Ferdinand Mount

David Cameron should honour his marriage vow

Labour’s Green Paper on families makes it clear that the party is opposed to promoting marriage. Ferdinand Mount says it’s crucial that the Tories don’t waver, but stick to their promise of a financial incentive

Labour’s Green Paper on families makes it clear that the party is opposed to promoting marriage. Ferdinand Mount says it’s crucial that the Tories don’t waver, but stick to their promise of a financial incentive

What, if anything, should David Cameron promise in order to shore up family life in general and marriage in particular? Would some sort of tax incentive help to improve social outcomes and make people happier? Or is this a retro dead end, at once patronising and impractical and prohibitively expensive? Doesn’t Cameron’s self-confessed slip-up when explaining his commitment show how devilishly tricky and unrewarding the whole business is?

He can at least claim to be the first party leader to have dared put the question on the agenda. For on the agenda it now firmly is. Ed Balls’s last act of the old year was to admit that Labour had been wrong. The Minister for Children, Schools and Families conceded: ‘Because we knew it was complicated, we ended up not talking about families and talking about children instead.’ Now he tells us that the adult relationship matters too and that marriage is the best way to bring up children.

A mea culpa from Mr Balls is a collector’s item, but this is not really a confession at all, merely a political feint to claw back ground from the Tories by securing the headline ‘Labour performs U-turn on love and marriage’ — which the Sunday Times duly gave it. This week’s Green Paper on the family confirms that Labour remains as fiercely opposed to any concrete incentive for people to marry or stay married as it was in its first Green Paper on the family back in 1998. That, we are told, in tones of affected horror, would be ‘social engineering’, for all the world as though social engineering were not New Labour’s holy grail.

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Written by
Ferdinand Mount
Ferdinand Mount was head of the No. 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher. He is author of a number of books, including ‘The New Few: Power and Inequality in Britain Now’.

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