By Hilary White
LONDON, May 25, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A document put out by Britain’s new coalition government outlining their goals, fails to include the word “marriage,” or any specific pledge to bolster the flagging institution. Prime Minister David Cameron had made numerous pledges to protect marriage in the build-up to this month’s general election.
The new coalition government, composed of ministers from the Conservative party and from the far-left Liberal Democrats, issued a document outlining their policies on “Families and Children.” The document assiduously avoids mention of “marriage” or any promise to help married couples in the tax code. Instead it speaks of “relationship support” for “strong and stable families of all kinds.”
“We will put funding for relationship support on a stable, long-term footing, and make sure that couples are given greater encouragement to use existing relationship support," the document says.
Labour’s policy had referred to support for “families of all shapes and sizes” and made increased day care for working mothers a key point. The new coalition government has followed a similar tack, putting forward a proposal to create more free nursery places with more male staff to act as role models for children of single mothers.
Cameron’s deal with the Liberal Democrats, in which Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg became Deputy Prime Minister, has been harshly criticised as placing Britain’s government even further to the left than it was under Labour.
Critics of the coalition were joined this weekend by the Catholic archbishop of Westminster, Vicent Nichols, who presided over a Mass at Westminster Cathedral for 600 married couples. Nichols, who was widely seen as supporting Cameron, said the government’s document “contains a number of welcome initiatives in support of the family” but “it lacks any specific reference to marriage.”
“Yet marriage brings considerable and measurable benefits to individuals, children, family life and society,” Nichols said. “It deserves a greater measure of public support.”
In his years as leader of the official opposition, David Cameron’s speeches regularly emphasized that marriage is a “good institution” that needed legal protections, including in the tax code. Speaking to party activists in Wales in 2007, Cameron said he would continue to promote marriage as the “central institution in a strong society.”
He was specific at that time about the nature of marriage, saying the reason the party supported it is that “one in two co-habiting parents split up before their child's fifth birthday, compared to one in twelve married parents.”
Up to the threshold of the election, Cameron continued to wag a finger at Labour policies on marriage. After Ed Balls, Labour’s Children's Secretary, said “stable relationships,” not marriage, are the key to happy families, Cameron attacked the government’s position in an interview, saying, “Labour's pathological inability to recognise that marriage is a good thing puts them on completely the wrong side of their own dividing line.
“Ed Balls seems to see marriage as irrelevant. I don't think it is. I think marriage is a good institution. I don't need an opinion poll to tell me whether it is or isn't. That's just what I think.”
The success of Cameron’s efforts to put marriage at the forefront of hot election topics could be seen in a statement from Balls, who later admitted the Labour party had been mistaken. “Because we knew it was complicated, we ended up not talking about families and talking about children instead,” he said. He belatedly admitted that marriage is the best way to bring up children, although his party’s policies were not altered.
The Conservative party’s July 2007 social justice policy group report said that wives or husbands who did not work should be able to transfer their tax allowance to their spouse. But Cameron has now backpedalled away from this, saying that his party had never committed to anything specific, but only to “recognizing” marriage in the tax system in an unspecified way.
Meanwhile, marriage as an institution in Britain continues its freefall. According to government statistics, the number of marriages registered in England and Wales in 2008 was 232,990, the lowest number since 1895. Religious weddings are also declining in a Britain growing ever more secular, with more civil ceremonies (about 67 per cent) in England and Wales than religious ceremonies since 1992. The Office of National Statistics noted, “The long-term picture for UK weddings is one of decline, from a peak of 480,285 marriages in 1972.”
Read related LSN coverage:
Cameron’s U.K. Conservatives Promise to Consider Gay ‘Marriage’ in Equalities Manifesto
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/may/10050509.html