Maybe the National Conservatism mob are right about ‘unconstrained individualism’

Last week’s National Conservatism conference grabbed plenty of headlines, as Tory politicians including Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg vied for influence, and activists and commentators such as Douglas Murray and David Starkey tried to outdo each other’s stoking of their confected culture war.

Anxiety about the apparent breakdown of traditional family models is particularly acute, and is evident too in a statement of principles for the NatCon movement – drafted by various American conservative thinkers for the Edmund Burke Foundation, the institute which lies behind the broader National Conservatism project. “The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilisation,” goes the thinking, which seems a tad exaggerated.

Apparently, the decline in old-style family set-ups is partly down to “radical forms of sexual license and experimentation” (I wish!), and in part also to “an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden”. In other words, people would rather have fun than a family. I scoffed at this, thinking about the fact that younger adults these days can barely scrape together their own rent, let alone take on the economic baggage that comes with setting up home and with kids.

But then I remembered that next week I have to take my daughter to school at 4.15am so that she can go on a school trip to France, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether my dismay at the inconvenience of it all was just the kind of thing these NatCon bods are on about.

After all, I should be thrilled that my child has the opportunity to visit the site of various First World War battlefields and to have her education bolstered. I should be pleased that she will have the chance to solidify friendships and experience some cultural joie de vivre on her first trip abroad without her parents. All that, plus the knowledge that her loving, traditional family are rooting for her back home, will I’m sure help her to achieve more great things for our civilisation.

But truthfully, I’m kicking myself for not thinking when we paid for the trip that of course it was bound to mean an early start that would ruin my precious sleep. And just as I do when one of the kids decides to dance around the living room when I’m in the middle of an important episode of Taskmaster, I find it hard not to stop my inner “unconstrained individualist” voice from grumbling about the burden of parenthood. (Ironically, that inner voice sounds a bit like David Starkey in particularly spluttery, crosspatch mode, but that’s by the by.)

I don’t suppose my parents, what with them being from a generation less affected by all this radical neo-Marxism and globalism, ever felt aggrieved when they had to drop me off for my school trips at similarly absurd times in the morning.

They would have known it was no burden for them when the pay-off was that their precious son would have the chance to spend hours throwing up on the coach to Calais, have the opportunity to wander around the town in a desultory fashion, and even to visit a real, live hypermarché. Likewise, as they willingly stayed up extra late to collect me from the very useful, sub-24-hour cultural experience, they would no doubt have been even more pleased to do so had they known that a significant portion of the journey home was spent debating whether my mate Nick should dispose of the small flick-knife he’d picked up in a Calais street market, before he got nabbed by customs.

The real trouble with the National Conservativism types is not so much that they seem to think things were better in the past – some things almost certainly were, while others were not. Rather, it’s that they present everything in such simple, black-and-white terms; as if it were possible – even should it be desirable – to translate their philosophy perfectly to real life in a click of the fingers.

Society is not that simple, nor are individuals. All of us are complex, messy and conflicted. Occasionally feeling the load of parenthood doesn’t mean you wouldn’t move heaven and earth for your children. And nor, for the vast majority, does the prospect of that burden put them off having kids in the first place. A more likely concern for many might be the risk of their kids growing up to be a Conservative MP or grouchy right-wing pundit. Maybe that’s a subject for the next NatCons gathering.