Yet at the same time, there’s still some part of me that hankers after integrity. That is, if I choose a particular value, I want to hold it across the board. I don’t want to affirm it in one place and deny it in another, recall it here and forget it there. That’s why I find myself also repelled by tribalism in politics.

For the bundling up of myriad moral issues into ideological “package deals” has meant that my coveted acceptance by one tribe has become conditional upon my automatically accepting all manner of other positions, positions I can’t reconcile with my deepest convictions, and even — when I really examine them — theirs.

For example, when I went off and tried to make friends with conservatives, I thought I would be an attractive, indeed ideal, candidate. When it comes to the family, I am prepared to bite the bullet and say that family structure is crucial and marriage does matter. I believe that while there are critical exceptions — cases of psychological and physical abuse, for example — when family breakdown is the norm, children fare worse than they do in home where parents struggle through.

Whether it is being subject to the merry-go-round of changing relationships, or being constantly on the move — not knowing how long their dresses and trousers will hang in the wardrobes, not knowing whether their suitcases will or will not gather dust under their new beds — I think the ideal of the married two-parent family is worth fighting for. That is a fairly standard, orthodox conservative position.

Yet when I divulged these convictions, to my surprise I found they weren’t sufficient. “Family Values” apparently stood for a wider bundle of beliefs, and there was other baggage I had to carry, other commitments I had to approve. If I believed that intact families to be a condition of flourishing, I had also to accept that family breakdown was a main cause of poverty.

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What would you sacrifice for integrity?

By James Mumford

Now on one level it is obvious that there is some truth to this. When family breakdown entails the loss of a second income, and a previous partner’s alimony payments are insufficient, parent and child will be worse off. The question, however, is what is causing that family breakdown in the first place?

The conservatives whose company I craved explained it as “cultural trickle-down”. According to that story, it was the lamentable behavioural change resulting in the nosedive of marriage among the elite, the rise of “expressive divorce” as the chance to “make oneself from the inside out, to refurbish and express the inner self” (in the words of sociologist Barbara Whitehead). Their assumption was that the persistence of such behaviour explains the concentration of family breakdown in the poorest communities today.

But try as I did to absorb it, that conclusion grated with me. What it overlooked, I felt, was the profound effect of scarcity on “intellectual bandwidth”. As sociologists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir posit in their book Scarcity: “When we function under scarcity, we represent, manage and deal with problems differently.” Not well, that is, since pressure does not focus the mind, as we might like to think. No, it affects people’s fundamental “orientations” — that is, their concern with the future as well as the present; it erodes their sense of agency — all crucial to sustaining a marriage.

The longer I cavorted with conservatives the more clearly I saw how the insistence on the “culture of poverty” thesis — the belief that family breakdown causes poverty, and not the other way round — sustains a larger package deal in which fidelity to the family is wrapped together with a commitment to unfettered capitalism fundamentally at variance with it. Bluntly, if it is not lack of financial resources that affects the stability of marriage, then fixing an economic system which punishes the working poor need not be a priority if you want to tackle family breakdown.

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The botched assisted dying debate

By James Mumford

And so, finally finding myself unable to make a home on the Right, I assessed my options. Maybe I’d been knocking on the wrong door, courting the wrong team? I started thinking seriously about the alternative tribe: the liberal-Left. But no sooner had I started to take soundings, then I found myself facing exactly the same problem: yet another package deal.

What I thought might endear me to the Left was the two years I spent leading a review into the conditions of life for the poorest older people. What had confronted me at every juncture was the depth of marginalisation, the realisation that despite the phenomenal rise in life expectancy, Britain is for many no country for old men.

I visited care homes where residents told me, “the outside world never comes in here”. I met carers in circumstances so isolated that they and the parent they were caring for had become “each the other’s world entire”. I conducted a telephone poll revealing that 40% of those older people who were going to be home alone for Christmas had children living in the same country. And I found that marginalisation expressed itself most frequently in older people’s fear of being a burden — upon the state, upon society and upon the family.

Inspired by the Left’s historic value of inclusion of the elderly — most notably, the campaign by the Fabians and Liberal Party to provide pensions to older people left high and dry by industrialisation — I assumed that I would feel at home with their attempts to transform the lives of the elderly. Instead, however, I found that for many the next great reform was assisted suicide.

Again, this grated with me. For in a society where older people increasingly fear becoming burdensome, it struck me that putting the assisted suicide option on the table would prove disastrous. Having learnt so much from the Left about power, and the way coercion can operate subtly beneath the cover of consent, I found questionable the assurances of assisted suicide advocates that no one would ever be pressured to die. How are doctors really going to know that, at the deepest level, a terminally-ill older person has not been put under pressure?

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Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

Where, then, have I ended up? Have I found a home, an ideology to underwrite my existence? One towering temptation I’ve felt is to renounce the culture wars altogether and insist that ultimate ethical questions are kept out of political discourse. We should focus on building a common political life together, many contend, and for the sake of that we should set aside trying to resolve vexed moral quandaries.

The problem with this solution, however, is that there are actual lives at stake. Sexual consumerism, family breakdown and the mindlessness of marijuana are real threats to human flourishing. How we think of the beginning and end of life, about the entrances and exits of human beings in the world, has lasting consequences.

Instead, as I argue in my book Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes, an etch-a-sketch approach to ideology is called for. We need to start from first principles and decide, undetermined and undeterred by our historic political identifications, which positions on the weightiest moral questions align with the good.

We need to be prepared to concede that our historic ideological enemies, whichever tribe they come from, may have got it right when it comes to a particular controversy. This pick-n-mix approach is very different from carving out some amiable middle ground; it means taking substantive positions on specific issues, but from across the political spectrum. For difficult though this may be, failing to do so ensures a kind of moral stagnation we should all find unacceptable. The deals may give us mates, but they cannot deliver genuine progress.

There is something totalitarian about package deals, and having our thinking governed by the constellations of opinions which are but the product of historically contingent coalition-building. And because of this, I find inspiration in the Vaclav Havel  essay The Power of the Powerless and the Czech playwright’s exhortation that “the primary breeding ground for what might be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living in the truth”. It is, he wrote, a drama “originally played out in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience of society”.

Deciding where we stand as individuals on moral questions, irrespective of political parties, may not be the terminus. But it is the place to begin.

James Mumford’s Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes is published by Bloomsbury on 5 March

What father of a son would disagree? And it’s not just fathers and sons. Most people want their children to develop the same sort of loyalties, beliefs and attachments that they themselves consider important. Of course, life doesn’t always turn out that way. One thing I have realised as I get older, and have ever more experience of a wider range of people, is that my contented, relaxed upbringing in a cheerful home overseen by happily-married parents was quite a bit rarer than I had once imagined. I have always felt that I owe my parents a great debt of gratitude.

What exactly do we owe our families? It’s a thorny question, not least at this time of year when many people are visiting family, and girding their loins for a big row about Brexit, or Boris, or Extinction Rebellion. Recent years have seen the emergence of a genre of article that encourages people to pick fights with their families at the dinner table (in the US, at Thanksgiving as well as Christmas).

One widely circulated tweet this year contained a picture of a T-shirt that a woman was planning to wear to Thanksgiving dinner, declaring her support for abortion rights, transgender rights, gay marriage and the rest of the progressive sacraments. Presumably the plan was to throw these beliefs in the faces of her backward, bigoted relatives, and storm away from the table basking in the warm glow of self-righteous satisfaction. Another was from an academic who quite openly scorned and mocked the idea that he should feel any kind of affinity or attachment to his relations just because they shared some DNA.

By the same author

It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By Niall Gooch

I have no idea whether this social media fad means anything in the real world. Are thousands of angry students and young people really heading home for the holidays determined to harangue their families for their insufficiently progressive political views? It’s anyone’s guess. Anecdotally, it seems fairly common for young people who are well-educated, or who have at least been through university-level education (not quite the same thing these days), to have a kind of performative disdain for their parents’ views, especially if those parents are from the dreaded suburbia.

It’s hard to deny that the dominant stories in our culture encourage dissatisfaction with, and suspicion of, home and community. From sex education to pop music to children’s TV and cinema, the message is clear: to find happiness and contentment, you must break away from the world into which you were born, and from the people who raised you, and seek your “real self”.

The foundation to this way of thinking is a form of hard liberalism, wherein the only attachments and obligations by which we are truly bound are those which we freely, and continually, choose for ourselves. If we don’t see eye to eye with our parents, if they’re not providing us with the requisite affirmation of all our choices or the appropriate number of hedonic units, then we should shut them out of our lives in favour of people whose company and politics we find more congenial.

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Eight ways to unite the nation

By Polly Mackenzie

If your interest in your wife has waned now that you have a bright and bubbly young secretary, don’t you have a right — a responsibility, even! — to pursue your own happiness, regardless of all those boring old vows you made twenty years ago? This hard liberalism is also increasingly applied to the concept of the nation-state: patriotism both as source of pride and as source of obligation is simply unintelligible where all moral and political choices are assessed through the prism of the individual and his currently existing desires and preferences.

There is, of course, another extreme, an over-emphasis on family loyalty to the exclusion of all else. Some years ago I read a fascinating short book arguing that one reason why the creation of stable modern states in the Arab world has been so difficult is that the traditional culture in that part of the world retains a strong focus on the clan or tribe, rather than any broader grouping. You cannot build a liberal democracy with the rule of law if people do not feel a strong primary loyalty to the nation, and feel able to trust outsiders. A world with an absolute and unqualified duty of loyalty and deference to your family would be unbearable.

Nevertheless, it is worth resisting the assumptions embedded in the view that it is generally praiseworthy or admirable to adopt a stance of disdain and superiority towards one’s family and community.

For one thing, the family should be a shelter from the political. The non-political way of life includes associations and interactions that are maintained not from above but by voluntary co-operation. It’s about maintaining customs, traditions and institutions — such as the family — whose normal operation is in a fundamental way beyond the reach of organised compulsion by the state. It’s about organisations that are ends in themselves rather than vehicles for some other goal, i.e. the point of a chess club is for people who like chess to get together to play chess, not to promote equality or capitalism or membership of the European Union.

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Can our shattered nation survive this election?

By Giles Fraser

The non-ideological view of life is an essentially humanist one, because it sees people and their situations as standing alone to be considered on their own terms, rather than being slotted into a neat pre-existing box. It is the basis of authentic pluralism, because it enables us to carve out room for minorities and dissenters. In some ways the family is the archetypal non-political institution, and to only value your family insofar as they are politically congenial to you is to miss the point.

To cultivate a positive stance towards your family also helps to develop two of the great virtues: humility and gratitude. A key part of humility is entertaining the possibility that you have something to learn — perhaps a great deal — from most people you meet, even perhaps your dreadful conservative dad. Gratitude is about taking seriously the things which other people have done for you; the sacrifices they have made, the security they have created, the help they have given. Both humility and gratitude are ways of breaking free of resentment, which is one of the most corrosive poisons in human affairs, whether at the level of individuals or in politics.

I don’t want to idealise family. I wouldn’t deny for one moment that many people are quite justified in their anger at, or suspicion of, theirs. Families are, after all, made of human beings, those strange, fallible, infuriating creatures.

But I suspect that many more people have poor relationships with their families because they have disordered priorities, or a mistaken idea of the relative importance of politics. Many seem to have swallowed whole our culture’s obsession with self-actualisation and its hostility to what you might call bourgeois normality; that is to say, the widespread view — often expressed indirectly — that there is something pitiable and inadequate about living quietly and honestly in a small-scale way and attending to the particular and the local.

This is, of course, quite false and damaging. But I fear that many people only realise its falsehood when the opportunity to repair the damage is long past. Cherish your family over this Christmas period; sometimes you don’t appreciate good things until they’ve gone, and it’s too late.

For instance, when westerners refer to the ‘extended family’ they do so as if it were some special feature of certain societies, as opposed to what the great majority of human beings think of as just ‘family’. It is the standard western conception of the family – one or two adults plus a small number of children – that requires a special term. Some academics refer to the ‘truncated family’.

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Test article

By JD Vance

In the not so recent past, having more than two generations (and/or more than one branch) of a family living together was commonplace, even in the West. It’s hardly unheard of today – but is regarded as a deviation from the norm, the result of some regrettable necessity or frailty. Almost always the expectation is that the ‘extra’ members of the household will, before too long, move on to somewhere else (either in this world or the next).

The ‘household’ is another concept that used to mean a lot more than it does today. In some ways, it is a broader idea than the extended family – because it doesn’t always depend on ties of blood, marriage or adoption.

In a fascinating and challenging essay for First Things, John Cuddeback reminds us just what a big deal the household used to be – and contrasts to the way we live today:

“The bustling little community that was the household—the context in which parents would raise their children to be responsible adults and citizens, even in seriously diseased polities—has practically ceased to exist.

“Not long ago, the household was a context of daily life. The arts that provided for the material needs of human life were largely home arts, practiced, developed, and passed on within the four walls, or at least in the immediate ambit of the home. Food, clothing, shelter, as well as nonessential items that gave some embellishment to life, were commonly the fruit of the work of household members, often produced with an eye for beauty as well as utility.”

He makes the provocative argument that “people [today] do not really live in their homes”:

“When we think of a family today, or even a home, we do not think of a real community characterized by substantial daily common action. Rather than a community woven together by common actions toward common ends, we have a kind of home base, a staging area in which to rest and refuel for remote daily activities. We should by all means attend to the sad realities of broken families. But too often, even married couples with children fail to live as a household.”

This isn’t entirely true, of course – but it isn’t entirely false either. Our ancestors would be amazed by the luxury of our homes, but also by what would strike them as their emptiness, passivity and disconnection.

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So many of the things that used to be the joint endeavour of the household are now undertaken separately and remotely. Not just ‘the household arts’ described above, but almost all work, education, healthcare, entertainment and hospitality.

Despite the existence of outside centres of religious practice, the home was also a place of collective prayer and worship. In ancient cultures around the world, we see people keeping an honoured place for ‘household gods‘ – an impulse faintly echoed in the present by garden gnomes and the fairy on the Christmas tree.

As well as what the household contained, there was what it kept out: at a time before modern policing, the household was the first, and perhaps only, line of defence. The single most important duty of the head of the household was to go round at night ensuring that all the doors and gates were secured and everyone safely inside.

But that brings us to the dark and stifling side of the household – its role in traditional societies as the primary instrument of social control. The modern era of individual liberty was first and foremost a liberation from the constraints of the household – for women most obviously, but also its other members too. With the partial exception of the parent-child relationship, western societies no longer expect individuals to subordinate their personal autonomy to the greater good of the family.

It wasn’t just the call of freedom that sparked the revolution, but also the demands of efficiency. We created the modern world by developing institutions that, one-by-one, supplanted the functions of the household. The factory, the office, the shop, the school, the nursery, the hospital, the police station, the restaurant, the theatre, the cinema, the hotel, the old people’s home: each offers a service that is more productive, specialised and varied than what we could ever hope to provide in our homes.

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Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

That, by the way, includes the services provided by servants – whose role in most households was rendered obsolete by these new institutions and by new technologies. We may think of ourselves as all the more egalitarian as a result – most households now consisting exclusively of the co-equal members of the modern family; and yet we continue to be served by a multitude of poorer, less powerful individuals, both in our own countries and around the world.

The great difference is that they no longer live with us, we no longer have to look them in the eye, know their names or take responsibility for their welfare. The great retreat of domestic service was progress of a kind , but not towards a truly classless society. Indeed, one can make a case that people of different classes have never lived more separate lives than they do today.

The emergence of modernity is thought of in terms of developments such as industrialisation, democratisation and the growth of the welfare state. We shudder at the thought of living our lives without prosperity, freedom and security. And yet we so easily forget the other great change that brought the modern world into being – the unbundling of the household.

The consequence is that opinions that are mainstream out there in the provinces of the United Kingdom are seen as taboo by the political class, thereby exacerbating the already-profound divergence between the priorities of the governors and the governed.

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The political void that Labour needs to fill

By Paul Embery

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the subject of the family. No institution is more pivotal to our lives, nor has such an acute influence over whether we succeed or prosper as individuals. Yet, beyond the usual platitudes about the need to ‘support hardworking families’, the merits of the institution itself, and in particular how it can operate most effectively, barely features in political discourse these days.

This is all the more inexcusable given the scale of family breakdown, with all its deeply deleterious effects, over the last 40 or so years.

We know from research carried out earlier this decade by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) that the UK has one of the highest percentages of lone parents in Europe. Over a million children have no meaningful contact with their fathers, and almost half of 15-year-olds do not live with both parents.

It is, of course, the young who pay the highest price for this disintegration of family life, with children from fractured families being twice as likely to develop behavioural problems and more liable to suffer from depression, turn to drugs or alcohol, or perform worse at school. There is also an increased chance of their living in income poverty in the future.

But it isn’t just children who suffer from family collapse. Divorce and separation have led to increasing estrangement between parents and their offspring, and growing loneliness among older people, such that around a quarter of a million people aged over 75 spend Christmas Day alone.

Yet so far as our lily-livered politicians talk about this social catastrophe at all, it is to tell us that families come in all shape and sizes and that to even raise concerns is to stigmatise those families that do not conform to the traditional image. It is a pathetic, negligent, pusillanimous response to an epidemic that is causing widespread misery and impeding the life chances of millions of young people.

What is so difficult or revolutionary about making the simple argument that, as the evidence conclusively demonstrates, children are generally better-served by being brought up by both biological parents, and that it should be the job of government to use every available lever available to encourage this outcome?

This is not to decry lone parents, many of whom undoubtedly do a grand job. It is merely to recognise that we should encourage as best we can the model that is proven to work most effectively.

It is, though, not all about spinelessness. Certainly for many on the modern Left, the undermining of the family was always a political objective. These are, after all, the cultural revolutionaries, the ‘68ers, the liberal dogmatists who have always regarded the traditional family unit as oppressive and patriarchal. To dismantle it was, in their eyes, to spread ‘liberation’. Know this, and you’ll understand why they have historically supported every policy measure that has had the effect of weakening the family.

But for those of us on the more traditional Left, the concept of family, far from being antithetical to our socialism, is the very essence of it. It is within the family unit that we first learn about obligation, sacrifice, loyalty, compassion and solidarity. It is one place where the common good will almost always transcend self-interest, where you are in every sense your brother’s keeper. What better example is there of socialism in action?

That’s why we socialists should defend the family unit against all-comers. And that means resisting not just the cultural war against it, but the economic one too. Austerity, low wages and poverty have all weakened family ties, as has the explosion in the number of families in which both parents go out to work, often not through choice but financial necessity.

Working-class families bear the brunt of all this, and thus are more prone to break up than wealthier middle-class families. A greater degree of financial security inevitably allows for more investment in the well-being of offspring and better insulates couples against pressures that often drive poorer parents apart. And all of this becomes self-perpetuating: children raised in strong families are themselves more likely to enjoy family stability later in life.

That’s why fighting the effects of austerity and demanding better wages and a healthier work-life balance for workers is crucial. But without a parallel commitment to the concept of the traditional family itself, and the courage to articulate it, any success will be limited, and we are destined to condemn a new generation of young victims to the destructive effects of family breakdown.

Remarkably, in spite of the sustained political attacks against it by our liberal establishment, the populace still cleaves to the concept of the traditional family unit. Polling for CSJ shows that 72% of adults believe that family breakdown is a serious problem in Britain today, while 69% think it important for children to grow up living with both parents and 64% agree that fatherlessness is a serious problem.

Confucius had it right 2,500 years ago when he said, “When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation.”

On this fundamental issue, as on so much else, today’s political class is woefully out of step with those whom it governs. And the chasm between the two groups grows ever wider.

Further reading

The truth about 'liberal' London

By Paul Embery

They are the two giants of the global financial press.

One, acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 2007, is clearly of the Right. The Wall Street Journal has been a champion of the Republican tax cuts package that Donald Trump signed into law at the end of last year.

But if the WSJ can see no wrong in the signature project of the American Right, we need only cross the Atlantic where, in the outlook of the FT, we find a business newspaper that sees no good in the flagship enterprise of Britain’s Right – Brexit.

I exaggerate a little in saying “no wrong” and “no good” but only a little. Crucially, it’s the one-eyed character of both platforms on such consequential questions that is so striking and depressing.

First, America. The US Right and the Journal have signed up to an economic theory of tax cuts that has a status only one step higher than “written on the back of a cigarette paper”. The Laffer curve, infamously scrawled on to a bar napkin in 1974, purported to show that government revenues actually increased when certain tax rates were reduced – because of the turbo charge that they gave to the encouragement of initiative, overtime and other economy-expanding activities. But despite the four decades of evidence which suggest few tax cuts ever come close to financing themselves, the Republican Party has fallen irrationally in love with a theory that says there need be no conflict between an aspiration to be a tax-cutting conservative and a fiscal conservative. And it’s a deep love. Not one Republican law-maker in Washington has voted to raise tax in any meaningful vote since 1991.

As for team FT, they may have been a model of prudence when compared to the Journalistas on the topic of tax, but they can’t claim to be less ideologically rigid on the issue where their own journalistic qualities are being most tested. When it comes to understanding why more British citizens voted for Brexit than have ever voted for any other cause, party or candidate in the nation’s history, you might be interested to know that not one regular FT columnist is a Brexiteer. However, when he was interviewed for Radio 4’s Media Show, the newspaper’s Editor, Lionel Barber, insisted the FT mind was not a closed one. To prove this openness he named three pro-Leave writers who graced his OpEd pages but oh dear – it wasn’t much of a proof. For a start he named me – even though I’ve never written on the subject for them. Second was Iain Martin – who has been an exclusive columnist for The Times for 12 months. And, third, Jacob Rees-Mogg – but who doesn’t publish the Moggster these days?

We got closer to the FT‘s true attitude to the oh-so scandalous project of giving Britain the same self-determination that the vast majority of countries in the world enjoy (and most would never consider giving up) when a former Editor of The Economist wrote to the FT, saluting it for performing its “duty” of pouring scorn on the Brexit project. Bill Emmott’s dismissive was Tweeted as “letter of the day” by Mr Barber.

Curiously, we pay huge attention to the role of Fox News in corrupting American conservatism, and of the allegedly corrosive impact of the Daily Mail on British political discourse, but seem to have forgotten that the deadliest rot within movements and systems of thinking starts from the head. It’s not hard to discern whiffs of decay from within both the Journal and pink ‘un.

Surely any media organisations that failed to anticipate 2016’s unexpected shocks to the system, and which had been leading proponents of the policies that had helped to drive the political revolts, would be expected to have subsequently undertaken extensive soul-searching? But there have been few signs of it from either publication. If anything, they hold even more firmly to their former beliefs.

From a commercial point of view, neither the Journal or FT has much incentive to, for example, revisit immigration policies that provide rich readers and big company advertisers with cheap labour. Nor to question the property and monetary policies that have put rocket-boosters underneath the market wealth of the kind of people who buy jewelled Cartier collars for their dogs and splash out on the many other varieties of luxury goods sold from the pages of both papers’ glossy lifestyle supplements. For certain high-ups at the FT, 2016 will live long in the memory for a 65% jump in digital revenues from the paper’s How to Spend It magazine. What’s not to like about a year, and an economy, that delivers such largesse for the bottom line – directly from the 1%’s platinum cards?

Putting aside the commercial factors that inhibit honest rethinking, though, the key intellectual weakness that the FT and Journal share for the task of understanding our changing and anti-capitalist times is a lack of interest in the “unmeasured”. Just as tax relief for the family makes no sense to the Journal’s GDP-number-crunching-podcasters, so the behaviour of Brexit’s voters seems illogical to groupthinkers at the FT who, living in a world of day-to-day press deadlines and quarterly company results, can’t see much beyond the short-term economic costs associated with the uncertainty of transitioning from the stability of EU membership to a new, as yet unknown, arrangement.

Average citizens – and this is borne out by fascinating opinion polling – are less focused on the near-future. They, perhaps, can see the likelihood of an EU emerging that will make the weakness and drift of today’s Theresa May government seem trivial in comparison. They’ve made the simple but wise long-term bet that a 27-member organisation operating on 27 different electoral cycles will probably struggle to agree on anything much at all – especially anything important.

A greater degree of long-termism might not be the only thing Brexit voters could teach people who are willing to buy $67,000 necklaces. Three drivers of the votes of 2016 may be particularly deserving of more reflection.

Changes to family structure.

Family networks are fracturing. In part because rising house prices mean that many young families can’t afford to live near their parents. And what has been the consequences for this fracturing for the care of children and the elderly? Could it be that in wanting to put some limit on immigration and its effect on house prices – or at least by ensuring inflows become predictable – voters wanted to defend something that the FT and the economics profession never worries about in any meaningful way? What’s the economic value of your child’s gran being within walking distance? What has been the economic cost and implications for inequality of the wastelanding of so many working class family structures? And, fundamentally, what’s wrong with a society and an economics journalism that doesn’t seriously try to design housing or immigration policies that protect such relationships?

Security.

This may be the first and last time I ever quote Ted Cruz approvingly but I’d like to think the campaign commercial from his 2016 run (above) might have caused a few financial journalists to shift uneasily in their seats. Globalisation, immigration and sometimes doctrinaire free market trade policies have created huge amounts of insecurity for many poorer citizens of advanced nations. It’s easy for people unaffected (so far) by competition from Chinese manufacturers or Indian call centres to say insecurity is a price worth paying for cheaper consumer goods and services – when they are not paying that price.

The UK’s Vote Leave campaign “got it” in 2016 when it chose Take Control as its rallying call to people who felt increasingly “done to”. And another person who has “got it” is the economic historian Niall Ferguson. Talking to UnHerd, he argued that there had been inadequate political management of the pace of globalisation. While we might want to eventually end up in the same freely trading world that we are already largely immersed in, it might have been more judicious to have approached the destination more slowly and had the time to help victims of it to adjust more smoothly to competition.

And then there’s the nation itself.

The FT has its headquarters in London but most of its readers are international. They may appreciate their own territorial identities but probably not as much as the people that David Goodhart described as “Somewheres” – more rooted in their communities and with less wherewithal or interest to jet regularly to other places.

One of the greatest examples of national solidarity in modern times came when the Berlin Wall fell and the people of West Germany accepted a large tax hike to help pay for their fellow countrymen and women of East Germany to be fast-tracked through 40 years of economic falling behind.

When the people of Greece suffered austerity of a catastrophic kind from the euro crisis, did Germany offer similar solidarity or anything like it? No, despite the many ways in which the configuration of the single currency area has super-charged its manufacturing exporters. Exiting an artificial supranation in favour of something with so much more shared history, so many more shared institutions, and knitted together through familial interconnectedness wasn’t so dumb after all. This might well be proved during adversities in the years ahead – when Britain and/or the EU are called upon to make the kind of neighbour-respecting self-sacrifices that polities may depend upon to survive.

Adam Smith would not have made the same mistakes. He – through his own Moral Sentiments book and the overlaps of his thinking with that of Edmund ‘small platoons’ Burke – understood the importance of the non-material ties that bind.

But when the leading two newspapers of the business world are so indifferent to the social soils in which markets grow, it is no wonder that markets, market players and policy-makers can also become nine parts materialistic and only one part relational. They are obsessed with what the US commentator David Brooks has called resume values – values and decisions designed to power success in careers – rather than eulogy values – values and life choices of the kind honoured at a person’s funeral and in the remembering of the big, non-workplace choices they made for their families, neighbours and beliefs.

There is plenty that’s still brilliant in both of these newspaper titles. Unlike my colleague Douglas Murray, I wholly applaud the FT’s takedown of the President’s Club, for example. Saturday’s FT Magazine nearly always challenges and educates more than its rivals. Saturday is also the day when the WSJ shines. The Review section edited by Gary Rosen displays the intellectual curiosity that the daily comment pages no longer evidence very often. And, personally, I’ll never stop reading a paper which has the great Peggy Noonan on its books.

But, overall, mirroring the economics profession which has lost the humanitarianism of Adam Smith, the  footloose multinational firms that have no community roots, the tech firms which see childhoods as easy routes to greater market penetration, and the executive company boards under pressure to hit quarterly performance numbers, there is little commitment within the pillars of the capitalist system to the people-sized institutions which civilise, educate and care, or to the national identities which people are likeliest to make sacrifices for.

It’s a shame that the newspapers that should be so well placed to challenge rootlessness within capitalism are actually so very far away from even reporting the necessity of doing so.

THIS SERIES CONTINUES TOMORROW.

Yesterday evening's introduction to this series

Test article

By Tim Montgomerie

But, just for the moment, Brexit is doing what membership of the European Union also did and is complicating lines of accountability for politicians. Most recently the government’s social justice agenda (or lack thereof) has been blamed on the time, energy and brainpower that the divorce from Brussels is eating up.

Alan Milburn cited Brexit when, last week, he resigned from the government’s social mobility commission.

Nicky Morgan, the staunch Remainer who now chairs the Treasury Select Committee, never misses an opportunity to undermine Brexit and told ConservativeHome readers that social reform had been sidelined because the government’s best brains were fixated on getting a good deal from Brussels.

And an opinion poll for today’s Independent finds the public in agreement with this ‘blame Brexit’ argument. 60% say important domestic issues are being neglected as a result of Britain’s most important post-war negotiations.

Sorry folks but it’s too easy to blame Brexit for this government’s general inertia and, with respect to the urgent need to address the acute social problems facing advanced western nations, it’s wholly unacceptable. It’s not acceptable because the whole ‘blame Brexit’ argument rests on the false assumption that a lot of effort would be needed to move one nation policy ideas from the drawing board to the take-off stage. Many are already on the runway and could be quickly airborne if there was the will.

Here are five policies that could be implemented by any one of the 95% of ministers who aren’t involved in the Brexit process…

1. Cancellation of middle class tax cuts[1. See David Laws’ recent UnHerd column for why increases to income tax thresholds now largely benefit better-off, two-earner couples.] and diversion of the money saved to improve the incentive structures within Universal Credit or to ease the council tax burden that disproportionately hits poorer families.
2. A green light for – as Sajid Javid, the freelancing Communities Secretary, had proposed – greater capital borrowing while maintaining tight control of day-to-day (or current) spending. This could help finance the houses that the south needs and the infrastructure that the northern and rural economy lacks (if you’ll forgive the slight over-simplification).
3. Reform the 1961 Land Compensation Act (as Nick Boles recommends in his ‘Square Deal for Housing’ manifesto) so that the surge in land value when planning permission is granted is shared more fairly between the private landowner and the taxpayer. Many Tory MPs would not like this proposal (because of the way it retrospectively changes the terms under which some investors decided to use their money) but it would almost certainly be supported by enough opposition MPs to become law and would release billions for investment in affordable homes and the infrastructure that is needed to support them.
4. Implement the manifesto to strengthen families put together by Tory MP Fiona Bruce and Tory peer Lord Farmer. Its eighteen simple and cheap policies would start to address the government’s current lack of interest in supporting the institution that the Pope has correctly described as the best educator, hospital and welfare provider.
5. And, finally, how about rehiring the welfare advisers to David Cameron who were summarily dismissed when Theresa May became PM? They had been working on a ‘life chances’ agenda and were ready to launch policies to address the paths to poverty caused by addiction, debt and mental illness. Their work was unforgivably binned when nearly all advisers to the outgoing PM were axed in an unnecessarily bloody clear-out.

In each of these cases the reason for inactivity is not Brexit…

In the case of policy one, it’s inadequate recognition that the benefit freeze that Philip Hammond left in place was proposed at a time when the rate of inflation was much lower. The freeze is causing real misery for many Britons who have to count every penny.

In the case of two it’s Mrs May’s unwillingness to sack her excessively cautious Chancellor and his support for the Treasury short-termist approach to the public finances. The failure to borrow now in order to increase the housing stock will only lead to higher housing benefit bills in the future but Britain’s finance ministry is too rigid in instinctively opposing preventive interventions of this kind.

In the case of three it’s fear of giving Jeremy Corbyn any kind of victory but if Mrs May is serious about housing being her number one priority she has a choice: reach across the aisle and deliver this grand reform or continue to promise big but deliver small.

In the case of four it’s simple lack of interest – throughout the Tory party – in family policy. At this year’s Tory conference in Manchester, for example, there was just one fringe meeting on the family (hosted by the Centre for Social Justice). If that meeting hadn’t have been held there wouldn’t have been anything at all on this most vital of social institutions at the conference.

Any why isn’t policy set five happening? The explanation is a deliberate political shift to woo a certain kind of voter. Mrs May made it clear, on becoming PM, that her focus would be the ‘just about managing’ class and, very regrettably, she shelved what might have been a great and honourable Tory focus on the helping the people at the very bottom, who are aren’t managing at all, or are hardly managing.

***

Post-the-Brexit-referendum when so many people who don’t normally vote went to polling stations in the hope for change… Post-the-general-election when the commanding Tory lead in opinion polls evaporated as voters signaled they did not want ‘stable’ but change… Post-the-Grenfell-tragedy when it was impossible to remain ignorant of the inadequate housing standards that so many have to endure…. Post these things it was and is vital that the party of Wilberforce, Disraeli and Macmillan rose/rises to the occasion. While it hasn’t enacted anything quite so regressive as its centre-right sister party on the other side of the Atlantic seems set to, the British Conservative Party has not yet come close to fulfilling the aspirations Mrs May set out on her first day in the nation’s top job. Most ministers are not involved in Brexit. Many complain at the control freakery of the Number 10 operation that stops them pursuing policies they’d like to. That desire by Mrs May to run the Whitehall machine as tightly as she used to run the Home Office is at least as much of an explanation for paralysis in government than Brexit. There are plenty of policies that could build the hope that is so absent at the moment – especially in the hardest-pressed corners of the country. And let’s not pretend that Brexit is the main reason that they’re gathering dust on Whitehall’s shelves.

“Congratulations to all of the ‘DEPLORABLES’ and the millions of people who gave us a MASSIVE (304-227) Electoral College landslide victory!”

Not everyone will be feeling quite so grateful to those who put Trump in the White House. As in the case of Brexit, liberal opinion is contemptuous of those who voted to disrupt the established order. Their actions are condemned as not only deplorable, but also trivial – a toys-out-the-pram moment from those too stupid and/or prejudiced to deal with economic and cultural change.

But what if the people who tipped the balance for Trump really do have something to complain about? Indeed, something so serious that their reaction at the ballot box could be seen as not just excusable, but proportionate?

In an extended analysis published on LinkedIn – and echoing Henry Olsen’s recent piece for UnHerd – Bridgewater chairman Ray Dalio provides some much needed statistical context:

“While conditions for the lowest income groups have long been bad, conditions of non-college-educated whites (especially males) have deteriorated significantly over the past 30 years or so. This is the group that swung most strongly to help elect President Trump…

“Now, the average household income for main income earners without a college degree is half that of the average college graduate.

“The share of whites without college degrees who describe themselves as ‘not too happy’ has doubled since 1990, from 9% to 18%, while for those with college degrees it has remained flat, at around 7%.

“Prime working-age white males have given up looking for work in record numbers; the number of prime-age white men without college degrees not in the labor force has increased from 7% to 15% since 1980.”

And then we come to the worst of it:

“The probability of premature death for whites without college degrees between the ages of 35 and 64 is nearly three times higher than it is for whites with college degrees, and the rate of premature deaths is up by about 25% since 2000 (while it is down for virtually every other demographic group). The US white population is unique among large groups in the developed world for seeing increases in their death rates.”

The primary components of this grim trend are the so-called deaths of despair – suicide, alcohol poisoning and the drug overdoses associated with the opioid epidemic.

In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Linda Loman has this to say about her unfortunate husband:

“His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”

Until the establishment does pays attention, we can expect those at the other end of cultural pecking order to keep voting for populists of one kind or another.

But what would paying attention involve? Well, it might help if more attention were paid to family structure – a point made by Kay Hymnowitz in an article for the Institute for Family Studies:

“…addiction is most common among young single and divorced men. Sixty-one percent of the adult population is married; that population makes up 28% of opioid overdose deaths. Never-married and divorced adults are a much smaller percentage of the population, 32% to be precise, but accounted for—take a deep breath—71% of opioid deaths…

“Given what we know about how single men fare on a variety of measures compared to their married peers, it makes sense that they would be more likely to succumb to America’s current pharmaceutical scourge. All in all, married men live longer and they are less likely to commit suicide. They typically take fewer risks than single men: they have fewer car accidents. get into fewer fights, and more generally engage in less thrill-seeking behaviors, including taking drugs.”

Family life is a private matter, but its disruption has the most public of consequences.

In a data-rich article for the Institute for Family Studies Naomi Cahn and June Carbone examine the striking disparity in (American) divorce rates across different professions:

“A recent report on which occupations have the highest and lowest divorce rates intrigued us. The study analyzed data from the 2015 American Community Survey, and, based on the number of people in a particular occupation who had married at least once, calculated the percentage of people who divorced… for example, librarians have about a 28% chance of divorce, while phlebotomists have approximately a 46% chance, according to this study.”

Actuaries, scientists and clergy are among the professions where divorce rates are lowest; while those at the other end of the scale include bartenders, flight attendants and various kinds of machine operator. For the ten professions most likely to experience divorce, the average divorce rate is close to 50% – more than twice that for the ten professions where divorce is least likely. 

Why should divorce be distributed so unevenly across different occupations? Income level is a good place to start looking for answers:

“People with less income are less likely to be married in the first place, and more likely to be divorced, as a recent IFS study discussed. About 25% of ‘poor’ adults (in households with income below the 20^th percentile) aged 18 to 55 are currently married, compared to 39% of working-class adults (in households with income between the 20^th and 50^th percentiles), and 56% of middle- and upper-class adults (above the 50^th percentile). Furthermore, while under one-third of ever-married middle- and upper-class people have ever been divorced, 40% of working-class and poor men and women who have ever been married have also been divorced.”

Are richer people staying together for the sake of their jointly accumulated assets? In crude numbers, they may have more to lose financially from divorce, but that’s far from the only consideration:

“…wealthier people report being happier in their marriages than low-income individuals: as Bloomberg recently reported, 53% of those who describe themselves as lower class rate themselves as happy in marriage, compared to 70% of those who rate themselves as upper class.”

A further complication is that divorce used to be rare for everyone, regardless of income level or occupation. Though divorce rates have risen across society, they have done so to highly unequal extents – part of the ‘coming apart’ phenomenon documented by Charles Murray and others.

Cahn and Carbone suggest it isn’t just the level of income from poorly paid work that is the problem, but also its unreliability:

“We suspect that employment instability, as opposed to low income per se, may be part of the explanation. For those who are not wealthy, marriage has risks as well as benefits. In the United States, the median working-age household has approximately $5,000 in retirement savings, and more than half of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. Commitment to a partner with an unstable income—someone who runs up the credit card bills, incurs large health care expenses, or needs to be bailed out of jail can diminish family savings. The commitment marriage entails requires a willingness – legally, financially, and emotionally – to share the couples’ joint resources. For couples with unstable finances, this commitment may be a source of peril.”

This is something that social conservatives must continually bear in mind. It is a fine thing to extol the virtues of marriage (even if the well-to-do opinion-formers most likely to experience its benefits are reluctant to do so); but marriageability requires reliability, which in turn requires a reliable income. 

An economy that fails provide secure jobs for all will be one that continues to come apart. 

But this lack of prudence is more than financial. Baby-boomers are also losing the family networks through which societies have traditionally supported the elderly. The point is made by Ashton M Verdery and Rachel Margolis in a paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

“Older adults have lived within dense kin networks for most of human history and the kinless have been a small subpopulation in the modern demographic era. However, recent declines in marriage, increases in gray divorce, and fertility decline are leading to larger numbers of older adults with no close family members. Mortality improvements and the increase in new relationship forms among older adults are not large enough to offset these trends.”

We have over-pruned our family trees, meaning that increasing numbers of us will spend some or all of our later years without close relatives. This isn’t just a personal matter, it has huge implications for public policy: “Those without living close kin report higher rates of loneliness and experience elevated risks of chronic diseases and nursing facility placement.”

The Verdery and Margolis study looks at the extent to which ‘kinlessness’ is likely to grow in the United States over the coming decades:

“Our findings point to dramatic increases in the numbers of kinless older adults in the United States, whether we consider a broad or a narrow definition of kinlessness. The increases occur for whites and blacks, men and women. By 2060, we expect the population of white and black Americans over 50 y old without a living partner or children to reach as high as 21.1 million, 6.3 million of whom will also lack living siblings or parents, up from our estimates of 14.9 million and 1.8 million, respectively, in 2015.”

So the number of older (not just elderly) Americans with no close relatives will more than triple in forty years. Of course, losing family is an occupational hazard of growing old. But by having fewer, or no, children, and by forming looser relationships with partners, we’re reducing our chances of holding on to at least some family.

But what of friendship, neighbourliness and community? Could the wider web of human relationships compensate for the growth of kinlessness?

It’s a nice thought, but consider how many of these connections are routed to you through immediate family members. By losing, or never forming, close family relationships you cut yourself off from a larger number of secondary, but still important, relationships.

Quite rightly, we worry about the number of people approaching retirement without savings or property. Where will they live? How will they pay the rent? Good questions. But we also need to think about their relational poverty.

No home, no money, no family, no friends – it’s a truly grim picture, but, unless things change, an increasingly common one.

Our politicians are reluctant to address issues of family life (‘a private matter’) and they’re unwilling to do much to build the houses and communities in which family life can flourish. Furthermore, as we saw in the British general election this year, any attempt to fund a social care solution is fraught with political risk.

Looking ahead, how might society adapt to the increasing isolation of the elderly? Machines to provide care and companionship in our dotage? Or maybe euthanasia – already a common cause of death in some countries.

So, in place of family life, robots and assisted suicide. How long will it be before we take these wonders of the modern age and combine them?

A case in point is extramarital sex – or adultery, if I may be so bold – on which public disapproval appears to be holding up. A fascinating article by Nicholas H. Wolfinger of the Institute for Family Studies presents the evidence:

“According to the past 30 years of the General Social Survey (GSS), three out of every four American adults aver that extramarital sex is always wrong. At the other end of the spectrum, under three percent of the population thinks extramarital sex isn’t wrong at all. The number of Americans who report actually having sex outside the bonds of matrimony has held relatively steady, at around 16 percent. Annual fluctuations have been minor, rarely exceeding more than a percentage point in either direction.”

However, when one unpicks the numbers on those admitting to extramarital sex, one finds a growing divergence between the generations – but not in the direction you might expect.

“…the broader trend has obscured startling changes: since 2000, older Americans are cheating more, while younger Americans are cheating less…

“For the first few years of the millennium, there were scant age differences. Starting after 2004, Americans over 55 began reporting rates of extramarital sex that were about five or six percentage points higher than were being offered by younger adults. By 2016, 20% of older respondents indicated that their marriages were nominally adulterous, compared to 14% for people under 55. Most married Americans remain committed to monogamy, but the mounting age difference is noteworthy and statistically significant.”

What could explain this phenomenon? Wolfinger shows that it isn’t those of advanced age driving the change, but rather people in their 50s and 60s — the “products of the sexual revolution”. While there may be some tendency for older people of whatever era to “grow bored of their marital beds”, the data is clear that “older Americans only became more sexually active outside marriage in recent years.”

Wolfinger wonders if the advent of Viagra might have some bearing on the matter – not in changing attitudes towards adultery, but in facilitating the dirty deed. However, the growing gap between the generations isn’t just explained by more infidelity among the older age groups, but less among the younger – for which Viagra surely can’t claim the credit.

One has to ask whether the baby-boomers play fast-and-loose with their marriages because they can afford to. If you have assets – especially housing assets – then divorce may be financially feasible. If on the other hand you have no property and no savings, and you and your partner can barely afford the rent between the two of you, then a split could spell financial disaster – even homelessness.

Nicholas Wolfinger’s analysis shows a big drop in extramarital sex (among the younger cohort) taking place in the second half of the last decade e.g. coinciding with the financial crisis. This also happens to be a period in which the long-term fall in teen pregnancies has accelerated.

The decline in various forms of youthful malarkey is often attributed to the distraction effect of social media. But perhaps it’s more a case of needs must.