Shouldn’t family be part of the ‘British Dream’?

In Manchester this week, I listened to a retired high court judge describe a “river of human misery” flowing through his courtroom over the course of his career.

Sir Paul Coleridge was not talking about austerity or low wages or drugs. He was referring to Britain’s high rate of family breakdown.

The discussion, held by the Centre for Social Justice and the Marriage Foundation (founded by Sir Paul), was the only one at the Tories’ conference to debate the family.

And yet British families are in rather a bad way. Britain has the second highest rate of family breakdown in the developed world, behind only the US.

OECD data shows that in 2014, just 70 per cent of British children were living with two parents (whether married or cohabiting), compared to the OECD average of 82 per cent.

And it’s hard to explain this using religion or the relatively advanced state of Britain’s economy. In Germany, the rate was 81 per cent, in France 77 per cent and in Australia 83 per cent.

Extrapolating from current trends, the Marriage Foundation estimates that nearly half of all children born today in the UK will have seen their family fall apart by the time they are 16. Given that the health of the family unit is probably the most significant determinant of happiness, it’s rather extraordinary that this receives so little attention.

It would, surely, be fertile ground for Theresa May and her “British dream”. But, like many of us, she has fallen into the modern habit of talking about mental health, educational achievement and generational fairness while ignoring the factor so strongly linked to all three.

It’s clear why. Mention families, and you are immediately pilloried for hating gay people or single mothers, despite the advent of gay marriage and the fact that it’s the men, not the women, who are being implicitly criticised for abandoning their parental responsibilities.

Still, Mrs May seems to think that “the family” is rather too “nasty party”.

Like many people, I’m uneasy at the state poking its nose into our private lives. But it also seems crazy that our tax and benefits system still create a financial bias against two-parent families.

And I am tired of seeing the middle-class orthodoxy about marriage being “just a bit of paper” fade into angst and unhappiness as young people hit their 30s alone. Mrs May is clearly low on ideas, yet Britain has no shortage of problems the Conservatives could be most trusted to tackle. It’s just a matter of finding the right words – and the guts – to talk about them.

Before Mrs May’s cursed address to the Tories this week, a string of MPS were sent up to the podium to introduce the Prime Minister.

None made a greater impression than Kemi Badenoch, the newly elected MP for Saffron Walden – and how different the philosophy she outlined was from what came next.

Ms Badenoch, 37, a former IT professional and mother who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, talked about the values her parents had given her as a child. Her father had always told her, she said, that “90 per cent of what happens to you is down to you, so when things go wrong, ask yourself what you can do better”.

Little could she know how many things were about to go wrong for the Prime Minister.

It wasn’t just the contrast in luck that struck me, though. It was the articulation of personal responsibility that we are almost afraid to voice nowadays.

Mrs May’s speech talked about injustice and victimhood, and certainly both exist in Britain. But it hardly mentioned the notion of free choice.

If all the Conservatives have to offer is a pale version of Labour’s philosophy, voters will be justified in asking why they should vote Tory.

Each time Mrs May lifted her hand to cover her mouth as she hacked her way through her conference address, a rather striking bracelet came into view. It consisted of a series of pictures of Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist.

Much was made of the fact that Ms Kahlo had had an affair with Leon Trotsky and was married to a Marxist. What better evidence of Mrs May’s wet Tory credentials, her critics screamed.

Alas, it seems we are still not past the habit of judging a woman by her lovers’ or husband’s activities.

Yes, Ms Kahlo was Left-wing. But her art had little to do with communist politics.

She suffered throughout her life from a debilitating spine condition that required repeated operations, she spent years in a wheelchair, and died at 47.

Her art focuses on survival and shows the strength of a creative personality shining out through years of pain and illness.

As it turns out, that was rather an appropriate theme for Mrs May’s address.

‘Mention families, and you are immediately pilloried for hating gay people or single mothers’