What are ‘family values’, anyway?

Let’s consider for a moment what a politician means when he or she uses the term ‘family values’.

I know it sounds all warm, cuddly, popular and ethical. Just the sort of thing any decent deputy would want to be associated with, but what the hang does it really signify?

It can’t possibly mean the sort of values espoused by families. After all, I know lots and lots of families and they all have different values. In fact, I would go further and suggest that even within each family it is rare indeed for the individual members to hold the same values. So that possible explanation of the expression can’t be right.

What about the sort of political values which help to support family life? Well, I suppose that as the majority of people in any community live in families it would be a strange politician who didn’t want to support them. But if we try to define our whole value system in this weird way, then what about all of those people who don’t live in families?

Is the elderly spinster really less deserving of our support than the family with three kids? Of course not – every citizen deserves proper consideration from their government. So instead of talking about ‘family values’, what we are really talking about is ‘people values’ or just ‘values’. In fact, the term ‘family values’ is clearly a completely meaningless platitude which means different things to different people.

Exactly the same applies to that other tired political cliche, ‘all right-thinking people’. As in ‘all right-thinking people will agree with me’. When I first heard this expression, I asked the States member using it who he thought wasn’t covered by the expression. Was it ‘wrong-thinking people’ or ‘left-thinking people’? He said it was the former, but given the person involved I suspect he thought the two were pretty much interchangeable.

So if a ‘right-thinking person’ is someone who is not a ‘wrong-thinking person’, we then have to define ‘wrong thinking’. It is subjective, but it pretty much boils down to holding different opinions to our own. So when a politician says ‘every right-thinking person will agree with me’ what they are really saying is ‘the only people who will disagree with me are those who don’t agree with me’. One hundred percent true, of course, but as an exercise in pointless tautology pretty hard to beat.

I’ll give you a third example of a meaningless political platitude: ‘evidence-based decision making’. On the surface this sounds objective, even-handed and logical. To be fair, it is technically possible to sift through all of the evidence on an issue and come to a balanced decision based on what that data tells us about the likely outcomes. Alas, in my experience 90% of the time that you hear politicians talk about ‘evidence-based decisions’ they mean something quite different. They may not even realise it themselves, but the reality is that within the political world evidence is used in a very partial way. Politicians start with their own view on an issue and hungrily seek out and use to their advantage any evidence to support that view.

At the same time they have a strange blind spot to all the evidence which tends to suggest their personal opinion might be seriously misguided. To be fair, most deputies are not completely closed-minded and will change their stance in the face of overwhelming evidence, but at the same time neither are they dispassionate boffins in white coats assessing the data on both sides in an even-handed way. They definitely give more weight to evidence which supports their own instincts. So always take any claim from a deputy that they practise ‘evidence-based decision making’ with a pinch of salt.

On a related subject, please be a little cynical of any deputy who claims to have done lots of background research on an issue. Sometimes it is really true and the member will have spent weeks reading through many learned publications on the matter concerned and speaking to lots of experts. More often, though, ‘background research’ means an evening of internet searching for relevant material, perhaps with a glass of wine in hand. Or is that last bit just me?

I suppose politics is no different to other areas of life in that most professions have their own jargon. The difference in my trade is that the cliched terminology is often an excuse for saying nothing, while sounding like you are saying something profound.

So the next time your deputy says something like ‘family values’ or ‘right-thinking people’ or ‘evidence-based decisions’, don’t accept it at face value. Dig below the surface and ask them exactly what they mean – if anything at all.