Blair and Blunkett

norman dennis, 11 December 2004

The Prime Minister continues to support the Home Secretary, on the basis that it is Mr Blunkett’s private affair that he has been the lover in an adulterous relationship that (he claims) has resulted in children being conceived and born.
There are plenty of people who think that sex, procreation and child rearing should be treated in some sense as the private concerns of the consenting adults.
Some of these believe that “privacy” means privacy from State interference. They believe that the media and the opinion of neighbours and friends have a role in condemining, praising or condoning such conduct, but that the State has no business favouring any sexual or child-rearing arrangement over any other.

Others take a still stronger line. They believe that neither the State nor any non-State agency or person (Churches, neighbours, relatives, think-tanks) is entitled to have or express any view about the personal and social consequences of any consenting sexual behaviour between adults, either on empirical or moral grounds. It is not their business.
Mr Blair cannot believe any of those things.
Tony Blair is an adherent of the Church of England. He sometimes attends services of the Roman Catholic Church. According to the theology of both churches, life-long heterosexual monogamy is with one exception the set of arrangements ordained by God for dealing with the human problems of physical lust, loneliness and child neglect. The exception is life-long chastity–abstention from any physical expression of heterosexual or homosexual desire.
One might have expected the bishops to give the public the benefit of their knowledge and wisdom in this case. The Bishop of Rochester has done so. Has anyone else?
Mr Blair, however, can properly plead that it is for each religion to retain its adherents and to make converts. He can plead, that is, that it is not the business the State to justify policy on any religous grounds.
But that is vastly different from any “private” versus “public” argument.
Mr Blair calls himself from time to time an “ethical socialist”. Ethical socialism is the term given to the powerful–the dominant– tendency in the Labour Party up to, roughly, the death of R. H. Tawney in 1962. It was explictly the socialism of the respectable English working class of the last half of the nineteenth and the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. To the ethical socialists, the ideals and to a large extent the achievements of the respectable English working class family made it, they said, “the socialist commonwealth in action”. Ethical socialism strongly supported the family of life-long monogamy, and believed that, in the interest of children, local communtities, and society as a whole, the State had a powerful and benign role to play in supporting it.
Mr Blunkett goes far beyond justifying that it is anyone’s right to have a sterile sexual relationship with another man’s wife, and of no public importance whatsoever. He is seeking to make it a general rule of society that where such a relationship results in the birth of a child, then the lover must be accorded by public law rights of control over the child, with the court-granted rights enforced by the public authorities, even where the wife, her husband and the lover’s child remain together as a married family, and vehemently reject the lover’s claim that he must take up his “responsibilities”.
Mr Blair’s government spends enormous amounts of public money on lone-parent and broken-family households: housing them, providing them with monetary benefits, caring for some of their children in local authority homes, and out of all proportion to their numbers coping with their children in the prisons. Nearly every department of government is implicated in a large way in coping with the consequences of sexual promiscuity, lone parenthood and step-parenthood outside of marriage. The impact of the Home Office in failing to support life-long monogamy and supporting its competitors is enormous.
Mr Blunkett has made it clear that his private conduct is in line with what he advocates as public policy.
But Mr Blair has not always endorsed Mr Blunkett’s view that “the family” to be supported by the State is any household with children no matter what their parentage and no matter what the sexual orientation of the adults or the nature and permanence of their relationship may be.
Mr Blunkett can self-righteously repeat that there is no conflict between the public policies he advocates and the personal life he leads. That does not make his personal beliefs about sex and the upbringing of children his own private business. It brings his personal beliefs about sex and the upbringing of children all the more decisively into the public domain.
Mr Blair, from his background in Christian doctrine and socialist philosophy cannot justify his new stance, either empirically, politically or logically, that criticism of Mr Blunkett’s conduct in the Quinn affair is an invasion of his privacy.
Is “moral illiteracy” too harsh a term, then, to describe Mr Blunkett’s and now Mr Blair’s hopeless efforts to silence public comment by appealing to the strong and meritorious injunction in English culture to “mind one’s own business”? This is not only Mr Blunkett’s business. It is everybody’s business.