Being single today is less a description of your relationship status and more an economic state. Of course, being single was never easy: couples can split deposits, rent, insurance, energy bills and more. It is cheaper to do the food shop for two than it is for one, cheaper to share a car and split the cost of filling the tank, cheaper to share one internet bill and streaming account. It has been estimated that people who live alone need to spend almost 10% more of their disposable income than two-person households. But in a cost of living crisis, that delta becomes enormous – and the single remain invisible to policymakers.
In Britain, we are near the beginning of what feels like a long general election campaign, and so we are witnessing the electoral map shrink ever-more until there’s only one true political subject left: “hard-working families”. If you are not a family (or, indeed, “hard-working”, but more on that later) then whatever politicians have to offer is not for you. The Labour party is working for a “future where families come first”, in a country where “many of Britain’s hard-working families are at breaking point”.
The Tories – always fans of “hard-working, tax-paying families” who “should be rewarded” – have now, under Rishi Sunak, appointed the hard-working family as a victimised group that must be protected from overzealous policies that care little for real people. “While we focus on helping hard-working families,” Sunak said, all Keir Starmer does is “punish them”, by allowing such measures as the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone – which, Sunak claimed, “adds to the burden of the cost of living”. In fact, last week’s watering down of net zero policies was also in the service of, you guessed it, “hard-pressed families”.
It’s not a matter of numbers: singles are not being ignored because there simply aren’t that many of them to matter electorally. Last year, there were 8.3 million people living alone, representing 30% of all households, with millions of others in shared accommodation. And yet they are absent from the political rhetoric and major policy discussions about alleviating pain for “typical households”, families struggling with childcare costs and mortgages. After all, it is often single people at the sharp end of the increasingly unhinged private rental market, with singles half as likely to get on the housing ladder than 30 years ago.
The problem is that single people do not evoke the right sort of image of citizens who the government should be dedicating itself to. Their state of singledom, especially in a time of economic crisis, implies a state not of suffering but of freedom, maybe even indulgence. There is a sort of permanent ambient prejudice towards the child-free and the uncoupled, as if their life choices are self-indulgent and immature. This despite the fact that the majority of people who live alone are over 45. The stereotype is of a freewheeling young cohort, but the truth is that there is less leisure time and less “choice” than ever in being single. Higher costs of living and housing wipe out disposable income, foreclose the possibility of owning a home, and force people who can to take on second jobs or freelance shifts. Socialising has become something of a luxury for many people, but for singles opting out, it brings the extra charge of loneliness and isolation.
Single people’s invisibility is part of a larger, longer shift in politics towards proving that government is only there for people who deserve support. Families are more deserving than singles, and “working people” are more deserving than people who aren’t in work, cannot work due to disability or illness, or do care work that is unrecognised and unpaid. It was back in 2005 that the BBC noted the ubiquity of the phrase “hard-working families” in New Labour rhetoric, and so it is no surprise that it has been revived in the current party’s tribute act to that era. “It has always been a Tory message,” the Times columnist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris told the BBC at the time. “It is nothing new from the Tories, but both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair want to rid the Labour party of this association with handouts to people. It chimes in very well with New Labour, this idea of no free rides and no feather-bedding.”
Decades later – after a financial crisis, years of austerity, Brexit, the pandemic and a cost of living crisis – the rhetoric remains unchanged. This is despite the fact that the UK is now a place where economic circumstances and Conservative policy have made it far harder to start a family, with all the costs it entails. Because the worst sin of all is to appear to help someone who has been made unpopular in the public mind: single people, immigrants, unemployed people, disabled people. The second worst sin is to dare to think of spending to reverse the damage that has brought all but the most privileged “to breaking point”.
And so claiming to come up with solutions only for deserving hard workers and families becomes an alibi for this political dereliction. They must be lionised and addressed more zealously than ever before, while still being offered little that is truly transformative in terms of heavy investment in housing and public services. It’s all to maintain the important notion that has policed contemporary politics for decades – there will be no “free rides”.
It is little consolation, but if you are single and struggling and feeling erased, remember this: those “hard-working families” will probably be hung out to dry too.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
The changing face of Saudi Arabia: is the west being bought?
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