“What’s your thing in politics, Michael?” David Cameron asked, when I started to support the Conservatives in their electoral dark days of the mid-noughties. I immediately knew: “My thing is families.”
The Conservatives’ hints of supporting families if they came back into office were what had got me on board. Cameron’s willingness to talk about marriage, stability and strengthening families was also helping them scale the electoral mountain they needed to climb to defeat the still all-dominating Tony Blair.
Blair himself used the F word to powerful effect in opposition, arguing before his massive victory in 1997 that a strong society cannot be morally neutral about the family. He was completely right but ignored his own nostrum in power and focused solely on children.
Yet without policies to help parents and address Britain’s peculiarly high levels of family breakdown, game-changing improvements for children are impossible to achieve.
The depressed prospects of children in care testify to the complete inability of the state to provide the care and nurture they need to thrive.
After nearly fourteen years of a Conservative-led Government, I got out some very large binoculars to look back over their record on families and can see very little they have achieved to nudge harmful trends in the right direction.
Family relationships that sustain people are social and health assets to be prized, not taken for granted or threatened by policies, yet their reforms like no-fault divorce actively undermine those bonds.
A running sore since the turn of the century has been the UK’s deeply unfair tax rules. Families with one wage or one-and-a-bit wages coming in are still totally hammered by our individualised tax system. It is blind to the costs of dependents, like children, and the contribution a parent makes by staying at home or greatly reducing their work to look after them.
The Family Hubs Network (FHN) sent a Budget Submission to the Chancellor this weekend showing almost two thirds of the public agree our tax system still fails to account for extra costs of raising children.
Our recommendations would make tax more family-friendly by doubling marriage allowance, addressing the discriminatory way child benefit is withdrawn from single, or mainly, single earner families and reforming the whole flawed system.
Back in the 1990s, when tax became individualised, Chancellor Nigel Lawson unsuccessfully lobbied for the option of joint income taxation as taxing single earner families so unfairly would require giving benefits – or ‘tax credits’ – to those struggling to make ends meet. The tax credit route is exactly what Blair and Brown chose, but it was hardly a Conservative way to proceed.
The Cameron Government however, and all Conservative Governments since, responded so half-heartedly to calls to sort out these tax traps, despite them being amplified by friendly think-tanks, that for too many families they might not have bothered. ‘Marriage Allowance’ puts only £250 back into the family budget and half of eligible couples don’t even bother to claim.
Two fifths of five eighths of not much at all!
What was our Conservative Government’s response to FHN’s call for a Budget for Families? They pointed proudly to the ‘largest expansion in childcare in our history’, yet this is a socialist policy: the most motivated and bespoke carer a child could have is required to fit their child like a cog into the childcare system so they can become a cog in the labour market, whatever their preference.
What about the mantra that we must see everything through the eyes of the child? Childcare typically provides a succession of different people coming in and out of a child’s sight, almost from the start of life. Yet the Government’s own Start for Life policy rests on research that says what’s important in the first three years of life is the smell, the voice, the
This expansion of the welfare state is notoriously unaffordable and requires vastly more childcare workers. Where will they find the Nursery Army, when they actively discourage many from looking after their own children by making it financially impossible – and subtly pour scorn on those who want to do this incredibly skilled and emotionally demanding job? So much for Conservatives getting out of the way and enabling choice.
They also say their Child Benefit rules sustainably support ‘the vast majority of families,’ yet nearly a third of families are about to lose cash because of the frozen thresholds, vastly more than the one in seven first intended. Yet again, families where a parent has chosen to look after their own children are particularly penalised. How has this Conservative Government so lost its way that it relentlessly targets parents who don’t want to use state childcare?
Two decades have gone by since those first promising signs that the Conservatives might still be the party of the family. Their time in power and their policies instead mark them out as the party of liberal individualism. Oft-mentioned income tax rate cuts will benefit single people most, leave tax system unfairness for families untouched and, crucially, be clawed back from any welfare benefits families receive.
Family policy-wise they are almost indistinguishable from Labour. Time is running out for them to rediscover those electoral crampons which our polling suggests could help them climb another electoral mountain of distrust, despair, and disillusionment. The country – and they – urgently need a Budget for Families.
