Electoral Anger

It may not to be anyone's surprise who has followed my blog that I'm angry about the Conservative plans to 'recognise marriage in the tax system'.

By some complicated system, you can transfer £750 of your tax allowance to your spouse, essentially saving them £150 in tax at the base 20% rate.

This is going to reaffirm the rightful place of marriage in society.

I find it hard to contain my irritation at such utter nonsense. Firstly, the thought that marriage is the magic solution to all wrongs. Putting aside my past comments on this, the fact that the thought that more marriage will suddenly overcome all problems in society is nonsense. That, and it's promoted some traditional vision of a married family, where the husband earns the money and the woman stays at home ironing his clothes and cooking his food and looking after the 2.2 children. What utter rubbish that this is the sort of thing that our 'progressive' opposition party is proposing to legislate, a throwback to Victorian morals of the woman with her place beside the stove and in the nursery? It's absolute utter nonsense.

At this point anyone listening to me typing this out would be clearly able to tell how much this angers me by the ferocity with which I am typing this out.

Anyway, back to the rant. We are talking about £150 for some families (not all, obviously) to somehow be enough of an incentive to mend society. Now, if we somehow accept the utterly ludicrous premise that marriage is how to right all of society's ills, and that the idea of government-sponsered bribery of couples to marry, then even accepting this the concept is ludicrous.

£150 on an annual basis works out to £2.89 a week.

TWO POUNDS EIGHTY NINE PENCE? You think that a tax recognition for marriage will encourage couples to stay together through difficulties for the prospect of nearly three pounds a week? "Well, we were fighting and there was domestic violence, and he cheated on me, but the £2.89 from the government meant it was worthwhile to stay together."

Is this someone's idea of REALITY? That a patronising, economically irrelevant, archaic Victorian-era throwback recognition of marriage will somehow be sufficient to 'mend society' of all its alleged ills? Who came up with this? Why do they think it makes sense? What sort of thinking is it that concludes that well, there are a lot of problems in the country, and this will solve at least some of them as a top priority of action?

It's just total, utter bollocks.