The Tories have said that at some indeterminate future point, they may favour marriage through the tax system. I imagine that the response of many people will be “about time”.
The commonsense conclusion that, generally speaking, children brought up within marriage have better life outcomes is now supported by a veritable mountain of rigorous academic research. The case for marriage has been stated in densely argued and detailed books such as Farewell to the Family: Public Policy and Family Breakdown in Britain and the USA and Marriage Lite: the rise of cohabitation and its consequences, both by the social policy expert Patricia Morgan, Senior Research Fellow at the think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. There is not enough room here to elucidate all the key conclusions, but these books do contain a veritable litany of killer facts, such as the strikingly high rate of relationship breakdown among cohabitees after the birth of children and the higher rates of marital breakdown among those who cohabited before marriage, when compared with those who did not live together before marriage.
Research into marriage is even challenging old assumptions, such as the widespread notion that it is better for unhappy couples to divorce than subject their children to an unhappy home life. On the contrary, it has been suggested by a number of researchers that it is in fact better for children to remain in what the sociologists call a “low-conflict marriage” – that is, a marriage in which parents are not perhaps very happy but do not argue a great deal and in which there is no violence – than for the parents to divorce.
Among the most frustrating aspects of the debate in this area is the abundance of red herrings and straw men with which one must contend in any discussion of the subject. Thus we hear comments along the lines of “well, my mother bought up 15 children single-handed after my father died and all of us are now High Court judges”. But that is simply not relevant. No-one is suggesting that every child from a broken family will become a crack-dealing sociopath with serial killing tendencies, any more than married parents are a cast-iron guarantee of a content and well-adjusted adulthood. There will always be exceptions to every rule. Who has not heard of the proverbial 60-a-day smoker who lived to the age of 97? But the facts – the cold, hard facts that pro-lifers are so often accused of ignoring – point to one conclusion: marriage is best. After all, even if a small number of heavy smokers live until a ripe old age, a great many more – the vast majority – die well before their time.
There is a lot more that might be said, but I will limit myself to one observation: an aspect of the debate that is often missed is that the vast majority of the more liberal commentators are from comfortable middle class backgrounds. They have the financial and social and educational wherewithal to adapt to divorce and single parenthood. They are, for example, largely insulated from the violent and nihilistic street culture that snares fatherless young men from deprived backgrounds. Put bluntly, it is much easier to have a rose-tinted view of single parenthood in the leafy squares of Notting Hill and Islington than in the crumbling high rises of Tower Hamlets and Peckham.