Love works

It seems that marriage and success go together as surely as love and marriage. A new study by the Office for National Statistics suggests that married men are 33 per cent more likely to find another job after being sacked than men who are single or divorced. Given that unemployment is 2.47 million and rising, perhaps it’s time to chivvy the unemployed off to church. Marriage is, according to the study, a more important determinant in getting a job than having A levels, a degree or a mortgage.

It is tempting to speculate about the reasons for this. Perhaps the prospect of staying indoors listening to the wife complain about mounting bills is enough to send even the laziest chap down to the job centre. It’s more likely, though, that marriage offers people a stable foundation in life, the confidence to look for work and an incentive to earn. So with all the proven benefits of getting hitched, why doesn’t the government support marriage? If anything else offered people the same advantages, the state would be rushing to endorse it. But there is a cultural cringe about marriage, a fear that it is old-fashioned. This is absurd. Marriage has been the building block of human society for more than 2,000 years because it is often the way of life that suits people best. David Cameron’s desire to support marriage in the tax system is seen by many on the left as proof that the Tories haven’t changed, that they are out of touch. But marriage long ago passed the test that Tony Blair set for policy: ‘what matters is what works.’