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Family splits cause social problems - Tory report.
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I don't attach blame to single parents, and I don't attach blame to parents who split from their partners, but I don't think its rabid conservatism to say that single parents and broken families cause a lot of damage and that it would be a good thing to try and minimise the amount of broken families and single parents.
Single parents try as hard as they can, for the most part, but it isn't a coincidence that the children of single parent and broken families tend to be more likely to commit crime and anti-social behaviour, tend to perform worse in school, and tend to have their own single-parent families at a young age.
Again, such is life.
Don't get me wrong. The more secure and stable the environment a child grows in, the better. If the Tories want to 'promote' marriage, that's fine by me. So long as it is not done at the detriment of unmarried couples and single parents, or their persecution. Which is exactly what happened the last time the Tories were in power and got talking about this subject.
No. A child should be raised in a happy and loving family.
Ideally you could not only say that there should be two parents, but that they should be rich. Because at the end of the day, only rich parents can provide the best care and education for their kids. So perhaps we should discourage those whose combined income is less than, say, 100k a year from having children in the first place...
We should not be idealists. We should be realists. Shit happens. Couples separate. Instead of persecuting those that do we should try to make things better for all concerned.
The Mail is always on its soap-box about single mothers, which doesn't do any good, and its a shame that this intelligent report has been tarnished with their hate-filled brush.
I think that there should be more tax advantages for getting married, I'd start by bringing back MIRAS and the tax allowances for married people. Families not started in marriage seem to have very weak foundations, and rather than promoting co-habitation as an "equal" (because it blatantly isn't) more time should be spent promoting marriage as the best setting to have children.
That has to be the most defeatest attitude I have heard for a while, just because something happens doesn't mean it's a good thing and doesn't mean that efforts shouldn't be made to change it.
Crime happens, such is life, should we just put up with it? I don't think so, I think we should look to the causes of it and try and treat them.
And by the way, the Thatcher government did have it in for single mothers. It said some of the most hateful and wrong things a government can say about some of their citizens and wasn't exactly jumping to help single mothers in trouble.
No, I was saying that rights over someone else's property should be opt-in, not opt-out, and that the proposed changes are utterly ridiculous.
And I still haven't heard a decent reason why someone should lose rights over their own property unless they opt-out of it. The rights that co-habiting couples want already exist, and if they make a conscious decision not to take out those rights then its their decision and their problem if it all goes wrong.
I'm still waiting for you to explain how co-habiting couples are denied access to the rights that married couples enjoy.
Cohabitating couples presently are left in limbo if one of them leaves them or dies.
That is simply not good enough.
Their choice, isn't it?
If they don't want to sign up to the rights (it takes half an hour and costs £100) then them's the risks they take.
Not that I want to distract the thread, but it isn't for the Government to change the law because people are too lazy/"principled" to take advantage of what is already there.
Unless you can show that co-habitees are denied access to the rights (and they aren't, they just choose not to exercise them) then any change in the law isterminally flawed. It isn't for the Government to save the lazy and the misguided from themselves.
Therefore thousands of couples are at risk if that happens.
Now, I know you appear to have trouble understanding that some people do not want to get married because they don't believe in such institution. It has nothing to do with laziness. And laws should serve the people and reflect life and society as they are.
They choose to be at that risk. They weigh up the pros and cons and choose not to get married.
If someone cares more about not getting married than they do about their partner's rights then that is their decision, and their lookout. If principles are worth more than their partner's security then that's a real shame, but I don't see why the Government should then go and interfere with everyone else's property rights to humour their choice.
Homosexual people should have the same rights to marriage as straight people, and now they do, but rights should not be imposed on either straight or gay people. If people don't want to get their estate in order then that's tough cheese.
If I wanted my partner to have rights on my house then she would be on the title deeds and in the will. If I don't want her to have those rights then she won't (you'd be amazed how many married people don't have their spouse on the title deeds, and so they have little rights on the property).
Why should someone get rights over my property without my express consent? It's my house unless I expressly state otherwise.
Millions of people would love to get their estate in order. Currently they can't.
If you or anyone else is so concerned about an evil, gold digging partner trying to get half of everything there are always contracts and opt-out clauses of course.
If a person wants their partner to have a stake on the property, their partner will be on the title deeds and their partner will be named in the will. Either that or their partner will be married to them.
Ergo, if the partner is on neither, then the owner of the property clearly doesn't want their partner to have a stake on the property. The Government is imposing a stake on the property without the consent of the owner.
Yes they can.
They can go to the registry office, sign a slip of paper, and have all the rights they want. It only costs about £100.
Name one person who is legally prevented from protecting their partner in the event of relationship failure or death.
Which, of course, contradicts your first assertion that the Government is not imposing anything on anyone.
If nothing is being imposed on anyone, why on earth would you need to opt-out?
You are talking about marriage, aren't you?
If you are, you should know very well that marriage is a lot more than going "to the registry office and sign a piece of paper"
Is not a question of imposing. Is a question of giving rights and support.
No different from people who get married and suddenly see half their estate belonging to their spouse isn't it?
You must be really outraged on principle at least that the laws of the land impose all those liberty-destroying rules on people who get married.
Here.
No its not. Or, to be more exact, it isn't if you don't want it to be.
The legal status of my marriage is nothing more than a sheet of paper which I have signed and which my wife has signed. The emotional and moral status is more because we married in a Church in front of God, but the law doesn't give a stuff about that.
Well, it is, because if you get married you explicitly consent to the implications of getting married.
When do you explicitly consent to a partner getting half of your property? When you have children? When she stays at yours more than hers? When she moves her toothbrush and a spare set of knickers in? When she comes in for coffee?
The meaning is obviously quite different for millions of others. That's why the government has proposed to introduce legislation to cover them.
I await the government's proposals in that respect. Common sense dictates when you have been living together for a set period of time. What that period should be is of course open to debate.
So long as no government chooses to alineate (let alone persecute) certain family types.
As I said before, I don't have a problem with the Tories promoting marriage and married families. But I make no apologies for distrusting them when it comes to the treatment they'd be giving to non-nuclear families. Their track record isn't exactly rosy.
It's like Israel/Palestine all over again
Personally I think there should be more done to give people the skills and education they need in the first place to make more informed choices than settling down with the first person who asks you and popping out a kid a year.
It's not the splitting up that's the problem, it's the gettig together in the first place
It's always refreshing to hear a politician saying the obvious. I've noticed years ago that family breakdown is leading to social breakdown. The family is the unit which has kept society together for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not just a coincidence that one cannot manage without the other. The family unit is also needed to maintain our democracy. A culture of state dependency is fostered through family breakdown - indeed, it costs the Government £20billion annually. It's in their interests to deal with this. If nothing else, they can spend that £20billion instead on keeping an illegal occupation in Iraq and an utterly pointless occupation in Afghanistan. But I digress.
Two-parent families are better than one-parent families, for obvious reasons. The evidence of this is overwhelming. Children from one-parent families are more likely to become drug addicts, alcoholics, are more likely to be poorly educated and thus potentially unemployable. I make no apologies to single mothers and fathers for saying any of this. I was in a relationship for quite some time with a single mother and I saw first hand what it was like. Although the situation was somewhat different - she was a single mum because the father of her child had died a few years earlier - she agrees with the conclusions I came to.
The question is asked: what can the Government do to keep families together? It can start by bringing back the Married Couples Allowance so disgracefully abolished by Gordon Brown, the most dangerous Chancellor that this country has seen in a very long time, and a man who must never be allowed to become Prime Minister. The state can help out financially, but there isn't much more that they can do. The rest is down to individual couples, and to personal responsibility. But these are very unfashionable concepts to the Left-wing mafia that run this country, so we will probably continue to go down this route to social meltdown.
Before anyone tries to demonise me as some kind of homphobic, nasty Middle Englander, let me make some points clear. I supported civil partnerships. Indeed, I think they should be extended to cover non-sexual relationships, such as two elderly sisters who live together. As a bisexual man, I'm absolutely fine about homosexuality. I've no problem with it. But all kinds of families must be helped out, and not some at the expense of others.
It is when the state has to pick up a £20bn tab because people are having children in insecure relationships and then raising anti-social criminal children.
Discuss.