Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Tory marriage policy

Okay, I haven't posted on here for such a long time but this made me SO angry it has made me return to my blog. As many of you may well have noticed, the 'modernising' Tory leader David Cameron and his cronys have been banging on about the importance of marriage and are even talking about introducing financial incentives for couples to get/stay married if they (god forbid) win the next election. This is because apparantly kids are less likely to become young offenders etc if they have both parents bringing them up. Maybe overall kids whose parents are not divorced do have a better time of it than kids whose parents are divorced, but by offering financial incentives is a really oversimplistic way of approaching things.
whats the point in bringing in financial incentives for couples to stay together for their children if the relationship is a destructive and abusive one? surely that is more disturbing for a child than if their parents get divorced. And anyway, if a relationship is doomed to fail it will do so regardless of a small cash incentive.
And why must couples be MARRIED to offer a good upbringing for a child? what about long term partners who live as if they were a married couple and are doing a great job bringing up their kids - why should they be exempt from these financial incentives? And whilst Cameron says that he is not suggesting that single parents do a bad job he IS in fact saying this by implication. Its quite frankly insulting. Why dont Cameron's 'new look' Tories think of some ways to help single mothers get out of poverty, like by offering free childcare? This is more likely to make kids upbringing better, not by forcing their parents to stay married.
And why the Tories are at it, why don't they look at the amount of affairs politicians in their party have indulged in over the years before preaching about marriage?