This article is an excellent summary of the deliberate destruction of marriage and men's rights by the UK.

It confirms all that we know about the social provisions regarding this, and while it does not deal with the corruption and ethical degeneracy of matrimonial and family law, we deal with that subject elsewhere.

Men reading this need to be aware that the social issues described have been put in place with the deliberate purpose of removing men's rights in the family. You have been warned.

Acknowledgement : The Sunday Times, 19 February, 2006

Where marriage is a dirty word

Marriage is now so disparaged by the state the very term is vanishing from official use, fuelling our feckless society, writes Patricia Morgan

Reports on population trends, or the latest news on how we live now, are usually served up by headlines screaming that the family of father, mother and children living under one roof is dead and buried — so yesterday and fit only for the dustbin of history.

As it happens, two-thirds of adults are married, but the tide is against them and the numbers are falling rapidly. Instead we must go with the flow of fragmentation.

About a quarter of families are headed by lone parents. Some 40% of births are outside marriage and many lone parents now produce their child(ren) in one or a series of cohabitations, though births outside any “partnership” have more than doubled in a very short space of time.

About 8% of married couples break up before their child is five, compared with 62% of cohabiting parents. Unwed childbearing was once a temporary phase, often fairly quickly followed by marriage. Now, a new boyfriend often means a new child, and a larger lone-parent family when the “partnership” ends, as it is very likely to do.

In the 1970s most children were found in middle-income groups. Lately most children are found at the bottom, with a slight rise at the top. The biggest fall in babies born to married couples has been in homes of about average income. With the age of mothers generally rising, a third of the increasing numbers of single lone mothers are now less than 25 years old.

And, along with the escalation in lone parenthood is the big surge in men living alone. Men in their thirties were the smallest group of men living alone in the 1970s. Now they are the largest, with a majority predicted to be living alone in 10 years’ time.

So what? The consensus of government, the main political parties, academia, children’s charities and public bodies has for long been that nothing should be said, let alone done, about the implications of changing family structure, unless it be to cheer it all on. We must welcome and support “diverse” and “vibrant” new “family forms”. The way we live now is by “participating in a web of relationships”, or revolving-door partnerships and haphazard reproduction.

Raise any doubts and you will be sanctimoniously told how families come “in all shapes and sizes”. What will be waved is an example of the fantastic lone parent rearing high-achieving children to offset the multitude of well-run studies that have for long been telling how children born or adopted and raised in an intact marriage are — on average — more apt to avoid criminal and psychiatric trouble, achieve more educationally, become gainfully employed and, in turn, successfully raise the next generation.

But the cracks are appearing. Not long ago, a report on the “drivers” of “social exclusion” for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister identified one such in the rapid decline in fertility for middle and upper-income groups, while a growing proportion of children are born to lower-class and single women. This is all disrupting the government’s plans to engender “inclusion”, or sweep away poverty, inequality, failure and underachievement.

The irony is that governments have pursued policies that precisely further family disintegration, not least by endeavouring to engineer the death of marriage.

The rebels of the 1960s had the nuclear family in their sights as the chief instrument of cultural transmission, or “conditioning”; a Great Satan enslaving people, especially women. The alternative? Unrestrained sexual expression with the communal support and rearing of children. Otherwise, à la Karl Marx, all human relations were matters of power and control, and any care and reciprocity operating within and between generations, servitude.

The abolitionists moved into control, not least in the universities, the parliamentary Labour party, the civil service and the government-sponsored quangos dealing with research and advice in the area of family affairs. Hardline feminists like Patricia Hewitt moved into senior government positions and promoted friends like Angela Mason from a homosexual pressure group to head up a Women and Equality Unit.

The idea of abolishing marriage was recognised as being unpopular and unrealistic: it would be far more effective to undermine the social and legal need and support for the marriage contract. This could be achieved by withdrawing privileges extended to the married couple. Such a move would not entail any punitive sanctions but simply extend legal recognition to different types of households.

Illegitimacy would be abolished by realising the right of all women, whether married or single, to give legitimacy to their children. Welfare benefits and tax allowances would be assessed on the basis of individual need or contribution, and not on the basis of family unit . . . so, deprive the plant of light and water and cut the roots: then it will wither and vanish.

Most of this has been accomplished. A couple’s combined earnings restrict their benefits, while at the same time they are denied any right to pool their tax allowances. A mother can receive income from an absent father, which is non-taxable and does not reduce the amount she is able to claim from the state (unless she is on income support). There are no similar disregards when parents live together and money passes between resident fathers and mothers. Effectively, you can share or receive income from someone else, as long as you do not officially live with them.

Even at average earnings a young couple with two young children and a below-average mortgage are, person and person, only about £1 a week better off than a non-working lone parent living entirely on benefits.

The married couples’ tax allowance was withdrawn in the 1990s. The drive for eradication has now reached the Orwellian state of deleting references to marriage out of public discourse. Officialdom and business now refer only to “partners”. Since language not only reflects how people live but also guides their behaviour, the aim is the perception and acceptance of a world of casual relationships where men move around siring and maybe parenting” children as the transitional “partners” of essentially lone mothers.

Insulting married people by referring to them as “partners” (for a dance or one-night stand?) does not count. The new model family the powers that be promote is found in the government’s Facs (families and children studies) of population trends and outcomes. A couple family is defined as one “headed by one natural or adoptive parent” and a “partner” who is “the person with whom the mother shares a home” (this could be the au pair or the lodger). Husbands have no status and are merged into the shifting mass of “partners” who move in and out of children’s homes. Virtually the only place left where marriage is alluded to is in the context of domestic violence, as with “wife-beating”. The irony is that domestic violence, like child abuse, is most likely in “alternative family forms”.

The upward trend in lone parenthood has most affected the level of benefit receipt and costs. More than half of all social security spending on families is for lone parents. Three-quarters of lone parents are housed in the public sector. All is symptomatic of the decline of the middle and respectable working classes, accompanied by the rise of a welfare-dependent class, where the children of welfare mothers are likely to become welfare-dependent themselves.

Thirty years ago, 92% of British children lived with two parents of whom at least one worked. When new Labour came to power, the proportion outside such families had risen to 29%, the highest in the European Union: fewer than half of lone parents had any employment.

If lone parents are the deserving poor, their deprivation derives from gender bias in the labour market and discrimination in the welfare system, according to feminists like Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt. Lavishly supported (lone) working mothers are meant to undo disadvantages for youngsters associated with this background.

This rests on the left-wing belief that all problems have economic causes and cures, when there really is little or no evidence that children’s outcomes are going to be improved by giving extra money to their parents. Hopes have also been vested in policies such as Sure Start for pre-school children (providing all manner of assistance, like “high-quality” childcare, parenting classes, training to get mothers into work, health advice and so on). Sure Start has a cost of £3 billion, with £2m being spent evaluating it.

Trying to push down child poverty while, at the same time, underwriting “family diversity”, is an extremely difficult and very expensive business. The state must take over the upkeep or the care of children — or both. Because of the nature of child-rearing, one parent cannot care for children while at the same time provide for the family. It has been self-evident through the ages that a mother on her own is not self-supporting.

Couples are more likely to improve their circumstances, hold any improvement and even enhance it. Working fathers help to lift families out of poverty and improve children’s life chances, just as fathers living within families make better citizens and workers than those living outside.

Marriage — the unmentionable — performs critical tasks. It allows individuals to join their energies, money and ambitions to create much they could not easily produce on their own. It provides a reliable means of attaching fathers to children over the long term, by bringing together under one roof the two people who have brought them into the world.

It is a cost-effective way to provide for and bring up children and promotes the economic, physical and emotional wellbeing of men and women. Marriage channels the flow of resources and care-giving between generations. It connects men to the larger community and encourages personal responsibility. It provides access to benefits such as savings, pensions, life insurance, and leads to cumulative advancement. It means significantly lower burdens on the state.

Since the benefits to society are huge, including health, education, housing, old age care, crime reduction and wealth accumulation, should we not invest in marriage instead of suppressing it? Individuals, society and the taxpayer will all be better off. There is no need to denigrate other lifestyles. Most people are pro-marriage and see it as a desirable goal.

Patricia Morgan’s Family Policy, Family Changes is published by Civitas

Comment : this deeply unjust social engineering can only take place because of the inaction of good men. See our quotation from Edmund Burke.