The Path to Power m-2

by Margaret Thatcher

  Much less research on welfare dependency has been done in Britain. But knowing what we do of the size and rate of increase in our Social Security spending, and seeing what has occurred in the United States, we should expect to see some similarly unintended consequences of government social policy here. And indeed we do — which leads on to the third development, the weakening of the traditional family.

  FAMILY MISFORTUNES

  The family is clearly in some sort of crisis: the question is what. There are those who claim that the family is changing rather than weakening. At one extreme some of these people view any household unit, such as cohabiting homosexuals, as a ‘family’ deserving the same degree of social recognition and respect as a married couple with children. Rather more would argue that an unmarried couple living together in a ‘stable’ relationship, who may or may not have children and may or may not in due course get married, should be so treated. Still more, doubtless, would regard serial monogamy, couples who marry and divorce lightly, as simply an ‘alternative lifestyle’ (divorce rates have risen rapidly in Britain as elsewhere in the West since divorce laws were reformed in the 1960s). And happily there is still the traditional family of dad, mum, youngsters and relatives.

  As is frequently the case with profound social change, it is much easier to distinguish specific more or less disturbing features than the way in which they will react together. It is, for example, possible that we are seeing a long-term demographic change with large and undesirable consequences. The fall in the birth rate and the increase in life expectancy, which is a general feature of our time and by no means one limited to or most evident in Britain, will result in a smaller working population sustaining a larger elderly one. People of sixty-five today are generally fitter, healthier and more capable of remaining in work — indeed younger — than their counterparts of fifty years ago. Many of them, possibly most, would prefer to carry on working and resent enforced retirement. Eventually new social arrangements will have to reflect this, among them a raising of the retirement pension age. Until that happens, the fact that in Britain retirement pensions and other benefits are not ‘funded’, but rather financed on a ‘pay as you go’ basis, means that the burden on those in work will at some point be significantly increased. It is a matter of speculation how they will react.

  Most public attention to changes in the demographic structure has, however, focused on the case of the teenage single parent. Understandably so, for this ‘lifestyle’ is an exceptionally irresponsible one, which both levies heavy costs on the taxpayer and imposes severe disadvantages on children growing up in conditions of relative poverty and without a father’s guidance.

  Moreover, it is a problem that is getting worse. The number of one-parent families with dependent children as a proportion of all families with dependent children in Britain has approximately doubled since 1976. Of course, this group includes widows, divorced and deserted single mothers — and fathers — as well as the group which is the main focus of this discussion, the never-marrieds. It goes without saying that although the circumstances of these different one-parent families are superficially similar, they arise from very different causes and, as we shall see, require very different responses. To over-simplify greatly, widows with children require financial help; the never-marrieds need that — plus a change of outlook too.

  That said, the number of single parents, though growing, actually understates the problem. Very often single mothers are concentrated either in a particular area or a particular ethnic minority. In these circumstances, complacent talk about relying on grandparents or the ‘extended family’ is quite unrealistic. For there may be no older married men in the narrower local community at all. Not only in such circumstances do children grow up without the guidance of a father: there are no involved, responsible men around to protect those who are vulnerable, exercise informal social control or provide examples of responsible fatherhood. Graffiti, drug trafficking, vandalism and youth gangs are the result and the police find it impossible to cope. There is also the financial cost. Of the 1.3 million single parents in Britain nearly 1 million depend on benefits, costing the tax payer £6.6 billion a year.

  Charles Murray regards the dramatic rise in the rate of illegitimacy as a crucial predictive indicator of problems to come. Over the last ten years the proportion of births outside marriage has more than doubled, reaching one in every three live births. Never in Britain’s recorded history has there been anything like it. It cannot be explained solely by urbanization — the catch-all explanation or excuse for most behavioural deterioration — because in Victorian Britain, which saw the most sweeping change in that direction, the illegitimacy rate, like the crime rate, actually fell. The attempt is sometimes made to minimize the significance of this change by noting that three quarters of today’s births outside marriage are registered by both natural parents. This is supposed to demonstrate that the child has been born into a stable home. But a young child needs above all the total confidence that both his parents will always be there. If the mother and father do not have sufficient commitment to each other to enter into marriage, it would hardly be surprising if the child doubts their own commitment to him. And children are much quicker on the uptake than many adults understand.

  As with crime and welfare dependency, so with family structures. Policy-making must be firmly based on analysis of what we know to be the facts. These do not show that everywhere the family is in retreat, or that most young men are criminals or that all those on means-tested benefits have accepted the culture of welfare dependency. Contrary to what the liberal-left would like to think, most children still grow up in a traditional family; most people marry; and most of these have children. In fact, no amount of philosophy, theology or social theory can provide stronger support for the argument that the family is the natural and fundamental unit of society than its resilience in the adverse climate of opinion and perverse financial incentives of the last thirty years. But this is no ground for complacency.

  Changes in behaviour which may be limited and containable within society as a whole may have dangerous and dramatic effects when localized in small communities. It is far from clear that a capitalist economy and a free society can continue to function if substantial minorities flout the moral, legal and administrative rules and conventions under which everyone else operates. What is clear is that at present we are moving rapidly in the wrong direction.

  A CYCLE OF CRIMINALITY

  We could argue indefinitely about the precise relationship between crime, dependency and family breakdown: this is an area in which more research will be valuable. But there is now little doubt in the minds of most professionals — and none, I suspect, in the minds of the rest of us — that such a connection exists and is of the highest importance.

  Take the large and important subject of juvenile delinquency as an example. The reduction of juvenile crime is not only of obvious importance in any strategy to reduce crime as a whole: it is also crucial to halt a budding career of crime in its tracks before it leads to serious and repeated offences. Discussions of the ‘causes’ of crime, both juvenile and adult, often end up in a cul-de-sac of generalities. The tendency to evil in human nature and the multiple opportunities for its expression are part of our ordinary experience. We can, indeed, do something about reducing the opportunities, by crime-prevention techniques such as ‘Neighbourhood Watch’. But in a world of greater mobility (where miscreants can more easily achieve anonymity and make their escape) and greater prosperity (where there is more to steal), the results of such strategies are bound to be limited. Moreover, although crime prevention may reduce the amount of ‘opportunist’ crime, it is only likely to displace the crime committed by determined habitual criminals from one area to another. Consequently, attention is increasingly focused on crime prevention at the level of the individual — the actual or potential delinquent — rather than on the physical environment in which a crime takes place.

  Research carried out in both
the United States and Britain has illuminated the connection between crime, the dependency culture and family breakdown.[95] British research suggests that juvenile delinquency is associated with low intelligence, impulsiveness and troublemaking at school. As regards background, common factors appeared to be low income and poor housing. The parents of these troublesome children were inclined to administer erratic discipline and poor supervision, in short either not to care or to care impulsively or ineffectually. They may well be separated or divorced or teenage mothers and have criminal convictions in the family. The small proportion of boys who became persistent offenders, continuing into adulthood, and who constitute the real criminal menace, apparently showed the same characteristics but generally in a more extreme form.

  Of course, this analysis does not seek crudely to ‘prove’ the ‘causes’ of crime. Rather, its purpose is to allow tendencies to delinquency to be predicted and — far more difficult — acted upon at an early age. But it is clearly also entirely compatible with the view that both dependency (which I suggest is more relevant than ‘poverty’) and family upbringing are crucial to any understanding of what has happened in the last thirty years to the crime rate.

  The evidence of research from the United States is still clearer. A US Department of Health and Human Services study of 1988, which surveyed the families of more than 60,000 children all over the country, found that children who were living with a never-married or divorced mother were, at anything other than the highest income level, substantially more disposed to troublesomeness at school, and emotional and behavioural problems. The latest quinquennial survey of prison inmates by the Federal Bureau of Justice showed that two thirds of chronic violent offenders and a half of all inmates had come from a background other than a two-parent family; and 37 per cent of all inmates came from a foster home or child-care institution. More than half of the chronic violent criminals reported that an immediate family member had served some time in prison. Keith Joseph’s ‘cycle of deprivation’ thus becomes a ‘cycle of criminality’. The evidence about violent chronic offenders is particularly significant, because no group is perceived by the public as more of a threat.

  In a free society there are limits to what government should seek to do to change people’s behaviour, particularly the behaviour of families. It is in considerable part because the state has intervened, on the basis of necessarily inadequate information and without proper consideration for the long-term consequences, that we are faced with so many intractable problems. But it is not only compatible with but essential to a free society to create a cultural, financial and legal framework which upholds, not undermines, the attitudes and institutions on which freedom rests.

  What then is to be done? Aiming at improvement rather than Utopia, and without wishing to deny that there are other initiatives which the fertile minds of social scientists and policy-makers might usefully devise, I propose the following four-fold approach.

  VIRTUES TO COMBAT VICES

  The first, most important and most difficult area is the moral and cultural ethos. A functioning free society cannot be value-free. Down through the ages the most profound thinkers have recognized this. For me, Edmund Burke sums it up with a clarity and sweep no one else has managed:

  Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and the good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.[96]

  Similarly, although those who framed the American Constitution chose to rely on ambition countering ambition, rather than the virtues, to preserve liberty, the fathers of the early Republic were well aware that virtue could make a significant difference. As the great patriotic American hymn puts it:

  Confirm thy soul in self-control

  Thy liberty in law.

  The character of the citizen both reflects and is reflected by the character of the state. This is an encouraging fact, for it reassures us — as it reassured me in the late 1970s — that if a people is better than its government a change of administration can release undetected talents and open up undreamt-of possibilities. But it is also a warning. For even a well established system of free government is vulnerable to any profound changes in the outlook and mentality of the populace in general and the political class in particular. Character, both individual and collective, is of course formed in many ways: it develops within the family, school, church, at work and in our leisure hours. Traditionally, the good and useful habitual characteristics which are the outcome of this process have been called the ‘virtues’. Although these virtues are by definition always good, their usefulness depends on the requirements of the situation. So, for example, some of the virtues extolled by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, though they will help get us to Heaven, may be of less practical use in our business or civic lives. Consequently, when we urge a return to those traditional virtues — for example, thrift, self-discipline, responsibility, pride in and obligation to one’s community, what are sometimes called the ‘Victorian virtues’ — we are not necessarily suggesting that only mass re-evangelization will pull Western society together. After all, it was the ultra-humanistic ancient Greeks who originally identified the key or ‘cardinal’ virtues of temperance, fortitude, practical wisdom and justice in the first place.

  That said, I find it difficult to imagine that anything other than Christianity is likely to resupply most people in the West with the virtues necessary to remoralize society in the very practical ways which the solution of many present problems requires. Although I have always resisted the argument that a Christian has to be a Conservative, I have never lost my conviction that there is a deep and providential harmony between the kind of political economy I favour and the insights of Christianity.

  I tried to explain this connection in a speech at the church of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London in March 1978.

  Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, some body of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family and the school. It will also destroy itself if it has no purpose. There is a well-known prayer which refers to God’s service as ‘perfect freedom’. My wish for the people of this country is that we shall be ‘free to serve’…

  It appears to me that there are two very general and seemingly conflicting ideas about society which come down to us from the New Testament. There is that great Christian doctrine that we are all members one of another, expressed in the concept of the Church on Earth as the Body of Christ. From this we learn our inter-dependence, and the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society.

  That is one of the great Christian truths which has influenced our political thinking; but there is also another, that we are all responsible moral beings with a choice between good and evil, beings who are infinitely precious in the eyes of their Creator. You might almost say that the whole of political wisdom consists in getting these two ideas in the right relationship to each other.

  I do not generally hold with politicians preaching sermons, though since so many clerics preach politics there seems no room in this regard for restrictive practices. So from time to time I did return to this theme. Ten years later in May 1988 I addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in similar vein. To the disquiet of some of those present, I emphasized that Christianity provided no special blessing for collectivism.

  [We] must not profess Christianity and go to Church simply becau
se we want social reforms and benefits or a better standard of living — but because we accept the sanctity of life, the responsibility that comes with freedom and the supreme sacrifice of Christ…

  Near the end of my time as Prime Minister, I became increasingly conscious of and interested in the relationship between Christianity and economic and social policy. In Michael Alison, my former PPS, and Brian Griffiths, the head of my Policy Unit, I found two committed Christians as fascinated by these matters as I was. The discussions I had and the papers produced for them formed the basis of the book of essays Christianity and Conservatism to which I contributed an introduction and which appeared in 1990 shortly before I left Downing Street.

  Not long ago it might have seemed unrealistic, to say the least, to envisage the return of an intellectual and moral climate conducive to the practice of the traditional virtues. Now, however, such matters are at the forefront of much serious debate about social problems.[97] Furthermore, at least some Church leaders, the people on whom much of the task of reshaping attitudes must depend, are having second thoughts about the beneficent effects of state provision and intervention. For example, Pope John Paul II in his Encyclical Centesimus Annus notes:

  By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbours to those in need.