How much do you love your partner? Are they worth £30 a year to you? Or perhaps £380 a year? As with much concerning Conservative Party policy, which now includes marriage, it all depends on how much money you have to begin with. That £30 per annum is approximately what the poorest married couple could expect to save under Tory proposals to give married couples a tax break. That £380 a year is how much better off those who already have a large household income could expect to be under the Tories. In fact, this constitutes a hugely redistributive tax – from poor to rich. Those at the top of the economic table would receive 13 times as much in benefits as those at the bottom.
David Cameron would have us believe that this latest attempt to impose a monetary value on marriage has nothing at all to do with cash. “The message is what’s important”, he trumpets from his pulpit. However, the Tory leader is again going out of his way to offer tax breaks to the rich under a plan that would allow couples to share an individual tax allowance of £6,500. This would mean that women (or indeed men) who are not working could transfer their allowance to a partner who could then earn up to £13,000 a year without paying any tax – effectively receiving a subsidy from mothers who work to bring up a family.
Now, I don’t necessarily think marriage is a bad thing. Many of my friends seem to be happily married and I am happy for them. This does not mean I want to offer them a subsidy in the form of a tax break. My married friends are not the same as schools, hospitals or other public services. They don’t empty wheelie bins, put out fires or provide any of other the services for which I pay my taxes. The married people I know are together simply because they are, on the whole, happier that way.
But most of those I am talking about were fairly happy to begin with and could, of course, afford to get married in the first place. This renders Tory assumptions that marriage makes you more successful – and so richer and presumably happier – something of a “chicken and egg” argument, as is the entire issue of social breakdown and broken families. Which comes first?
If Cameron really wishes to mend Britain, he would get more value for money by investing in decent homes, extending childcare provision from 15 to 20 hours a week and creating youth employment opportunities, rather than punishing single parents for their supposed fecklessness while simultaneously employing a regressive tax system to curtail the opportunities afforded to their children.
The Tories’ as yet uncosted plan has nothing at all to do with mending society’s ills and everything to do with a return to the kind of old-fashioned values the Tories have always favoured – as evidenced by the fact that the greatest winners would be couples where one partner can afford to stay at home.
Perhaps this is Cameron’s real masterplan. If so, it is a risky political strategy. In order to win the general election, Cameron needs the votes of women. Unsurprisingly, women are far less keen on tax breaks for married couples than men. It’s unsurprising, because when a man leaves his wife and his children to share his married tax allowance with a new partner, it is invariably the abandoned wife who struggles on alone.
Despite this and notwithstanding the fact that the average modern wedding costs more than my parents’ first house, a recent opinion poll indicated that seven out of 10 young people in this country hope to marry or enter into a civil partnership. Of those, just two
out of 10 cited tax concessions as a reason for doing so. It was ever thus and will probably always be so.
And married people will continue to benefit from the tax advantages already in place. A married person can already transfer assets to exploit their partner’s capital gains allowance, personal allowance and income tax bands. They can also transfer any unused element of their inheritance tax allowance – an amount that would increase exponentially under the Tories. Clearly, all this is only going to save couples money if they have plenty of it already. For those who are less well-off, a tax concession for married couples will not make the slightest bit of difference to their lives.
“It sends out a signal”, Cameron proclaims. Yes it does – a signal that if you are unmarried or, more pertinently, the child of unmarried parents, you will be discriminated against. But that is the whole idea.
Cameron would do well to remember what happened the last time his party meddled with taxation on ideological grounds. There were riots in London’s Trafalgar Square.
If the Tories want to reduce the institution of marriage to a figure on a tax return, then that is up to them. But to suggest, as Cameron seems to be suggesting, that if you are married, you are contributing to society’s wellbeing while if you are cohabiting you are partly responsible for “broken Britain”, is dangerous nonsense. It’s a clarion call to the stupid and the smug.
