running down of the services which most families depend on to one degree or the other. The family and not the state 'must be in the front line when Gran needs help' according to Patrick The notion that the family can exist ndependently Stale, is of course, a sham, as are the Tory declarations against state interference. government stands on its 'libertarian' principles in refusing to intervene to save a factory or mine on which the livelihoods of thousands of workers depend, but will readily mobilise all its resources against a strike.
The Think Tank proposals hemselves are the most shocking and extensive intervention in the heart of private and family life. Its proposals amount to a massive programme of social engineering to achieve its nirvana of a culture in which business and wealth creation becomes acceptable.
The double standards aiso apply to the position of women. Mount argues in favour of basic civil rights for women as enshrined in recent legislation. there is a class bias to the way in which the Tories extend these rights: namely to those who can afford to exercise them. Abortion is readily available to the rich in private clinics, while cuts in the NHS restric the same right for working people.
At the same time the Tories have of society into six groups: employees, OLIC employed, working age not gainfully employed, those below working age, those above it. and housewives married women of working age. It is in this context that the granting of family allowances has to be seen, not to give women economic independence, but to encourage larger families without which the British race cannot continue.
The concept of the family wage informs regulations on most workforce at three times the rate of men. Nurseries & creches Again the double standards of the Tories regulations introduced The unemployment benefit system by the Ravner Report. requiring women to prove that they have the means to look after children in order to be eligible for work. So at the same time as the Tories the possibility of women having their children cared for through nurseries and creches they demand that women provide that thev have access to these same facilities.
But the hypocrisy of the Tories does not make their policy inconsistent. The catalogue of attacks on the family outlined above, has taken its toll in families broken up and violence within family. But these represented as • individual which only prove the general rule that But the family is a haven of happiness in a grim world.
The starting point of the Tories is not defence of the family, but the promotion of policies which put profit before social need.
Tories is to bolster the family as a buttress against the effects of their own policies.
y philosophy wage bargaining women will lose out. of But of course the myth of the family wage applies to all those in the family. It is estimated that if wives did not work the number of families on the poverty line would quadruple mousLy to tne seven mulion already dependent on state benefits. In Tact te tory poncy or ariving womer back into the home resulted by 1980 in a drop of disposable income available to families of six per cent. state lie new philosophy of the family into the provided by Marxists and socialist feminists.
that the nuclear family working legal relations. evidence offers place within and reproduction of the working class failures are instances sion of women.
tive responsibility; and to The aim of the - adding enorpeople FOR MOUNT there is only one coherent alternative to his own interested in loving, sonal relationships.
He accurately describes this view is not the natural and universal way to organise society personal relationships, but an institution with a definite historical role in the them context of given economic, social and Socialists do not deny that the fami- tion, ravages of capitalist society, and that love, care and genuine affection take framework. But socialists also insist that the functions of the family, in particular the welfare through the family takes place on the basis of the subordination and oppresTo Tory notions of individualism socialists argue the need for cooperaboarding tion; to self-help the notion of collecnotions of nominal equal rights we put forward the prospect of a real choice and power for women and children in determining their lives. But while Mount correctly In sees these notions as counterposed, he Joan Lestor — is also forced to distort socialist conceptions. He accuses them of not being caring relationships' and having a rigid schema into which they want to organise all perThe irony is that Mount and his colleagues' policy is to impose a schema on through discouraging women from going out to work and forcing into the home, while preaching the evils of maternal deprivation increasing family poverty, cutting educataking away • children's Marxists do not believe that there is one way to bring up children. We do not think that women can have a real choice ine cestrainthe yar domestic constraints domestic drudgery and responsibility.
At present only the very rich are liberated from the bulk of these tasks. Ironically a large number of examples of non-nuclear family arrangements — schools, nannies, domestic servants and the like — are the prerequisites of a class that enforces a different model of family life on the majority of the population.
proposing the notion of the abolition of the family, Marx and Labour's spokesperson on women Engels exposed the hypocrisy of the ruling class who preached one thing and practised another; not to limit peoples choice about how they lived, but to enhance it. t is tronic commen on Thatcher's appeal for a return to Victorian values that her ideologues should preach the same Victorian humbug.
The fact that the ruling class have no principled objection to collective responsibility to the functions of the nuclear family is shown by measures such as 24-hour nurseries introduced during the Second World War to free women for the war effort. Tory objec tions apply only to the liberation of women and humanity.
The first steps towards such freedom of choice lie through state provision of socialised child-care through 24-hour nurseries, complete socialisation of health and welfare through the expansion of a free and comprehensive health service; socialisation of education that allows people of whatever age access to education; care of old people through an adequate pension and provision of suitable accommodation.
All these necessary steps towards freedom of choice are those which the Tories are undermining.
Friedrich Engels - for liberation