Chapter 7: Family values and the nation-state.

This chapter investigates the functional relationships between nationalism and the family policy provided under the New Right in Great Britain. For the New Right, nuclear family is the natural unit of human social organization. This New Right conception makes the membership of a nation an ascriptive characteristics deriving from pre-political facts as to one's identity. With this, the use of the family as a model for the nation emphasizes other considerations. It emphasizes ties of loyalty founded on supposedly natural sentiments and the security such ties bring. In relation to this, a need to ask whether the family can be rescued from the New Right arises. To rescue the family from the New Right would be to show that there was a value in a parenting project undertaken by a domestic group committed to it and, perhaps, a value not to be achieved by socialized parenting or other non-familial arrangements. The claim concerns what sort of values are in principle available in different kinds of relationship. With the controversies surrounding family values and the nationalism of New Labour show that the system has not sufficiently broken free from the assumptions of the New Right to embrace the consequences of a socialist communitarianism.