Latest / Thinking Class / #053 - David Goodhart - The Impact Of Freedom And The Age Of Sex Equality On Caring For The Family

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#053 - David Goodhart - The Impact Of Freedom And The Age Of Sex Equality On Caring For The Family · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with David Goodhart.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: David is a British journalist, commentator, and author, and is the founder and former editor of Prospect magazine.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: He has authored four books: The British Dream, Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration, The Roads to Somewhere, The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, Head Hand Heart, The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century, and most recently The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, we talk about David's latest book, The Tension Between the Trade-offs in Pursuing Freedom over the demands of caring for dependence, how many government policies undervalue the domestic realm and the negative impacts of this on society, children, and mental health.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: How family policies have been driven by care egalitarians rather than care balancers, what these terms mean and why this matters, the implications of low fertility rates on our ability to care for our families in future, the paradox of female happiness despite advancements in women's liberation, the challenges men face in a changing socio-economic landscape, the political blind spots regarding family dynamics, and David calls for a reevaluation of family policies to support stability and address the demographic shifts we are experiencing and much, much more.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is the second time David has joined the show, and I was delighted to welcome him back on his books Have a Habit of Kickstarting a Conversation in the Wider Culture.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we actually spoke about the care dilemma as he was finishing writing it earlier in the year.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if you'd like to hear his more detailed take on immigration policy being trumpeted as a solution to our care issues and why it isn't really, then check out episode number 28 of Thinking Class, where we also discuss his other contributions to wider policy debate and socioeconomic analysis centered on his book, The Roads to Somewhere, which I also highly recommend.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: On a personal level, David has been a supporter and voice of encouragement, and that gives me great humm for what I'm doing here and the conversations that I'm having with the guests on the show.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: We do experience some audio issues in the last few minutes of the recording, and I also apologize for my own audio, some settings were not quite right.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: David is still audible, however, it's a little patchy at the end, so bear with us.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: As ever, let's grow the show together, classmates.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Press follow, subscribe, share on whichever platform you watch or listen to the show on, and enjoy the show.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: David Goodhall, welcome back to Thinking Class.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not at all, John.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Glad to be back here.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, welcome back to this digital spacious ethereal realm, which we do lots of chats in.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're here to talk about your new book, The Care Dilemma, uh, Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality, which posits that we now live in a world where this dilemma has been created by multiple things.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you do you explore the downstream impact of women's liberation, of an aging society, of policy choices made by those in the anywhere class, which are typically liberal metropolitan folks who are focused on opportunities to hand status in the public realm.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And this has created a bit of a precarious or non-optimal world for many other people, particularly those who want to optimize for rooted, closer family ties.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that you argue that most of our policy answers fall short, and there are things that we could focus on.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there would be a time in this that we're going to get to those without stopping people from reading your book.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps we begin with describing the issue we're facing here and bit in between that gulf in what the political classes sought to bring about and uh its its impact on the family.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, um, the the the big idea that frames the book is this tension, if you like, between freedom for men and women, but perhaps particularly for women in recent decades, and the continuing demands of uh of care for dependent young and old people, and how we've got that balance wrong in some ways in in recent years, and what we can do to get the balance right again.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um well, not so much again.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, there, you know, I'm not a golden ageist.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't, you know, I'm I'm not yet I'm not concerned to return to the 1950s in any way, but I do think that um we and this is very much a kind of anywhere bias.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've spoken before about how this book is in a sense the kind of third in my anywhere critique trilogy, the first book, The Road to Somewhere, where I talked about the Anywares and the Sumwares, the value divides, education-based value divides, with anywheres being much more uh educated and mobile and and and leaning towards sort of openness and happy with change, whereas somewheres tend to be less well educated and and more rooted and have their identities much more linked to place and group and therefore much more discomforted by change.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the second book, the head, hand, heart, struggle for uh dignity and status in the 21st century, about how which is a kind of elaboration of the Pennywhere Somewhere thesis based on the idea that we attribute too much um too much value to um to one form of human aptitude, you know, the the kind of exam passing cognitive ability.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that leads us to uh under um it leads us to create educational and indeed economic institutions that are designed for people of high cognitive ability.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, by definition, most of us are of average ability, um, and too many people of average ability feel uh are made to feel like second-class citizens uh in in this world.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and this actually is is also one of the themes in this new book, uh Becare Dilemma, caring enough in the age of sex equality, because actually one of the roles that um people of average ability can flourish in, um, more difficult though it has become in recent decades, is parenting.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, to be you know, it's it's it's easier to be a decent parent than it is to be a brain surgeon or a corporate lawyer.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and yet it's a role that um public policy has kind of leaned against.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, family policy, as I say rather facetiously, is about making it as easy as possible for both parents to spend as little time in the family as possible.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, family policy is essentially child care policy.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um But um as you said at the beginning, I mean, there are the the the the care dilemma is about how the undervaluing of the family in the domestic realm and the attributes associated with it, nurture and care, that this undervaluing lies behind so many of our contemporary problems.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it lies behind the um the unstable family, which itself then puts huge extra pressures on the social state, the ever-expanding social state, the mental fragility crisis uh among, particularly among young people, um the um the the sharp fall in fertility, you know, we've had yet further falls since we last spoke.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're down in the UK and at just over 1.4 total fertility rate.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the recruitment crisis in social care that that we, along with all other rich countries, uh experience, because we undervalue um uh emotional labour, these these roles sort of traditionally associated with the kind of female domain, if you like.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and because they because we've had a sort of male default version of um of women's rights and women's liberation, um there is this tendency to kind of overvalue the workplace and what is done in the workplace and undervalue the work done by women and by men uh in the in the domestic realm.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um now that I mean the reason it's a dilemma is because is precisely because so many of these problems I've outlined, all of which have their root in the undervaluing of domestic realm, um are also intimately connected with lots of positive things, um, you know, like the movement of the mass movement of women from the 50s through to um the 90s into jobs and careers, the fact that women are much less defined by marriage and motherhood than they used to be.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I mean just the much good and and and obviously this isn't just about women.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the fact that all of us, you know, we live we we have much more um much more emphasis on freedom, you know, the the the freedom to to break contracts, to to to leave unhappy marriages and so on, and obviously um that has has been a plus, but you know, like all of these things, you can overshoot.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: And um we've been reckless in some ways in in not accounting for the damage that is also attendant upon these new freedoms if they're not if they're not constrained in some way.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: You you pick up on multiple strands within the book, and two of them let's focus in on.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So one is this groundswell, I suppose, of uh desire for autonomy and freedom, and uh and uh a thread that keeps on going throughout your book is a reference to Milan Kanderi's The Unbearable Likeness of Being, where the novel is about the impacts of only living a life focused on freedom and autonomy, and how it leaves uh an emptiness in somewhere and has these uh negative impacts if only focusing on those.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other side is uh those who are making policy, and I suppose their ideological tilt, and you refer to the care egalitarians and care balances, and how policy is typically being defined by care egalitarians.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps we begin there and unpack what that is and why it's important, how that has a downstream impact.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean I I I don't I don't think it's gonna catch on quite quite in the way that Anywares and Some Wales did.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh a lot of people will um look at my look at my definitions and um and find them find that they don't quite fit into either category.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean that's true also of anyways and some ways.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean uh I'm I I guess so the care egalitarians are the people who see men and and they're quite a small proportion of the population, although disproportionately influential, who see men and women uh as essentially not only equal but the same, I mean interchangeable in many ways.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um they do not think that family structure is uh a particularly important issue.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um they um uh are um concerned with the um um very much focused on what happens in the public realm of of work and public life, so very much focused on 50-50 outcomes uh in as many areas as life uh or life as possible.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um and have no concern at all for the for the fall in fertility, indeed, probably think that um that that is a good thing, um, in that it um uh you know they'll they'll they probably have a kind of environmental argument against uh against having um uh or attempting to increase the fertility rate.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and yeah, and regard the domestic realm as something for men and women to escape from, really.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know something that belongs or being central to women's lives is something that belongs that belongs to women's past and not their future.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um whereas care balances are I think probably a majority of the population.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, people who do um also want um a fairer balance between men and women, um, you know, would would regard themselves as sort of feminists with a lower K Z F.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't believe that men and women are are are wholly interchangeable, that uh in many circumstances they do have somewhat different priorities.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: They do worry about the um the impact um of family instability on particularly on children, on the greater freedoms that that the greater freedoms that adults have achieved in in recent decades have to some extent come at the cost of good care for infants and for the elderly.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and they worry about that and think that maybe we have overshot in some ways and we need to rethink things.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um they do worry about about the sharp fall of infertility.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think you know they they represent the the kind of um the you know the the decent but still liberal majority uh in the on these issues.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And uh but I think the care egalitarians have you know have more or less dominated public policy in this field, hence family policy is essentially childcare policy, um, and hasn't even been particularly successful in that area.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I write quite a lot about childcare and how we've got the regulation of it wrong, and uh so we end up with it being very, very expensive and uh and and people quite legitimately complain.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, we need certain we need to create a childcare system which does allow uh does allow women to combine motherhood and jobs in careers uh you know more easily than they're doing now.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, I mean at the moment kind of everybody is unhappy.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um we have a uh we have um we have a public policy that essentially ignores the priorities of a large minority, if not a majority, of women with young children.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Almost all of the polling that you look at, um, some of it done by government bodies, Department of Education, asks people about their ideal um childcare arrangements in the early years, when children are preschool, and the majority of women say they would like to work less, and quite a large minority say they would they would like the freedom not to have to work at all in that period.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: And these voices are completely ignored by public policy.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: When Jeremy Hunt in the 2023 budget announced a four billion pound extension to the childcare subsidy, I mean this you know, we're we're supposed to be living in in an era of uh you know fiscal retrenchment, and nobody batted an eyelid about this enormous expenditure.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying that the expenditure is wrong, um, but it was it was noticeable that you know none all the political parties, if anything, were were bidding to increase the childcare subsidy.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Jerry Hunt explicitly said um that he was doing this so that um to encourage women not to waste their talents on motherhood.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean he actually used the worth the phrase what to not waste their talents um on staying at home in that period.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is you know, we're talking preschool, um, you know, not at all.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that you know that that is some you know that's much more expression of sort of care egalitarianism than the kind of pluralism that that I'm arguing for, which I think is becoming I mean there there's I mean there's there's a a quote in the book um that um is you know it's sort of you could take as as my um the sort of u a text in some ways of the book from an American feminist, a woman called Anne-Marie Slaughter, uh who she worked for Hillary Clinton in the State Department um prior to 2016.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: She's a very well-known academic, she runs a think tank in Washington, and she puts it like this My generation of feminists was raised to think the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: Women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men, but as we attain that power, we must not automatically accept the traditional man's view, actually the view of a minority of men, about what matters.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that seems to me to sort of capture where, in some ways, where we have gone wrong, uh that the that this that is very much a sort of care balancer view uh and not a care egalitarian view, not a not a male default care egalitarian view.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and yeah, it's the the the kind of care-egalar care egalitarian view has been very much promoted by the left.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, sort of you know, from the kind of 1970s onwards, you know, the Labour Party would have seen itself as the party of kind of feminist advance, um, and the party of the non-traditional fam supporting the non-traditional family and so on.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that was uh you know, and and that was good and necessary um at the time.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: The Conservative Party, after some sort of initial resistance to many of these changes, um essentially embraced them.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was the uh embarrassing um Um John Major's famous Back to Basics in the mid-1990s, uh Peter Lilly's famous attack on single parents, single mothers.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and those left deep scars.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was Theresa May's famous um famous talk about the conservatives being the nasty party.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a lot of that was associated precisely with uh a more conservative view of the family.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: So and so the the conservatives after that sort of brief sort of attempt at counter-revolution sort of essentially sort of embraced a a kind of uh uh liberal left view of matters in in this realm.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and in the Cameron-Osborne years, David Cameron actually himself personally was very um was very committed to supporting the family, but he never did anything about it, telling that it was one of the few areas I think where him and George Osborne um differed, and the Osborne view essentially prevailed.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: So and and what um and a pr the product, the outcome of all of this is that we have the most miserly family policy, we have the least support for the family uh in any form in the rich West.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we don't we're one of the very few countries that doesn't recognize the family in the tax system.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we do not make it easy for one parent to stay at home when when children are preschooled, quite the opposite.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, all of the incentives are to push people out to work as quickly as possible on the grounds that you know this is this is good for them.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's good for their kids to be in um you know stranger care from the age of you know um nine months actually uh is going to be where the subsidy now kicks in, uh despite the fact that all you know a very large number of child development experts will tell you that um that it's preferable for children to stay within the family until the age of about two.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um obviously there are differing differing views on that.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we've um yeah, I mean we we've had a sort of consensus uh has coalesced around a very um work-oriented, very kind of individualist, work-oriented um kind of um um yeah, the the culprit and um the the work you know arbeit macht frei um um uh rather than the um rather than getting a better balance between um between the world of work.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean obviously you know there are huge pressures on families.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: They need at least one and a half, often two incomes to maintain the standard of living they want.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: But the way that the state um helps or fails to help is not is not creating that that better balance that I think the majority of people would like.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you touched on the downside impact on children in all of this with regards to how child development experts will tell you about the impact of having children as young as nine months old in third-party childcare.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you draw out a few stories that are quite personal within the um within within our uh public uh sphere here in the United Kingdom.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you you mention uh true Trevor Phillips, a former Labour MP, who's now uh a media personality in his own right, and he lost his daughter uh when she was 36 years old and she suffered from anorexia, and he has uh placed a a link, I suppose, in that he and his wife regret being full-time workers and believe that perhaps their lack of uh input and being around her was good.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when you uh sorry was was sorry, was uh was a bad thing and and and influenced uh potentially her her mental health or or impacted it even.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you draw out a few child development studies in there that show that any child before the age of three effectively gets less out of it than they that than we think they do.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you mentioned something like even having a nine-month-old baby in um their cortisol levels rise throughout the course of the day because they don't have anyone to to to stroke them, to love them, to hug them, to kiss them, because they've got the 30 other children to be dealing with in this uh childcare setting.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then even when the parents come and get them, they've had a full day at work, they're a bit stressed, and they can provide the the love and attention, and those cortisol levels keep rising.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then you go even further and build this picture, which is that we look we we we look around and see mental health being spoken about everywhere.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: We had rising mental health issues amongst generation uh Z or Z, and I suppose you're drawing the link out as people like Jonathan Height do as well, that this is the generation that has grown up in third-party childcare, potentially both parents out of the house, or another generation in which half of children only live with one parent, and so they they there's a whole different set of stresses here.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the one quote that really stood out to me towards the end of the book was one that you um you opened a chapter with, which was from a social policy commentator who wanted to remain anonymous, and they wrote, No, I haven't written about the family, it's too fraught atop it.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: But considering what we've just trotted through in the space of five minutes as to the detrimental impact of civilization, why is it that you think that people don't want to talk about the family, even if they are ultimately focusing in on areas that are going to be totally intertwined with the family setting?
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I mean, Pumble, partly for the reasons that we've touched on already.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the old saw that it you know, going back to the 1980s, it was the the right won the economic economic argument, and the left won the I mean the progressive side of politics won the kind of cultural argument.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that I think probably applies to family more than almost any other area.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the association between the kind of conventional two-parent family and um and kind of repression.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it sort of goes back to kind of Freudianism.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that the the the 20th century kind of intellectual life was quite skeptical about the family uh as a site of um repression of of kind of human impulses, human freedom.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um feminism then added a kind of another layer of critique that it was it was um the the the family um suppressed women essentially um and prevented them from you know expressing their um their um creativity and and and freedom.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think you you have that sort of broader intellectual background who was particularly taken up by the left.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I I mentioned in my book this uh something that John Crudus, the uh former Labour MP, who at one point was um stood did he stand for deputy leader?
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, by the way, Trevor Phillips was never actually a Labour MP, but um was he not?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well he was a Labour activist, and uh I think he may have been candidate for Labour's candidate to London mayor at one point.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um Crottus um was actually given the responsibility for writing the 2015 Labour manifesto by Edmiliband, and he said to me the other day that um he he um he made lots of references to exactly what we've just been talking about, the the connection between family instability and so many of our social problems, whether it's you know poverty, obviously, if you have a high proportion of single parents, you're going to have um greater poverty in the country, greater poverty, greater inequality.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, something I point out in the book, one of the reasons why the UK is uh is right at the top of the inequality league in Europe is that A, we have an outsized financial sector, which always tends to uh to lead to greater income dispersal, um, and we have the highest level of um single parenthood.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: 24% of families with dependent children in the UK um are single-parent families.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: That is almost double the uh the European average.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um but so many other areas, whether it's kind of housing, um whether it's um criminal justice system, you know, a huge majority of people in the criminal justice system come from broken homes.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a relatively recent phenomenon.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously a lot of this started back in the 70s and the 80s when divorce became a lot easier, and you know, the all all of the freedoms that you know the the the the the welcome freedoms of the great sort of sixties and seventies liberalizations, um but um and it but then the the the the kind of effect on creating greater instability for children happened relatively gradually.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it was still um by the um so children growing up to be in in the the end of the 90s, beginning of the 2000s, um it was still only about 20% or so of children who weren't growing up with both of their biological parents.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now we've got nearly half of children um by the age of 14 are not living with both of their biological parents.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that is a very, very large proportion.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, John Balby's attachment theory remains absolutely kind of you know, psychology 101.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, no one has really uh attempted to debunk the idea that that stability is very, very important, both for for infants, um, hence the question mark over putting children too early into stranger care, um, how however good it is.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but also the um how how potentially damaging.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, obviously, every child is different.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Some children can sail through all these things and be fine.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh but uh but many other children um are badly affected, um, both by but being put into childcare perhaps too early, um uh, but also then being badly affected by disruptions to family life um through relationship breakdown.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the um those numbers have increased really substantially.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I and I have a whole section which links this.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think Jonathan Height is clearly onto something with his whole argument about social media and the way, particularly young women you know curating their lives on these platforms is is obviously very damaging.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um but one of the reasons that that these children spend so much time on these platforms is because they do not have stable sort of traditional family life that is that is there for them, that is, that is guiding them.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, their their parents are even if their parents are together, their parents are on the on their screes the whole time.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um I think the yeah we we I mean alongside the height critique, I think the other the other possibly even bigger elephant in the room is is the breakdown in family stability.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, obviously not all families.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I have a very I've had a very benign experience of family.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm one of seven children, I have four children my own.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and there are lots of people for whom the word family does not have um does not evoke something sort of warm and welcoming.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so you know, I'm not uh as I keep emphasizing, I'm not trying to turn the clock back on the great liberal reforms in the 60s and 70s.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh no, there are there are huge outcomes, uh, as I've already said, both in kind of any pretty much any social policy area you want to look at, educational underperformance, you know, criminal justice, etc., that you can see an absolutely direct link between family instability and these things.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: But the political class has decided, as I say, both left and right, um, that this is somehow beyond politics, that you know that we cannot um and I mean it may be in a way they're right.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these are I'm not I'm not for a moment saying these are easy things to solve.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean that's you know given that we don't want to go back to you know we don't want to make it much harder for people to to escape from oppressive or damaging um partnerships.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know we we don't want you know we we want to still maintain uh you know a high degree of freedom, but we but we do need to we need to balance it more.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we live in a largely post-religious age.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um the moral stigma associated with um you know leaving a a long-term partnership or marriage, even even when you have young children, is much much reduced.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and those the kind of handrails that used to balance the you know the human the human impulses towards freedom satisfying our selfish desires and so on.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um those things used to be balanced in a way that they that they ceased to be in some ways, um except for religious people.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um religious people still do often have um much more conventional family arrangements, they tend to have higher fertility rates.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um indeed I think this is what one of the arguments of of uh Louise Perry, who's writing a book about um about um fertility and uh pronatalism, is that uh the liberals are going to die out uh or they're gonna be outnumbered by uh conservative conservative religious believers because they are they are the ones that are still having children.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um but no, I mean uh you know uh I think the the Jonathan Haidt argument is is clearly right to an extent, but he this uh and he also makes this point that that that almost to compensate for the lack of security and stability that we're creating for many of our children, parents then sort of almost overcompensate with this sort of highly intensive parenting.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um it actually came in really in the eighties and nineties when education started to become the great sort of divider.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when the you know de decent jobs for people with low educational, low educational attainment started to disappear.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, parents, particularly middle class parents, um what you know, them became much more focused on their children's um uh ability to do well at school and then get into university and into the sort of safety of a professional job.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but you saw you saw that uh rise in so-called uh attentive uh uh you know intensive parenting.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it often went along.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: It was a sort of funny mix of um of kind of almost over intensive, you know, the decline in play, you know, the the fact that children no longer walk to school and all those kinds of things.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um also sort of coincided with a um with the this combination of sort of too much attention, particularly when children were kind of adolescents, with almost not enough attention when they're younger, either because of the increase in uh formal childcare or because um because family relationships were much more disrupted than they had been before.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: So um yeah, uh and and I think there is a there's a huge amount of evidence that the this epidemic of mental fragility has not only social media iPhones and social media uh at at its root, but also the um the much less secure early years that young people experience.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate John here.
• 36:42
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• 36:45
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• 36:54
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• 36:57
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• 37:10
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• 37:12
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• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: I personally think that we ought to conduct exercises like you're doing around the policies that have led us here on any policy that is going to have wide-scale change, because the only way you can ever try to mitigate unintended consequences, which are having a negative impact, is by understanding the various threads and then adding new levers.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose it's that's just the nature of politics.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: But if we bury our heads in the sand, then things get even worse.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some things that were coming to mind uh when I was reading your book was that in the world of women's liberation, we can also see in polling that even in this world of women's liberation, that women are not totally happy across the board.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think people refer to it as the female happiness paradox, that despite all of this, and as a total caveat before I go any further, this is as you begin with your book, with you're not suggesting anyone go back to Hearth and Home, but that the world we have created, liberation, is proving once more that liberation on its own is not enough.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: And besides that, if you look at the impact on men, and again, I'm not suggesting we go back to some model where only men benefit, that I don't think that ever really existed, perhaps a subset, but not all of them, is that we have men who are probably about as uh diminished as you could imagine because their status has gone down.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think men are very sensitive to their place in the status hierarchy.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think we we know that.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, psychologists that use on it, like Roy Ba Bannermeister Meister says so.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose looking at other policies that have impacted all of this, like, and I think we did touch on this in the last podcast, but like Tony Blair's uh let's get 50% of everyone to higher education.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember the impact that had on me as an early school lever, that those late teams, early 20s, looking around at my peers.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: I felt very, very low status.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: I really struggled with girls.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of girls were just immediately out of my league because they had those.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't know it at the time, but I definitely now do looking back that there was this gap to fill.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then I did all of my study later on in life, and that started to dovetail with a career that was increasing around me, and I found myself around the cognitive classes.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: And whilst I would say my now fiance is not going to look at me and say, I'm with you because of your degrees or whatever, I think there's probably no doubt that if I hadn't have done those things, I wouldn't have gotten myself into a position which would have been of esteem in this society.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: And indeed, I have friends who are doing career changes in the middle of their lives and they're students again, and they feel really low about that because they think, well, how does that look for me at a status perspective?
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's quite interesting that then you see this intertwining with perhaps the use of, and I know this is something Chris Williamson, Modern Wisdom, has talked about, the use of um uh the birth control pill, which um is apparently, according to some research, is having an impact on testosterone levels in society.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you add you it feels like even beneath all of this, these these political policies we're coming out with to try and raise status and opportunities and GDP, is that we're we're potentially having these unforeseen biological impacts where we've got you know males feeling low status, low testosterone, all these other things of tools of women's liberation having similar effects.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then even at the end of this, despite the higher status, the higher GDP being produced by women is even women aren't entirely happy, total nested set of issues there.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean I think I mean I I I have a chapter in the book on um what about men?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and clearly the um all of these changes have have have obviously had a big impact on male-female relationships.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um because they've coincided because the kind of advance of women, you know, the what half of women now in the UK um go to university compared to about a third of men.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um the um the pay gap between men and women is now virtually zero.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: For those under 40, uh, women are more or less equally represented in the professions now, indeed, increasingly dominating certain professions, um, particularly as it were, the kind of higher care professions like medicine, um, but even the law, too.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the fact that that coincided with the fact that this sort of shift in gender relations in favour of women uh coincided with the the rise of the so-called knowledge economy and the and the export of so many traditional industrial jobs.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um when has it has created um I think it's one of the things that that uh drives populism both in the US and in in much of Europe.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um it tends to be men who vote in larger numbers uh for populist parties and women, um, partly as you say, because they do feel a loss of status.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean I think um the the majority, I mean I'd even say the vast majority of men have uh kind of accepted the the um you know the what what loot the loose, the broad sort of idea of greater equality between men and women.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and indeed that there's plenty of evidence I'm scientists in my chapter that the distribution of domestic labour has shifted quite a lot and become more equal in recent decades.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: We've moved from something like sort of set a 70-30 balance with women doing about 70%, around 30% of domestic and childcare labour, to something more like 60-40, even 55, 45, probably in more middle class, higher educated homes.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: But still a large minority of men feel that they've kind of lost a protector provider role and haven't really found anything to replace it.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the labour market has moved against them, um, moved in favour of uh of women and soft so-called Soft skills, communication skills, which on average women tend to flourish in more than men.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: So you've had a sort of double whammy for a lot of men.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, as you mentioned, Chris Williamson, I mean, you know, he he talks about, you know, why is there not more sort of violent protest against this uh shift in in status and the kind of removal of useful productive roles for at least a large minority of men?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, he he talks about the the um the sort of soporific effect of sort of video games and weed and um this kind of it's that that's um that's preventing um a much uglier uh situation than we than we might be experiencing.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, I mean that that is clearly part of the story and another reason why we need to um to kind of adjust some of the overshoots and indeed you know and just take account of the fact that you know men face some very significant uh challenges, particularly working class men in in America and Europe.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we we should take we should take these issues seriously on a lot of these social policy issues.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're still, as it were, fighting the battles of the 80s and the 90s.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know you know feminism, at least in its sort of mainstream form, has has kind of won.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's like social democracy, you know, sort of won, had won um in by you know by the 60s and the 70s.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we then had a you know, we had a brief period where the market economy was kind of restored, but um, you know, we still have enormous public sectors, big welfare states.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is you know, so so so much of sort of progressive thinking still seems so trapped in a in a in a um it assumes that the kind of reforms haven't taken place that have taken place, and I think this is uh this is an example of it.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this sort of there's this odd sort of blind spot that uh as we've already mentioned, that the political, I mean I notice it so much more now that I've sort of looked into these issues that you know when Gordon Brown talks about child poverty, when Jennifer Dixon of the Health Foundation talks about the problems of the the NHS, when Sam Friedman talks about um kind of educational failure and disadvantage, behind all of these things lies broken families, I mean, to a very, very large extent, and yet they never talk about it.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um as you say, it's it's as somebody said to me, you know, I I challenged that someone had just written a huge piece about all various sort of UK social policy problems and the New Statesman, and they didn't mention the family and read the unstable family.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I said, you know, surely this is a factor is oh well it's it's all a bit too fraught, you think.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um and it is difficult, you know, and we've got but we've got into this sort of trap of thinking that talking about the conventional family must somehow be um stigmatizing single parents or the non-traditional family.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: But why?
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, nobody since the 1990s, there's no senior political figure who has you know who's made a speech um you know uh attacking single parents.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: It it's uh it's it's no longer a worry.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the worry is on the other side that um you know, and most people who are in a single parent situation do not do not welcome it.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, the polling shows, you know, 65% of single parents say that that you know they would prefer to be in a in a conventional two-parent um situation.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um that that this is not um, you know, and and as I said earlier, you know, the conservatives have been sort of frightened out out of you know fear of being appearing hypocritical.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean that was partly the problem with the with the job of the famous John Major back to basics.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: Suddenly we had we had all these sort of stories about the philandering behaviour of Tory MPs.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and not wanting to be hypocritical is a good thing.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even then you might say that's actually been an advance of our politics.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we do have the rather depressing, I think I cited in the book, that something like 40% of all MPs elected in 2010 who were married or in long-term partnerships are no longer in those relationships.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, the Westminster Life is not a is not a good one for stable families.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and you know, if you are concerned not to be hypocritical, you can see why people may not want to talk about these things.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, um, and you know, there is um you know I mean you might say a good reason for not talking about these things is there's no point talking about things we can't really do anything about.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's the sort of the genie's out of the bottle, people now embrace freedom, um, and that there's kind of no going back, so we just have to sort of live with the consequences of it.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and maybe that's right in a way.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I mean I think that as I you know, I go back to this point about the fact that our family policy is so weak.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there are things that that they do routinely in other comparable countries, you know, recognize family and tax system, make it easier that Finland has a home care allowance that allows that actually pays people to stay at home to make it easier for those, for those that large minority, if not majority, of women who would like to be able to stay at home but cannot afford to stay at home when children are preschool, make it easier for them to do that.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it would cost a bit of money, but actually a lot of that could just be re-channeled from money that we're already spending.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, as uh I mentioned we've these very large subsidies for childcare, 9 billion pounds in total.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think by the end of next year we're going to be spending on subsidizing childcare.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Why not give that money direct to families?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: They can then decide, you know, we'll either some of them, perhaps most of them, will still spend it on formal childcare, a lot of them will spend it on themselves or on granny, or a combination of the two, so they can they can stay at home and create that stability and reduce the stress.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: So much of family breakdown happens in those, you know, that nearly half of um kids in the UK not living with both biological parents when they're 14.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, some of that would be reduced, I think, if you families feel so stretched at that that period.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you have one child, you have two children, um, pressures at work are sometimes at that maximum when you're when you're in your 30s or early 40s, and and and everything falls apart.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: Then you know that is where we should be trying to create you know uh some protection.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the state has a legitimate role in doing that.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it would cost money, but some of the money could, I mean, we could also another of the ideas of being floating around is to front-end child benefit.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can go on receiving child benefit to if if the if the if the young person is in education until the age of 20.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and it's a it's a reasonably decent amount of money.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you have a couple of kids, it's about 2,000 quid a year.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: If that was if you could take, say, half of all child benefit in the first three or five years, that again would um would m make life a lot easier, make it easier for single parents, single mothers usually, uh, to keep some of their benefits when they start a new relationship.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean at the moment there's absolutely no incentive um for a single parent to start a new relationship because they lose all their benefits.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: The the the the person coming into the relationship, assuming they're assuming it's a man who is the main earner, doesn't get any sort of tax benefit from uh from a new partnership.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: That needs to be uh reviewed as well, so that um the revolv the revolving door that that young people experience as such a damaging thing in their lives revolves less fast.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: Your book, I think, also pulls out quite clearly that there are civilizational tectonic shifts that are underway.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about demographics, you cite people like Paul Morland, the demographer, to talk about how we're we're we're trending toward very few people that are not just in the Western world, but in many different parts of the world, and this makes the organization of uh big big states a a bit harder, um, not least because of fall in tax revenue and the like.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the responses that we've seen were such as mass immigration, uh as causing um for many people a sense of cultural dislocation.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so even if you could go and hire all of those care workers from poorer parts of the world, is then you're depriving them of people you could care for, their own their own compatriots, as it were.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm going to try to avoid going into a doomerist mode because I think we should always retain a sense of hope.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: But if you do look at the civilizational strands that were that are being pulled on really heavily here, so you've got immigration of distinct peoples on a large scale, we've got low social cohesion on that and less future support for welfare programs.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then even because of the narrowing demographics, we we're going to have a lower tax base for that.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: We've got growing regional imbalances here in the United Kingdom, but you could argue in other parts of Europe too.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: That declining fertility, we've got low trust in institutions and public officials.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose what you are starting to see as a positive response to that are you do see some people attempting to look after themselves through grassroots organizations.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: You cite some in your book.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I see amongst certainly some of the more conservatively minded Gen Z is people who are throwing themselves into committed relationships and marriage much sooner and championing traditional values.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so my crackpot theory as a potential scenario here, this civilizational shift is given the pressures coming on the nation-state and all of that low trust and these regional imbalances and potential fractures, uh, you know, perhaps we're starting to see the unraveling of the recent technology of the nation-state.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't know, maybe it's a bit Oswald Spangler decline of the West for you, David.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean of that?
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's that that's um that's a big that's a big one.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I do think about I agree.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: There is a kind of degree of particularly in this country, yeah.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, the kind of Anglo-Saxon countries are famous for their short-termism.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think this is you know, this is we're kind of verging on civilizational short-termism when you know you talk about you know the treasury model um is about maximising workforce, GDP, and tax income today, but I but only by making it harder to raise the stable families of the future.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I do think it's you know, demography, you know, it's the economics that may come to our aid here.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: The economics of low fertility, um, low fertility, which is associated with kind of lower marriage rates, more unstable families, uh, certainly makes it um uh it's obviously lower fertility is also associated with uh with women's freedom.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, we can overshoot in these areas, and and we still have this fertility gap.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: Women and you know, young young parents say they want more children than they're having, and we should do all we can to you know imagine if we valued reproduction in the same way that that we that we value production.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know that you know we would create a a much more family-friendly um uh arrangement so for people in those in those reproductive years, for men and women to to share the burdens, um, and for you know for companies in the state to to to help.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um yeah, I I do think that yeah, it's it's GDP thinking.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: GDP thinking has become so dominant uh and and just the way that we you know the way that we count what we regard as economically productive.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how can it not be productive to create the the stable, well-balanced children of the future who are going to be the workers of the future and the taxpayers of the future?
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think it is I I really do think uh people have talked about the limits of GDP accounting for for decades.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's not not a use of each tool, but I think it's becoming more and more dysfunctional, particularly as actually as an aging society, we're actually spending more time at home, doing more productive work at home, whether it is raising children, we're doing that less, it's true, but but we're we're also working, um helping, looking after old people at home more.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and a lot of that does happen in the GDP economy.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of it happens outside the GDP economy, that some of these distinctions are becoming increasingly um sort of pointless in some ways, and and we need to we need to count both both types of work, whether it's paid paid for or not, uh, as productive work.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: So there's we're spending more time at home.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we have working from home as a result of the you know, partly as a result of the pandemic, the whole zoom, zoom economy, particularly if there are laptop classes.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um we have AI that is presumably going to reduce the the um uh the working week at some point in the near future.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: We have men stepping up more, doing more uh work in the domestic childcare field, in the domestic realm.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, all that the we're sort of the GDP is sort of setting ourselves up to fail in some ways.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: That the way we currently count productive work is setting ourselves up to fail.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think um we really deem do need to go back and look at that.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I I think that it's not um so I mean I I yeah, I I don't think it is an entirely pessimistic story.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I actually remember when I wrote my book, The Road to Somewhere, where I'll create these labels anyways, and some ways it book I was writing it in 2016, and I remember looking at the issue of the family for the first time.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never really been particularly interested in family politics before, and I was really surprised to find I mean, both how little support we have.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean, I kind of stumbled across the the this sort of this gap that I mentioned earlier, this huge gap between uh probably the biggest one of in in order public policy between the views of ordinary people.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: They're there in the British Social Attitude Survey, they're no secret, but but the views of ordinary people about a lot of these things and the views of the political class.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean something I think I forgot to mention earlier.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: When you know the I I mentioned Jeremy Hunt and his um why why are you women wasting your uh talents on mothering uh as he was announcing this expansion of childcare?
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um the families that will benefit most from this expansion of childcare subsidy to children as young as nine months will be those uh those households where both parents work full-time, which is about a third of uh of families of children.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um the proportion of the British public who think that that is the best arrangement um for the best of uh family arrangement is nine percent.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is not a you know people are uh many people are forced into it.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: Many people want to do it in and and they obviously they should be free to do that.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: But but most people do not think this is a this is an ideal arrangement.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: The only people who are tripping about these things at that at the time seem to me were regarded as cramps and Christians.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean I actually do think things have improved now compared to them, have been so there is there is a conversation for these things, partly because of the fertility crisis, uh, which even Italian she usually keep into our economy.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um I think that we can see a have a that uh that would be sort of roll back into a lot of these other issues.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_01: How can we actually support the family in a process, not just by talk about childcare, but talking about something we messed to wealth and um men and we can pretend the you know men you know we are getting international outliers?
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: We had two weeks, you know, at some trivial um um payment.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I do think these issues will become more meat-centric.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: You're starting to see you know politics.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's unlike your ones that see the Labour Party embracing these things, but uh kind of reverted Conservative Party on the King Adnock is talking about reforms of family.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean everybody talks about informative families, and that's like that doesn't really mean very much of heaters with people about um she might be she might be interested in thinking about some of those ideas of creating a really family policy of monetary does support more stable families and makes it easier for for parents to stay together and reduces the the huge stress to those with early years.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, and that does include men setting up or um that it means um you know not not always treating women by a mill should um you know if we can want to want to be at home and treatment free school, or you would have them then that should be made easier.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: Feminism should be confident enough now to be pluralistic, you know not not just have a men in the world someone that that reflects the um the priorities or uh or maybe focus with it.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um I think that you know that is going to be on the agenda.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, David, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you back.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: For everyone listening, watching, go out and read the care dilemma, caring enough in this age the age of sex equality.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: It tells you everything you might want to know and haven't even thought about as to how we ended up in this position of family um uh dissolution or devaluation and how it is that we might move forward, some of the red herrings in there.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: David, it's been an absolute pleasure and look forward to the next time we speak and hearing what you're working on, and I'll see you in the future.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, David.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.
• 1:03:54
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• 1:04:04
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• 1:04:10
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• 1:04:29
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