Families. Who needs tham?: Bring back the traditional mum, dad and 2.4 children and all will be well, say the politicians. But Helen Wilkinson argues that women and young people don't want to know

Less than a year after 'back to basics' petered out in a mire of petty scandals, the political territory the slogan marked out is the ground the political parties are contesting.

Last week when Alistair Burt, the Social Security Minister, denounced the trend towards cohabitation he was joining a chorus which already included Tony Blair, who has reasserted the virtues of the two-parent family, along with the Tory right, defenders of the traditional family.

British politics is converging into a social conservatism which offers an engagingly simple analysis of society's ills and their cures. In the Eighties, many of the new ideas in British politics came from across the Atlantic with the free-market, radical individualism of economists such as Milton Friedman; in the Nineties, US philosophers of social conservatism are among the leading influences on British political thinking. They include the academic Charles Murray; James Q Wilson, author of The Moral Sense; and Amitai Etzioni, who in his influential book The Spirit of Community recommended policies ranging from restrictions on divorce, through compulsory community service, to inducements for parents to stay at home in the early years of child rearing.

Our central problem, they argue, and the ultimate cause of everything from rising crime to mushrooming welfare costs for child support, is the decline of the traditional family. Rebuild the family, whether by reforming benefits to discourage single parents or passing laws to require parents to police their children more strictly, and a cluster of intractable social problems will become soluble.

Yet, far from offering a solution, the new conservative consensus contains a fatal flaw. It is opening up a yawning generation gap in politics. For just as mainly male, mainly middle-aged politicians have taken to fondly recalling the fabled stability of the Fifties family, so the generation spawned by the Thatcher years is moving in the opposite direction. They expect insecurity, embrace individualism and enjoy hedonism.

Several factors, loosely tied together, have fuelled the rise of social conservatism. The first is the daily experience of insecurity, exemplified by the widespread perception that crime is rising inexorably.

The second is evidence that the breakdown of the family has accelerated. Britain has the highest divorce rate in Europe - four out of 10 marriages are expected to fail - mirroring trends in the US, where half of all marriages end in divorce. Increasingly, young people are choosing not to marry. More than half of today's 25-year-olds have cohabited with a partner, compared with fewer than 2 per cent 25 years ago. A third of children are born out of wedlock.

The third factor is the rising cost of welfare. The welfare state was built around the presumption that families would remain united, with women taking on the bulk of parenting and caring work. With far more families fragmented, many of these costs are falling on the state.

The fourth is the less tangible feeling that a decline in parental authority within the family is partly responsible for declining respect for institutions in general, from judges and the police to teachers and doctors.

Another factor is demography. The baby boomers who espoused personal liberation in the Sixties have become the fortysomething parents. Poll evidence suggests that many have turned conservative, becoming deeply worried about bringing their children up into a world marked by insecurity.

For politicians on the left, an additional factor has encouraged a more conservative agenda. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher pilloried their opponents as representatives of a permissive, out-of-touch elite that was hostile to 'decent' traditional values. In the US the Democrats have responded with conservative social policies, coining the language of 'tough love' to describe using benefits as carrots and sticks to get welfare mothers back to work.

Social conservatism remains a far from coherent position. But its more fundamental flaw may turn out to be political: the distance between its assumptions and those of two critical groups in the electorate - women, and young people.

In the past, women were a natural constituency for conservative social policies. Today, they are far less sanguine about the family than a generation ago. Women can often find work more easily than men, and are less likely to accept unpaid roles as housewives, carers or stalwarts of charity. Financially independent women are more likely to divorce.

The National Council of Women, an umbrella body for more than 100 national women's organisations, which conducted a survey of just over 1,000 women, found that only 21 per cent want to spend more time with their families, compared to 32 per cent who want more time for education. Employment forecasters, such as the Henley Centre, expect 80 per cent of new jobs to go to women in the next decade.

Yet if the gap between the social conservatives and women is serious, the generation gap may be even more devastating. Corporate market research polling of a panel of 2,500 people, carried out over the past 20 years, has been analysed by Demos, the independent political think-tank, and shows that typical 20-and 30-year-olds have become steadily more individualistic and libertarian.

Younger women in particular overwhelmingly reject family, parochial, community and puritan values. About 79 per cent of 16-to 35-year-old women want careers and work, compared to only 50 per cent who see children as a goal. Theirs is a world in which cohabitation is the norm, sexuality is far more prominent (certainly by contrast with the Sixties), and where the idea that politicians - of all people - can tell anyone how they should live their lives has become absurd.

Perhaps even more importantly, this generation has come to expect, and even to embrace, the insecurity which social conservatives and older people find troubling. Most have absorbed the Thatcherite argument that they need to be responsible for themselves, and nearly half say they would like to be self-employed. According to the market research polling data, to be published later this month, the watchwords of people under 30 are autonomy, hedonism and optimism. In contrast, pessimism about the future is one of the main forces behind social conservatism.

This gap between the views of women and the young and the prescriptions of the social conservatives presents the leaders of all political parties with a dilemma: the more they appease the fears of Middle England about social decay, the more likely they are to lose the interest, let alone support, of young people and especially young women.

The dilemma is perhaps sharpest for Tony Blair. On the one hand he is a Christian family man who represents 'decency' and 'stability'. Yet he could also represent a generational shift in British politics. As a dual earner married to a career woman, he could represent a break with the past. He could bridge the generational gulf which social conservatism is opening up - or he could fall into it.

Helen Wilkinson is a research associate with Demos.

(Photograph omitted)