Politicians neglect unfashionable but cherished values of family and community

A friend of mine, the social researcher Geoff Dench, died a few weeks ago. You are unlikely to have heard of him, although you may have heard of his close associate, Michael Young (father of the mischievous Toby). Young helped to write Labour’s 1945 manifesto and then fell out of love with the party and wrote a celebrated critique of the new meritocratic class, The Rise of the Meritocracy, and founded the Consumer Association and the Open University, among other things.

Both Dench and Young, who died in 2002, would probably have described themselves as communitarian social democrats. And Dench was that rare thing, a socially conservative social scientist whose concern for family, community and working-class men put him at odds with most of his discipline and eventually drove him out of the academy.

Dench was, in fact, heroically out of step with the times. He was critical of both meritocracy and feminism – or at least of their unintended consequences – two of modern liberalism’s most powerful ideas, strongly supported right across the political spectrum. Alongside Young, he argued that meritocracy was inadequate as an organising principle for society because it divided people too sharply into winners and losers and prioritised the public realm over the private, despite the primary importance of the latter to most people.