The Wardman Wire

Today is my first wedding of the year - I don’t quite get as nervous as the bride, groom or potential in-laws, but the stakes are high - if the vicar botches it everything is caught on video, for ever. Like many couples we marry, they’ve already set up home together, and have a child. When it comes to the prayers, the child will come and kneel with mum and dad and we’ll pray for them all together as a family.

Families are starting to bug me. Not families per se, but the language politicians use about them. Though I’m a husband and a dad, the phrase ‘hard-working families’ is deeply irritating, because it excludes so many people. It also bugs me for another reason - the idea that ‘families’ need an adjective like ‘hard-working’ putting in front of them.

Hooray for Families? Or is it Boo?

Most words have an inbuilt boo-hooray factor - without being told, we tend to feel positive (nurse, Churchill, cream tea) or negative (hoodie, Mugabe, cod liver oil). It’s then the exceptional cases which get an adjective - e.g. ‘hero hoodie’. My problem with ‘hard-working families’ is the inference that there are 2 classes of family, and only one of them is a social good. It’s as if we need to be reminded that some families are hard-working, because some are lazy, and some probably just work a bit then put their feet up, and somehow this is bad.

Underneath this is a deeper unease. Firstly that New Labour doesn’t actually value the family unit as a unit, but only in so far as it makes economic sense. A Civitas report last month noted Labours failure to build any sort of policy around marriage and family life, and argued that, despite marrieds becoming a minority in the general population for the first time, for many people issues over marriage and family structure were as much about poverty as they were about choice, with many more disrupted families among poorer households. The New Labour policy of not stigmatising lone parents has rebounded in not stigmatising the other lone parent - the absent father - with devastating results for childrens well-being and development.

Added Value - But What Do We Value?

Secondly, the ‘hard working families’ rhetoric is always used in economic debates. Outside this, families seem to barely exist, except when they’re trying to get their children into a local school. But what both of these are about is money: the better the child does at school, the more they’ll earn and the more tax they’ll pay, and Labour has been very keen to gear schools to the modern economy. At one level, that’s great, but at another you do have to wonder whether it’s being driven by childrens well-being (at an all-time low), or by £££££ signs. Likewise the hard working family (lets call it the HWF) is first and foremost an economic unit. It’s not about love, companionship, raising children, building community, or any of that stuff, it’s about the money.

We had a government leaflet through our door a few months ago, which basically said ‘why stay at home looking after your kids when you could be out working - look at all the different people who are queueing up to take the little darlings off your hands!’ The overall message of the thing was ‘work = good, parenting your own children = bad’.

HWF Wedding Vows

The message of all of this is that couples, families, parents, all have to justify their existence by doing paid work. Imagine introducing that to the wedding vows:

I take you,

for richer for poorer

for better for worse

in sickness and in health

till death us do part

to be a hard working productive member of society.

Gordon, I don’t much mind that you’ve not given us a vision. I’m just holding out for an acknowledgement, for someone to recognise that families are a good thing, full stop. We don’t need you to annoy single people by inferring that only us families are hard working. Some of us aren’t hard working, but that’s not a problem is it? Is it?

Wrapping Up

At todays wedding I’ll talk about various things: the need to listen, communicate, discovering each others love languages, and to accept one another instead of trying to change your partner. But I’ll also talk about vocation: that marriage is a sacred calling - God bringing 2 people together to love each other in a special way, but also, as the service says, because marriage ‘enriches society and strengthens community’. The forming of loving families is good for us and for those around us. It takes the hard work of listening, patience, love and grace to become a loving and happy family, and that’s the kind of hard-working family we should celebrate.