Somewhere in my distant memory I recall how about 20 years ago an agitated young man in the audience of TV politics show asked Oona King, then the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, the vexing question of when her party would hurry up and get around to abolishing marriage. She appeared surprised but treated him courteously, explaining that New Labour had no plans to abolish marriage because it was very popular with the British electorate.
The task of abolishing marriage was left therefore to the next lot of neo-Marxist revolutionaries, the coalition government of David Cameron, a decade later. They relied on the support of Labour to push though the 2013 Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. They did so without a manifesto pledge and against the wishes of the parliamentary Conservative Party and the rank and file members in the shires, who left in droves, attracted back by the offer only of a referendum on membership of the European Union, a gamble which backfired spectacularly for Cameron and his cronies.
The Act redefined marriage to make it juridically equivalent to radically different unions so that everyone could enjoy the rights of marriage conferred by previous governments upon heterosexual couples who made a public commitment to one another before carrying out the tremendous responsibility of raising the next generation of children which had privileged marriage because of the burdens and sacrifices that came with it.
Same-sex unions are closed to procreation without third party involvement and therefore are not like marriage. This issue came up during the passage of the Bill. Whereas anyone is capable of understanding how a marriage between a man and a woman is consummated by the act of full vaginal intercourse, the same question, when made of same-sex couples, left even the most astute adult legal minds tying themselves in knots. At what point is a marriage between two men consummated? What about two women? Many differences flow from sexual complementarity, or lack of it, besides the creation of families. There is also the creation of radically different lifestyles.
All of this was brushed aside by Theresa May, then Home Secretary, who declared to the <em>Daily Telegraph</em> that the change in the law would mean “homosexuals will be missionaries to the wider society and make it (marriage) stronger”.
The only robust sociological evidence presented to the House of Commons predicted the opposite, however. A 22-page paper submitted to MPs at Committee Stage by Dr Patricia Morgan, a distinguished sociologist and author, warned politicians that the redefinition of marriage would undermine the institution by reinforcing the idea that marriage is irrelevant to parenthood. It contained a detailed analysis of marriage trends in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Canada and some US states where same-sex marriage had been already legalised, and it showed how traditional marriage in such jurisdictions was in freefall.
Spain in particular saw a “precipitous” downward acceleration in the numbers of all marriages by 15,000 a year in first three years that followed the legalisation of same-sex marriage by the Socialist government in 2005, then the decline doubling to 34,000 fewer marriages per annum in the years that followed. This was the only hard evidence brought to the debate, and it was ignored and rejected.
Yet as surely as night followed day, the same thing happened in the UK. Following the pandemic of 2020, the number of marriages in England and Wales collapsed by 61 per cent. It was the sharpest fall in any country in Europe so covid was not solely to blame. Other factors were fuelling the phenomenon.
They may be manifold, but what is beyond doubt is that gay marriage did not make marriage stronger. On the contrary, young heterosexual people are now giving up on marriage in favour of <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/less-stable-less-important-cohabiting-families-comparative-disadvantage-across-the-globe"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">cohabitation, a poor and fragile substitute,</mark> </a>and one in three say they never want children, leaving the population replacement rate perilously low in the face of an aging demographic pyramid. Those children who are born are increasingly disadvantaged by the separation of their parents.
One of the most recent studies by the <a href="https://marriagefoundation.org.uk"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Marriage Foundation</mark></a>, a charity launched in 2012, has revealed that by the age of 14 years, some 46 per cent of children in the UK are today not living with both natural parents. While a third of these children have experienced the collapse of their parents’ marriages, almost half (46 per cent) have witnessed the separation of parents who were unmarried. <a href="https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/source-of-family-breakdown/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Among teens whose natural parents are still together, the majority of parents are married (84 per cent) with only a small minority unmarried (16 per cent).</mark></a>
UK government family policy is now focused on the provision of childcare and encouraging all parents into work instead of supporting marriage, even though the institution is proven to be the most secure for children. Aside from regulatory changes, the Tories avoided making distinctions between married and cohabiting couples in both tax and benefits systems. The only remaining financial advantage in getting married was a £252 tax allowance for low-income couples introduced in 2015. This is dramatically offset, however, by a substantial "couple penalty" for low-income couples who stand to lose thousands of pounds in welfare payments if they move in together or marry. Campaigners have argued that this is a serious barrier to marriage among the poorest which has been completely neglected by politicians, <a href="https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/MF-policy-brief-Refocus-the-Marriage-Allowance.pdf"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">and they want to refocus the marriage allowance.</mark></a>
Without action, marriage is becoming the preserve of the better off. It is for the elite, for politicians like Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak and Lord Cameron. It’s not for hoi polloi. For them, there is a one-bedroom flat with extortionate rents, contraception and abortion <a href="https://righttolife.org.uk/news/repeat-abortions-accounted-for-over-40-of-all-abortions-in-2022"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">(now at a quarter of a million a year – the highest recorded level)</mark></a>, or the meaningless soul-destroying “liberty” of interchangeable sexual partners to ease the grind of miserable economic servitude. The subsequent collapse of the birth rate created by this calamity is offset by large scale migration to which the Treasury is hopelessly addicted.
It is significant that in the 10 years since 2014, when the Marriage Act came into force, not one Cabinet Minister has said anything publicly in support of marriage. It isn’t just that the Tories wholesale no longer believe in the institution. It’s that they have created a problem in which they cannot say what marriage is and why it is good and desirable. They cannot publicly uphold the view, without being accused of homophobia, that marriage is an exclusive and life-long union of a man and a woman naturally ordered to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of children. They cravenly sit by while those who do are harassed, intimidated and cancelled into silence at risk of being kicked out of their jobs or attracting a visit from police officers in patrol cars painted with rainbows.
Marriage is now slowly disappearing and even the churches are reluctant to come to its defence. The Church of England, true to its Erastian constitution, is embracing the ideological secular consensus with alacrity while others, for whatever reason, appear reluctant to speak out. Even the Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster and president of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, released a message<strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"> </mark></strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://www.cbcew.org.uk/next-government-should-support-a-society-in-which-families-can-flourish-says-cardinal/">in which he advised voters to elect a government “in which families can flourish” but without once mentioning the word “marriage”</a></mark><strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://www.cbcew.org.uk/next-government-should-support-a-society-in-which-families-can-flourish-says-cardinal/">.</a></mark></strong>
There are of course exceptions. <a href="https://www.dioceseofshrewsbury.org/homily-of-bishop-mark-davies-at-annual-marriage-mass-in-chester-8th-june/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">This is what Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury said during a Mass in Chester earlier this month for couples celebrating their landmark wedding anniversaries:</mark></a>
“Research indicates that the single most important factor in a child’s flourishing is the stable relationship of their parents and while this stability is the norm when parents are married, it is the exception when they are not. Recent surveys also indicate most young people in 21st century Britain still aspire to the enduring faithfulness of marriage, even as we suffer one of the highest rates of family breakdown anywhere in Europe and witness the institution of marriage in near-catastrophic decline.
“Sadly, in public life and policy we have seen a parallel diminishment of the place of marriage, as if it were merely a lifestyle choice rather than the bedrock on which the well-being of the individual and society is bound up. Amid the many choices and challenges faced at a General Election, we cannot hope for families and society to flourish if marriage does not flourish. And while we cannot expect a generation of politicians to resolve so great a crisis, we should expect our elected representatives to have the courage and responsibility to recognise the central place of marriage in securing the good of society and of new generations.”
The bishop is right. When marriage is undermined, redefined or abolished, children suffer the most. Britain will remain broken until we have the guts to fix this problem.
Photo EPA/DANIEL KARMANN
<em>(This article is reproduced courtesy of <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="TCW: Defending Freedom">TCW: Defending Freedom</a></mark><strong><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">.</mark> </strong>Simon Caldwell is the author of <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://amzn.eu/d/0giUVPcI">The Beast of Bethulia Park</a>, </mark>a 2022 crime thriller published by Gracewing. The sequel, Lady Mabel's Gold, is due to be published in October)</em>
