Overall I thought this was a good speech and it was a good way to approach the subject suggesting that whatever happens we ought to at least have a plan for population. I expect to see Labour appropriate the ideas, slightly modified of course, in the coming days/weeks.

However, there was one part of the speech I was uncomfortable with. I wonder if others feel the same way?

It was the bit about the "atomisation" of society.

I guess it was supposed to sit on the back of the "family values" thing David has going (and which many of us also are unclear about because we don't really understand what he means by a 'family' - and others of us feel uncomfortable about because we don't like the government dictating to us how we should live).

In the speech David made the following remarks:



Now, while I can see that in order to reduce the housing shortage encouraging EXISTING families to stay together makes sense (though it may not always be the best thing for individual families depending on the circumstances), there seems to be a sense here of suggesting that EVERYONE should live in a nuclear family - and this is what makes me feel uncomfortable. Am I imagining this?

I (and I suspect quite a few others here) don't think that government should dictate to people how they should live. David says atomisation needs to be addressed - and this is true. However, I think it should be addressed by arranging resources to be sufficient for our needs - not by trying to force people into some 1950s model of what a family should be (if done this would be doomed to fail anyway as people have rightly or wrongly moved on since then).

A more rational approach would be to cut immigration to ensure that resources are sufficient to support both that immigration allowed and the atomisation effect.

I think that David is arguing that single households are inefficient. That is true. But even if you take the inefficiencies into account I bet that a single household still takes up far less energy then a family even with it's lack of economies of scale.

Also I don't think individuals are an issue with regard to the housing shortage simply because few individuals can afford to own their own property anyway. Those who can - well you can't get rid of single people altogether so I don't think it's realistic to suggest we can somehow...

Anyone have any comments of their own to add? Have I misunderstood what David means?

I think DC makes a mistake in inventing this phrase "atomisation of society" with the implication that it has something to do with "family breakdown". It is more about the desire for independence and more choice in how to lead one's life. The consequent pressure on housing should not have taken anyone by surprise. What is surprising is the politicians' failure to plan for it, and their failure to prevent further pressure on housing and infrastructure from unrestrained immigration.

One really does despair and wonder where they were when braincells were dished out.

DC, I understand, still wants positive net immigration, which I for one don't agree with. We already have too many here and we should aim for zero or negative net immigration for a period and, of course, focus on skill needs and train our own people - we owe it to them.

Nick Clegg gets off to a bad start and blots his copybook with daft remarks like: "Does David Cameron have a magic number in mind or does he seriously think that immigration can be turned on and off like a tap?" Grow up Clegg! Of course it can.

Ive just found a 2005 BBC report that suggests 1 in 4 adult children stay with their parents. Source 2005 The main reason cited is the 'kippers' can't or won't afford rent or mortgage payments.



Elsewhere, it has also been suggested they life is cushy at home, so why move?! Source 2007 However, they also comment:

I think David Cameron is right to use the 'Atomisation' analogy. Society is breaking down and has been breaking down for the last decade at an alarming rate. We have to ask why this is happening? Compare our nation to what it was fifty years ago? Now try to imagine what our country will be like fifty years from now? There is decline.

Nontheless David Cameron reminds us that we don't have to just let things slide, there is an alternative. People can mock the concept of family but there is no doubt that a correlation exists between the breakdown in family life and social breakdown. At one time we had the extended family, that became the nuclear family, now we have reached the stage where single parent families are becoming ever more dominant, all the time the family is shrinking, breaking apart, that is the problem.

Are we saying that families are OK and un-atomised if the 'kippers' are still living at home into their thirties?

40 to 50 years ago they were leaving school at 16 or 18 and going straight to work and earning enough to get married and buy/rent their own home. Now that it's the fashion to be a perpetual student, delay becoming economically productive and sponge of parents' good nature indefinitely, the stresses are beginning to show. Not surprising really.

Tony, what do you put the breakdown of the family down to? Also if the family is such a great thing why do we have such high levels of divorce? Not trying to be anti-family - just wanting to know your thinking on the reasons behind the breakdown as you see it and why you think it may be reversible by using tax incentives?

As regard atomisation - I kind of agree with both you and Yorker (if you see what I mean). It's right to think about it and plan for it - but I'm not sure it's right to present it along the lines of if you choose to be single you are to be penalized. I'm not talking about single parent families because the word atomisation and the way David used it tends to imply anybody who choses to be a loner - not just single parent families.

Tizzy, I agree with those stats. I left home far later then I wanted to (when I was 29) for financial reasons too. That was some time ago - now it must be nearly impossible for single people to go it alone unless they rent somewhere maybe. If you rent you are destined to be stuck in a money trap as in the UK rent is expensive and will keep you poor and without assets. So I think such single people must be a tiny percentage of home owners and not a big problem - which brings us back to who is David really talking about when says 'atomisation'.

ADDED:

I just re-read David's quotes again it seems like he's talking about broken families. But it does kind of imply everyone must be in a family - which is tough on those who don't want to have a family and enjoy their own company. So are we being told you either have to have a family or you have to remain living with your parents? Seems a bit dictatorial of lifestyle to me.

Well, as women became more liberated and career minded it was obvious that they would want to remain single for at least a while or, if they married, it was a miracle if both partners developed harmoniously in parallel and after 20 years still shared to same aims and outlook on life. Once the kids leave school why not strike out independently? That's not remotely a family breakdown.

I would say that would be a fair assumption. Is 'atomisation' just a play on words viz 'nuclear' family?

Atomise



I agree with DC - society is breaking down from self supporting groups into individuals.

Constraints imposed by the group no longer apply.
Support in time of need, is no longer from the group, but is expected to be delivered by government.
Offspring with no control or group role models, rapidly become feral.

Add to this the reluctance of the police to involve themselves in social disturbance - we can see how we have ended up here.

If you want to know where here is - walk down a dark street late at night in Manchester - Birmingham - Bristol or any UK City.

Labour's Liam Byrne said of David Cameron (and Nick Clegg has similar thoughts)



This is ridiculous. Clearly Labour and the LibDems don't think it's necessary to think things through properly over time or have a debate, or have discussions with businesses before announcing specific numbers. David Cameron should ignore these feeble attacks from his opponents.

I don't follow... why shouldn't DC's opponents ask him to quantify?

Glynne:



I don't think anyone disputes this. Neither do they say that it shouldn't be taken into consideration when planning population growth and resource allocation. The questions are more:

a) Is it prohibited or frowned on to function as a loner according to DC - i.e. can you leave home and choose NOT to have a family but to live on your own as a bachelor (female or male).

b) Is the nuclear family (which is suggested as the remedy through implication) really going to work when people choose to no longer live that way? Can you really force people to live that way if they don't want to and should that be something government gets involved in?

Votedave:

I think what the other parties - or at least Labour - are really saying is "Could you please give us some numbers so we can take your policy, change it a tiny bit and call it our own without having to do our own research".

Yorker:



...because he may not have sensible figures yet. As I interpret the speech it was mainly just saying it would be good to have a plan. If that's the sentiment it's getting across then it's far too early to be getting into specific numbers. I think the other parties are trying to pin him down on it because there's not a lot else to disagree about in the speech (apart from 'atomisation' which no major party would want to get involved in for fear of being called anti-family).

None of this is going to make the slightest sense until a political leader finally summons up the bottle to tell the EU that its crazy free transfer from one country to another is CANCELLED, at least as far as the UK is concerned.

Yorker, I repeat;



You don't just click your fingers and come up with a number. A bit of research and investigation is needed first, as always. It's fundamentals first, specifics later. DC's critics all too often seem not to appreciate this basic fact.

Ah, but I thought that's what Cameron's policy groups has been doing these past months/years - research. You don't need to debate the problem to quantify it. And I'd have thought the Conservatives had permanent ongoing links to business.

But it could be nearly three years before the next general election, yorker. I would have thought the business of quantifying these matters would have been more appropriate when we get an election announcement.
Only goodness knows what the situation will be like by then, a lot worse than now I'm sure.

Well, far be it from me to tell the Tory Party how to do research, but on key issues such as this it's necessary to have an ongoing programme so that you can demolish the government at every turn. BrownJob must be forced to act now, not in 3 years' time. The country can't wait and neither can I!

The PM can always be interrogated at PMQs or be urged to listen to what the Opposition are proposing.
Whether he'll listen whilst sitting on a 60-odd majority in the House of Commons is another matter I'm afraid.

To successfully interrogate the PM you need to know the answers yourself!!!

Frank Field seems to know more than all the ministers put together - why doesn't the Tory Party?

Yorker, have you got a figure in mind? 200,000? 1 million? 750,000?

Perhaps Liam Byrne can tell us if he has an idea to back up his absurd and short-sighted accusation.

Lukus, a big factor in family breakdown in my opinion rests on the changing roles of men and women. At one time women 'Had to have a fella' to support them but now they can get the state to do it. Men know that too and have no conscience about leaving the woman and kids knowing they will be looked after by the state. Thats why I think its such a shame that the CSA didn't work properly because it was a good idea to make absent fathers pay up.

Yorker, I can't agree with you on Frank Field. I really don't like the man. He said the poor should be put in workhouses. He tries to cultivate an image for himself as a hardman when it comes to welfare and comes out with some very nasty statements.

Tony, you are probably right about the changing roles of men and women leading to 'atomisation' as David puts it. However, I don't really see that there is a way to reverse that. I think David is implying in his speech there is some way to reverse it and is offering this as a method to 'fix' society.

As I see it you can try and offer incentives all you like to support traditional family units - but isn't it somewhat meaningless if people no longer want to live that way? You can't force people to live like that if they don't want to as that will just lead to resentment, stress and probably even greater breakdown.

Do you disagree?

This all seems somewhat irrelevant to me as to the issue of immigration - which is why I rather wish he hadn't included it as an aside in an otherwise sound speech. At least the idea that we can reverse 'atomisation' to benefit housing shortages. I'm not sure that's achievable. We should take 'atomisation' into account when calculating needed resources - but there is no point in being sidetracked into social engineering projects (we know those tend not to work from Labours many attempts to make people live how they think we should).

Any advance on 1.6 million?

So all the British taxpayers' money ploughed into job creation over the last decade has resulted in more than half those jobs going to foreigners. Brilliant. Basic housekeeping rules say that you first mop up the British unemployed before you start giving away jobs to outsiders.

Note that DC suggests a cap on only non-EU immigration, which is a side issue. What's really causing grief is immigration from the EU. Here's a heaven-sent lever to force a re-negotiation of our relationship with the EU - which would have tremendous popular (and commonsensical) support - and he apparently hasn't the bottle to work it!

Setting aside the issue of immigration, my argument on the social issues lukas raises was two-fold.

First, we should indeed prepare properly for a sustainable rate of growth of population, as lukas suggests.

That means, on housing, coming up with proposals on planning to encourage affordable and sustainable house-building – as well as our plans on Stamp Duty for first-time buyers.

We are now setting out further details of our reform plans for the NHS and schools, to reduce top-down centralisation and enable public services to respond more flexibly to changing circumstances.

And on transport, we are developing ambitious proposals for increasing and modernising our rail capacity, extending light rail services in our cities, and tackling road congestion.

But we do also need to recognise the effects that some of our lifestyle choices may have on our resources, our public services, our infrastructure, and their ability to cope.

The independent National Housing and Planning Advice Unit said recently that a total of 270,000 more homes may be needed each year. And a recent estimate suggested that divorce and separation accounts for twenty-four per cent of the growth in the total number of households. So this is a big part of the increased demand for housing and other services.

The result of these changes is that it is harder for young people to get on the housing ladder. It is harder to build strong families, communities and public services. And it is harder to protect our quality of life and our environment.

None of this is about government forcing anyone to live one way or another. But that doesn’t mean we should go to the other extreme and become completely indifferent to the kind of society we have.

Instead, I set out in the speech the kind of approach I am talking about. For example, we currently have a benefits system that actively discourages parents from living together. I want to abolish this 'couple penalty.'

I also think that building a family-friendly society is the first step in fighting crime, in fighting poverty, and in improving our quality of life. So this approach will help us both to tackle the problems associated with family breakdown, and also to deal more effectively with some of the pressures on public services that arise from more and more people living on their own.

We are still waiting for David's definition of 'family'...

Thanks for the response David.

But

There is a strong body of opinion (with which I agree) which thinks; The UK is not only full - but significantly overfull.

Thank you for taking time to respond David. I am somewhat encouraged by your response which seems to step back from saying that a new Tory government might force people into traditional nuclear family units.

However, there is still great uncertainty by exactly what you mean by 'family' as keeps coming up here. Nowadays families can be Traditional, Gay, Cohabiting or even Lesbian (the law changed just recently to include Lesbians). Do you encompass all these groupings when you say 'family' or do you mean a traditional nuclear family? I fear that you are deliberately avoiding this question in order to try and play to both sides of this argument. Or perhaps you feel there is no need to define 'family' because of Labours meaning of the term? But I think people do want to know exactly what you mean due in large part to the Tories long history of backing 'traditional family values' in the context of 1950s values... It's not hard for us to imagine the party would rather exclude those who are not in traditional nuclear family units from these benefits and so due to that history this really does need clearing up.

Otherwise broadly speaking what you are saying makes sense as long as the plan is to remove penalties for couples but not by adding new penalties for those who remain single or live in some non-government approved way.

I do agree with you that we must prepare for a sustainable rate of population - but what is sustainable is something I believe that needs to be discussed. Not least because we need to think about what to do if the answer is that it is not possible with the current numbers of population increase.

Somewhere I read that some group had figured out that the best sustainable population for England which gave the best quality of life to all was 30 million. Clearly there is no way we can achieve that. Not least because of our obligations to the European union. So perhaps what we are really discussing is how to stop the country falling apart and descending into chaos.

Regardless of the immigration issue I must admit I am not looking forward to living my old age in a 70 million or more strong England. I wonder how many others feel the same way and is that a discussion that needs to take place too? Is our only real option to retire abroad to anywhere that still has open spaces? (if we can afford it).

"...our plans on Stamp Duty for first-time buyers"

Blatantly discriminatory and I hope it is blasted in the courts.

What David forgets to mention is that he doesn't plan on redressing the balance with a neutral policy - he might abolish this 'couple penalty' and then introduce a 'single penalty'. Where is the logic in that?

David Cameron - We are EQUAL - not everybody fits into YOUR idea of a 'family'.

How does DC define 'family' ?

I agree Canvas.

David's definition of family is becoming more and more important for me personally to know. I wish he would answer that question instead of dodging it to play things to both sides (i.e. we are really liberal and modern / we are very traditional moralist).

The way (as opposed to the substance of) the recent announcements on toughening up rape laws were handled seems to also imply a moralist streak which I must admit I find unattractive.

Perhaps the way we handle rape as an offence does need looking at and IMO MOST prison sentences (not just for rape) are inadequate.

But the fact that DC stated that rape laws need reform because there were insufficient convictions RATHER THAN because the law simply needed to be revised makes me think that somewhere at the back of all this along with the 'family' stuff is a desire to go back to 1950s moralism - which is outdated and won't work today because social conditions and norms are no longer the same as they were then. Apart from which regardless of how you view the era MOST people do not want to live that way anymore and would simply reject any attempt to force them to. I think people value our modern sexual freedoms of expression and won't put up with going back to a simplistic moralist agenda.

So if that is in fact the hidden agenda behind all this posturing then much as I like many Tory policies I have to ask myself are they really a modern party with modern views or just an ancient artifact trying to cherry pick modern views they like while balancing propaganda to keep the old guard happy. Is this a party I want to be supporting?

I would hate to be responsible for voting in our own UK version of Bush / Reagan style moralism. Perhaps, while he's at it, David should tell us how he feels about Evolution vs Intelligent Design and what his views are on media presentation of sexuality generally (does he want to start our own Hayes commission for example to censor all television/film and perhaps music since he keeps blaming the music industry for most things?).

With regard to family and morals what I want to see a modern broadly speaking liberal political agenda AS IS THE NORM in Europe. And before anyone says that the breakdown of moralism is at the root of our problems please keep in mind that European countries are for the most part not strictly moralistic (some are but most are not) yet have few of our social problems...

I rather wish that DC would say something to emphasize that the Tory party is modern and forward looking with regard to all this. Instead we seem to get flirtations with policies which seem to hark back to a nostalgia for the past. It may be nice to live in such a dreamland but we need to deal with modern reality and I do not think this is the way to do it.

Lukas - please will you post your last comment above on the thread in the FAMILY forum ? it's called 'How does DC define 'family?'. I am still hoping David Cameron will answer that question.

I get very concerned about TORY family values and back to basics. I simply don't want to hear about it. I worry that DC does have a hidden moralistic agenda? I would be so very disappointed in DC if that is the case....


click here to read the thread about the definition of 'family'