Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  As Britain rebuilt its infrastructure, the model of the ideal nuclear family was also being renovated to take account of the social legacy of war — particularly the changing ambitions of women. The traditional pre-war marriage assumed the man ruled the roost: wives undertook parenting and domestic duties while their husbands were the breadwinners and paternal protectors. But when men went off to fight, women were invited to enter the labour force and proved reluctant to resume their place in the kitchen after the troops returned home.

  Prominent social commentators argued it was mothers neglecting their household responsibilities who were to blame for the wave of divorce and delinquency: latch-key children up to mischief while their parents were both at work; the birth-rate tumbling as marriages failed. The question became how to woo women back to the hearth. The answer was to redraft the contract. Men and women should resume their traditional roles, it was decided, but with husband and wife enjoying equal status. Education programmes trained girls for domesticity and motherhood, while promising personal fulfilment in a ‘relationship’ rather than an ‘institution’. This romantic ideal proved popular with women, even if the reality was often very different. Many men struggled to adapt.

  The hope had been that the ‘companionate family’ model would sustain the institution of marriage through a tricky patch. The reality was that it often raised unattainable expectations and was later accused of being a major contributor to marital disillusionment and the rise in the divorce rate. By the end of the 1960s it was clear that government would have to think again if the traditional family was to survive the fallout from revolutionary sexual politics.

  It was no longer possible to try and shame married couples into staying together. Plan B was to encourage those who did divorce to re-marry. It was an admission that not every couple could or should stay together ‘til death us do part. Instead, the idea was that even when individual marriages failed, the institution would survive.

  The Divorce Reform Act of 1969 made it much quicker and easier for couples to split and re-tie the knot, and initially it seemed the tactic might work. In 1972, the year after the law came into force, more veils were lifted, brides kissed and confetti scattered than at any time since the frantic days of 1940 when the troops were leaving. The number of marriages dissolved had jumped 60 per cent to 119,000 but, crucially, the number of divorcees who remarried was 121,000.

  Optimism was short-lived, however: 1972 marked a highpoint for marriage in the UK. It has been in continuous decline ever since, a steep downward curve that provided traditionalists with a graphic depiction of how British society slid into a moral cesspit of deviance, selfishness and sin.

  What had really changed, though, was Britain’s understanding of what constituted ‘normal’ family life. An unmarried couple sharing a bed had moved from scandal to convention within thirty years. By 2010, almost half of children in the UK were born outside wedlock. Indeed, the majority of babies in Wales and the north of England were delivered to parents who were not married, rising to 75 per cent in some towns.

  For Britain’s ethnic minorities the definition of a normal family varied substantially, dependent on cultural heritage. Within the British-born Caribbean community, the key features had become very low rates of marriage, high rates of single parenthood and high rates of mixed marriage: 63 per cent of men with a partner lived with a white woman; 45 per cent of women with a partner lived with a white man; only around a quarter of Caribbean children lived with two black parents.

  In contrast, the key features of family life in South Asian communities were very high rates of marriage, low rates of single-parenthood and low rates of mixed marriage. Around three quarters of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women were married by the age of twenty-five, and a clear majority saw their role as looking after the home and family.

  Interpreting the data, academics at the Institute for Social & Economic Research concluded that there had been a general shift from what they called ‘old-fashioned values’ towards ‘modern individualism’ among all ethnic groups in Britain, but changing at different paces. ‘Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are behind that trend. Caribbeans are in front. In fact, all the groups studied are moving in the same direction.’

  Britain’s white population was somewhere in between, with a range of acceptable family options now available. Gay or straight, married or cohabiting, open or monogamous, when it came to family structure in the twenty-first century, researchers concluded there was no longer a recognised thing to do.

  Reaction to the ‘anything goes’ attitude to family life could be divided into two camps. For some it was evidence of the corrosion of society and character by an increase in selfish individualism. For others it was the victory of personal liberation and freedom over outdated moralist values and structures.

  During the New Labour era, government thinking on family life was heavily influenced by the ideas of Anthony Giddens, the architect of Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ political philosophy. He argued that marriage and the nuclear family had become shell institutions, urging ministers to base their social policy, not on shoring up traditional structures, but on encouraging what he called ‘pure relationships’. He imagined these being based on ‘the acceptance on the part of each partner, until further notice, that each gains sufficient benefit from the relationship to make its continuance worthwhile’.

  Giddens called it a democracy of the emotions, but to more conservative commentators, it was the road to hell, a philosophy for a society set to self-destruct on selfishness and sin. The ideological battle lines were clearly drawn, with Giddens describing the potential showdown as fundamentalism against cosmopolitan tolerance. It was clear where the loyalties of Tony Blair’s guru lay. ‘Cosmopolitans welcome and embrace this cultural complexity. Fundamentalists find it disturbing and dangerous. We can legitimately hope that a cosmopolitan outlook will win out.’

  The politics of the family were heating up to the point where, in 2009, the British Academy (a learned body which acts as a mother-ship for social scientists) decided that analysing family patterns should be a top priority. A report the following year noted how many political claims on the topic were based ‘solely on value systems’ and ‘vary hugely in their source and solidity’. In short, the boffins were saying that politicians often talked a lot of tosh when it came to families, confusing personal views with objective evidence.

  The academy set out to separate the science from the politics, a delicate operation at the best of times, but particularly fraught in the area of family policy. First, they examined the assertion that divorce caused delinquency. When they looked at the data, they found the link to antisocial behaviour in children ‘applied to unhappy separations but not to happy ones’. A second experiment supported the finding, comparing the absence of a parent as a result of a divorce with loss through a death. ‘The association with antisocial behaviour applied to divorce, but only very weakly to bereavement,’ they found. The conclusion was that it is not the broken home that makes the difference, but whether conflict and discord accompanied the break-up.

  Family break-up had also been linked to children doing badly at school and suffering depression, but was it causing the difficulties? Again, the evidence suggested it was parenting that was the real problem. ‘Poor parenting constituted a risk even in the absence of family break-up, whereas family break-up carried little risk if it was not also followed by poor parenting.’

  What about the claim that traditional marriage is better for children than cohabitation? The report found ‘abundant evidence to conclude that committed loving relationships between parents benefit children’ and ‘married people are more likely to be strongly committed to living together than was the case with the unmarried but cohabiting.’ But this didn’t mean that marriage itself was better for children. It might well be that the kind of people who get married are better at bringing up kids.

  When the researchers looked at the profile of parents who have children outside marriage they fou
nd they were likely to have less money and lower educational attainments than couples who were married. They were also more likely to have had underage sex and to have been a teenage parent — factors statistically linked to poorer parenting.

  The scientists wondered what would happen to marriage stability if more people in the high-risk group tied the knot. ‘The evidence suggests that probably it would lessen and that the differences between the married and cohabiting would diminish.’ In other words, it wasn’t marriage that improved children’s chances, but the kind of people who chose to marry.

  At the same time as the British Academy was questioning the magic of marriage, the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the think tank for rich countries) was questioning the received wisdom that children raised by single mums do less well than those brought up by two parents. Having examined the evidence from twenty-five countries, they suggested the causal effects of being raised in a single-parent family were smaller than hitherto believed, or even zero. The OECD was honest about the limitations of its analysis but it summarised the research findings like this: ‘Overall, if there are indeed negative effects of being raised in a single-parent family, the effect is small.’

  Once again, the point was that the important driver in successful families was less its form than its function. The focus, it was argued, should not be on trying to revive or sustain traditional structures, but in teaching and supporting good parenting and relationships. Here, potentially, was the answer to the riddle of why people’s experience of family life in Britain appeared to be improving despite the collapse in marriage and widespread relationship breakdown. As one academic put it: ‘Families are doing the same business in different conditions.’

  It might just be that our society’s interest in good parenting and children’s rights, the emancipation of women and the changing role of men, the greater acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships and the challenge all these changes throw down to traditional cultural orthodoxies has, actually, produced happier families. Maybe, but I wouldn’t, necessarily, mention that in polite company.

  G is for Grass

  As a reporter, my natural habitat tends to be on untended grass, among the litter and dog mess of a British sink estate. In my BBC suit, tie and shiny shoes, I have stood in countless neglected urban parks, like an erratic boulder abandoned by a glacier. The local park is a good place to judge a neighbourhood. Look around. Is the description that leaps to mind ‘refuge’? Or ‘no-go area’?

  Just as the condition of the village green might once have reflected the social health of an ancient British settlement, so the patches of public open space in contemporary communities are an indicator of the resilience of local people. And the biggest clue of all is the state of the grass. If a community is functioning well, the grass will tell you. The football pitch, cricket square, bowling green or public lawns: if they are cared for, the people almost certainly care for each other.

  Trendy gardeners may dismiss the lawn as a monocultural abomination, but the British relationship with closely cropped turf runs too deep to be troubled by mere horticultural fashion. Our passionate affair with grass is founded upon a fierce and bloody civil war that stretches back to Tudor times and beyond: each blade is a sharp reminder of a power struggle that lasted for centuries. The battles that shaped Britain’s social structure were fought on fields of grass.

  Some sociologists suggest that our love for verdant shaded lawns is based upon a primeval urge described as Savannah Syndrome, a throwback to the tree-dotted grasslands of Africa on which humanity evolved. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote: ‘The foot is freer and the spirits more buoyant when treading the turf than the harsh gravel.’ However, walking on the grass in Britain came to be regarded as a privilege rather than a right, prompting inevitable unhappiness and upheaval.

  When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, land previously controlled by the church was purloined by the increasingly powerful gentry. Walls were built and fences erected around commons and greens, once public spaces now enclosed for sheep rather than people. Land became a privately owned commodity. The king himself acquired vast tracts in the 1530s, including numerous acres farmed by the monks of Westminster, which he intended to turn into hunting grounds; the London parks we now know as St James’s, Regent’s Park and Hyde Park became the exclusive domain of His Royal Majesty ‘for his own disport and pastime’.

  A proclamation of 1536 spelled out the pain and punishment that would befall any commoner who presumed to hunt or hawk anywhere from the palace of Westminster to Hampstead Heath. Henry had tied land ownership to social status and entrenched in British culture for centuries to come the demand for public access to green spaces. The English Civil War was essentially a power struggle between the new land-owning gentry and the older feudal landlords, a re-ordering of rights that swung to and fro with each passing decade.

  Admission to the royal parks in the capital reflects the complexities of the tussle. Charles I allowed some general public access but, after the king’s execution, Oliver Cromwell closed Hyde Park and demanded an entry payment of one shilling for a coach and 6d for each horse. The Puritans had little interest in playgrounds. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the park gates opened wide once more, although free entrance would always be dependent on the grace and favour of the Crown. I am reminded of the limitations of the royal welcome to many of London’s glorious parks whenever I wish to place a BBC camera tripod upon their lawns. It is not public space and, unless we have obtained a permit from the sovereign, the Palace’s park keepers will, politely but firmly, escort us to the exit.

  In the 1730s, Queen Caroline, the cultured German wife of George II, developed grand plans to enclose St James’s Park and the whole of Hyde Park into private royal gardens. When she enquired of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole what it would cost, he replied simply ‘three crowns’. The Hanoverian dynasty, which had recently succeeded to the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, did not dare alienate its subjects and the plan was shelved.

  European observers thought there was something peculiarly British about this idea of general access to green spaces. The French novelist Abbé Prévost was amazed to witness in St James’s Park ‘the flower of the nobility and the first ladies of the court mingled in confusion with the lowest of the populace’. However, Prévost also noted the tensions within the relationship. ‘Who could imagine, for example, that the most wretched porter will contest the right of way with a lord, of whose quality he is aware, and that if one or the other stubbornly refuses to yield, they publicly engage in fisticuffs until the stronger one remains master of the pavement? This is what sometimes happens in London.’

  The city park was to become the battleground for class struggle, increasingly so as hundreds of Parliamentary Enclosure Acts stripped agricultural workers of their access to pasture and meadow, forcing a landless population from the fields to the factories. As the commoners lost their commons, so the mighty landowners competed to show off their vast sweeping lawns. Hugely labour intensive, only the wealthiest could afford to maintain the acres of immaculate turf, hand-produced with scythes and shears. This was grass as a statement of authority, a display of power as emphatic as a parade of North Korean tanks in Pyongyang.

  These days, landscape gardeners advertise in the local services directory between kissograms and launderettes, but in the nineteenth century, they were both culturally and politically influential figures, shaping not just the great estates but wider society.

  John Loudon was among the most celebrated landscape planners of the age, engaged by the wealthy Stratton family in 1808 to redesign Tew Great Park in Oxfordshire. His landscaping was held up as a model of elegance and refinement, but as he marked out lawns and drives he was thinking about soot and smoke. Sniffing the changing wind, Loudon determined to establish himself as one of the first urban planners.

  In 1829, more than a century before the creation of London’s much beloved
Green Belt, Loudon proposed just such an idea in his work Hints on Breathing Places for the Metropolis. He knew what enclosure had done to rural communities such as Cambuslang in Lanarkshire, where he grew up, and feared a worse fate was about to befall the rapidly expanding industrial towns and cities.

  Loudon came up with the idea of concentric rings of turf and gravel, which would ensure that ‘there could never be an inhabitant who would be farther than half a mile from an open airy situation, in which he was free to walk or ride, and in which he could find every mode of amusement, recreation, entertainment, and instruction’.

  He instinctively believed that civic health was closely linked with access to grass, a view shared by some Parliamentarians who feared rapid industrialisation was throwing up towns and city districts unable to cope with the influx of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families. Forced to live in cramped and squalid conditions, cholera, diphtheria and small pox quickly spread among the urban poor. It was the perfect breeding ground for disease and social unrest.

  In 1833 the Select Committee on Public Walks concluded that it was advantageous to all classes that there be grassy places to which wives and children (decently dressed) could escape on a Sunday evening. It seems an innocuous enough idea today, but the committee had used the phrase ‘all classes’ and, in so doing, inspired the reformers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to pen a furious demand for universal access to green spaces like Regent’s Park. ‘To call such a spot a public park is an impudent mockery,’ they wrote. ‘It is not a public park, but a place set apart for the use of the wealthy only, and the people are permitted to grind out their shoes upon the gravel, merely because they cannot be prevented.’

  Although the Crown claimed that there was open access, the keys to Regent’s Park were only available to those who paid two guineas a year, a restriction justified on the basis that young trees would be injured by the mischievous and the park would become a place of assignation for young lovers. ‘Heaven preserve us!’ Bentham and Mill’s fury at the injustice explodes in mockery from the pages of their letter to the Public Walks Committee. ‘Righteous souls, who deprive thousands of your fellow-beings of the means of taking the most innocent and healthful enjoyment, lest the chaste park should be polluted by the whisper of ungodly passion.’ As for the risk of vandalism, Bentham and Mill accepted that the English were more destructive than other nationalities, but said that this was because ‘the people of the Continent have long been trusted in all public places… while the people of this country have been trusted scarcely anywhere, except where money has procured admission.’