Marriage in modern Britain: out of reach, not out of fashion
pete quentin, 20 May 2008
A new report from Civitas, Second Thoughts on the Family, finds marriage to be more popular than ever – but a luxury beyond the reach of the poor
Overwhelming majority of Britons want to marry
Defying the idea that marriage is dead, a new Civitas/Ipsos Mori survey of 1,560 young people reveals that the overwhelming majority want to get married:
Marriage: fit for purpose in 21st century Britain
• A nationally representative sample of 20-35 year-olds shows that seven in ten want to marry
• Cohabitation has NOT replaced marriage: nearly eight in ten (79 per cent) of those cohabiting want to marry
• The number one reason why young people want to marry is to make a commitment (47 per cent)
• Just two per cent want to marry for tax reasons
• Less than one per cent think that marriage jeopardises equality between men and women
Declining marriage rates are sometimes seen as a sign of the death of marriage, but the evidence that the majority still want to marry, despite it no longer being socially ‘necessary’, shows that marriage is in fact more popular than ever. In a secular, liberal society such as 21st century Britain, marriage has become a choice – which research shows most people want to make.
People don’t have to marry – they want to
‘In the past people had to marry,’ comments Anastasia de Waal, author of the report and Head of Family and Education at Civitas, ‘today people want to.’ However, family patterns shown in the last Census and Millennium Cohort Study reveal that marriage is out of reach for Britain’s poorest.
In Second Thoughts on the Family Anastasia de Waal has brought together:
• 27 interviews with high profile opinion formers, including Cherie Booth, Harriet Harman, Polly Toynbee, Jenni Murray, Esther Rantzen and Fay Weldon
• A nationwide sample of 20-35 year-olds attitudes to marriage
• An examination of Britain’s family trends
The report demonstrates a striking relationship between income and family structure and exposes a shocking poverty divide between the marrieds and the non-marrieds: it is the divide between the haves and have-nots. Perversely, Labour is embracing this divide in the name of ‘diversity’.
‘Diversity’ – as enjoyed by the poor
• The Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative survey of the families of children born around the year 2000, reveals the stark correlation between economics and family structure in Britain today.
At the time of birth, 55 per cent of single parents and 43 per cent of cohabiting parents lived in disadvantaged areas compared with 26 per cent of married parents. By contrast, 35 per cent of single parents and 56 per cent of cohabiting parents lived in advantaged areas compared with 68 per cent of married parents.
● The 2001 Census also highlights the correlation between poverty and non-marriage, showing that areas in Britain with the highest proportion of cohabiting parents are ‘notorious for the economic breakdown of once thriving working-class industries’. By contrast, marriage is concentrated in areas with high numbers of middle-class families.
Policy makers out of touch
Both the Conservatives and Labour assume that those people not living in married two-parent families are simply choosing not to. The Conservative Party therefore believes that the two-parent family needs promoting by financial incentives to marry, while Labour, has adopted a ‘neutral’ position in which family structure doesn’t matter. Both parties are out of touch with reality:
• Marriage doesn’t need incentivising. Most people already want to marry – research shows that more employment, not tax-breaks, will enable them to. Pressurising people to marry will not stabilise the family in the absence of the circumstances conducive to commitment. Marriage signals, rather than generates, commitment.
• Structure should matter to Labour. Owing to economic obstacles, people who are poor and unemployed are considerably more likely to be unmarried and separated.
Reactionary Labour
Anastasia de Waal argues that while Labour thinks it is being liberal, its position on the family is actually highly conservative. Its policy is currently determined not by its own priorities, but by Conservative policy and past notions of the repressive ‘traditional’ family. Labour therefore considers family structure to be solely Conservative moralising territory and marriage irrelevant to 21st century policymaking. Instead, the government has focused on celebrating so-called ‘diversity’. But Labour’s nominally inclusive stance is actually blurring the lines between the poor family and what Labour imagines to be the ‘modern’ family:
‘What are construed [by Labour] as positive manifestations of diversity are in fact very often negative manifestations of deprivation and limiting circumstances. This is not to deny that new opportunities to end unhappy relationships and a greater freedom of choice in family life have positively affected families right across the socio-economic spectrum. However, non-marriage and parental separation in the UK today disproportionately represent the problematic, as opposed to the progressive, elements of family diversity.’ [p.5]
Labour must recognise the significance of family structure
Labour’s misjudged resistance to acknowledging the importance of family structure is undermining its equalising agenda, perpetuating inequality between both the classes and the sexes. The significance of structure is imperative to:
1. Tackling ‘structural poverty’
Lower marriage rates and greater numbers of cohabitating parents are strongly connected to what Anastasia de Waal terms ‘structural poverty’, that is, unemployment-related poverty incurring further poverty through parental separation. The relationship between unemployment and parental separation is hugely significant because child poverty in Britain is concentrated in single-parent households.
Child poverty is a central priority for Labour, yet the government is failing to acknowledge the circumstances giving rise to parental separation and subsequent single parenthood.
A child born to cohabiting parents is nearly twice as likely to see his/her parents break-up before his/her sixteenth birthday than a child born to married parents. The unmarried parent is therefore more likely to become the single parent.
Labour must finally tackle the issue of NEETs – young people not in education, employment and training – which is exacerbating family poverty. Almost a fifth of school leavers today are unemployed, a 15 per cent rise in the last ten years. The effect on families is an increased risk that young women and men enter into parenthood in unstable circumstances.
2. Fostering equality in parenting between men and women
There is currently a very narrow—conservative—conceptualisation by Labour as to what is meant by attaching importance to family structure and the two-parent family. Structure ought to refer as much to the parenting model as to the relationship between parents. For this reason it would be useful to stop talking about family breakdown and start talking about parental separation—and single parenting instead of lone parenting. The household may split, but the family unit—the parenting structure—should remain intact.
One of the main reasons that the children of separated families are more likely to suffer difficulties is because the two-parent structure in terms of responsibility – the dual-parenting – breaks down.
Labour’s treatment of fathers as ‘optional extras’ is exacerbating difficulties for women and children. Whilst the aim has been to be non-judgemental to mothers and children in separated families, in reality the effect has been to legitimise irresponsible fathers.
Policy recommendations
The current emphasis on women in every area of policy affecting the family should be reformed in favour of equal responsibility. Family policy must include men, starting from childcare to the position that even if the relationship between adults ends, the responsibilities towards children don’t. Child poverty is strongly connected to the failure of non-resident parents to contribute financially. Child maintenance should be automatically taken out of wages or social assistance through HM Revenue and Customs, regardless of income.
‘Second Thoughts on the Family’ by Anastasia de Waal is published by Civitas (www.civitas.org.uk) at £11.75 inc. pp. Tel 020 7799 6677.
Interviewees include: Cherie Booth, Harriet Harman, Polly Toynbee, Esther Rantzen, Jenni Murray, Fay Weldon, Anthony Giddens, Peter Tatchell, Charles Murray, Michael Lamb, Terri Apter, Susie Orbach, Linda Papadopoulos, Jenny Watson, Jo Elvin, Marie O’Riordan, Deidre Sanders, Virginia Ironside, Libby Brooks, Kate Bell, Linda Bellos, Annette Brooke, Tim Loughton, Deborah Joseph, Kate Green, Duncan Fisher, Sue Burridge.
You say there is a striking relationship between income and family structure as if this is a suprise. Of course there is a relationship, the same relationship there is between income and character. Those people who are unable to marry are, in many cases,the same people who are unable to get or keep a job. Of course they will say they want to marry, in the same way they will say they want a good job, but they won’t do anything about it. Not being married has very little to do with poverty except that both these conditions mainly exist for the same reasons – they will tend to go together in the same way as poverty and crime tend to go together. You have to ask yourself ” and why are they in poverty ?” Is it because some nasty society has put them there, or is it more that they themselves through their own unfortunate inability cannot raise themselves above it ? Clearly welfare policies have a lot to answer for, but its so easy for some people to just sit around and let others pay their bills, just as its easy for them not to get married – although of course they say they want it to be different. Some people can’t want it that much, otherwise they would just go get married – it probably doesn’t cost much more than a few packets of fags does it ? Of course, this provides no answers, but I do think your report is perhaps misleading when it tries to tell us that poverty is the cause of non-marrieds when it is more likely that poverty and non-marriedness co-exist for largely the same reasons.
What is completely missing in PSHE lessons in schools is the articulation of marriage as a realistic and atainable ideal and how to prepare oneself for it. There are so many self-help books around these days of the Mars and Venus genre for adults but nothing for children. Sex education is limited to contraception but lacks any further or deeper moral dimension. The idea of chastity is regarded by school pupils as weird because it has never been explained to them – what it is and the reasons for it.
The main problem is that many teachers themselves are not chaste and so it is very hard for them to preach what they don’t practice. And so, supported by FPA and its allies, they promote liberal sexual mores. Also they don’t wish to offend the many children of unmarried mothers. Until we have a cohort of people who have the confidence to challenge the present immorality there isn’t much future for the white English. We’ll just have to wait for the Muslims to get involved.
Less well off couples can’t afford to marry thanks to Labour tax and benefit policies. The damage, in conjunction with the political removal of the concept of discipline in state schools, has been enormous, and largely of Labour’s making.
Causes and effects compound each other in this issue. The elements are poverty, family breakdown, politically correct policy making and fecklessness.
The first knot to unthread, however, is political correctness.
Psychological profiling studies have long recognised working and middle class generalities. Namely, “the working class” have certain attributes that mean that their lives appears to work best within frameworks of authority, order and social support.
No breath is whispered that this generality applies to each individual. There are no rules to say any one cannot or ought not aspire to more, or equally ought feel obliged to.
However, fail to recognise this group as a prelude to stripping away their social fabric – replacing it with the vacuum of Labour’s value-less ideology plus a handout – and its not rocket science what happens next.
You can throw in other factors: treating their traditionally nationalist tendencies as something soiled and meanwhile threaten their stability with compeition from immigrants for their jobs. If there is complaint, then create laws to silence them and banish the offender. Ply them with cheap drink and credit.
It is also clear that if you wish to have a society in which there is economic mobility, the planks and scaffolding of the supporting structures for the less well-off are not the things to tear down.
So bad are labour, one wonders if this demise is not actually what Labour have strategically planned? Why else carry out acts that appear to most like gross stupidity? For instance, why pretend man has no role to play in the family, knowing the evidence shows his influence is greater than that of the mother; his absence can cause great trauma; fatherless children are more likely to commit suicide as well as criminal acts? Is their judgement so incompetent as to misinterpret these fundamentals, or are they so cynical as to wish to breed dependency through the suffering their policies cause? It can only be one or the other.
I am sure women on these estates now feel greatly emancipated by being rid of the tyranny of man! (Both at the level of policy decision and as a partner with whom run their home). And the feckless or hopeless offspring agree there was never was a need for a father.
I agree with the article: “Labour thinks that is being liberal”: However, let this not mean we acknowledge any good intent. Labour’s arrogant ideology and cynical neglect has been disgraceful.