Saving Marriage

Here's Iain Duncan Smith's plan for this:-

The £120 billion bill for the cost of crime, drug abuse and educational failure would be slashed if the law and tax system were reformed to protect marriage, according to the report, by the Centre for Social Justice.

Sounds interesting. Go on...

As well as counselling during difficult periods of marriage, couples should also be given more access to marriage preparation classes before their wedding, he will add, pointing to evidence that these can reduce divorce rates during the first five years of marriage by 30 per cent.

More likely the case that the people who go to marriage preparation classes are the sort of people who are more committed to being married.

"Britain's record on family breakdown is currently the worst in Europe," Mr Duncan Smith will say. "Its scale and impact should be of concern to us all ... Healthy marriages build healthy families, and healthy families build a healthy society".

He will add that encouraging marriage is crucial to preventing social breakdown, pointing to research suggesting that fatherless households are twice as likely as two-parent families to be living in poverty.

I'm shocked. A household where the tasks of childcare and breadwinning are taken by 1 person are more likely to be poor.

"Children who grow up in a lone parent family are 75 per cent more likely to fail at school, 70 per cent more likely to be a drug addict, 50 per cent more likely to develop an alcohol problem and 40 per cent more likely to have serious personal debt problems," Mr Duncan Smith will say.

Sounds about right.

Mr Duncan Smith will say: "On average half of all cohabiting couples will break up by their child's fifth birthday – compared to only one in 12 married couples."

So, the sort of people who don't make commitments are the sort of people who more easily walk away from things?

I know what IDS deluded thinking is here: throw money at people and they'll get married and they'll then have good, happy homes with their kids. The fact is that for £20/week it's just not going to happen.

You really want to sort things out? You nail down the benefits system. Stop pushing unemployed pregnant girls up the council house ladder.