The Marriage Foundation: dodgy statistics and Victorian-era morality

The Marriage Foundation is a lobbying organisation that was recently created by Sir Paul Coleridge for £150,000 to “be a national champion for marriage, strengthening the institution for the benefit of children, adults and society as a whole”. [1] It’s based here in Cambridge, run out of the Jubilee Centre, which describes itself as “a Christian social reform organisation that offers a biblical perspective on issues and trends of relevance to the general public”. [2]

It’s tempting to just laugh at this – after all, if people want to “be a national champion for marriage” what’s the harm? It seems almost too funny and old-fashioned to take seriously. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find a dangerous ideology that’s being used to justify vicious attacks on women, on families, and on the working classes in general. The people pushing this ideology just happen to be rich, and linked to the Conservative Party.

The ideology behind the Marriage Foundation

Here it is, in point form:

• The only morally correct type of family is a married heterosexual couple with the woman doing the bulk of the child-raising work. Every other kind of family is morally bad.

• The most important and fundamental cause of all social problems is families that are morally bad, i.e. families that don’t fit the married heterosexual mould. People who are poor, homeless, unemployed, addicted to drugs, or criminal, are that way because of their own moral defectiveness, and specifically because they (or their parents) are not married.

• Thus the way to solve all of society’s problems is to make everyone get married. Obviously.

These ideas are so ridiculous that I feel silly even writing about them, except that they are actually being used by the government to shape social policy. This is the ideology behind Daily Mail headlines about “scroungers” and “feral youths” and “Broken Britain” and “neighbours from hell”, although you won’t catch the luminaries behind the Marriage Foundation using such uncouth language. And this is the ideology the government uses to justify its vicious attacks on the welfare state. The lower classes don’t need decent schools or Sure-start centres, or affordable childcare, or housing, or money for the unemployed or for disabled people or for those whose jobs to not pay enough for them to live above the poverty level; no, they just need to get married.

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