Friday, January 22, 2010

Why the Lib Dems are wrong on marriage and why it matters

There is a knee jerk reaction in the liberal political class, and its groupies, of attacking anything that comes out of the Conservative party on the structure of our society.

So naked political opportunism means they attempt to join the dots between "Back to basics" and recognising marriage in the tax system ( marriage is of course discriminated against in the benefits system ).

We use tax to encourage and change peoples behaviour all the time, and all parties agree with this approach.

Marriage has spectacular benefits for society ( and there is every reason to believe that civil partnerships will also ). The long term, until death do us part, commitment provides better health ( and lower NHS costs ), free care for the sick and elderly (savings to the NHS and benefits and local council services - for example my Grandfather looked after my dying Grandmother for years before he finally had to allow her to be put into a home ), and vastly better child rearing with better outcomes by an order of magnitude.

It is a Judo/Christian principle to let people share in the benefits their work and actions bring. And encouraging marriage also improves the strength and cohesion of our society.

Some of the strongest parts of our society are Muslim, Sikh and Hindu families - almost all I would hazard to guess married. Are the Lib Dems really wanting to discriminate against those pillars of our society ?

The arguments used against the proposal to recognise and share the benefits marriage brings to society through the tax system are the usual debating tricks of using wild examples which allow table thumping and self righteous claims of being unfair. ( See Nick Clegg doing his fake indignation routine on the cheating husband. )

That is of course good politics, and we know the Lib Dems excel at politics. However its bad for society, the country and especially the life chances of the children who it will damage.

Its time to honour marriage again in our society and to value it and share its benefits.

3 comments:

Mrs Rigby said...

And married people tend to live in the same house/flat - so there's less pressure on housing resources etc.

Anonymous said...

From America,
The parasite (government bureaucrats, lawyers, social workers et al) class used by the Fabian merchants of do-gooderism use the destruction of family as a means to finance their existence, consolidate their machine and secure their evil intent. Plundering family government is essentially what modern socialism is built on. The police state is the inevitable product of a society that accedes all sovereign authority to the State. Church government is an extension of the Nanny State. The Police state keeps it all in place.

Watch out Man in the Shed. They have a camera on us! One of these days...... liberty will make a come back.

Weekend Yachtsman said...

I remain unconvinced.

The fact is, people likely to have more stable relationships, rear their children properly, look after each other properly, accept responsibility for their actions and inactions, etc etc etc are more likely to get married.

If you take a bunch of underclass neds and bribe them to get married, they probably will get married (after all, if you bribe them to have babies, they do that, don't they?), but they'll still be underclass neds.