EPA RESPONSE TO CONSERVATIVE REPORT FAVOURING MARRIAGE TAX BREAKS
The Equal Parenting Alliance supports the Conservative's tentative proposals to give £20 tax breaks to married couples. We agree that marriage is the best foundation for raising children in our society.
It's clear that current policies are not working. Britain's children are among the unhappiest in the Western world; depression among our children is spiralling, and our youth suicide rates have quadrupled since the 1950s. We also have higher rates of family breakdown than elsewhere. Is this just co-incidence?
The report of the Conservative Social Policy review group, published today, thinks not. It describes a correlation between the two issues, while David Cameron goes further and speaks not just of a correlation but of a causative link: "there is something deeply wrong with our society, with family breakdown at the heart of the problem."
Labour promotes policies which it claims support families, while at the same time pursuing other policies which needlessly create one parent households, and it has rationalised these opposing policy thrusts by re-defining the concept of "family" as children + mother.
By contrast, it is refreshing to hear Cameron and Duncan-Smith state the simple truth that family breakdown is the cause of the deep unhappiness which permeates the nation. It now remains to be seen whether the Conservative Party will have the courage to act purposefully on this conclusion, and place the restoration of the family, as everyone outside the Labour Party understands the term, at the centre of its policies.
