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David Lidington, a member of the CCF's Governing Council and the Shadow Treasury team, outlines the importance of marriage in the light of the Government's decision to withdraw funding from National Marriage Week and other pro-marriage organisations.
It was my constituency surgery that made plain to me the link between what is happening to marriage and family life in our country and the poverty and social exclusion which politicians of all Parties are trying to tackle.
Very few constituents come to see their MP to discuss policy. What they want is help with some problem that is blighting their lives. And again and again I find that at the root of a personal crisis to do with debt or homelessness or the Child Support Agency is the collapse of a marriage or a cohabiting partnership. In supposedly comfortable Buckinghamshire, I meet the young mother, abandoned by her children's father, desperately struggling to make ends meet. I see divorced fathers who want to do the best for their children but can't afford a home big enough to have their children to stay. I see boys growing up with no stable adult male role model in their lives, who latch on instead, with predictable consequences, to their slightly older peers.
These are treacherous issues for politicians. Re-reading John 8 and Luke 6, 37 is probably an essential bit of self-discipline. And there are limits to what can be achieved by passing an Act of Parliament or changing the tax or benefit system. Like other CCF members, I come to this debate with personal religious and moral beliefs. But I think that the Minister I shadow, Paul Boateng, got it right when he told a conference on family policy: "We know that cohabitation is less likely to inculcate stability in a family than marriage. But that is not making a moral judgement. It is just a fact. We need to make this argument on the basis of evidence. We are more likely to win on the argument for stability than by making moral statements."
Given those words, it is dismaying is to see decisions like the Lord Chancellor's, earlier this month, to cut off funding for National Marriage Week and turn down applications from other avowedly pro-marriage groups. This was despite the words of the relevant statute saying explicitly that the purpose of such grants is "in connection with the provision of marital support service, research into the causes of marital breakdown and research into ways of preventing marital breakdown".
As Iain Duncan Smith pledged in his own message of support to National Marriage Week, our Party's policy review "will be seeking effective ways of supporting parents and married couples in their hopes and aspirations." Those of us in Parliament and at Conservative Central Office will need the prayers and the practical ideas of CCF members as we contribute to that work.
Related links
Jill Kirby on children paying the price when parents don't marry
David Lidington MP on William Hague
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