Hardworking platitudes

If I ask you to picture a hardworking family, who springs to mind? The Obamas? The Camerons? The Beckhams?

How about the family who run your local grocery store, or your friends from church? How about your own family?

‘Hardworking’ is subjective. Some people would say models and professional footballers are hardworking. Others would strongly disagree.

During the 2005 general election, the BBC ran a story on the term’s ubiquity in political discourse. The blame, as for so many things, goes to New Labour’s charm offensive – specifically, their desire to snatch the ‘family values’ mantle from the Tories.

Their 2001 manifesto alone uses the term a Tourettic seven times. A ‘hardworking family’ is, of course, whomsoever you want them to be. They are the deserving common man, the squeezed Middle Britain. They are a flattering mirror held up to every Johnny who has a vote.

In social psychology 101, you learn about the ‘actor-observer bias‘ - the tendency we all have to blame others for their mistakes, but excuse our own. ‘Hardworking families’ are a way of crystallising this innate ‘us and them’ mentality into votes.

 

The Manhattan Project

The hardworking family is a concept which can trace its ancestry to the nuclear family – a central tenet of mid-century American conservatism. The industrial age tore apart settled communities, heretofore the social fabric of the nation. Men moved to urban centres. Their wives and their children followed. Nuclear families became the basic unit of civilisation – more social rag-rug than social fabric. The nuclear family represented modernity, wealth, and luxury – the new articulation of the American dream.

The Sixties and Seventies brought dissent from this hegemony, at which point the nuclear family became a political bargaining chip. Nowadays, Republican ‘family values’ form the basis of the schism that splits America.

Consider this: four American Presidents – James Tyler, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, and James Buchanan – entered office as bachelors. Is this conceivable today? The nuclear family has become a moral centre of gravity, in America and in Britain. Politicians from nuclear families are elected by nuclear families, and run the country for the benefit of nuclear families. Hence, for example. the British Government offers tax credits for families with children, and the Conservative party is toying with ways to incentivise marriage.  Policies which reward traditional, nuclear families are generally very palatable.

The problem is that many families are no longer nuclear. The hardworking family fixes this. It is far more inclusive notion. It reflects the variety of modern families – the children who grow up with one parent, or no parents; with parents of the same gender, and of different race. It encompasses everyone without explicitly saying so – thus remaining palatable to the socially conservative. It was born of New Labour, but it is such a clever trick that it has been adopted by the left and the right, and on both sides of the pond.

 

Vanity fair

When politicians talk about ‘fairness’, they invoke a similar platitude. There are 16 references to what is fair and unfair in the 2010 Conservative manifesto, and over 70 in Labour’s.

Again, fairness is subjective. Some consider it entirely fair that the rich pay large amounts of tax to fund welfare initiatives; others see this as an unfair tax on success. The point is that no one can disagree with the notion of ‘fairness for hardworking families’, so arguing against any policy couched in these terms is tricky.

 

Catch-2012

Politics is a popular exercise: an appeal not just to the lowest common denominator, as the cynic might say, but every denominator; an appeal to hearts, kidneys, livers and spleens, as much as to heads. Spleens love hardworking families.

No politician can say this – there lies spin, and spin is bad. Thus the great balancing act of modern politics: running the PR machine so smoothly that the public never hears its roar.

 

P.S. Jack Thurston’s scathing 2005 piece on New Labour’s cult of hardworking families is well worth a read.