A tax-break for married couples, is how the Tories are trying to spin it. The reality could scarcely be different – here are the groups of people the Tories are now officially classifying as undeserving:
- Two married teachers bringing up a child.
- A co-habiting couple who have lived together for years but not married.
- People whose partners have abandoned them and their children.
- A widow whose husband has died in Afghanistan.
But perhaps I’m being unfair … after all the Tories will reward some people at the expense of those clearly undeserving groups:
- Those happily married for 50 years.
- Over a million people in Britain who have separated but are still legally married.
- Somebody who abandons their partner and children and then remarries.
The Tories’ feeble defence of their Edwardian tax-war on groups in society they regard as unworthy is that it their £150 a year will help solve the much-talked about ‘Broken Britain’ – so what will the Tory policy do for those living in poverty?
- Less than one in seven of the children living in poverty in the UK will see any benefit whether their parents marry or not. Just 14% of children in poverty live in coupled families where just one parent works full time.
- It will be no help to the 232,000 children living in poverty with one parent who juggles work with caring for them.
- It will be of no help to the 29,000 children who live in poverty with both parents who both work full time.
Nick Clegg delivered the perfect liberal response:
The proposal from the Conservatives for tax breaks for marriage are patronising drivel that belong in the Edwardian age. David Cameron clearly has no idea about modern life. Every family is different, and instead of creating rigid rules or special policies that help some families but not others, we need a new approach from government: one that is flexible and doesn’t dictate to families how they should live.”
(Hat-tip for the Tory poster: Alex Wilcock via mydavidcameron.com).
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19 Comments
I don’t think our critique goes nearly far enough. There’s no detectable proof in the relevant Centre for Social Justice research on marriage that they’ve controlled for the causation/correlation problem – ie that people who are good at parenting tend also to be good at stable relationships, and being in a stable relationship tends to correlate with marriage. The shorter, 9-page report *appears* to take it as read that marriage must be the cause of all this rather than the symptom.
I’m starting to work through the references, but seriously, this is cracked. Listen to this:
“Married couple relationships are significantly more stable than cohabiting relationships: regardless of socio-economic status and education, cohabiting couples are between two and 2.5 times more likely to break-up than equivalent married couples.”
Pending my checking the source this is from, that’s very probably because people who cohabit aren’t always intending to marry. I’ve cohabited with people I had very little intention of staying with for life. Unless the source has controlled for intention and motivation in some incredibly clever way, “cohabiting couples” includes everyone from rock-solid decades-long relationships with kids and mortgages down to in-love new couples seeing if it’ll work out. Ironically, social acceptance of people doing the latter has probably averted a great many unhappy childhoods.
“It’s such a good idea that couples live together nowadays to make sure they really want to get married and have a family.” – paraphrased, my great grandmother (1893-1991). And this safety mechanism against lifelong unhappiness is what the Tories are trying to disadvantage.
The report also spells “flies” as “flys”. Hm.
Will £150 a year persuade people to marry? The average cost of a wedding in the UK is about £20,000. Stay married for at least 134 years and you’ll be quids in.
£150 tax break for Married Couples, or raising the income tax threshold to £10,000. I know which I’d prefer.
It may appear a tortuous distinction, but I don’t see anyone being disadvantaged in the sense of loosing owt… just that they’re getting nowt extra (and Cable has likened it to a cappuccino or 568 ml of beer). Clegg said that he’s not with Mrs Nick for a financial advantage, and a corollary of the above would be that anyone seeking to co-habit to test out a future relationship should be prepared to scrimp rather than having it paid for.
After the Great War, a CofE vicar was horrified when he saw the number of claimants for war-widows’ pensions who were common-law wives, and therefore not entitled.
And here’s one I made earlier: the thinking behind Tory marriage & millionaires’ tax breaks explained in a poster http://bit.ly/8MTySH
“It may appear a tortuous distinction, but I don’t see anyone being disadvantaged in the sense of loosing owt”
That rather depends on what they might have otherwise spent the money on.
But actually, it wasn’t the money per se I was thinking about. They’ve said the policy is “symbolic”. It’s symbolic of their preference for the married state over other states, and bestows an advantage upon it. And I’m sure it won’t be the only thing they do to promote and advantage a particular moral view. Hence my suggestion that the corollary is to disadvantage cohabitation, as not belonging to that moral view.
You’re obviously clutching at straws with those examples: two married teachers have a high income anyway; the war widow deserves a state benefit separate and greater than this tax break; and a single parent with children is entitled to maintenance from their estranged partner.
As for Alix’s argument about disadvantaging cohabiting couples prospecting for marriage, when (and if) they get married they’ll be entitled to the tax break and by his argument their marriage will last longer, so over their life time they’ll still be better off for it.
And, er, about the whole “the research appears to mistake correlation for causation” argument? Which was rather my point in citing the cohabiting example in the first place? Have you somehow misunderstood this?
I’ve looked into the original study that produced that statistic (Benson, H., 2006, The conflation of marriage and cohabitation in government statistics – a denial of difference rendered untenable by an analysis of outcomes, Bristol Community Family Trust), and they draw the same conclusion as you that its couples with a higher level of commitment will be the ones that get married.
If this was an engineering problem I’d say that merely encouraging a higher level of marriage would probably result in more divorces. For a more reliable method of increasing the number of children to be raised in stable relationships you should discourage unmarried couples from having children. This would increase marriages among the number of couples wanting children and by making these ‘scary’ decisions arrive at once it would have the potential to ‘weed out’ weaker relationships before any children were produced.
Whether we want our government to show this level of pragmatism is another issue entirely.
Why not just admit that it is a reasonable principle. If two people become joined together in law then it is not unreasonable for the tax system to reflect this. If they decode that one spouse works 50% of the time and the other works 100% they will be taxed the same as if they both worked 75% of the time (assuming that produced the same amount of income). Income Tax is after all a tax on income and most families pool their various incomes.
“Why not just admit that it is a reasonable principle. If two people become joined together in law then it is not unreasonable for the tax system to reflect this.”
You see, that’s exactly the point that bothers me. It’s not reasonable. The entire income tax system is based on the individual. It is totally incongruous to change just this one rule to deviate away from that principle.
Why don’t you admit that you seek this incongruity for purely moral reasons? We’re talking about a bunch of people with certain moral beliefs trying to impose them on other people. If they’d just admit that, rather than trying to pretend it’s somehow “logical” or worse, a social justice measure based on “research” that turns out to be a bunch of flaky assertions, we’d have an honest argument. Right now, it’s all just smoke and mirrors, and it comes across as pathetic. You reckon you’ve got these moral principles, you reckon they’re important, you damn well stand up and own it. I’ll tell you to **** off out of my personal life, of course, but at least I’d respect your honesty.
I could not help but enjoy the irony of the advert advertising Ukrainian Brides in a comment section largely decrying the idea of promoting marriage. Anyone for an immigration debate whilst we are about it?
@Alix, the income tax system is based on the individual; but the benefits system is based on the household. This is the main reason that the Lib Dems have abandonned the idea of a unified tax and benefits system.
It is correct to denounce the small allowance of this Tory £150 marriage bribe that would have have been right for family life in 1910 but we all require a more flexible approach to family life in 2010.
The Liberal Democrats message is to give the most least off hard working 4 million families a tax refund of £700 in the pocket on the first earned £10K.
It is infinitely fairer to provide each family with an average extra £700 tax return then to merely encourage marriage lines.
Vince Cable as the next Chancellor would also help address the poverty of children who will undoubtedly benefit from the the extra earned income their parents will get as a result of L/D economic policy.
Widows including war widows are losers and spouses who remarry are winners in the Tory marriage stakes.
Poorer families who deserve equal and flexible fairness under tax will all lose out under Cameron`s proposals.
My blog and Youtube video takes up this issue.
http://norfolkblogger.blogspot.com/2010/04/contradictions-of-tory-marriage-tax.html
While the Tory policy is poor and should be criticised, am I alone in thinking that’s the media’s job and we should be spending our time positively putting forward and explaining our policies?
Richard, as I understand it the extent of the Tory plan is to make the personal allowance transferrable. Why are you introducing the benefits system into the discussion?
What about single people, who would like to marry, but for one reason or another haven’t found anybody? Why do the Tories want to punish them even more? Isn’t it enough, that they suffer from loneliness?