Labour’s family values

By Emma Burnell / @scarletstand

I want to tell you a story about an incredibly inspiring group of people I know. I’ve known most of them since we were all teenagers. They don’t work in politics. They work in retail, in childcare, in restaurants, in leisure centres, in clerical and administration jobs in housing and for the council. Some of them are now mature students, but when I first knew them, few ever went further in school than GCSEs. Most but not all of the women in the group had children at a very young age. Very few of the fathers of those children are still involved.

Hilary Clinton once famously said “It takes a Village to raise a child”. None of these people would have read much of Hilary Clinton (and if I said that to them, they’d laugh at me and point out they live in Hackney not a village – they don’t suffer fools or policy wonks gladly), but they are the prime example of the lived experience of this motto made good. Everybody in this group is responsible for the childcare. Every child knows that if they act up, they don’t just have their Mum, but the group to catch them out. The men have actively chosen to be role models to the boys. To ensure that they see men who go out to work and who value these children and their schooling, their behaviour and their futures. One – then childless – woman, actively took on the role of secondary carer for her friend’s two young children after she had been abandoned – while pregnant – by the man who begged her to have a second child.

When I have conversations with people in the Labour Party about family values, it is to this group of people that my mind turns. This group wouldn’t define themselves as a family, but it’s exactly what they are. While the Tories may want to conserve the nuclear family in aspic, and bribe unhappy couples to say in loveless marriages, Labour must be the party that values all families. We can’t let the Tories claim to the be the party of the family and let them define what that means, leaving thousands of successful single parent families – like those who make up my group of friends – out in the cold.

Labour can’t just be the party of the family. I know plenty of childless, single people who find that equally isolating. But we also can’t let the right wing own the concept. When we shy away – as many have done in response to some of Maurice Glasman’s pronouncements – from offering a Labour definition of family values, we let ourselves down and deny ourselves a way to talk to the voters in their language. We know our voters value their families. Just because others have perverted that to suit their agenda, does not mean we should not offer our own vision of how we will value families. But all families, or all shapes and sizes.

We must be ambitious in our politics. We must be lofty in our ideals. But we must be grounded in the reality of the voters. If we don’t have the gumption to talk the language of the voters we can have all the ideas we like. But we won’t ever convince enough people they are right to enact them.