Get married, we'll make it worth your while
March 3rd 2007, 17:51 Jeff Sela
The recent fuss about whether the UK government should ‘support’ marriage, financially speaking, is probably not all that important, just the Tories trying to sound like they have something to say. It's like John Major's ‘back to basics’ campaign. When the politicians don't know how to fix things, they resort to telling us how we should live. If the root problem in our society is that people just don't behave well enough, the solution is unlikely to be a moral diktat from Westminster.
Of course marriage can be a good thing, but it can also be destructive when it doesn't work out. The government needs to leave individuals to decide what's right for them, rather than trying to bribe people to get married (or get into one of the new civil partnerships).
I think what really bothers me about this is the prudery which lies behind it. I'm not saying that marriage isn't a good way of structuring a family, for the benefit of the children above all, but we're coming close here to making it a matter of the wrong and right way to live.
If this is about helping children—which is what it should be about—then there are much more effective ways of getting money to them. Any newly allocated budget should go into increasing child benefit rates, or into better funding for schools. There's no need to create a new kind of benefit or tax relief, with all the bureaucracy that entails.
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::: uknaked, July 29th 2007, 09:51:
It is about time that the idiot conservatives realised that you can't start this as a meaningful promotion of conservatism while the actions of the last conservative prime minister (John Major) and Edwina Curry are still fresh in the minds of voters. Ok, marriage can be great, but bribery will not help it succeed!
