The only problem with the Tories’ tax break for married couples below the 40% tax band is that it’s far too low. In principle, it makes perfect sense, but it should put at least a thousand pounds in middle to low-income families’ pockets rather than £150.
I know that, for many of my friends, a this represents an insignificant sum – but for the rest of us, a thousand quid still buys you a lot (just under two hours of Stephen Byers’s time, apparently – and think how helpful that would be!).
In any case, if the paltry sum of £3 a week (small latté, please) isn’t exactly going to change lives - no one’s going to decide to get married or not get divorced because of it - it signals, for the first time since that crypto-socialist Ken Clarke abolished the married couple’s allowance in the ‘90s, that the State approves of marriage. Given that most of us approve of marriage, it would be nice if the State reflected our wishes (for a change).
Let me be honest up front: I don’t necessarily and in all instances disapprove of unmarried couples shacking up together – the decision to get married is, for most of us, the most important one we’ll ever make, and to factor in some sort of trial run doesn’t seem such a bad idea. But once the trial is over – whether it last for three months or a year, or unless there’s some overwhelming reason for not getting married (though it’s hard to think of any apart from religious differences) - then bloody well do it! What are you? Lazy, uncommitted or timid, or a mixture of all three? And spare me the lefty student nonsense about not needing society’s approval to live together or the yuppie excuse of “just not having enough time”. If you have enough time to go on holiday, or to have kids, you have enough time to get married.
And I certainly don’t favour couples staying together when they can simply no longer stand each other’s company: there’s enough misery in the world.
But of course, you - the triallists and those contemplating the hell of divorce - aren’t the problem the Tories are rather half-heartedly addressing here. (And there’s no guarantee that the progeny of married parents will turn out to be model citizens. And many single parents find themselves in that position through absolutely no fault of their own.)
The real targets for a married couple’s tax break are working class girls and women on council estates who get themselves knocked up because they’re too stupid or lazy to take precautions, and the knuckle-dragging sperm donors who do the knocking up and then promptly skedaddle at the first hint that they might be asked to take some responsibility for their actions.
It’s the products of these meaningless, selfish liaisons who are making life in our towns and cities increasingly repellent. Besides, they cost us a fortune in social workers and probation officers, court officials, lawyers, judges, prisons and young offenders’ institutions, policing (when they can be bothered, of course), council housing and a welter of generous benefits – plus a vast army of council officials, civil servants and government agency staff for whose existence the mating habits of the underclass represent the only possible justification. And of course, there’s the cost of cleaning up the litter they drop and the graffiti with which they deface practically every surface they slouch past, and increased insurance premiums for everyone because of all the stuff they nick, and the added expense of not using buses because they’re heaving with simian louts, and having to book holidays in out-of-the-way places in order to avoid finding yourself stuck on a beach next to a troop of pissed-up Geordie gyro-junkies.
And obviously there’s the cost in sheer human misery: imagine being a decent, hard-working, law-abiding wife or husband trying to bring up kids on a council estate ruled by the products of these casual couplings. Imagine trying to hold down a low-paid job while having to run a gauntlet of violent Calibans every evening, and then having to sit imprisoned in your tower-block flat listening to their revolting music and animalistic yowlings into the early hours.
I remember once, when working on the BBC’s main TV news bulletin, suggesting that our traditional, unquestioning Christmas compassion-fest for the homeless should contain, somewhere, the point that some of them, far from being the victims of Mrs. Thatcher’s cruel economic policies, were in fact bone-idle wastrels who viewed sleeping in a shop doorway on The Strand with some poor mongrel in tow as a price worth paying to get the guilt-ridden middle classes to fund whatever vicious addiction they had chosen to adopt.
Didn’t go down well.
The editor expressed mild amusement that anyone should still believe in the Victorian concept of the deserving poor. What was Victorian about it? I asked, genuinely astonished that most of my colleagues couldn’t accept that, while many poor people – the mentally ill, the unlucky, those who have suffered tragedy - are to be admired, pitied and helped in any way possible, others are simply lazy, immoral, irredeemable scum.
That’s why Britain got broken – because this simple and undeniable truth somehow became a laughing matter rather than a guiding principle for the framing of social policy.
Am I being cruel? I don’t think so. Adam Smith encapsulated another unfashionable truth: To show mercy to the guilty is to punish the innocent. Every time some slack-jawed strumpet is rewarded for willfully bringing a child into the world which neither she nor the biological father have the slightest intention of supporting through their own efforts, they are guilty of a crime against society – but one for which everyone except the perpetrators will end up paying.
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