I realised then that in the National Health Service, Britain’s sanctified temple of altruism, compassion, and decency, if you were old, feeble, and poor you just didn’t stand a chance.
CHAPTER 7: Onwards Into the Fire
The ineluctable logic of what I was discovering led me step by step in a direction I had never imagined I would take. There was no sudden break, no thunderclap of revelation, no seismic life-changing event. It wasn’t even that I was simply growing older. My views steadily evolved, building block by building block, on the scaffolding of my own belief in truth and evidence and morality, from one issue to another — until there seemed to arise an entirely new structure. But it wasn’t actually new at all. It was standing on the same firm foundations, while the citadels of Western belief and identity were crumbling one by one.
Although at the time I didn’t realise it, I was also stepping outside a basic journalistic convention on highbrow papers. Most such rarified journalists write for other journalists or to impress politicians or other members of the great and the good. By contrast, I always wrote for ordinary people. But the left didn’t like ordinary people — especially the lower middle class, the striving class who believed in things like self-discipline and personal responsibility.
I did not dislike them. I remained one of them. Just as they were sceptical of intellectual abstractions, fantasies or utopian solutions, so I was too. I simply went where the evidence led. ‘Leftish intellectuals’, I wrote, ‘too often have such contempt for the views of the populace at large, such a terror (not wholly unjustified) that popular prejudice owes nothing to facts that they sometimes appear to think that the only people either worth listening to or talking to are themselves’ (Guardian, 13 January 1989).
According to my own logic, I was trapping myself. By merely writing this, I was becoming for those leftish intellectuals someone not worth listening or talking to. The more I connected with reality and championed the people against the left, the more I sealed my own fate.
Issue by issue, my writing during the 1980s and 1990s reflected the fact that Britain was undergoing a cultural revolution. And, as society changed, so too did my own attitudes change. Fundamental assumptions and values were being challenged, attacked and undermined. The homogeneity of British society was being eroded by mass immigration, which was changing the face of the country. As socialism withered and the free market dominated, identity politics replaced economics. Above all, what was emerging was the cult of the individual, which gave rise to the dominance of subjective experience over objective authority of any kind, and was not merely to transform family life but also turn the understanding of what was normal and what transgressive inside out.
My ideals remained as they had always been: upholding truth over lies, justice over injustice, protecting the weak against the strong, putting others first instead of the self. One by one, however, every one of these ideals was being smashed by my former comrades on the left in their relentless march through the institutions. Issue by issue, I felt they were embracing lies over truth, injustice over justice, rule by the strong over the weak – and even destroying the very basis of what it was to be a human being.
My position was not so much political as moral. The left was rejecting all external authority and embracing instead moral and cultural relativism – the idea that ‘what is right’ is ‘what is right for me’, and declaring any hierarchy of values illegitimate. But to me, this was a recipe for an amoral free-for-all in which freedom would die and the most vulnerable would go to the wall. This was not progressive at all; this was going to take us backwards towards a Hobbesian war of all against all.
So, departing from the orthodoxy on such varied issues as the underclass, embryo research, human rights, volunteering, and multiculturalism, I pressed on further and further into the fire. One particular issue, however, suddenly propelled me in left-wing eyes into yet another circle of hell.
In the late eighties, environmentalism emerged as the latest great progressive cause. Suddenly people were fulminating about pollution, extinction of species, the felling of the rain forests, the hole in the ozone layer, and man-made global warming, as a result of which the planet was heading for destruction.
Right from the start, I smelled charlatanry. I cared about curbing pollution and protecting wildlife, and believed very strongly that people had a duty to safeguard the environment. But I thought that this new creed smacked of zealotry. Indeed, some of the claims being made by the greens – such as the belief that the planet had an anthropomorphic identity as the goddess Gaia – struck me as totally off the wall. And as for man-made global warming, it was immediately obvious – and this was before we learned about the brazen scientific frauds that would be perpetrated to prop up the theory – there was simply no evidence that anything out of the historical ordinary was happening to the climate at all.
Worse, I saw that deep green environmentalism brought together deeply obnoxious strands of thinking on both left and right .On the left, it was very obviously a new take on the usual anti-Western, anti-capitalist agenda; the West would have to give up consumerism and return to a barter economy to save the planet. Or something like that. But it was also a sanitised version of the disreputable and discredited dogma of population control, which had given rise to the eugenics movement and the semi-mystical worship of the organic, both of which had been deeply implicated in both the rise of Nazism and in ‘progressive’ thinking up to World War II.
To me, the clear message of environmentalism was that the planet would be fine if it wasn’t for the human race. So it was a deeply regressive, reactionary, proto-fascist movement for putting modernity into reverse, destroying the integrity of science, and threatening humanity itself.
Even more significantly, it also showed me the artificiality of the distinction between left and right. It simply wasn’t true that the left was fighting the good fight for progress against reaction, for reason against obscurantism, for humanity against fascism. No, environmentalism placed the left on the other side of these divisions. And yet it was axiomatic that environmentalism was a left-wing cause and synonymous with virtue, and anyone who opposed it was a rapacious, reactionary right-winger in hock to Big Oil.
So it was a particularly delicious development when Peter Preston, with his genius for spotting a cultural trend significant enough to engender a swathe of lucrative advertising, decided to start a new supplement, Environment Guardian, and asked me to be its editor. When I reminded him what my views were, his eyes glittered with amusement. Maybe he thought a spot of controversy wouldn’t be bad for business.
Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were thrilled to learn that the Guardian was starting such a supplement and doubtless thought they would turn it into their house journal. When they learned of the views of its editor, however, they were aghast and stupefied. Or so I was told by my gifted and creative deputy John Vidal who, despite being himself a deeply committed green, was loyal and professional to a fault; between us, we managed to turn out an environment supplement which asked many important questions while managing to steer clear of the rocks of wilder eco-zealotry.
By far my biggest break with the left, however — the most visceral, the most ferocious, the cultural Rubicon — was over the breakdown of the family.
In the late 1980s, I noticed that the institution of the family was suffering a ‘chronic crisis of identity and self-confidence’. There were more and more divorces and single parents; at the same time parents were becoming less confident in managing their children. Poverty, the left’s habitual excuse, could not be the culprit since middle-class children were also not receiving from their parents the attention they required. ‘Many children lack a consistent mother or father figure’, said researchers from Goldsmith’s College, London (‘How to avoid children growing up like Lord of the Flies?’ Guardian, 15 July 1988).
As ever, I was listening to the evidence of those with no ideological dog in the fight but who simply spoke of what they saw
was happening. In 1990, both the Conservative government minister, Kenneth Baker, and his ideological opponent, Mary Tuck, the liberal former head of research at the Home Office, held fatherless families at least partly responsible for a national breakdown in authority and rising levels of crime. Zelda West-Meads of the marriage guidance counsellors ‘Relate’ got to the heart of the issue when she said that although many single mothers did a heroic job, it was the absence of the father that did such terrible damage to their children. This was because children drew for their own identity from the combination of male and female components of their family. Even with a loving mother, children without their father felt torn in two. ‘The denial of these inconvenient truths’, I wrote, ‘derived from the instinct for self-justification rather than care for the interests of children’ (Guardian, 11 May 1990).
The balloon really went up, however, with a report in 1991 about the effects of family breakdown by two social scientists, Norman Dennis and George Erdos, which included a foreword by the doyen of sociologists and promoter of left-wing educational doctrine, AH Halsey.
There was incontrovertible evidence, according to Dennis and Erdos, that children in fractured family units tended to die earlier, suffer more ill health, do less well at school, were more likely to be unemployed, more prone to criminal behaviour, and to repeat as adults the same cycle of unstable parenting.
The report provoked uproar. The reason was not just what it said but who was saying it, for although the report had been published by the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs, the authors were from the left. Indeed, Halsey and Dennis were co-authors of the classic work English Ethical Socialism, and regarded themselves as still belonging to the tradition when the left famously owed ‘more to Methodism than to Marx’. But being ‘against single mothers’, as this was crudely seen, was an evil right-wing position. It was therefore simply impossible for the authors to be left-wing. They were therefore instantly rebranded right-wing. But since they clearly were not, they could not easily be dismissed; and so the uproar continued.
The social science establishment circled the wagons. One distinguished academic claimed the authors’ research was ‘old, out-of-date, selective, and misleading’. I rang this expert to ask what the research actually said. But when pressed, he would not answer the question. Instead he released a stream of invective, calling the authors’ mental faculties into question and asking emotionally, ‘What do these people want? Do they want unhappy parents to stay together?’
Eventually he admitted that the authors were actually correct as far as the research was concerned. ‘But’, he asked rhetorically, ‘where that got anyone? Nowhere! Was it possible to turn back the clock? Of course not! And why were they so concerned about the rights of the child? What about the rights of the parents?’ (Tablet, 31 July 1993).
Of course, he himself turned out to be divorced. That conversation revealed a devastating pattern which I was to encounter over and over again. Truth was being sacrificed to expediency. Evidence would be denied if the consequences were too inconvenient. Sheer selfishness was being justified regardless of the damage done to others.
Surely, though, the essence of being progressive was to minimise harm and protect the most vulnerable? Yet this was simply tossed aside by left-wingers, who elevated their own desires into rights that trumped the emotional, physical and intellectual well-being of their children – and then berated as heartless reactionaries those who criticised them!
The more this was being justified, the more it was happening. Rising numbers of people were abandoning their spouses and children, or breaking up other people’s families, or bringing children into the world without a father around at all. The left claimed that these activities made the women and children happy and were a refreshing change from the bad old days when simply everyone was miserable because marriage chained women to men who – as everyone with the correct view knew – were basically feckless wife-beaters and child abusers as well as being irrationally prejudiced against the opposite sex.
Yet there was a huge amount of evidence that family disintegration and re-formation did incalculable damage to children, and that there was far greater risk of abuse of children or violence between adults in cohabiting or serial relationships. Since marriage, by and large, was a protection for both children and adults, I thought the state should promote it as a social good. For this I was told I was reactionary, authoritarian and, of course, right-wing. Yet how could it be progressive to encourage deceit, betrayal of trust, breaking of promises and harm to children?
I talked to other experts and looked at the evidence. It was unequivocal: in general and relatively speaking, divorce, step-parenting, and lone parenthood hurt children. A child psychiatrist, Dr Sebastian Kraemer, told me he regarded it as ‘a personal holocaust for the children when the parents separate… I see it clinically that children are deeply hurt, their lives are shattered because the people who got together to make them can’t keep together to bring them up’ (Guardian, 16 September 1991).
Later, Dr Kraemer told me he regretted having said this; widespread family breakdown was now an established feature of society, and we all had to accept it and work out how to make the best of it. Over and over again I found that family therapists, academics and other experts were in effect censoring themselves over the baleful effects of family breakdown, either because they felt it was a social tide that could not be resisted or because, increasingly, they or their own families were themselves caught up in it.
As far as I was concerned, this was selling the pass and abandoning the vulnerable. There was surely an overriding duty to tell the truth about the damage being done by fragmented family life, consequences that were harming not just children but also women and men. But those who did tell the truth as they found it risked becoming victims of a professional witch-hunt.
Two researchers from Exeter University’s Department of Child Health, Dr John Tripp and Monica Cockett, discovered that although children whose parents were fighting each other did worse than children from peaceful intact families, they did worse still after their parents had divorced (Exeter Family Study: Family Breakdown and its Impact on Children, University of Exeter Press, 1994). This was explosive, since a major justification for easier divorce was the claim that children were usually better off if their unhappy parents separated.
From the moment they published their research, the authors found themselves bad-mouthed and their report rubbished by influential academics — and they were cut off from further funding. One academic on a grant-making body told me their work was ‘methodologically unsound’; the evidence for this claim, however, seemed to be merely that they ‘had an agenda’ – just because one of them was a committed Christian (Observer, 28 June 1998).
When I started writing about the baleful effects of family breakdown, I was accosted angrily by someone I had previously thought of as a friend. ‘How can you possibly say that family breakdown hurts children?’ he spat out at me. ‘The worst damage to a child is always done by the traditional nuclear family!’
I could only gaze at him, defeated by the sheer impossibility of conveying the stupendous shallowness of such an attitude. I, of all people, knew first-hand what damage and anguish could be inflicted within an apparently model family. But I also knew that much of what I had experienced or witnessed derived from the absence of a properly involved father. I had personal knowledge of the lifelong harm inflicted on a child who is forced to become in effect the parent to her own parent. I knew intimately what harm can be done to a child’s psyche from a dyadic relationship with one parent, unmediated and unmitigated by the other. I knew from experience how the absence of proper fathering could screw up a child for life. How then could my erstwhile friend or anyone else possibly be sanguine about the explosion of lone parenting, female-headed households, and mass fatherlessness?
On issues such as education and family, I believed I was doing no more than stating the obvious. To my amazement, however, I found that I
was now branded an extremist for doing so. Astoundingly, truth, evidence, and reason had become right-wing concepts. I was now deemed to have become ‘the right’ and even ‘the extreme right’. And when I started writing about family breakdown, I was also called an ‘Old Testament fundamentalist’.
At the time, I shrugged this aside as merely a gratuitous bit of bigotry. Much later, however, I came to realise that it was actually a rather precise insult. My assailants had immediately understood something I did not myself at the time understand – that the destruction of the traditional family had as its real target the destruction of Biblical morality. I thought I was merely standing up for evidence, duty and the protection of the vulnerable. But they understood that the banner behind which I was actually marching was the Biblical moral law which put chains on people’s appetites.
The result was a kind of social ostracism. Gradually I noticed that I was no longer being invited to join colleagues for lunch, no longer receiving invitations to parties at their houses, no longer getting the flow of gossipy messages and office banter which had once made me feel as if I was back in an Oxford junior common room. Now, at lunchtimes, I found the office emptying around me. Few ever tried to engage me in argument. I simply became more and more isolated.
Something similar was happening outside the office too. Gradually, my more politically-minded friends drifted away. From snatches of their conversation, I deduced that what had finally got to them above all was my position on family breakdown. I realised that they took it personally, those who themselves had walked out on their families or were cheating on their spouses. Some of them said to me they felt I was disapproving of what they had done.
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