Last week, Conservative MP Danny Kruger made some controversial remarks about marriage at the awful National Conservative Conference in London. He said:

The second truth is that the normative family – held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children and the sake of their own parents and for the sake of themselves – this is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society.

“Marriage is not all about you. It’s not just a private arrangement. It’s a public act, by which you undertake to live for someone else, and for wider society; and wider society should recognise and reward this undertaking.

I guess it is good in a way that these comments are now considered controversial. It does show how far we have come in the past few decades. Christine Jardine, our equalities spokesperson said Mr Kruger’s comments

show just how utterly out of touch the Conservative Party is with modern day Britain.

Conservative MPs are happy to lecture families on how to live, while making life harder and harder for millions of families through the cost-of-living crisis and years of unfair tax rises.

East Midlands Lib Dem commentator Mathew Hulbert did a good interview on Peter Cardwell’s Talk TV programme:

WATCH: This is part of my appearance on @petercardwell's fab show on @TalkTV this afternoon.
Commenting on Tory MP Danny Kruger's remarks on 'the family' at a certain much commented on conference this week.
My take is rather different to his, as you may imagine. #TalkTV pic.twitter.com/77BeasB1Qw

— Mathew Hulbert 🔶️ 🏳️‍🌈 (@MathewHulbert) May 20, 2023

WATCH: This is another clip from my appearance on @TalkTV yesterday-debating a bloke from the Evangelical Alliance-on @petercardwell's always ace programme, about Tory MP Danny Kruger's comments this week on 'the family.'
I'd be interested to know your thoughts. Thanks. #TalkTV pic.twitter.com/Bp1PwzKQ0s

— Mathew Hulbert 🔶️ 🏳️‍🌈 (@MathewHulbert) May 21, 2023

Mathew said:

I think that families come in all shapes and sizes and that diversity is absolutely our strength as a society and our strength as a community.

He asked if his life as a childless gay man somehow made his family less valuable.

He was on with someone from the Evangelical Alliance and made the point that his Christian perspective was very different:

I’m very proud to go to an inclusive church that is inclusive of all relationships and all types of people and I think that better represents the God that I believe in.

Mathew was close to both his parents, before and after their divorce and spoke about how his mum was more confident after they split up:

My parents sadly split in 1991 when I was 11 and subsequently divorced. Was that painful at the time? It absolutely was. But was my life more peaceful after my Dad moved out? There wasn’t the arguments that there had been. It took a while, but life ended up being better and my Mum certainly grew in confidence.

I think the idea that people stay together for the sake of the children is a nonsense. Children are well aware of when things aren’t right at home. Of course it’s sad when people split up and divorce but sometimes it is necessary. To stay together and be permanently unhappy is surely not something that anyone should be advocating.

The whole National Conservative Conference was, like others round the world, setting out an agenda that would roll back many of the hard won social gains of the past 60 years. It is no coincidence that the wilder end of the Republican Party in the US is now going after no fault divorce, a move that would force mainly women to stay in abusive or unhappy marriages as this CNN article sets out:

Women of the 21st century are currently living through direct, concerted attacks to their rights including reproductive choice. This renewed assault on divorce shows how quickly purported concerns about marriage can become a proxy for a conservative agenda that wants to reinforce women’s subordination to men.

Danny Kruger was re-opening an old front in the Conservative culture war that they hope will win them the next election. Taking them on and winning that culture war needs to be an important part of our strategy. We need to very calmly, very reasonably, call out their attacks on so many of our citizens and their lives. For a party that is supposedly small state, the Conservative right has a lot to say about things that are none of the state’s business.

We also need to make sure, as the Democrats have done with some success in the US, that all young people, particularly young women, are registered to vote and have all the ID they need to have their say.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social