Now that John Lewis has produced a Christmas ad that celebrates family, starring white people as humans, all sorts of thinkers and commentators on the right have decided that the progressive madness is nearly over. One after the other they’re popping up in print, like bunnies who’ve decided the fox has gone. ‘Whisper it, but woke is over,’ these pieces begin. Even those Tories who thought it wisest to put their pronouns in their Twitter bios have quietly deleted them.
The soundtrack to the John Lewis ad, the Verve’s dirgey ‘Sonnet’, was recorded in the spring of 1997, just as John Major was vowing to put ‘the family’ at the heart of his campaign, and some Conservatives, I think, just assume that life will somehow naturally revert to the norms of the 1990s – all those children who think they’re cats or are begging to have their genitals removed will fade out like a bad dream.
But it’s the idea of ‘normal’ that’s a hallucination I’m afraid, Tory friends. We have not reached the end of the rainbow yet. How can things return to ‘normal’ when for a generation of young people the whole idea of family has been undermined? Every cult tries to weaken the ties between parents and their children, so as to establish itself as the ultimate authority, and the ‘identity’ cult is no different. Rather than ‘honour your mother and father’ or ‘love your neighbour’, the first commandment is now to ‘love yourself’.
I have an eight-year-old and I can’t tell you how many times a day he is told, sometimes quite aggressively, to love himself – on Netflix, in school, in any after-school class. In church a few weeks ago, the priest addressed the congregation: ‘Do you love yourself?’ he asked us all. ‘Well, you should.’ My son swivelled round in his pew to eyeball me and his face was uneasy. I’ve told him to ignore the ‘love yourself’ stuff in the past, but – a priest? ‘Do I have to love myself, Mum?’ he whispered. It took me until the evening to summon an answer. ‘What the priest meant, darling, is that you have to believe that God loves you, which is different.’ Is that theologically sound? I have no idea.
The trouble is that once you’ve established in a child’s mind that their first duty is to themselves, the idea of family is horribly vulnerable. If your father or mother don’t instantly affirm you, why, then they’ve violated the moral code. And although I’m sure most self-love pushers are well-meaning, just trying to stem the flood of anxiety, there are bad actors too.
One of the most successful social media influencers in the LGBTQI+ world is a man of about my age called Jeffrey Marsh, who likes to pair his rainbow eyeshadow with a silk blouse and a heavy stubble. Marsh has written two bestselling books, How to Be You and Take Your Own Advice. Oprah Winfrey is a fan.
Just because John Lewis thinks it can sell the idea to mums buying V-necks does not mean everything is OK
In the run-up to Christmas, Jeffrey has released a new series of videos with a catchy title: ‘Cut off your Trump family.’ In the latest one, episode three, he eyes the camera coyly, like an evil cockatiel, and addresses his teenage audience: ‘Hi, listen, if someone voted against your humanity, you are NOT going to go home to see them at Christmas.’ Here he grins and waggles his finger. ‘Just because someone is genetically related to you does not mean they automatically get your time.’
Now watch out for this phrase, and any variant of it, during your own family Christmas: ‘You don’t owe your family your time.’ It’s one of those snippets cooked up by activists and repeated with great certainty by the online influencers your child watches and you will never see. It comes up on TikTok alongside the popular #toxicparents snippets in which children complain about unforgivable things their parents have done, like going into their rooms without knocking. It’s such a telling phrase. There are so many nasty assumptions nestled inside it, not least the idea that the only reason to see family would be if they did somehow have this right.
The attack on family is not just on TikTok; it has wriggled its way into schools and on to the statute books across the West. In California, Assembly Bill 665 allows children as young as 12 to start the process of changing their gender without alerting their parents. Identity trumps family. The New Yorker recently published an astonishingly uncritical piece about the trend for going ‘no contact’ with your parents. One young woman interviewed had permanently severed contact with her loving parents because they wouldn’t get a Covid vaccine in order to attend her wedding. The interviewer did raise with the self-righteous woman whether she felt it fair to sever her future children from their grandparents. ‘I have a good thing going,’ replied the woman.
I’d like to have asked her what she planned to do when her child, inevitably, grew up to have different views. Does a child have a right to the parent’s time?
The truth is that this is not all the fault of the woke mind virus. The family has been exploding in slow motion for decades. First we jettisoned the grandparents, then fathers began to hotfoot it from the family scene. With no extended family to call on, frantic mothers left a lot of the most important parenting to schools and to TV. We began, just as a reflex, across the media to celebrate the liberation of the individual from boring marriages. ‘The kids would rather we were happy.’ No they wouldn’t. As long as you’re not killing each other, they’d much rather you were together. We long since stopped thinking of killing unborn babies as a sad or bad thing.
So we’ve let it happen. Conservatives let it happen during their 14 years in charge, and just because John Lewis thinks it can sell the nuclear family again, to mums buying V-necks for Christmas, does not, I’m afraid, mean everything’s OK.
What are Mary’s reflections on the year? She joined the Christmas special of The Spectator’s Edition podcast to discuss, alongside Rod Liddle, Lionel Shriver, and Matthew Parris:
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