Review: The Care Dilemma. Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality, by David Goodhart

What a conflicted work this is! On the one hand, the author offers a passable account of what is wrong with UK care systems and points to some plausible measures that might improve matters. Most of this has been documented by liberal and feminist organisations—from the Women's Budget Group and Carers UK to the Child Poverty Action Group and (my own base) the New Economics Foundation.

On the other hand, he unloads a stack of ‘worries’ about the state of the nation and outlines steps towards ‘reinvigorating’ the traditional family and boosting reproduction of indigenous Britons. Leaning on anecdote and unsupported assertions, he takes aim at liberals and feminists, whom he blames for a catalogue of woes: unstable families, rising rates of mental illness, low fertility and a recruitment crisis in care services.

These two strands of argument are the horns of Goodhart's ‘dilemma’. The word usually describes a problematic choice between alternatives. Rather than choosing, he strives to fashion a velvet glove out of one to wrap the iron fist of the other. The glove is woven from liberal and feminist politics, the fist is a polemic against both.

On the glove side, Goodhart draws on well-established feminist arguments. The domestic and reproductive sphere—long the site of unpaid female labour—is grievously undervalued. Care work outside the home suffers from chronic low pay and status because it is identified with women. Politicians see childcare more as a route to female employment than a means of enhancing childhood experience. Employed mothers work an extra shift when they get home to a full load of family care and housework. Their lives would be better if men took a more equal share. Economists should pay attention to the care economy and stop using GDP (gross domestic product) as the sole measure of success. There should be longer parental leave for mothers and fathers. Care workers should have better pay, training and career development. There should be more men in care work. Parents should have a better work-life balance. So far, so velvety.

Now for the fist. This is the third in Goodhart's trilogy about ‘Anywheres’ and ‘Somewheres’. The latter have ‘identities shaped by geographical location and social group’, and tend to resist modernity. The former ‘tend to be comfortable with change, autonomy and openness’, and find ‘meaning and identity in educational and professional success’. Anywheres are a dominant minority, Somewheres are the majority and underdogs. Somewheres include Brexiteers and blue-collar white men. Anywheres include Remainers and graduate ‘elites’. Critics have nailed this as a false dichotomy that romanticises one group, caricatures the other and ignores countless overlaps. Undeterred, Goodhart comes up with a new and no less daft polarisation, from which the iron fist rises: ‘care egalitarians’ versus ‘care balancers’.

Accordingly, ‘egalitarians’ see women and men as ‘essentially identical’ and favour putting tiny babies into nurseries. They represent a ‘radically androgynous, public sphere-centric world view with an individualistic bias that sees men and women as autonomous, transferable units’. They harbour a ‘Leninist assumption that care egalitarian policymakers know your true interests better than you do.’ Good grief, Goodhart! What boyhood trauma left these ghosts in your attic?

Against the horde of Anywhere viragos, he conjures ‘a larger, probably majority, body of opinion, male and female’ representing the ‘care balancers’. They want ‘to look without prejudgement at the facts’ (unlike those poxy egalitarians). They welcome ‘most of the changes of recent decades’ but worry about ‘unintended consequences and overshoots’.

Shielded by these Somewhere-balancers, Goodhart shakes his fist at liberals and feminists. He blames them for creating ‘a culture that has elevated freedom and individual autonomy without the traditional balancing forces of religion, community obligation and moral stigma’, for the incursion of women into the paid workforce, and for rising rates of divorce and single parenthood. He blames these developments for family instability, rife among the poor and leading to an ‘epidemic of mental fragility among young people’.

To turn back the foul tide, he wants public policy to support two-parent married families and stay-at-home caregivers. He wants funds currently designated for free childcare diverted to financial incentives—a ‘Home Care Allowance’ and tax relief for a sole breadwinner in a two-parent family. He wants children to be looked after at home at least until they are two and preferably longer. And he wants much more breeding—to produce home-grown carers and eliminate dependence on immigrants.

He carefully doesn't say that it has to be women who stay at home. He notes that more men are ‘stepping up’ to share duties, but progress is slow and his care balancers ‘do not believe it is a form of false consciousness for a woman to put family first and to want to stay at home and raise children’. He bemoans the lost ‘civilising responsibilities of the old husband/father provider role’ and argues that breadwinning ‘is also a form of care’.

Wrapped in velvety disclaimers, Goodhart's essential thrust is a post-truth pitch against progressive politics. More marriage, more male breadwinners, more women at home, more babies, more family-based care, more religion and moral stigma to hold all this in place. Down with divorce, lone parents, childcare for under-threes, immigrant care workers and the graduate elites who have brought all this upon us.

Blind spots are legion: here are just three. First, Goodhart notes that poor families are less often married and stable than their better off counterparts. He blames ‘egalitarians’, failing to connect poverty with neoliberal economics that have shaped politics for half a century, stripping back public services and making a safe, settled life much harder for those who struggle to survive. He does not link mental fragility with young people's increasingly precarious existence as their families can no longer rely on decent education or health services, let alone secure housing or employment. Nor does he blame the shocks of pandemic and lockdown. No, it is liberals and feminists who are guilty of unleashing freedoms with their ‘unintended consequences’.

Second, he side-steps the case against paying women to stay at home, set out in the 1970s when some radical feminists demanded ‘wages for housework’. Most feminists argued that this would perpetuate gender inequality and women's dependence on men, making it harder with every passing year for them to earn a decent living or fulfil their potential for anything other than caring and homemaking. Nodding favourably at a better work-life balance and more involved fathers, Goodhart fails to explore the huge potential of shifting to a four-day week, which is widely acknowledged as a promising route to shared parenting. But giving due credence to evidence on either point would undermine his central message that biological difference is a barrier to equal opportunity, so women should stay home and married, perhaps with a part-time job when kids go to school.

Finally, the book is blind to the ecological crisis. Despite significant evidence that population and consumption growth is a major force behind climate breakdown, Goodhart urges parents to ‘stay together and have babies for the planet!’ Not letting facts interfere with a profitable rant, he backs the pro-natalist lobby, whose views are described by one leading environmentalist (Jonathon Porritt in an interview in April 2021) as ‘right-wing, deeply intolerant and divisive’ seeking ‘to advance the interests of their own particular race/tribe/culture/people’. Exactly so.

The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality, by David Goodhart. Forum Press. 256 pp. £25