It has been a strange week for Dr Katherine Rake, the new head of the Family and Parenting Institute. Last Monday she gave her first major speech as its chief executive and instantly found herself cast, along with Ed Balls, as an enemy of marriage, a strident assassin of the nuclear family.
The Daily Mail called her a “crop-haired” feminist who derides the traditional family, her lack of flowing locks a symbol of her wicked agenda. It urged her to go and live on a sink estate, observing the “feral” children of single mothers.
This, because she said that within ten or 20 years there would be no such thing as a “typical” family and that policymakers must not “fall into the trap of investing large sums of money trying to reverse the tide of trends by encouraging more ‘traditional families’”. Throw into the mix Ed Balls saying that matrimony was not necessarily the key to a happy family, David Cameron returning fire by saying that Labour is “pathologically opposed” to marriage and that he would give tax breaks to married couples, and, lo, wedlock emerges as the bouncy political football du jour.
In some ways this is timely. Marriage is at an axis: by 2005 the marriage rate in the UK was at its lowest since records began in 1862. Currently, 52 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women are married, but in the next couple of decades the scales will almost certainly tip and it will acquire minority status. To many, the fact that by 2031 the number of “married” and “never married” women is predicted to be equal is not momentous. It is a sideshow to more pressing issues such as poverty, education, terrorism and national debt. Should we be panicking about the future of marriage? Is it the crucial glue of society or no big deal? Some believe that we have an overattachment to the institution as a cure-all and that what is important is finding a way to live together, however that might be.
At her offices in North London, Dr Rake, 41, is unequivocal in stating that marriage is an “enormously important social institution” and that “committed, stable relationships are important and marriage is one form of that”. But she believes that we risk overstating matrimony’s importance. Marriage is not, she says, a panacea. “We all know that people have committed, stable relationships outside marriage and we all know of marriages that aren’t stable or committed. We know that if parents are in conflict, it’s bad for kids, whether they are married or not . . . Marriage in and of itself doesn’t give you a quick solution.” This seems obvious and yet the assertion that marriage is the ideal is clearly one of the platforms on which the three political parties will joust over the next few months.
Are you “anti-marriage”, I ask Dr Rake? “Certainly not,” she says. Does she think the institution will die a natural death? She is doubtful. “It is an incredibly important part of people’s identity and their desire to express commitment. But some try to paint you into a camp; people living in different ways does not take away from the value of marriage.”
Perhaps we mythologise the neat, nuclear family? “There is a nostalgia without a doubt that I don’t think is based in reality about what families used to be,” she says, “and I suppose there’s an assumption that, if only you could put that back, everything else would be solved. I think that we tend to look back at families [from past generations] with rose-tinted spectacles and we forget the thousands who were miserably married and couldn’t get out and actually it had a hugely damaging effect on their children. We should have a reality check on what family life used to be.”
This kind of talk still angers those who believe the nuclear family to be the bedrock of society. In its leader column the Mail said it was a “perverse curiosity” that Dr Rake and Ed Balls denounce marriage while being “happily wed”. In fact, Dr Rake is separated from her husband, a commercial manager for The Guardian newspaper, with whom she has a son, aged 4. She has not tried to hide this fact “If anyone [from the press] had asked me, I would have told them, but they didn’t.” She is sanguine about last week’s coverage and accepts that she got caught in a political argument. “People feel passionately about families, which is great.”
Statistics show, though, that married couples stay together longer and that the children of lone parents are more likely to underachieve and become involved with crime. Here Dr Rake, formerly with the pressure group The Fawcett Society, argues that the equation is complex because “The Selection Effect” comes into play — ie, better off people and those who are natural “committers” are more likely to marry. Also, mothers who become separated or divorced in Britain suffer worse poverty than in most other European countries. This is due to factors such as the pay gap between the sexes, persuading fathers to pay for families and women struggling to hold jobs because of inflexible working conditions. “What’s not clear is whether they are specifically British consequences of divorce and separation,” she says.
Cards on the table, though, is it better to try to keep couples together where children are involved? “There are points in relationships where it might not be better,” says Dr Rake. “Certainly I’m not going to sit in judgment. But if people want to stay together we should offer them support. If they decide that they are going to split up, we should support them then, too, so that they can continue to parent together. Nobody goes into a marriage thinking that they’ll divorce. On their wedding day they aren’t thinking ‘well, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll quit’.”
In profiles of Dr Rake (she was raised in Canterbury), it is often mentioned that she suffered family disruption because her own parents divorced when she was 18, inferring that this might affect her opinions. She rejects this. “I am working in a professional capacity, I’m not talking about my personal experience,” she says. “I am a trained social scientist and I look at trends. We simply held a mirror up to social change; people got upset by the reflection, but it doesn’t mean the mirror’s wrong.” But the destigmatisation of divorce has been a good thing. “There are generations, including mine, that have lived through their parents’ divorces when there was huge shame attached,” she says. “We won’t see that happening again because we’ve all become a bit more savvy.”
She believes that many politicians misread the nation’s mood when they overfocus on marriage, that much of the electorate “wonder what they are going on about”. Indeed the British Social Attitudes survey in 2007 found that a large majority see no difference between being married and cohabiting, even when raising children, two thirds believe that divorce can be a positive step and three quarters that a mother and stepfather can bring up a child just as well as two biological parents.
This doesn’t seem to suggest an electorate that would swing its voting preference on the back of nuclear family soundbites. Dr Rake insists that the “Broken Britain” rhetoric doesn’t resonate with many people and that they are actually very optimistic about their own families. They don’t feel that they need “fixing”. If you ask adults if they believe that family life is in crisis, 54 per cent say yes. If you ask them about their own families only 5 per cent do.
What gets lost in the debate, she says, are the many positives in the modern family: that fathers now spend much more time doing things with their children than in the 1970s, that people know their grandparents better, that many children have positive relationships with step-parents.
Is the extended family inferior to the nuclear one? Yesterday David Willetts, the Shadow Cabinet Minister, said that the nuclear family was not an “historical blip” but a structure that has shaped what is distinctive about Britain. However, our average household size of 2.4 is one of the smallest in the world and “a key difference between more equal and less equal societies is that more equal societies generally have bigger households,” he wrote in The Sunday Times.
Dr Rake rejects the suggestion that you can’t be a feminist and pro-family. “People might not like the label but they are living the reality. You can see that women are choosing to be in work and men increasingly are choosing to look after kids. We are in a process of change and that always feels slightly unsettling, but it’s the reality.”
David Cameron, however, has made it clear that a Tory government would change the tax system to reward those who tie the knot. Many believe this is overdue, others that the State cannot fiscally manipulate something as intimate as marriage. Dr Rake says that, judging from European evidence, tax seem to have little effect on divorce and separation, and such a move would be expensive — up to £5 billion. “Why invest that much in something if you have no idea whether it’s going to work? We know what works for families. Why not spend it on that?” She means providing support such as relationship counselling early on and when families reach pressure points, such as the birth of the first child or when an elderly relative needs care.
Mostly, though, she worries that this policy would be unfair. “One of my fears about the proposals is that if they are attached to marriage per se, not children, you end up with a situation in which you punish children for their parents’ behaviour.” If a married man with three children had an affair, left his wife and married his mistress, the mother of the children left behind would lose the tax break and the husband and his new wife would keep it. Mmm, you can see why that might be a flaw. And the notion that a simple tax change can alter a sociological change which has been evolving for years, though well-meant, might seem simplistic.
“The State can never know the complexities and difficult circumstances under which [people] make these decisions,” she says. “What families say to us is ‘We don’t want to be judged. We know what’s best for our family in these circumstances, it’s our business and we want to be supported in the needs we have’.” Families, she says, have always been messy beasts. “There has never been an age in which family life wasn’t complex and messy and full of good and bad, because that’s just what family life is.”
And marriage? “I think we have to leave people to make their own judgments,” she says. “There are some people who simply don’t want to get married. It’s not something that they feel they want to do. And that’s fair enough, isn’t it?”
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