Family values
As if the Tories weren’t in enough trouble, a team of academics has come up with another reason why the party may never regain power. Researchers studied the link between marriage and voting. Across the Western world there has been steady growth in the number of single, divorced and cohabiting women as marriage rates fall and divorces rise. And unmarried women appear less likely to support rightwing parties like the Tories than their married counterparts. (By contrast, men’s votes appear unrelated to marital status.)
The US-based research team believes it has detected a link between election results and the change in women’s lives over a twenty-year period starting in the 1970s, in Europe and North America. No one is sure of the reason for the link but the shift in the population can only be good for Labour and other parties of the centre-left.
The clever wing of the Tory party recognises the problem. David Willetts has urged his party to embrace the ‘Bridget Jones generation’ of young, single women, and insisted that they are not lost to the Conservative cause – although part of his reasoning was that many of them would settle down to start families eventually.
But the Tories appear wedded to traditional marriage, to the extent of pledging at the last election to restore the married couples’ tax allowance, scrapped by Gordon Brown.
So Labour politicians should avoid the kind of ‘marriage is best’ generalisations that trip easily off the tongue on Question Time but which alienate many of the party’s natural supporters. Respect for people’s choice of lifestyle must be a central feature of progressive politics.
Which makes Tony Blair’s condemnation of the 1960s all the more bizarre. It was the decade that saw liberalisation of laws and attitudes on divorce, homosexuality, abortion and race relations. Many on the left came into politics to defend the social reforms of the 1960s, that most progressive of decades.
But the Prime Minister considers that ‘a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others.’ If that is the case, why – as he often tells us – has crime fallen over the past seven years?
Many people hanker for a past, often illusory, when people left their doors unlocked and let children play in the streets. Surely it is better to inspire them about the future, as Harold Wilson did in the 1960s, than to feed their fears. Maybe the PM will use his conference speech to explain exactly what he does not like about the 1960s. I hope not. I can’t see it being a vote-winner.
Terrorsim.
The threat of a terrorist attack hangs over the next election. While our security services do all they can to head off the danger, the problem for the government is what to tell the public. When David Blunkett talks about the extreme danger we face, or stations tanks at Heathrow, he is accused by critics on right and left of hyping up the threat to scare people into voting Labour.
Now senior parliamentarians on the Joint Human Rights Committee have taken up the theme. They want an independent inquiry into whether terrorism genuinely poses a real and present danger. The MPs and peers raised the question as they demanded the lifting of emergency laws that are keeping twelve foreign terrorist suspects locked up without trial at Belmarsh prison.
The timing of their report, during parliament’s summer recess, ensured minimal political reaction. But the issue of what to tell the public about terrorism is critical. The theory that doom-laden warnings are being used to scare the public into the Labour fold appears far-fetched. If a minister was caught playing politics with unnecessary alerts, it would be a sacking offence. Surely a worse risk is that an atrocity occurs and it emerges that ministers were warned, but failed to tell the public.
As we saw after the Bali bomb – Australia had passed on a warning of sorts to its citizens, Britain hadn’t – the public wants to know that information is being shared, even if it is incomplete. The government is right to increase the spooks’ budget to try to avert an attack, and right to scare the public when there is just cause.