You probably won’t agree with all of Mr Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal
THE left really ought to love the traditional family unit. After all, it represents what one might call ‘socialism in action’.
It is within the tabernacle of the family that humans first learn the virtues of solidarity, mutual obligation, loyalty, respect, trust, compassion and sacrifice – qualities that many on the left would claim define their politics.
It is there, too, that the common good prevails over naked self-interest. Ancient trade union slogans such as ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ and ‘United we stand, divided we fall’ could easily have been composed with the family in mind, for they go to the heart of the collective spirit and what it means to be part of something greater than oneself.
No family unit could thrive if ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ were instead the guiding principles.
The left once understood all this. There was never a conflict between socialism and the family. The early Labour tradition was, in fact, rooted in respect for the family structure.
But then along came the 1960s and the battalions of university-educated cultural revolutionaries with their hatred of existing social norms and anything that smacked of tradition or order.
Suddenly, the nuclear family became a ‘right-wing’ concept. It was here that men were tyrants, and women were oppressed, and children were readied to become the next generation of wage slaves serving the capitalist beast. It was also here that conservative-minded people did tedious and petit bourgeois suburban things like washing their cars and tending their gardens.
These attitudes began to take hold across the left. And as those young graduate rebels of the 1960s came of age, their ideas started to dominate within the upper echelons of our institutions and across the liberal media.
They still hold sway today. And even though our society has, in the past half century, experienced the devastating social effects that go with industrial-scale family breakdown, few who pushed the anti-family agenda appear willing to rethink their position.
In fact, the entire subject of family is largely taboo on the left. As far as anyone is willing to enter into a debate about it, it is usually to trot out cliches about how the nuclear family is ‘obsolete’, and modern families come in ‘all shapes and sizes’, and it is ‘bigoted’ to show preference for a particular model, and single-parent families should not be ‘stigmatised’.
Every now and then, a hardy soul will break ranks. David Lammy, for example, before he went a bit dotty over Brexit, campaigned passionately and articulately in favour of fathers playing a more central role in their children’s lives, lamenting the often-devastating impact on families (and especially on young black boys) when male role models were absent from the family home.
The rest of the left cut Lammy some slack on that occasion – principally, I suspect, because of his own backstory and the unique insight it gave him. But usually the left’s foot soldiers will try to stop any debate on the topic in its tracks by painting their opponents’ views as beyond the parameters of civilised debate.
Thus, when Reform launched its recent policy prioritising married couples with children in the allocation of social housing, many on the left were aghast. Not just because they disagreed with the finer details of the policy – I don’t agree with every aspect of it myself – but in many cases because Reform had dared to devise a policy around the concept of the traditional family at all.