Has Cameron gone too far?

In April of last year, the Tories floated the idea of an annual tax break of £150 for married couples at a cost of £550 million a year.

Since then, the issue has faded from attention due to Lib Dem opposition. David Cameron, however, chose to use Father’s Day as an opportunity to bring the matter back into the public eye. Cameron re-announced the proposal in a speech that also attacked ‘runaway fathers’ and praised single mothers who, in Cameron’s words “do a heroic job against all odds”. However, these two issues are unrelated at best and cynically mentioned side-by-side at worst. By giving a tax cut to the married, he would be rewarding a couple that stays together rather than a mother who is heroic enough to raise children by herself. Maybe it’s just a kind attempt by Cameron to make single mothers even more heroic by further increasing the odds they face. More likely, it was a sinister attempt to place a proposal which will stigmatise single parents alongside rhetoric which seems to praise them in order to make the tax break seem less offensive.

The £150 obviously won’t work as a practical incentive. Few people would choose to remain in a loveless marriage for slightly less than £3 per week. I don’t know if you can replace love with money or material goods, but if you were to attempt it, it would probably take more than the price of a ready meal. Likewise, if people are getting married for the sake of a £150 annual tax break, they’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons. It would take at least £1,500, surely, after all, weddings are expensive. Given that it has little practical incentive then, the decision seems to be entirely symbolic. It implies that marriage is something to be rewarded and being single is something worthy of stigma. Cameron claims he wants to ‘shame’ runaway dads, but he’s doing nothing of the sort. He’s shaming people who choose not to be married and the single parents who are raising their children alone. This further seems to be the case when Cameron mentions that traditional family life is the "cornerstone of our society". Those living a less conventional family life are chipping away at the cornerstone in his eyes, I guess.

When the policy was initially proposed, George Osborne said it would support commitment. Around the time of the announcement, he said, "I don't preach about people's lives, and many marriages fail, but I think we know now from years of evidence that a society where more people are married is a stronger society." Osborne isn’t preaching about people’s lives, he’s simply pointing out the evidence-based fact that single people create a weaker society. Obviously marriage up until this point was a mere pilot scheme that we’ve been using to garner evidence. We were just testing it out to see if it benefited society. As it turns out, it does. Luckily, we now have a catalogue of examples, which provide myriad examples of societies being strong because of marriage. Likewise, we know about the plethora of countries in which society fell apart due to people choosing to stay single rather than marry. The most famous example comes from the collapse of the Somalian state in 1990s, when too many members of society were single and ready to mingle rather than married and ready to uphold civil order. Clearly.

Given that public spending is facing massive cuts at the moment, maybe it’s not the best time to re-ignite talk of imposing a personal view of the ‘traditional’ family upon society through a tax break that would cost £550 million a year to fund. Maybe there isn’t a good time for such a thing because it’s a terrible idea. But that’s just one view. Of course, if it does get brought in, I look forward to the day that I take the big leap and propose. I won’t be doing it for love. I’ll be doing it for £3 a week and for the sake of our society. I don’t want society collapsing because I’m spending too much time alone and sobbing about my single status rather than spending time with my wife, eating my ready meal and contributing towards the cornerstone of our society.

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