Margaret Thatcher, speaking to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland on 21 May 1988, praised ‘the basic ties of the family which are at the heart of our society and are the very nursery of civic virtue. And it is on the family that we in government build our own policies for welfare, education and care.’ Family was the basic building block, as she saw it, of modern society. This argument has returned again and again to political discourse, since it was used by Aristotle, and has most recently appeared in the same narrative of fragile social bonds under pressure in speeches by the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, talking about the failure of the family as the central problem of broken Britain. His solution was to operate through taxation reform to privilege propertied families by reducing the tax on those who had children while legally married. But Thatcher's speech also demonstrates another intellectual problem in a narrative of the family as building block. The state is to build on it but, in order to do so, needs to intervene in it. State policy has historically attempted to preserve an ideal of an integrally private domain in which social and psychological health can be left to flourish. The family raises difficult questions for politicians and officials about the inequality of power and resources between ages and sexes in the family and hence can be seen not as an entity or unit but as a site in which different people share a location but have different tasks within it.