-life issues, and half said they were more likely to vote for them.
Those are the hard facts, and everywhere I look I see the reasons why. I live in a part of England where roses still grow on cottages and where most families, even those like mine that don’t look traditional on the outside, take families very seriously. We want to give our children a good start. We want to be able to go to work without putting them at risk. We want to be able to go home when our children or our elderly parents need us, and without risking our jobs. We are tired of being lectured and disrespected by politicians who know a great deal less about families than we do. When we’re addressed like line managers on an assembly line, we see red. So watch out, Tony. Watch out, Gordon. Watch out, David. And the rest of you, too. We’re this close to snapping.
J'ACCUSE: Tony Blair
Blair always said he was committed to helping Britain’s hard-working families,” says Maureen Freely, “but he put us on the bottom of the agenda. His commitment to the long-hours working culture stays absolute, and he’s refused to engage with his own experts, who point out how many problems result from this severe work-life imbalance.”
J'ACCUSE: Gordon Brown
“Gordon Brown pledged to end child poverty by 2020. His methods towards this noble goal have been so devious, convoluted and narrowly targeted that even his own people at the Treasury can’t do their sums. His goal remains elusive.”
J'ACCUSE: Harriet Harmon
“Harriet set herself up as the saviour of lone parents. But it was a glitzy package that failed to join the dots. In the first big backbench rebellion she chose to side with Blair, shafting the very people she was meant to help by proposing to cut single-parent benefits by up to £11 a week.”
J'ACCUSE: David Blunkett
“Blunkett brought in what insiders now call the Culture of Punishment — naming and shaming ‘bad’ parents and wayward children with Asbos, parenting orders and, if need be, prison. The measures designed to help families in difficulty never got properly funded.”
J'ACCUSE: Jack Straw
