Being Social Animals

Family and community helps us to find meaning and purpose

Towering columns

On ConservativeHome, Miriam Cates argues that childcare policy should prioritise helping families over boosting Treasury spreadsheets.

A policy that offers financial support to a mother only when she leaves her nine-month-old baby in the care of strangers sends a very clear signal: a mother’s primary value to society is measured by her direct contribution to GDP. Just like the fiscal nudges that encourage us to buy electric cars or stop smoking, the adoption of this policy delivers the message that society believes it is a good thing to put your child in full-time formal childcare from the age of none months.

The evidence suggests otherwise. Erica Komisar, an American psychoanalyst, has explained that the attachment between biological mother and infant is crucial to a baby’s developing brain, and that an infant experiences grief when separated from her mother for extended periods. In the first two years of life, the mother or main carer acts as a buffer against the outside world, stabilising a child’s emotions and allowing her to develop from a place of security rather than a threat. Disrupted attachment can lead to life-long difficulties with physical, mental, and emotional health. For a baby, the nurture of a mother is not a fungible commodity.

There is evidence that group childcare from the age of three can have cognitive benefits, and the long-standing ‘15 hours’ childcare entitlement for three and four-year-olds has very high take-up rates.  However there is no evidence of positive outcomes for infants in long hours of group daycare before the age of two, and plenty of evidence of negative consequences.

At PoliticsHome, Danny Kruger makes the case for reviving the Big Society to reform a centralised, inefficient, and costly public sector.

The Big Society was a response to the sclerosis of the state after years of tinkering and target-setting by the Blair and Brown governments. It was an alternative both to socialist universalism and to the ersatz privatisation of new public management theory. A bottom-up, trust-the-people approach came naturally to the heirs of Disraeli and Thatcher. It would give individuals purpose and skills, and progressively reduce demand for expensive, remedial state services…

…Meanwhile we have an epidemic of physical and mental ill-health, of loneliness, family breakdown, addiction and economic inactivity. We are unhappy, unwell and unproductive. Just as the overwhelming imperative for the state at this moment is to strengthen our nation’s defences and boost our economic resilience, the imperative for society is to get fitter, healthier, more purposeful and more capable. And the government has a key role here – not by finger-wagging about obesity or welfare dependency, but by creating the conditions in which individuals can become more resilient and communities more self-governing.

How, then, do we revive the Big Society for the mid 2020s? Many of the ideas hesitantly experimented in 2010 remain the right ones, requiring bold implementation – more neighbourhood planning, more partnerships between public services and civil society, more payment-by-results with working capital provided by social investors and regional banks, more support for the community businesses and social enterprises that strengthen the economies of left-behind neighbourhoods. And since 2010 we have seen an explosion in the opportunities provided by technology for low-cost, versatile, collaborative organisation of people and resources.

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien asks what will British communities look like with the continued decline of mainstream Christianity.

The share of those moving to the UK from overseas who describe themselves as Christian is very similar to the share of those born in the UK. Census data shows the main difference between those born in the UK and those who have come to the UK is a much smaller share of people of no religion, accompanied by a larger share of Muslims, Hindus, and somewhat more Buddhists and Sikhs. The pattern is similar if we just look at post-2001 migrants. Migration certainly doesn’t seem to have changed any of the trends above for the mainstream Christian denominations.

The mainstream churches still have quite a large and positive influence. The C of E alone has something like a quarter of all primary schools and secondary schools in England. They have more youth workers than local authorities and has spent about £40m since 2022 on youth work. People still go for “hatches, matches and dispatches.” But the gradual disappearance of Christianity in Britain seems set to continue - at least in the mainstream form we have known it.

Even as an atheist I find this kind of sad. Christianity inspired so many to do amazing things. It played a central role in the abolition of slavery.¹ It played a huge part in the end of Communism, most famously through the role of the Catholic church in Poland² but also through the role of the Protestant Churches of the old East Germany and more. It has been a central part of life in Britain since the third century. It provided comfort and purpose and meaning for so many people. Fired by religious devotion, people created music and objects and buildings of incredible beauty.

For The Times, James Vitali looks at what the Church of England can do to help solve the housing crisis and regain a sense of purpose.

Almshouses continue to provide shelter for tens of thousands of people in the UK. They are operated by charities and their trustees are bound by governing documents, which gives them some discretion over who qualifies to be housed by them. Occupants of almshouses are known as “residents”. They are neither tenants nor leaseholders, but beneficiaries of the charitable almshouse association. Almshouses are essentially micro-communities with a strong emphasis on neighbourliness, expressed architecturally through the arrangement of almshouse buildings into three-sided courtyards.

The almshouse model is uniquely suited to tackling a number of objections to new housebuilding. If you speak to residents in rural England, they know we need more housing, but they don’t want it to fundamentally change the character of their community, they don’t want it to be a visual scar on their village or town, and they want it to serve local people, such as those who have grown up in the area but cannot afford to rent or buy there themselves.

Almshouses would meet many of these legitimate concerns. They are undeniably high quality; just look at St John’s House in Sherborne, Dorset, or the Thrale Almshouse in Streatham, south London. They are affordable and well maintained. Almshouses are not rented for profit, and are run by dedicated volunteers who are often connected with a church. They are designed specifically for the benefit of the community to be held in perpetuity by the charity in the interest of local people.

At CapX, Sam Bidwell takes a look at the revival of the centre-right in New Zealand and what lessons can be applied to Britain.

Now that the coalition has power, it’s actually using it. Unpopular water management reforms are being scrapped, plans to give the Kiwi equivalent of HMRC a mandate to deliver on a set of ‘tax principles’ have been rolled back, planned fuel tax hikes have been halted, and blanket reductions to speed limits are gone.

They’ve also significantly tightened visa rules for new immigrants, and overturned Labour’s smoking ban. Looking forward, there are ambitious plans in the pipeline to liberalise planning rules, building on localised successes in cities like Auckland. This is an active, effective coalition, with clear goals – summarised in a neat 49-point plan – and a pragmatic approach to delivering them…

…If we believe that the assumptions of aspirational 20th century Anglophone conservatism can be re-tooled and re-fitted for the 21st century, then New Zealand offers a compelling case study on how to do so. It remains to be seen whether or not the current coalition will be able to deliver on its lofty ambitions, but the initial signs are encouraging. On the other hand, if we think that the novel challenges of the 21st century require a more radical approach, accompanied by a more aggressive political style and a more strident approach to development, then we can go further, taking our cues from the likes of Bukele, and learning the lessons of historical figures like Lee Kuan Yew.

In the New Statesman, Sohrab Ahmari reports on the pro-Palestine campus protests that are spreading in the United States.

Most of the militants were chilling out in front of their tents, and it took not a little effort for one of the leaders to gather them in the centre of the encampment for a sort of reveille. “If you hear me, clap once. If you hear me, clap twice.” Her announcements gave the impression of a typical lefty jamboree: “Please bring toothpaste, we don’t have much, and we want clean teeth.” “There’s going to be a zine workshop.” “There’s going to be Palestinian music.” “We will also be having a drum circle in the art corner back there.” On a more serious note: “Please nobody engage with counter-protesters. Nobody should be speaking with [university] public safety or NYPD except our police liaisons. Nobody should be giving Zionists the time of day.”

The “press corner” not being set up yet, I was granted an ad-hoc interview by Grant Miner, a medieval-studies graduate student with a scruffy beard caked with what looked like dried soap or sunscreen lotion. Miner spelled out the group’s asks: amnesty for students who had been suspended by the administration over earlier campus protests (he being one of them); divestment from Israeli bonds and equity; financial transparency around how the university invests its $14 billion endowment…

…A group of Jewish students I interviewed elsewhere on campus had a different account. Said one: “I’m a student, I’m a senior, I’m a Jew. I’m also not a very religious Jew. I put this [kippa] on in solidarity with my friends who are religious, because I appreciate that I can take it off when they can’t.” He said he was walking around with a group of similarly kippa-wearing friends when one of the campers “started following us, yelling, ‘We’ll f***ing kill you, f***ing kill yourselves.’ ” Outside the university’s gates, he said he heard such slogans as “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!”

Wonky thinking

Civitas has published its new report Back to basics: what is childcare policy for?: Towards a childcare system based on choice by Ellen Pasternack and George Cook. The report makes the case for greater clarity around the purpose of childcare policy, taking into account the balance between impacts on employment, education, and families.

Childcare is a larger political priority in the UK than it ever has been before, and the target of unprecedented, and growing, levels of public spending. Despite this, there is little clarity on what the purpose of childcare policy is.

Politicians and policymakers often talk as though childcare policy is a labour market intervention, designed to increase the employment rate of mothers, or an educational one, designed to improve educational outcomes for children. However, if this is truly what childcare policy is for, then it is highly inefficient: both of these outcomes could likely be achieved more effectively by other means than the system we currently have in place.

Current childcare policy is also not effective at achieving what we believe it should be aiming for, which is supporting parents with the cost of raising children in the early years. This is a goal that seems to have been lost sight of, but it is an important one. Parents often face very high financial costs in the years between the end of parental leave and when their children start school, because those children have to be provided with full-time adult supervision. Whether parents achieve this by paying for childcare or doing it themselves at the expense of paid work, these costs for some may be prohibitively high. This is especially important in light of the worrying long-term consequences of falling birth rates around the world, as highlighted in a recent review in The Lancet.

This report makes several suggestions for reforms that would re-orient childcare policy towards the objective of supporting parents. We propose enhancing the level of cash support available to parents, by (1) making the current budget for ‘free hours’ and tax-free childcare available as a childcare voucher; and (2) uplifting the rate of Child Benefit available to parents in the early years by cutting it in the teenage years. Next, we propose streamlining childcare regulation, allowing it to work more effectively for parents and providers, by (3) making the learning and development goals of the Early Years Foundation Stage optional for childminders and (4) developing a simplified childminder-equivalent status for grandparents or other named adults. Next, we propose reforms to the tax system that would allow parents to keep more of their earned income: (5) raising tax thresholds for parents of early years children; (6) making childcare expenses tax-deductible; and (7) reviewing the relationship between taxation and household income. Finally, we propose (8) reconsidering the labelling of stay-at-home parents as ‘economically inactive’ in official data; and (9) zero-rating VAT on some products needed by parents in the first years of a child’s life.

Book of the week

We recommend After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre. This classic work launched a scathing attack on post-Enlightenment moral philosophy, exploring the decline of virtue in debates around ethics and the need for its revival by returning to the Aristotelian tradition.

The problems of modern moral theory emerge clearly as the product of the failure of the Enlightenment project. On the one hand the individual moral agent, freed from hierarchy and teleology, conceives of himself and is conceived of by moral philosophers as sovereign in his moral authority. On the other hand the inherited, if partially transformed rules of morality have to be found some new status, deprived as they have been of their older teleological character and their even more ancient categorical character as expressions of an ultimately divine law. If such rules cannot be found a new status which will make appeal to them rational, appeal to them will indeed appear as a mere instrument of individual desire and will . Hence there is a pressure to vindicate them either by devising some new teleology or by finding some new catagorical status for them. The first project is what lends its importance to utilitarianism; the second to all those attempts to follow Kant. in presenting the authority of the appeal to moral rules as grounded in the nature of practical reason. Both attempts, so I shall argue, failed and fail; but in the course of the attempt to make them succeed social as well as intellectual transformations were accomplished.

Bentham's original formulations suggest a shrewd perception of the nature and scale of the problems confronting him. His innovative psychology provided a view of human nature in the light of which the problem of assigning a new status to moral rules can be clearly stated; and Bentham did not flinch from the notion that he was assigning a new status to moral rules and giving a new meaning to key moral concepts. Traditional morality was on his view pervaded by superstition; it was not until we understood that the only motives for human action are attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain that we can state the principles of an enlightened morality, for which the prospect of the maximum pleasure and absence of pain provides a telos. 'Pleasure' Bentham took to be the name of a type of sensation, just as 'pain' is; and sensations of both types vary only in number, intensity and duration. It is worth taking note of this false view of pleasure if only because Bentham's immediate utilitarian successors were so apt to see this as the major source of the difficulties that arise for utilitarianism. They therefore did not always attend adequately to the way in which he makes the transition from his psychological thesis that mankind has two and only two motives to his moral thesis that out of the alternative actions or policies between which we have to choose at any given moment we ought always to perform that action or implement that policy which will produce as its consequences the greatest happiness- that is, the greatest possible quantity of pleasure with the smallest possible quantity of pain -of the greatest number. It is of course on Bentham's view the enlightened, educated mind and it alone which will recognize that the pursuit of my happiness as dictated by my pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding psychology and the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number do in point of fact coincide. But it is the aim of the social reformer to reconstruct the social order so that even the unenlightened pursuit of happiness will produce the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number; from this aim spring Bentham's numerous proposed legal and penal reforms. Note that the social reformer could not himself find a motive for setting himself to those particular tasks rather than others, were it not the case that an enlightened regard for one's own happiness here and now even in as unreformed a legal and social order as late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England will lead inexorably to the pursuit of the greatest happiness. This is an empirical claim. Is it true?

It took a nervous breakdown by John Stuart Mill, at once the first Benthamite child and clearly the most distinguished mind and character ever to embrace Benthamism, to make it clear to Mill himself at least that it is not. Mill concluded that it was Bentham's concept of happiness that needed reforming, but what he had actually succeeded in putting in question was the derivation of the morality from the psychology. Yet this derivation provided the whole of the rational grounding for Bentham's project of a new naturalistic teleology. It is not surprising that as this failure was recognized within Benthamism, its teleological content became more and more meagre .

John Stuart Mill was right of course in his contention that the Benthamite conception of happiness stood in need of enlargement; in Utilitarianism he attempted to make a key distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures and in On Liberty and elsewhere he connects increase in human happiness with the extension of human creative powers. But the effect of these emendations is to suggest -what is correct, but what no Benthamite no matter how far reformed could concede- that the notion of human happiness is not a unitary, simple notion and cannot provide us with a criterion for making our key choices. If someone suggests to us, in the spirit of Bentham and Mill, that we should guide our own choices by the prospects of our own future pleasure or happiness, the appropriate retort is to enquire: 'But which pleasure, which happiness ought to guide me?' For there are too many different kinds of enjoyable activity, too many different modes in which happiness is achieved . And pleasure or happiness are not states of mind for the production of which these activities and modes are merely alternative means. The pleasure-of-drinking-Guinness is not the pleasure-of-swimming-at-Crane's-Beach, and the swimming and the drinking are not two different means for providing the same end-state . The happiness which belongs peculiarly to the way of life of the cloister is not the same happiness as that which belongs peculiarly to the military life. For different pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weigh them. Consequently appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier.

To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for the reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use. To say this is not of course to deny that many of its uses have been in the service of socially beneficial ideals. Chadwick's radical reforms in the provision of public health measures, Mill's own support for the extension of the suffrage and for an end to the subjugation of women and a number of other nineteenth-century ideals and causes all invoked the standard of utility to some good purpose. But the use of a conceptual fiction in a good cause does not make it any less of a fiction.

Quick links

First deportation flights have been booked now that the Rwanda Bill has become law.

The UK is increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, raising the defence budget to £87 billion by 2030…

…as the Royal Navy shoots down a ballistic missile in combat for the first time since the First Gulf War.

Labour had a 25 point lead over the Conservatives at 20% with Reform at 13% according to the latest YouGov poll.

Rail journeys fell from 1 billion to 750 million between 1948 and 1995, but have increased to 1.75 billion after privatisation.

Treasury analysis showed that 1,000 higher rate taxpayers left Scotland after the introduction of two new income tax bands.

Since the lockdowns ended, truancy rates have jumped from 13% in 2020/21 to 24.2% in 2022/23.

Research has introduced the term ‘fertility realizability’, defining the ratio of total fertility to average desired fertility.

A teacher asked their class of 13-year-olds to raise their hands if they hated Britain. Thirty pupils put their hands up.

Alternative for Germany is now the most popular party among 14-29 year olds.