Sophie Heawood: why is David Cameron so afraid of single parents?
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Version 0 of 1. Sometimes I think that David Cameron is actually obsessed with marriage, like some kind of Groomzilla, poring over wedding venue brochures in his lunch break and jotting down shortlists of suitable bridesmaids on his phone. So often does he speak about the importance of marriage that I am almost 100% certain that, if he could just get the party whip behind him on this, he’d give up hosting Tory conferences altogether. In their place, he would conduct mass, Moonie-style weddings of absolutely anybody in Britain he could persuade to get hitched. George Osborne would be brought in as ring-bearer, and Nick Clegg made into the nation’s pageboy, while Michael Gove would rise to recite the same best man’s speech over and over, memorised through all that rote-learning on which he’s so keen. So it came as little surprise that, when Cameron last week announced his plans to raise the threshold of inheritance tax from £325,000 to £500,000, he gave a special mention to married couples. A married couple will get the same allowance each, meaning that, over time, they can leave, say, a family home worth a million quid to their children, tax free. You might, at this point, be rolling your eyes and saying, “For God’s sake, the poorest sector of society are now living off food banks and this man is not only offering tax cuts to rich people, but to rich dead people.” You’d be right. Yet what also struck me was that, even when talking about the wealthiest members of society, Cameron still can’t quite see how single parents fit into things. As a single parent myself, I’m used to spotting his coded assaults on us – such as his plan to take away housing benefit from 18-25-year-olds, without ever mentioning, despite it being clear from government figures, that half of these claimants are unmarried mothers. Or when he replaced the Child Support Agency with something he said was more efficient, but that skint single parents would now have to pay to use. Or when he made his first tax break for married couples who, given they can share many costs, might not actually be the people in society who need it the most. Now he’s moved on to rich single parents. So, the estate of a single mother in this new tax bracket (yes, they do exist), who paid for the family home herself, and raised her children in it, will avoid tax on only a house of half the value of one a married couple could leave to the same number of children. Dave, would it come as such a surprise for you to learn that, in every tier of society, there are people raising their kids on their own? For someone whose plan to win the election seems entirely geared around ensuring you use the words “hard-working families” on an hourly basis, you might want to try to spot the ones who are, just possibly, working the hardest of all. We’re not all in a coalition, you know. Of course, not everything in life can include everyone. No one speech can mention everything. I do get this. The other day, I heard a famous actor complaining that National Siblings Day (not an occasion most people have noticed) was an insulting kick in the teeth to only children, who have no siblings to celebrate. It did strike me then that we might be losing the crucial differentiation between “something that seems benign enough and just isn’t aimed at me” and “something that isn’t aimed at me and therefore must have been invented solely to bring about my destruction”. A policy that celebrates married couples is not necessarily aiming to kick the unmarried in the teeth. It’s just that, when Cameron pushed for gay marriage, which was brilliant, it did seem very much part of a Tory plan to make gay couples move towards a traditional nuclear model, too. Let’s have everybody assimilate to this sort of lifestyle, their rhetoric seemed to say, and make all relationships look a bit like this. So now we have a state that rewards people who have same-sex weddings and overlooks those who aren’t having weddings at all. It’s a funny sort of progress. The party that claims to be all about small government does seem peculiarly interested in our private lives. Well, for what it’s worth, I think marriage is great. I also think the Seychelles are great. It’s just that I’ve never been to either. And that’s all Dave needs to know. • Follow Sophie on Twitter. |