Does marriage matter anymore? Not so long ago, David Cameron was foremost amongst those giving an unfashionable ‘yes’ to this question. It became his signature theme, the closest he had to a Blair-style ‘irreducible core’. It seemed, at the time, as if a 1979-style realignment was underway. The Labour Party was being sucked into the vortex of its own economic failure. Its social failure was just as profound: it had tested to destruction the idea that more welfare makes countries stronger or fairer. And study after study showed that the institution of marriage was easily the most powerful weapon every developed to promote health, wealth and education. In Cameron, we seemed to have leader willing to say so. In my Telegraph column today, I look at what happened.
George Osborne is not a social conservative and dislikes the marriage agenda. He’d have to implement it, boast about it – and the words would stick in his craw. So he’s said there is no money. A light version of this need only cost as much as £600m, and a recent study put the cost of family breakdown at £46 billion – but this isn’t about maths. This is about the vibe the Tory Party should give out. Osborne thinks there is a special rung of hell reserved for politicians who moralise, but I’d argue that this isn’t about being pro-family. It’s about being family-neutral, and stopping the daily undermining of the family going on right now – but only at the low-income level.
The idea of a ‘couple penalty’ is well-known: the extra price that a low-income couple has to pay if they declare their relationship. For years, extra help has targeted single parents whereas nothing has been done for two-parent families since Lawson’s 1986 Budget. This has led to a situation where a woman can be better-off without her husband’s presence, especially if she can claim housing benefit. I once wrote about this, and had a letter from a guy who explained that he loved his family but thought the best thing he could do for them was leave them. He included the maths, and his figures stacked up. He had been effectively outbid by the welfare state for the right to look after his family. The state had edged him out of his role as role as breadwinner: his presence in that family was a financial drag.
Of course, he could just fake it. In 2011 there were 2.3m claiming lone-parent benefits – which is odd, given the ONS puts the number of lone parent households at 1.96m. It won’t do to hurl abuse at ‘benefit cheats’. Instead, ministers should ask what kind of system has mothers pretending to be single, or men sneaking back to their homes at night. If I were a lone parent on the breadline, I have not the slightest doubt that I’d game the system as best I could.
If you care about poverty, it’s hard not to care about family breakup. There’s an American statistic suggesting that if fathers got back together with the mothers of their children then child poverty would fall by 80%. No one has attempted to make a similar calculation for Britain, but our stubbornly high child poverty problem is undoubtedly linked to our family breakup. Statistics show one in four UK kids lives in a lone parent household, one of the highest rates in Europe. By comparison, between 87% to 97% of kids have mobile phones. It’s a funny turn of events: Britain has become a country where a 14-year-old is more likely to have a mobile phone in the pocket than a father in the house.
But do they really need a father in the house nowadays? Can’t the government nowadays look after the welfare of the child in other ways? In a speech two yeras ago, David Cameron put it well:
‘I have always made it clear what I think about the family. I think families are immensely important. I am pro-commitment, I back marriage and I think it’s a wonderfully precious institution… Strong families are the foundation of a bigger, stronger society… There’s a whole body of evidence that shows how a bad relationship between parents means a child is more likely to live in poverty, fail at school, end up in prison or be unemployed in later life… Unlike the last government that focused almost exclusively on children, we have had the courage to say loud and clear that if you want what is best for children you have to address not just children but families and relationships too.’
Cameron’s government has the courage to say, but not to do. A marriage tax cut is in the Tory manifesto and the Coalition Agreement – so, technically, the latest this can happen is the 2014 Budget and it would come into affect shortly before the next election. It seems it will do as little as possible as late as possible.
Meanwhile, almost five years will have passed with the welfare state (and tax system) discouraging marriage of the poorest while encouraging it for the rich. And evidence from Europe shows that people, rich or poor, do respond to these incentives. The Charles Murray scenario – a social bifurcation between the married rich and the unmarried poor – no longer looks so fanciful, for Britain at least. The Sunday Times recently made an ONS request for the data and revealed that, for Social Class 1 (ie, the best-paid), marriage rates were 64.8% in 2001 and 66.3% in 2011. For Social Class 7 (‘routine occupations’) it fell from 52% to 44.5% And thus the seeds of even deeper inequality are being sown.
I’d like to add one crucial caveat. These facts, figures and studies are simply averages. Within this are very happy and stable single parent families, and unhappy/abusive two-parent families. This is why I’m uneasy about David Cameron’s occasional exhortations, like his Father’s Day broadside inviting us to treat absent fathers as we would drink drivers. How is anyone supposed to know the circumstances behind anyone’s breakup? Marriage works for some people, it doesn’t work for others.
The people who know best are those who intend to get together (or split up). I think government should be marriage-neutral, so those minded to tie the knot can do so without having to pay a massive couple penalty. I differ from those on the right who think that government should actually advocate marriage. Or even be pro-marriage. It just needs to take the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm.
P.S. For those interested, my colleagues at the Centre for Social Justice have published an excellent paper on all this.
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