Turning royalty into royalties impoverishes us all

What if we could create a marketplace for relationships, so that – just as we can rent our homes on Airbnb – we had an app that allowed us to sell at the market rate dinner with our husbands or bedtime with the kids?

Marriage is a legally recognised agreement after all, one that has been shown to confer many benefits for health and wellbeing. Why should I not be able to rent my place as wife and mother in my particular family to others who wish to enjoy some of those benefits?

Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute recently argued that the technology exists to enable us to trade citizenship rights. Calling the right of British nationals to work in the UK’s high-wage economy “an effective property right we own but can’t currently trade”, he suggests we could ease immigration pressures by implementing an Airbnb-style secondary market in working rights.

If we frame citizenship, or marriage, as something owned by an individual, it is simply a set of bureaucratic permissions. Like the right to live in a house, surely this could be traded in a marketplace? And if the technology exists to create a citizenship market, surely we could do the same for marriage? I could sublet my wifedom and nip off for a weekend on the tiles with the proceeds. Why not?

The problem is obvious — my husband and daughter would, not unreasonably, object. She would no more want her bedtime story read by a stranger than my husband would want to share a bed with that stranger.

My marriage is not a good I own but a relationship, created by mutual consent. In a marriage, I give up some of my autonomy, privacy and private property rights by declaring my commitment to the relationship. What I gain is of immeasurable value: a sphere of belonging, the foundation of my existence as a social creature.

Likewise, citizenship implies relations of belonging, both of me to a community but also a community to me. It also implies commitments on behalf of the community of which I am a citizen. And in exchange it requires commitments of me, as a citizen: to uphold the law, to behave according to its customs and so on. As the late Roger Scruton put it in a 2017 speech:

The citizen participates in government and does not just submit to it. Although citizens recognise natural law as a moral limit, they accept that they make laws for themselves. They are not just subjects: they appoint the sovereign power and are in a sense parts of that sovereign power, bound to it by a quasi-contract which is also an existential tie. The arrangement is not necessarily democratic, but is rather founded on a relation of mutual accountability.
Roger Scruton

Just as my husband and daughter have a stake in who is entitled to be called “wife” or “Mummy” in our particular context, so other citizens of a nation have a stake in who is entitled to the rights conferred by citizenship.

In this light we can better understand the revulsion that greeted the actions of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in trademarking “Sussex Royal” for personal commercial gain. Royalty, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an intrinsic property of a person, like blue eyes or long legs, but something conferred both by the monarchy and also by the subjects of that monarchy.

As Charles I discovered in 1649, ultimately no king can govern save by the consent of his subjects. Royalty is not a private property, but a relationship. The popular disgust and anger engendered by the Sussexes’ move to transfer their stock of royalty from the relational public sphere to that of private property is in truth anger at their privatising something which does not belong to them but to the whole nation.

In The Question Concerning Technology, writes Josh Pauling, Heidegger argues that technology uncouples humans from what is real, paving the way for a mindset that treats everything as “standing-reserve”, or in other words “resources to be consumed”. For Heidegger, seeing the world thus is dangerous because it flattens all other perspectives:

Commodifying nature and humanity leads us to discard other understandings of being-in-the-world and the practices, beliefs and ideas that accompany them: all aspects of reality are incorporated into the ordering of standing-reserve.
Josh Pauling

My husband’s goodwill would rapidly wear thin were I to Airbnb my role in our family. Similarly, Bourne’s citizenship marketplace fails to consider how the general population would react to seeing fellow citizens renting their right to work to non-citizens and swanning about spending the unearned proceeds. And the goodwill enjoyed by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex while discharging their royal duties has already evaporated, now it transpires they wish to enjoy the privileges of their elevated station without embracing its obligations.

Treated as objects to be exploited, relational meanings wither and die. Treated as dynamic relationships, they are infinitely renewable. In this sense, they are more akin to ecologies in the natural world. In Expecting the Earth, Wendy Wheeler argues that in fact ecologies are systems of meaning: whether at the level of DNA or megafauna, she says, living things deal not in information but in meanings that change dynamically depending on context.

Why does any of this matter? “Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus. “The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” The impressive achievements of modernity might make the loss of meaning seem, to some, a fair exchange.

But if Wheeler is right, meaning is more than an optional seasoning on the mechanistic business of living. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl observes of his time in Nazi concentration camps that those who felt they had a goal or purpose were also those most likely to survive.

Indeed, the growing phenomenon of “deaths of despair” is driven, some argue, by deterioration in community bonds, good-quality jobs, dignity and social connection — in a word, the relational goods that confer meaning and purpose on life. As Frankl observed, humans need meaning as much as we need air, food and water: “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”

An order of commerce that treats relational ecologies as objects that can be exploited will exhaust those objects. That is, in the course of its commercial activities it actively destroys one of the basic preconditions for human flourishing: meaning.

The Estonian thinker Ivar Puura has called the destruction of meaning “semiocide”. As concern mounts about the effects of pollution and emissions on the earth, campaigners have called for new laws to criminalise the destruction of ecologies, which they call “ecocide”. Perhaps we should take semiocide more seriously as well.

This piece was originally published at Unherd

John Clare, poet of the Somewheres

Can someone be so much of a Somewhere — so rooted in a place — that the loss of that home could drive them mad? The tragic story of the poet John Clare (1793-1864) would suggest so. A contemporary of the Romantics, Clare was neither an aristocrat like Byron nor a grammar school boy like Wordsworth and Keats, but a farm labourer. And when the Enclosure Acts transformed his birthplace, he was so devastated by the loss of his familiar landscape and way of life that he fell gradually into depression, panic attacks, alcohol abuse and finally psychosis.

Born in 1793 in Helpston, a rural hamlet north of Peterborough, to a barely literate farm labourer father and an illiterate mother, Clare spent most of his working life as a labourer, despite at one point during his lifetime outselling John Keats. Only haphazardly educated, he fell wildly in love with the written word after encountering James Thomson’s The Seasons. He began writing his own verse — at first mainly about the natural world — on whatever scraps of paper he could find, or on his hat when he had no paper.

Clare first sought a publisher in the hope of raising money to stop his parents being evicted from their tenement. When a lucky contact brought him to Taylor & Hessey, his first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in 1820 to wild acclaim.

Clare stands out among the poets of the Romantic era for his understanding of and communion with the natural world he describes. Contemporaries treated the natural world more as emotional stimulus: in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey“, for example, landscape is observed, but with little knowledge. Wordsworth’s “plots of cottage-grounds” are “clad in one green hue”, and this is chiefly an anchor for moral reflection, a means of “hearing oftentimes/The still sad music of humanity”.

Clare, on the other hand, was critical of this mix of ignorance and sentimentality, saying of Keats that “his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies, and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described”.

Landscape, to Clare, was not a source of high emotion but home, livelihood, work, family and the richness of plant and animal life. His vistas brim with too much knowledge to seem painterly, or to be turned easily into moral metaphor. Colour is shorthand for a natural and farmed landscape intimately known, as these fields in “A Sunday With Shepherds and Herdboys”:

Square plats of clover red and white
Scented wi’ summer’s warm delight
And sinkfoil of a fresher stain
And different greens of varied grain

In Keats’s famous “Ode to a Nightingale” the bird herself is not even described, serving instead as the focus for reflections on death, history and emotional rapture by a poet “half in love with easeful death”; Clare’s hushed, intimate “The Nightingale’s Nest” is both more prosaic and, in a sense, more faithful to the bird. For Keats, she is a “light-winged Dryad of the trees”. In contrast, Clare describes the materials used to build her nest and, with hushed empathy, the terrified bird:

How subtle is the bird she started out
And raised a plaintive note of danger nigh
Ere we were past the brambles and now near
Her nest she sudden stops — as choaking fear
That might betray her home

There is no need for a moral. For Clare it is enough to observe, then tiptoe away leaving the bird to find her voice again:

We’ll leave it as we found it — safety’s guard
Of pathless solitudes shall keep it still
See there she’s sitting on the old oak bough
Mute in her fears – our presence doth retard
Her joys and doubt turns every rapture chill
Sing on sweet bird may no worse hap befall
Thy visions then the fear that now deceives
We will not plunder music of its dower
Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall
For melody seems hid in every flower
That blossoms near thy home

Yet Clare’s lack of moralising does not strip his work of emotion. He is as unflinching in his descriptions of the brutality of his world as of its beauty. “The Badger” begins with a description of the animal’s habitat “A great hugh burrow in the ferns and brakes” and ends with its death at the hands of a village crowd:

He turns agen and drives the noisey crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud
He drives away and beats them every one
And then they loose them all and set them on
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies

His ever-present empathy is with the birds and beasts besieged by humanity, as in “Summer Evening” when he curses the boys who creep into lofts to catch and kill sparrows. He calls on the birds to nest in his house where they will be safe:

My heart yearns for fates like thine
A sparrow’s life’s as sweet as mine

If Clare rises to moralise from his observation of the natural world, it is done without ornament. The last two verses of “To The Snipe” give a reflection at once uplifting and humble:

Isee the sky
Smile on the meanest spot
Giving to all that creep or walk or flye
A calm and cordial lot
Thine teaches me
Right feeling to employ
That in the dreariest places peace will be
A dweller and a joy

Clare’s modesty was out-of-step with the mood of the times: Keats wrote of Clare’s poetry that “Images from Nature are too much introduced without being called for by a particular Sentiment”. Romantic poetry often seems as indifferent to the minutiae of the natural world as it is enthralled by the poet’s ability to overlay it with “Sentiment”. This aesthetic was well suited to the political and technological shifts of that age. Whether in poetry or landscape, the movement was away from coexistence with the natural world toward subordinating it to human desires.

In the Middle Ages, much of the arable land in central England was “commons”, which was farmed on a communal basis for a subsistence livelihood. This was the landscape of John Clare’s childhood. But between the 13^th and 19^th centuries, and accelerating from the Georgian era onward, the land was ‘“enclosed” — that is, turned from common to private property — either by buying the land rights or else forcing enclosure through an Act of Parliament.

Between 1809 and 1820 Enclosure Acts transformed the landscape around John Clare’s birthplace, draining ditches, felling ancient trees and displacing subsistence farmers from once common land. Clare’s 1830s poem “The Lament of Swordy Well” expresses his horror at the process, in the voice of the land itself:

The silver springs grown naked dykes
Scarce own a bunch of rushes
When grain got high the tasteless tykes
Grubbed up trees, banks, and bushes
And me, they turned me inside out
For sand and grit and stones
And turned my old green hills about
And pickt my very bones.

The natural world, that seemed so numinous and eternal in Clare’s early work, is depicted homeless and starving as a consequence of this exploitation:

The bees flye round in feeble rings
And find no blossom bye
Then thrum their almost weary wings
Upon the moss and die
Rabbits that find my hills turned o’er
Forsake my poor abode
They dread a workhouse like the poor
And nibble on the road

By the age of 30, Clare had six children to feed and his brief fame had dissipated. Displaced from his way of life by enclosures and disturbed by the changing landscape, Clare fell into depression and alcohol abuse. Friends and admirers clubbed together to buy him a cottage three miles from Helpston, with a smallholding, but even this slight move from his birthplace only increased his distress. The Flitting captures his desolation. Even the sun, he says, seems lost:

Alone and in a stranger scene
Far far from spots my heart esteems
The closen with their ancient green
Heaths woods and pastures’ sunny streams
The awthorns here were hung with may
But still they seem in deader green
The sun e’en seems to loose its way
Nor knows the quarter it is in

Not long after moving he began to experience hallucinations and was sent to an asylum near London. So desperate was he to return home that four years later he escaped and walked the 70 miles back to his cottage. But he found no solace there, and shortly afterwards he was sent to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he lived the last 24 years of his life. He died aged 71 in 1864.

John Clare speaks to us from the other side of an unimaginable gulf. He was so profoundly Somewhere that even David Goodhart’s Somewheres would, to him, seem like Anywheres. His voice, almost modern-sounding, nonetheless hails from an ancient England where the normal livelihood was subsistence farming on land held in common, culture and history were mainly oral and the natural world held a richness of allusion Wordsworth and Keats found in classical mythology.

Yet his politics feel fresh and increasingly urgent, while his empathy for the living world making him a compelling advocate for change in how we relate to the land that nourishes us — whether via conservation, sustainable farming or land reform.

Clare is both protester and casualty of the Enclosure Acts, as well as a meticulous recorder of what was lost in that founding act of modernity. Enclosure spurred the phenomenal productivity gains of the agricultural revolution, created a labour force for industry — and devastated a whole way of life. His grief and anger at the costs of enclosure, an event largely seen from the perspective of its beneficiaries, reminds us that the growing power of individual property rights in the modern era displaced premodern subsistence lifestyles in the United Kingdom as well as in the colonies founded by English explorers overseas.

Clare’s descent into depression and alcoholism is echoed in the shockingly high prevalence of mental health issues and substance abuse in indigenous populations across the world who have been dislocated from their ways of living by modern property-owning relations to the landscape.

UK land ownership today is ever more carefully obfuscated and ever more critical to social and — perhaps — ecological renewal. The industrial capitalist economic model that took root in Clare’s lifetime is now cracking in earnest, along with the ecologies “grubbed up” (like Swordy Well) for “gain”. The “peasant poet” of Northamptonshire has lessons for us today.

This piece was originally published at Unherd

Growth is destroying our prosperity

e started the 2010s reeling from the Great Crash of 2008, and ended the decade with angry populism widespread in the Western world. Today, the global economy limps on more or less as usual, while resentment grows among the “little people” at an economic consensus many feel is rigged without really knowing who is to blame. Over the same period, climate change activism has gone from being a minority pursuit to mainstream debate, occasioning worldwide “school strikes” and, since the beginning of the year, the high-profile and colourful Extinction Rebellion movement.

What these dissatisfactions share is a sense of being trapped in an economic logic whose priorities no longer benefit society as a whole, but that — we are told — cannot be challenged without making things even worse. The foundational premise of that system is continual growth, as measured by GDP (gross domestic product) per capita. Economies must grow; if they do not, then recession sinks jobs, lives, entire industries. Tax receipts fall, welfare systems fail, everything staggers.

But what happens when growth harms societies? And what happens when growth comes at the cost of irreparable harm to the environment?

As Sir David Attenborough put it in 2013, “We have a finite environment – the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”

This is the argument of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth. The challenge the book sets out is at once simple and staggering. In a finite world, with limited natural resources, how do we deliver prosperity into the future for a human population that keeps on growing?

Jackson, who today is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), argues that we need to start by scrapping GDP as the core metric of prosperity. As the book puts it: “Rising prosperity isn’t self-evidently the same thing as economic growth.”

The pursuit of growth is also undermining social bonds and overall wellbeing. In 2018, a commission reported on the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that is blighting lives and worsening health across the UK, driven in part by greater mobility of individuals away from family connections. (Mobility of labour, of course, is essential to drive economic growth.)

This year, even The Economist acknowledged that rising growth does not guarantee rising happiness.

If that were not enough, the resources available to supply continued growth are dwindling: “If the whole world consumed resources at only half the rate the US does […] copper, tin, silver, chromium, zinc and a number of other ‘strategic minerals’ would be depleted in less than four decades.” (Prosperity Without Growth)

Rare earth minerals, essential for technologies from circuit boards to missile guidance systems, are projected to be exhausted in less than two decades.

Inasmuch as the public debate considers these nested dilemmas, the vague sentiment is that technology will save us. The jargon term for this is ‘decoupling’ — that is, the ability of the economy to grow without using more resources, by becoming more efficient. But will decoupling happen?

The theoretical core of Jackson’s book is a detailed unpacking of models that suggest it will not, or that if absolute decoupling is possible it will happen so far into the future we will already have wrecked the climate and run out of everything. Rather than rely on this fantasy, Jackson argues, we must challenge the dependence on growth.

But how? The global economic system depends on growth and in times of recession it is the poorest who suffer first. It is a policy double bind: on the one hand, we must think of the environment, so governments encourage us to buy less, consume less, recycle more and so on. But on the other, they must deliver a growing economy, which mean encouraging us to buy more, consume more, keep the economy going. Electorates are, understandably, cynical about the sincerity of this flatly self-contradictory position.

What, then, is the alternative? Jackson is an economist, not a revolutionary firebrand, and his book does not call on us to bring down capitalism. In the second part of Prosperity Without Growth, he instead suggests some quietly radical approaches to bringing the global economy back into the service of human flourishing.

He advocates government intervention to drive much of the change he proposes, including encouraging economies to pivot away from manufacturing, finance and the pursuit of novelty at all costs toward less obviously productive but more human services such as slow food cooperatives, repair and maintenance or leisure services.

He also advocates heavy state support for ecologically-oriented investment. When I contacted him to ask about his book ten years on he spoke positively of the contribution that a “Green New Deal” could make on this front: “It shows a commitment to social and environmental investment that is absolutely essential to achieve a net zero carbon world”, he told me. “Simply put, we just can’t achieve that without this scale of investment, and that form of commitment from Government.”

He also told me he is often criticised for being “too interventionist in relation to the state”, as he puts it. But perhaps (though Jackson does not use the term himself) he might be more fairly described as post-liberal. Prosperity Without Growth is a quiet but excoriating critique of the growing human and ecological costs of liberal economics.

Intriguingly, within Jackson’s proposals lurks another challenge to liberalism, that to date has not been greatly associated with the left: the critique of radical liberal individualism as a social doctrine. Along with state intervention to tweak the economy and drive ecological investment, Jackson argues that governments should promote “commitment devices”: that is, “social norms and structures that downplay instant gratification and individual desire and promote long-term thinking”.

Examples of ‘commitment devices’ include savings accounts and the institution of marriage. Governments should implement policies that clearly incentivise commitment devices, for doing so will promote social flourishing and resilience even as such institutions offer alternative forms of meaning-making to the pursuit of shopping-as-identity-formation.

Thus, we cannot save the earth without reviving some social values and structures today thought of as small ‘c’ conservative: stable marriage, savings, settled and cohesive communities with lower levels of labour mobility.

I asked Jackson whether some of the more vociferous socially liberal proponents of environmental change had cottoned on to these potentially quite conservative implications of his theories. He told me “This is an interesting question, for sure, and one that I don’t think has really been picked up – even by me!” (Except at UnHerd – see here and here for example.) But, he says, it is incumbent on us to set aside political tribalism in the search for solutions to our current dilemmas.

“I believe there are elements of a Burkean conservatism which are profoundly relevant to a politics of the environment, even as I am convinced that the progressive instincts of the left are essential in our response to social and environmental inequality. I see it as incumbent on those working for change both to understand the underlying motivations of different political positions and also to adopt a pragmatic politic in which solutions are suited to the challenges of today rather than the dogma of yesterday.”

Indeed.

This essay was originally published at Unherd

Why liberal feminists don’t care

A society that venerates health, youth and individual autonomy will not much enjoy thinking about birth or death. We are born helpless and need years of care until we reach the happy state of health and autonomy. At the other end of life, the same often applies: the Alzheimer’s Society tells us there are some 850,000 dementia patients in the UK and that this will rise to over a million by 2025 as life expectancy continues to rise.

If we are reluctant to dwell on the reality of human vulnerability at either end of life, we are unwilling to give much thought to its corollary: that (somewhere safely hidden from the more exciting business of being healthy, youthful and autonomous) there must be people caring for those who are unable to do it themselves. Someone is wiping those bottoms.

Traditionally, this job of caring for the very old and the very young has been “women’s work”. To a great extent, it still is: the OECD reports that, worldwide, women do between two and ten times as much caring work as men.

In the UK, this tends in statistics to be framed as “unpaid work”, a sort of poor relation of the economically productive type that happens in workplaces and contributes to GDP.

Carers UK suggests there are around 9 million people caring for others in the UK part or full-time, of whom up to 2.4 million are caring for both adults and their own children. Women carry out the lion’s share of this work: 60% according to the ONS. Full-time students do the least and, unsurprisingly, mothers with babies do the most. Older working women carry the heaviest load of people in employment, with those in the 50-60 bracket being twice as likely as their male counterparts to be carers whether of a vulnerable adult, a partner or a child or grandchild.

Second-wave feminism pushed hard against the pressure women experience to take on this work of caring. Within this variant of liberalism, caring work is routinely framed as a burden that imposes an economic “penalty” while harming the economy by keeping skilled women away from the workplace. The OECD report cited above states: “The gender gap in unpaid care work has significant implications for women’s ability to actively take part in the labour market and the type/quality of employment opportunities available to them.”

The implication is that, once freed of this obligation, women can then pursue more fulfilling activities in the workplace.

So what does this liberation look like in practice? According to a 2017 report by the Social Market Foundation, women in managerial and professional occupations are the least likely to provide care, as are people with degree qualifications. The number working in routine occupations who also donate more than 20 hours a week of care in their own homes is far higher than those in intermediate or professional occupation.

In other words, higher-earning women are to a far greater extent able to outsource the wiping of bottoms to less well-off people, who are themselves typically women: 90% of nurses and care workers are female.

These women are then too busy to wipe the bottoms of their own old and young, who are sent into institutional care. Such institutions are typically staffed by women, often on zero hours contracts, paid minimum wage to care for others all day before going home to do so for their own babies and elderly. The liberation of women from caring is in effect a kind of Ponzi scheme.

This is a problem for our liberal society, for two interlocking reasons. Firstly, the replacement of informal family-based care with a paid, institutional variety renders caring impersonal, in a way that invites cruelty. Indeed, cases of care home abuse are well documented – see here, here or here – and the number is rising: the CQC received more than 67,500 in 2018, an increase of 82 per cent over the already too high 2014 figure of 37,060.

It is difficult to see how this could be otherwise. Caring for those who are physically or mentally incapacitated is emotionally testing even when we love those we care for. An exhausted worker on a zero-hours contract, paid the minimum wage to perform more home visits than she can manage in the allotted day, is unlikely to have a great store of patience to begin with, let alone when faced with a refractory “client”. The entire system militates against kindness.

Secondly, and relatedly, it turns out that the informal, traditionally female networks in which caring for the young and old once took place were actually quite important. Those networks also ran church groups, village fetes, children’s play mornings – all the voluntary institutions that form the foundation of civil society.

When caring is treated as “unpaid work” and we are encouraged to outsource it in favour of employment, no one of adult working age has time for voluntary civil society activities any more. If the number of people caring informally for relatives is waning, replaced by institutional care, so is voluntarism: between 2005 and 2015 alone there was a 15% drop in the number of hours donated (ONS).

The result is loneliness. Almost 2.5m people aged between 45 and 64 now live alone in the UK, almost a million more than two decades ago. Around 2.2 million people over 75 live alone, some 430,000 more than in 1996. In 2017, the Cox Commission on loneliness described it as “a giant evil of our time”, stating that a profound weakening of social connections across society has triggered an “epidemic” of loneliness that is having a direct impact on our health.

Several generations into our great experiment in reframing caring as a burden, we are beginning to count the cost of replacing mutual societal obligations with individual self-fulfilment: an epidemic of loneliness, abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes, substandard childcare. A society liberated from caring obligations is, with hindsight, a society liberated from much that was critically under-valued.

What is the alternative? Some would prefer a more communitarian approach to caring for the old and the young. Giles Fraser recently wrote on this site that caring for the elderly should be the responsibility of their offspring:

“Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. […] Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them. But instead, many have cast off their care to the state or to carers who may have themselves left their own families in another country to come and care for those that we won’t.”

These are strong words and there is much to agree with, but the barest glance at the statistics shows that in practice what that means is “women have a responsibility to look after their parents”.

If we are to count the costs of liberating society from mutual caring obligations, we must also count the benefits, as well as who enjoyed them. Society once encouraged men to seek worldly success, underpinned by the imposition of an often-suffocating domestic servitude on women.

Liberalism blew this out of the water by declaring that in fact both sexes were entitled to seek some form of worldly activity and fulfilment. It is not enough to point to negative side effects of this change and say: “Someone needs to be resuming these mutual caring obligations or society will disintegrate.”

To women well-accustomed to the widespread tacit assumption that it is they who will pick up those underpants, wash up that saucepan, pack that schoolbag and so on, this sounds a lot like a stalking-horse for reversal of societal changes that, on balance, most of us greatly appreciate. In truth no one, whether liberal or post-liberal, wants to confront the enormous elephant that liberal feminism left in society’s sitting room: the question of who cares. Who, now that we are all self-actualising, is going to wipe those bottoms? There are no easy answers.

This article first published in Unherd

Miserable babies in industrial childcare

THE Times reports that a chain of nurseries has invested in ‘frustration toys’ for children prone to biting. The Tops Day Nurseries operations director said: ‘The children learn that if they get the sudden desire to bite they can select a teething toy or similar to bite on to release the urge.’

With more than three-quarters of UK mothers of dependent children in work, non-maternal childcare is overwhelmingly the norm for young children in this country, and it makes its impact, at a mass scale, on their development.

Decades of research show that maternal attachment – meaning the strength and security of the bond between mother and young child – is of crucial importance in laying the foundations for psychological wellbeing in later life. We have known since 1997 that children spending more than ten hours a week in poor quality childcare are at increased risk of for unhappiness and insecurity.

That children left in ‘industrial’ childcare settings (however committed individual staff may be) are likely to be less secure than those cared for by a loving mother at home will not come as a shock to readers of The Conservative Woman. What is disturbing is the rising prevalence of nursery behaviour indicating infants’ frustration and unhappiness. It suggests an epidemic of infant misery across the country as barely-verbal preschoolers shuttle between screen time at home as their overworked parents scrabble to complete domestic chores around full-time jobs, and sometimes chaotic nursery settings which function less as caring environments for development than holding facilities for children whose parents cannot afford to look after them themselves.

Stones would weep for these poor babies. For their mothers as well: I know too many women who spent weeks in a state of bereavement, sobbing in the office loos on returning to work after maternity leave. Eventually, those mothers became accustomed to suppressing the visceral desire to be physically close to their baby (for a 12-month-old is still a baby). Presumably their babies adjust – at whatever cost – as well. But for the most part, these sobbing mothers are returning not to fulfilling careers but to mundane jobs. They have little choice: the alternative is not staying at home with their baby but having their home repossessed.

The conservative stance on these matters has for some time been to see the problem in terms of women’s needs (not babies’ needs) and their assumed desire and priority for fulfilment via the workplace.

Now too much screen time and the pressures on working parents, which means they are not spending time talking to their children, are blamed for the rise in children’s problems communicating.

Seeing the situation through this lens alone ignores the way public policy, from left and right, has been falling over itself for years to put the entire population – male, female, young and old – under this pressure by driving them out of the home and its purported ‘economic inactivity’ and into GDP-boosting employment instead.

To glance past this and place the blame solely on mothers, as individuals, for the misery of their babies in industrial childcare is at best wilful blindness and at worst a kind of sadism. Where are the voices in our political discourse who are unafraid to stand up for mothers and mothering and say that some things matter more than GDP? That top of the list is family life and especially the needs of young children?

This article was first published in The Conservative Woman

Motherhood put and end to my liberalism

I was raised to believe all the usual liberal things about men and women. How humans are all broadly the same apart from differently shaped genitals and some socialisation; how sexist stereotypes alone are what hold women back in the workplace; how success in the workplace and the world at large is what men and women, to equal degrees, do (and should) aspire to. How parenthood, not motherhood, should have equal impact on both parents; how having a child would be a temporary blip in a life otherwise oriented outwards, towards the world.

Then I had a baby. It is commonplace to observe that life after becoming a parent is different from life before, which is true, and one part of this was my cherished liberal beliefs running aground on the physical reality of being, not a parent, but specifically a mother.

For me, becoming a mother involved 12 surreal and painful hours of labour followed by a crash C-section and a week on a drip. Recovery took a month. On sharing this with other women who are mothers I discovered that most of us have a horror story of one sort or another about childbirth, but that a polite omerta exists around sharing these either with men or with non-mothers. On the whole this is probably for the best, or no woman would ever consider getting pregnant. But it is only the first layer in a cloak of obfuscation that lies over the nature of motherhood.

Gestating a baby is physically punishing, and one sports science study compared it to running a 40-week marathon in terms of energy expenditure. Getting the baby out is not easy, either. Although, mercifully, fewer women die having babies in Britain nowadays thanks to modern obstetrics, childbirth still carries a high risk of sometimes life-changing complications.

Women who have had one or more babies by vaginal delivery are at double or treble risk of developing pelvic floor disorders – that is to say, anal or vaginal prolapses or urinary or even faecal incontinence. And once the baby is there, breastfeeding demands some 500 or so additional calories a day, is painful to establish and comes with a risk of mastitis and other unpleasant experiences.

This life-changing experience collides at a fundamental level, as I discovered, with the liberal vision of all humans as equal, rational individuals, for whom embodied existence is a mere servant to the pursuit of individual desire. To the extent that it is a liberal movement, much of feminism has focused on freeing women from those aspects of our traditional roles that seemed an impediment to women’s freedom to fulfil ourselves.

Freedom from domestic drudgery; personal safety on the streets; recognition as equally deserving of the right to vote, own property, succeed in the workplace and so on. More recently, this being largely accomplished, third-wave feminism has focused more on liberating women from the necessity of even being female, declaring that “Trans women are women” and that about this “there is no debate”.

This is all (or mostly) good stuff; I have no desire to live in the nineteenth century. The problem with where we are now, though, is babies. When it comes to the most gruelling aspects of propagating the species, there is no means by which the work can be equally distributed between the sexes. Males cannot give birth, unless you count those male-identified females who are periodically reported in the papers as “pregnant fathers”. Neither can males breastfeed, and it is arguably breastfeeding where the roles of a mother and her co-parent in a couple really begin to diverge.

A breastfeeding mother needs to stay physically close to her baby, and runs on the baby’s timetable for months. That is to say, on a two, three or four-hour feed-play-nap loop regardless of whether it is day or night. The other partner, meanwhile, can support the mother in practical ways but is considerably more free to maintain a normal daily schedule or return to work, as most fathers typically do following the legally-allotted two weeks. (Indeed, fewer than a third of fathers take their legally permitted two weeks’ paternity leave, according to a report earlier this year.)

Reports lament the poor uptake of shared parental leave, but given that males cannot breastfeed, it should not come as any surprise. Or is the idea to ask mothers who have endured cracked nipples, blocked ducts and sleepless nights establishing breastfeeding to then move their baby onto a bottle after a few months so daddy can have a turn at home? Not going to happen.

This in turn shapes how housework is divided. There is no doubt that socialisation plays some role in a differential distribution of housework between men and women, but the rubber really hits the road when children arrive, and this is to no small degree because of a mother’s desire to be close to her baby. It will feel logical for a mother to take on the lion’s share of house and child management during maternity leave.

By the time she returns to work – and over three-quarters of mothers with dependent children in the UK now work – it is highly likely that a pattern will have emerged in which this is normalised, and the mother has become more oriented toward managing the household while her partner is more focused on work.

Then there is what I call the “Mum Bluetooth”. This is more difficult to describe but likely corresponds to what attachment psychology calls “maternal attunement”: the capacity mothers have (to a varying degree according to their own psychological background) to tune into and reflect their infant’s state of mind. Non-mothers of course have some capacity to attune to infants, but for most healthy mothers there is an intensity to the connection that is simply not evident in others, however fond they are of the baby.

I routinely found myself waking a few moments before my daughter did in the night, even after she moved to her own room. The sound of her hungry cry would cause my milk to let down and all rational thought to cease until she was fed: the only occasion in two decades of driving where I have ever damaged a car was trying to get it around a sharp corner with my hungry baby daughter screaming in the back.

I embarked on motherhood with a vision of myself as rational and autonomous. It was unsettling the least to find myself in this messy, leaky symbiosis with a wholly dependent infant whose cries caused me to lactate and lose the ability to think coherently. I am not saying we should shrug our shoulders at the different ways men and women are treated by society, on the grounds that it is a biological inevitability. I want rather to suggest that the simplistic picture of sex equality promoted by popular feminism has a motherhood-shaped blind spot and, as such, lets both sexes down.

Popular depictions of motherhood in our culture tend to go two ways. Motherhood is either an adjunct (or obstacle) to other more worldly achievements but of no notable value or difficulty in itself, or else it is a pastel-coloured ideal of domesticity cleansed of the blood, milk, excrement and hormone-driven altered states of mind.

Left-flavoured liberalism generally ignores the embodied nature of motherhood, and assures us that sexist stereotypes, and those social patterns that conform to sexist stereotypes, are an oppressive creation of the patriarchy designed to keep women from fulfilling our true potential. Right-flavoured liberalism tells us these same patterns are simply a matter of “choice”.

The truth, though, is that carrying and nursing children is neither exactly choice nor coercion: it is an animalistic experience that cuts profoundly across the fantasies implicit in liberalism of free, rational individuals for whom liberation means transcending our physiological natures.

This matters. We cannot think politically about the place of family life in society, or indeed about sex equality at all, unless we can look frankly at what motherhood is, rather than at the motherhood-shaped space gestured at by a liberal focus on identities and economics. Maternity leave in Britain is far better than in many places but it has been a long time since a political party of either Left or Right dared to suggest that many mothers might want to spend years rather than months at home with their children, and adjust the tax codes accordingly.

Motherhood is a crunch point where the liberal pursuit of individual freedom collides not just with communitarian obligations to others in society, but our very nature as biological creatures, yet for political reasons the ball has been dropped and kicked into a corner by Left and Right.

While our mainstream liberal culture pretends that all humans are essentially identical apart from our dangly bits, it will continue to recoil in disgust from the messy reality of motherhood as a deeply animal experience. And so mothers will continue to be as overworked, guilty and burned out as they currently are, and our birth rates will continue to plummet. Perhaps, finally, it is time to restart the long-overdue public conversation about what motherhood is, and move beyond the polite political omertà that covers the subject.

First published at Unherd

Masala spiced roast lamb, or: politicians are rubbish at culture

Looking for a keema matar recipe online yesterday for dinner, I stumbled across Afelia’s Kitchen. A British Bangladeshi Londoner and mum of 4, she cooks what I can only describe as Anglo-Bangla fusion family grub, and has – deservedly – 82,000 Instagram followers for her simply photographed, clearly explained and tempting-looking recipes.

I’d been expecting the website to deliver just South Asian recipes so, on delving around, was surprised to find pakoras and make-ahead Ramadan ideas mixed with pasta dishes, coleslaw and one for masala spiced roast lamb with roast potatoes and – intriguingly – a spicy gravy that combines naga pickle (which I’d never heard of but looks hot enough to strip paint) with sriracha sauce and (wait for it) Bisto. I’m sold.

I share Afelia’s Kitchen not just because you really should try the keema matar, but because food is often used as a proxy for the benefits multiculturalism brings and I can’t think of a more iconic fusion recipe than a classic Sunday roast with a South Asian spice rub and savagely chilli’d-up Bisto. It made me think about cultural integration, and how bad politicians are at approaching it.

Here’s what fusion looks like when attempted from the top down. European Union politicos across Europe and Africa submitted recipes for a collection celebrating the cultural diversity of Africa and Europe. It was billed in a press release as ‘the ultimate diplomatic tool to bring two continents to the table’, but I suspect its impact was probably confined to bringing the people who produced it to the table of a no doubt tasty but impact-free dinner, before disappearing largely without trace.

Politicians being rubbish at approaching cultural integration is a problem, because politicians also push immigration, diversity and the movement of people. There’s a piece missing. I humbly suggest that Afelia’s Kitchen gives us a clue as to what that piece is.

The missing piece is mothers. Coming at it from another angle, Mary Wakefield discusses here the below-the-line chat of mothers debating whether or not it is okay for Muslim mothers to stop their children socialising with non-Muslims. I can see why a devoutly Muslim mum would do it: you live surrounded by people who profoundly do not share your values, and you want your children to grow up with the right values. So you try and control their environment. All mothers do it, in different ways, all the time: whether it’s managing screen time or screening their social circles.

Going by the photo on her website, Afelia is a hijabi, but you can see by the food she cooks that her life, and the life of her children, is not held apart in this way, because neither is her food. I’m willing to bet her kids will grow up with a mix of friends from a range of cultures, plus a high tolerance for very hot chilli. Good for them. There is no going back now to the overwhelmingly white Britain of decades gone by, even if we wanted to; the only way forward is integration. But politicians don’t seem to know how to approach this.

The EU’s celebration of culinary diversity will, I humbly suggest, achieve precisely nothing to forge bonds between people of different backgrounds because it was not created by mothers, nor even with mothers in mind. Frankly if politicos did try and create a fusion recipe book for mothers with the aim of forging links across different cultures, it would almost certainly be so cringe-inducing as to sink without trace as well.

But if the kaleidoscope of cultures that now makes up modern Britain is ever to settle more comfortably than at present into a new iteration of a more widely-shared national culture, my hunch is that it will take several generations, and it will be driven by mothers. Looking up recipes from a style of cooking they aren’t familiar with, so as to make something for a kid who’s coming to play. Allowing space for those playdates to even happen. Seeing that process move forward glacially as their own children grow up and do the same. If you want to help the process along, give mothers the space to do what they do. The problem for politicians is that this aspect of culture isn’t easily amenable to top-down interventions. If it were to be approached at all, it might be done obliquely, for example by supporting the existence of more and better spaces where mothers from different cultures might find themselves rubbing shoulders while getting on with their lives. That’s how it starts.

Politicians are rubbish at culture, and cultural integration, because they have nothing really to offer mothers. Because politicians rarely if ever think about family life except as something to meddle in. But if it’s not a stretch to quote Steve Bannon in a discussion of cultural integration, politics is downstream of culture, and all culture starts, ultimately, with mothers. If we are to leave this uncomfortable and fragmented cultural moment for the sunlit uplands of some more harmonious national culture, our politicos will have to put a bit more thought into how public policy can support giving mothers with different backgrounds the space to come together, and to let their children do the same.