Shannon Matthews, Family Breakdown and progressives.

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The unravelling of what was assumed to be the Shannon Matthews child abduction case has revealed aspects of our society that are deeply uncomfortable for most observers. A family of seven children, (always noted as being from five diffferent fathers), relationships that are distorted both by age and by background, a seemingly fraudulent use of a child for gain – all played out against what may or may not be a background of child abuse.

It feels like an infinitely depressing story. By the light it casts on tragedies that are normally played out in the quiet shadows, it seems to demand that we look at our society, what it has become, how it got here. It’s perhaps even more depressing for progressives. Conservatives of all stripes, while feeling the same horror at tragedy, can at least enjoy the reflex of condemning, not only the Matthews family, but social breakdown, “liberal” attitudes, and the current government, all in one.

Naturally, the first draft of our national response has come, not from politicians, but from the media. The platonian form of this response comes from Allison Pearson, writing in the Daily Mail, though equivalent articles can be found in most newspapers.

“Those of us who dared to question the family’s way of life were pilloried. Apparently, we were middle-class snobs looking down on a poor, working-class world. Who were we to judge Karen with her seven kids from five different fathers?

“Yet the more we learned about Shannon’s family, the more the tangled roots of the little girl’s unhappiness were cruelly exposed.

“No one is supposed to be “judgmental” any more. But isn’t it the failure to be judgmental that has created the chaotic world where a nine-year-old can (allegedly) be taken by the child-abusing uncle of her mum’s toyboy? An uncle, by the way, with whom the mum herself is alleged to be having an affair. I know it’s hard, madam, but do try to keep up at the back!

“This is precisely the kind of family breakdown that Mr Justice Coleridge warned against on Saturday. The senior judge said that the collapse of the family unit produces “a never-ending carnival of human misery” on a scale few could have imagined even a decade ago.

“On the council estate where my own mum grew up, there was restraint and self-discipline because there was disapproval. Compared to the Matthews, who own two computers for goodness sake, there was poverty, but people had standards.”

A few key points to remember here. This type of crime results from family breakdown, is something new (indeed something “unimaginable a decade ago”), It is attributable to a lack of moral restraint not to lack of resource, and springs from a failure to judge those whose families are in some sense broken.

This is of course, complete nonsense and demonstrably untrue.

The suggestion that these crimes come from “broken” families only and were unimaginable a decade ago, is clearly wrong. We don’t have to reach far for examples of seemingly “happy”, strong families that were horribly destructive two, three, four decades ago . The shelves of bookshops are littered with them.

To take just one example, Stuart Howarth’s book “please daddy, no”, recounts how in the early seventies he and his sisters were abused by his stepfather. You can read the tragic end to the case here.

Yet showing that children are abused, that people have always done terrible, dark things, is not enough. For the allegation is here that it is family breakdown, a collapse of moral order, the has led to these crimes, and that this is new. Simply pointing out that “strong” families can produce similar tragedies merely leads to the accusation that you are ignoring the real problem. So It’s not enough to say these issue are not new, progressives must offer a way out.

Yet the past a good place to start looking for clues about what causes family breakdown.

Nick Davies, writing in the “Dark Heart of Modern Britain” in the mid nineties meets two pre-teen boys working as prostitutes outside toilets in Nottingham. Shocked, he begins to uncover a network of family breakdown, prostitution, drug abuse and lost children. He finds communities that have lost confidence in themselves, turned inwards and begun to consume their own. He blames the loss of the post war consensus.

But of course, Davies is writing  after the social changes of the seventies and eighties, after divorce rates in the UK had been rising for some time. To look at the causes of social breakdown in a time of moral certainty we have to go a little further back, to an era where for the respectable, churchgoing and marriage was the norm.

So how about in the Victorian Era? Henry Mayhew, writing his magnum opus “London Labour and the London Poor” in the 1840s, found example after example of what politicians now call the “Shameless Society”here are just two.

First an example of marriage amongst the London poor. Mayhew is talking to a costergirl, a street trader. He’s careful to say she’s the repsectable type, for he wants his readers to sympathise with her plight.

“I dare say there ain’t ten out of a hundred gals what’s living with men, what’s been married Church of England fashion. I know plenty myself, but I don’t, indeed, think it right.

“It seems to me that the gals is fools to be ‘ticed away, but, in coorse, they needn’t go without they likes. This is why I don’t think it’s right. Perhaps a man will have a few words with his gal, and he’ll say, `Oh! I ain’t obligated to keep her!’ and he’ll turn her out: and then where’s that poor gal to go?

“Now, there’s a gal I knows as came to me no later than this here week, and she had a dreadful swole face and a awful black eye; and I says, `Who’s done that?’ and she says, says she, `Why, Jack’ — just in that way; and the she says, says she, `I’m going to take a warrant out to-morrow.’ Well, he gets the warrant that same night, but she never appears again him, for fear of getting more beating.”

“…This is another reason: when the gal is in the family way, the lads mostly sends them to the workhouse to lay in, and only goes sometimes to take them a bit of tea and shuggar; but, in coorse, married men wouldn’t behave in such likes to their poor wives. After a quarrel, too, a lad goes and takes up with another young gal, and that isn’t pleasant for the first one.”

Notice though that marriage here is seen as salvation. Sadly, we never get to hear from the ninety per cent of women who aren’t married. (except in volume 4, when we hear from prostitutes)

But what about the children produced from the irregular victorian unions? What was their fate?

Later in the book, Mayhew talks to two half sisters, in their early teens, making a living as flowersellers.

“My father was a tradesman in Mitchelstown, in the County Cork. I don’t know what sort of a tradesman he was. I never saw him. He was a tradesman I’ve been told. I was born in London. Mother was a chairwoman, and lived very well. None of us ever saw a father.”

[It was evident that they were illegitimate children, but the landlady had never seen the mother, and could give me no information.] “We don’t know anything about our fathers. We were all `mother’s children.’ Mother died seven years ago last Guy Faux day.

I’ve got myself, and my brother and sister a bit of bread ever since, and never had any help but from the neighbours. I never troubled the parish. O, yes, sir, the neighbours is all poor people, very poor, some of them. We’ve lived with her” (indicating her landlady by a gesture) “these two years, and off and on before that. I can’t say how long.”“

Well, I don’t know exactly,” said the landlady, “but I’ve had them with me almost all the time, for four years, as near as I can recollect; perhaps more. I’ve moved three times, and they always followed me.”

There were about 1.8 million paupers in England and Wales in the Eighteen Fifties, roughly ten percent of the total population. Their lives would have been much like this- if not worse, as the two cases above were not paupers. Mayhew does caution that the lives of many of the lowest class were never captured by any official statistic, so this may be an underestimate.

Going even further back, we can look at Hogarth’s Gin Lane, Described aptly by Martin Rowson as containing “infanticide, drunken oblivion, disinterment of corpses, starvation, beggary, poverty, impalement, suicide, debt, debauchery and the collapsing buildings standing as metaphor for the collapse of society in general” you might think it was a little over the top, were it not a reaction to a real event.

Gin Lane is  not simply a work of art, but Hogarths response to a contemprary “social crisis” that resulted in cases such as  a mother who reclaimed her baby from the workhouse, left her in a ditch to dies and sold the childs clothes  to buy gin or an elderly carer whose grandchildren died in a fire while she was in a stupor.

Gin Lane then, is a sort of Georgian equivalent of a dramatist using the Shannon Matthews case to write a TV drama. We don’t live in a “Shameless society”, but still in Hogarthian London*, where drugs or owning a computer has replaced buying gin or wasting money on fripperies such as fancy clothes.  Novelist Allison Pearson can in this one respect be compared to Henry Fielding, who blamed increased 18th century crime on a new appetite for luxury amongst the working classes and increased drunkeness. He would have made a fine columnist!o

So neither family breakdown, nor abuse of children, nor the outraged reaction of observers to social breakdown is new.

I hope your first response to this is some disgust with my smug repose. After all, I seem to be saying that what’s happened with Shannon Matthews is somehow tolerable because it is part of a historical continuum of poverty and hopelessness leading to familial breakdown and criminal behaviour.

But my point is rather different.

It is simply to state that instead of seeing a new “family crisis”, something unimaginable a few decades ago, we are in fact seeing the results of the oldest family crisis possible – the results of of culture of worklessness, of lack of hope of ambition, a poverty not only in the sense of material possessions, but of aspirations.

For the last thirty years we have as a matter of policy sought an increasingly fractured society, one that distributres wealth and opportunities unevenly. We cannot then stand back amazed and horrified when confronted with the results of what we have done.

Ah, you might say, but isn’t that just what New Labour has done too? You and yours are complicit in this great fracturing.

In recognising that the price of of an even society was a slowly growing one, Labour accepted that it was impossible to buy a united, more just society at the price of stagnation for the whole economy. Instead, a decade ago Labour proposed a new sort of social compact, promising to put a proportion of the growth of a dynamic, unequal economy into investing in the future of those who would be left behind.

From that commitment springs New Labours emphasis on child poverty, on helping people into work, on Sure Start, on flexible working. It is an investment that will only pay off in a generation or so. It is perhaps, not enough. Cases like Shannon Matthews remind us how entrenched the poverty of education, of aspiriation and of hope is.

If we are honest, we have found it easier to address the material poverty of the sink estates than we have the poverty of ambition that they foster. Addressing material poverty is no small triumph, nor is it anywhere near completed, but for progressives the next stage in the fight against poverty must include a focus on community, family and social responsibility.

Programmes like Sure Start, like community policing, like after schools clubs and education maintenance allowances are making a difference. We’ve go to go further though, especially in addressing those who do not take up offers of help easiliy.

This is a ground we must be prepared to fight on, not because of some ludicrous image of golden era that never existed, or Gracie Fields caricatures of the working classes of four decades ago, but becasue you can change lives in in the junction between parenting, ambition, employment, support and discipline.

It’s why progressive have to embrace, not just the respect agenda, but a firm agenda on strong families and communities. If we don’t, then those for whom a strong family is one that gets a tax cut and a stong community is one that doesnt’ need a Sure Start will seize this ground, and abandon the social compact that after a decade is beginning to see make a difference to our communities but still has a long way yet to run.

*Neither, by the way is our reaction new – Goeroge Orwell captured the Allison Pearson reaction perfectly when he wrote

“IEvery middle-class person has a dormant class-prejudice which needs only a small thing to arouse it; and if he is over forty he probably has a firm conviction that his own class has been sacrificed to the class below.

“Suggest to the average unthinking person of gentle birth who is struggling to keep up appearanceson four or five hundred a year that he is a member of an exploiting parasite class, and he will think you are mad. In perfect sincerity he will point out to you a dozen ways in which he is worse-off than a working man. In his eyes the workers are not a submerged race of slaves, they are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence.”

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