How Can I Stop My Daughters Becoming Communists

The other morning, over breakfast, I made what I believed was a fairly harmless observation: that capitalism might, on balance, be a good thing.

This came shortly after I had spent 26 hours in NHS A&E with my mum, inside a system that felt confusing, broken, and, at times, properly scary.

So I felt, contextually, that a mild nod to functioning markets was not unreasonable.

It was my 18-year-old daughter who looked at me as if I had just said something so morally catastrophic it should be reported to the authorities.

I have also been helping that same daughter with her A-levels.

When I say “helping,” I mean I stand in the kitchen while she arrives at high speed carrying several colour-coded mind maps, explains her revision in great detail, and I nod in a way that suggests I understand words like “dialectical.”

What I have learned from this process is that sociology now appears to be a subject where, if you follow the logic far enough, everything is capitalism’s fault, including possibly the weather.

At one point, I gently suggested that communism, historically speaking, has not always gone brilliantly, what with the famine, repression, and general lack of cheerful postcards.

She responded with a shrug, which is the modern academic equivalent of saying, “Your evidence is noted and completely ignored,” and then left the room while informing me that I “don’t understand.”

This is correct.

I do not understand how someone can revise for six hours using highlighters that cost more than my first car, while also believing consumer culture is the problem.

Geography, meanwhile, has also changed.

When I was at school, geography was about rocks. You had igneous rocks, sedimentary rocks, and a teacher who was deeply passionate about erosion.

Now, geography is about people.

And it turns out people are bad.

Particularly people like me, who apparently caused everything from climate change to the invention of beige carpets.

This is confusing, because my generation grew up without avocados, had pesto arrive sometime around our late teens like a foreign exchange student, and believed mobile phones were a fictional device used by captains in space.

Yet somehow we are responsible for everything.

Meanwhile, the current generation, who own multiple screens, wireless headphones, and a collection of water bottles that could sustain a small expedition, feel they are victims of excessive consumption, despite never once having taken the rubbish out or done the recycling without treating it as a major constitutional crisis.

So this leaves me with a pressing parental question:

How do I convince my daughters that communism is, at the very least, not the flawless utopia it appears on a revision sheet, and that capitalism, while messy, is the reason we have things like food variety and next-day delivery?

I briefly considered giving them books such as The Road to Serfdom or The Wealth of Nations, but these are not so much “light reading” as they are “upper body workouts.”

I also considered taking them to North Korea, but this presents logistical challenges, including visas and the possibility that we might not be allowed to leave.

So instead, I have come up with a more practical plan.

I am going to take them to A&E.

Not as patients. As students.

We will arrive at 2pm with a bruised 81-year-old woman who has fallen, closed one eye, damaged her shoulder, and is trying very hard not to be a fuss.

Then we will watch.

We will watch her get scanned.

Then we will watch everyone realise they scanned the wrong bit.

Then we will watch the hospital begin to close, which is an unusual feature for an emergency department, in the same way that “closed after 8pm” is an unusual feature for a fire.

Then, just as things are getting exciting, the computer system will go down.

Planned, apparently.

Which is reassuring, because if there is one thing you want in a hospital, it is a scheduled moment where ten members of staff gather in a small group and say, “What do we do now?”

Then we will be told to drive 30 minutes to another hospital and start again.

At 10pm.

With an 81-year-old woman who has already been waiting for seven hours.

This, I will explain to my daughters, is not a market. This is a system.

A large, well-meaning, highly staffed, massively expensive, occasionally heroic system, in which nobody appears to own the whole experience.

There are wonderful people inside it.

Kind people.

Skilled people.

People doing their best.

But the machine itself behaves like it was designed by a committee, translated into Latin, faxed to another committee, then uploaded into software that only works when Jupiter is in alignment.

And after 24 hours, when my mum has received roughly 30 minutes of actual care, and we are still waiting for someone to officially let us leave, I will lean over to my daughters and say:

“Imagine if this ran everything.”

And then, I suspect, we may finally be having the same conversation.