- From 1889 first-time-marriages rose steadily peaking at 340,000 pa. in 1970
- From 1842 the numbers of ‘live births’ has climbed annually
The arguments today surrounding benefit dependency was also common currency in 1832. It was argued then that the old relief system handed out aid regardless of the merit of the applicant and that larger families received more relief and this encouraged larger families that could not support themselves (for ‘parish’ relief in 1832, read Family Credits in 2006). Women with illegitimate children in the 1800s could also obtain relief, which the Commissioners believed encouraged immorality and children to be born out of wedlock.
The second of the Royal Commission (1852-3) looked at the distress caused by the workings of the marriage, inheritance and divorce laws. Most notable for this text was its findings on “Irregular Marriages” first mentioned earlier in Chap 14 and 15.
Much of the misery these irregular marriages caused stemmed from marriage practices in Scotland that wrecked the legitimate expectations of widows and which plunged her and her children into poverty.
The inheritance rights of widows and families in England could be totally wiped out if, on her husbands death, it could be shown that he had a previous wife from a previous verbal marriage (e.g. in Scotland). This fate was also true of widowed wives in Wales and Ireland.
Marriages in England, Wales and Ireland all required a bona fide priest to be in attendance. Marriages in Scotland, however, did not require a priest, just a form of words between consenting adults.
This put Scotland on a collision course with Europe and with English customs and law in particular, and was exacerbated by the economic expansion.
The early 1700 saw the expansion of trade, the introduction of machine-based manufacturing colonialisation and the Act of Union (1706). The fledgling Industrial Revolution and subsequent industrial boom of the 1800s sucked in many workers migrate from an impoverished Scotland into a wealthier England.
Some men (and women) spent so many years in England that they effectively started new lives.
Only upon his demise did wives learn of the existence of their husband’s former / earlier marriage to another woman. The prospect of a comfortable old age was snatched from them. Their future years would be transformed into a series of bankrupting litigations over inheritance with the certainty of enforced poverty (Shaw v Shaw, 1954).
Where no formal marriage existed, and DNA yet to be invented, widows had to show that any children had been cared / funded by her husband during his lifetime in order to gain any benefit from his estate (Appendix J).
Other than direct inheritance (upon death), marriage was and remains the single most important method for property to be transmitted and for this reason “clandestine” marriages have always taken place. Irregular marriages include ‘clandestine’, secret, and enforced marriages.
To add a veneer of authenticity to these disreputable proceedings (and possibly overcome any lingering doubt that the marriage was ‘legal’ and permanent, proceedings were conducted using the ritual of the Book of Common Prayer, for a fee, by a clergyman of questionable scruples.
Most importantly, the advantage of such a ceremony, though under duress and illegal, was that the marriage was nonetheless recognised as legally binding having full property rights in ecclesiastical and common law (Appendix J).
Take, for instance, the case of headstrong Kitty Mellish, a giddy young thing who knew nothing of inheritance law but who knew that being under 21 she required her parents consent to marry and that it would be refused. Fearing parental opposition to their romantic suitor young men and women would marry in ‘secret’. An heir or heiress was regarded as credit cards are in the 21st century and naturally attracted the criminal element who kidnapped them for gain or deceptively ‘fell in love’ with them to gain control of the inheritance.
By the 1730s public concern was being expressed at the number of ‘clandestine marriage’, the system’s impotency reflected in complaints in the London newspapers about the fraudulent seduction of heirs and heiresses. Parents with daughters felt especially vulnerable to kidnap, blackmail or if forcibly married her subsequent abandonment and impoverishment by her gold-digging ‘husband’.
Ecclesiastical, common and equity law, all had control over some aspect of marriage. Medieval canon law determined the rules of marriage (they were revised in the Canons of 1604) and enforced by the church courts. The criminal courts could be involved if either party chose to sue the other for a statutory offence such as bigamy. Equity law had jurisdiction over trust deeds and became involved in marriage where there was litigation concerning marriage settlements and the enforcement of trust deeds.
It was possible for clandestine marriages to set one court against another. Even supposing thee difficulties were overcome and the marriage annulled the victim’s family then faced the troubling question of their daughter’s future marriagability prospects.
In this atmosphere the divorce courts of the time found that their workload was overwhelmingly one of deciding which marriage was valid, not dissolving them. (Appendix J).
Then, as now, the problems of poverty, fatherless children, abandonment and unmarried mothers continue to represent a running sore. The consistent connection between a father constantly active in the household and that same family’s absence from want, in the form of abject poverty, is a bulwark that dare not be acknowledged by reformers.
They prefer the explanation of poverty and social exclusion for the poorer outcomes and for the solution to be the ‘state socialisation’ of the family.
The conventional wisdom asserts that government alone can’t influence events and cannot hope to alter the way people think, lead their lives or make their choices.
It is downright dishonest to promote this theory.
There are countless instances where government alone hugely influence people and events.
If such government protestations were true why do reformers seek changes through the law ? Why do advertising agencies exist if they cannot hugely influence people and events ? What was wartime propaganda if it was not to alter people’s perceptions of the grim life they lead ?
Government and legislation can alter society. The moral and the actual influence of the Royal Commission on the Law of Divorce (1852-3) saw the complete eradication of the so-called “irregular marriages”. If in the unsophisticated 19th century, a government could manage to control marriage patterns surely this can happen again in the 21st century when government is anything but unsophisticated ?
The Law Commission must subscribe to the view that it has the power to alter human behaviour and events; otherwise it would not have floated its many and varied proposal over the years. The question unanswered is what sort of society does the Law Commission want to bequeath to us ?
1. Does government and/or the Law Commission want only cohabitation for all ?
2. Does the Law Commission view cohabitation as one more step towards making the mother-and-child unit a ward of the state ?
3. If this is the case, how are the state’s bureaucracies expected to cope with serial and multiple partnering ?
4. Their proposals may also encourage simultaneous partnering - which among spouses is termed bigamy - and which every advanced civilisation has criminalised. Will this be easy to handle as no benefits are paid to men/fathers in any eventuality ?
5. If nothing else, the Law Commission should give consideration to the implication at the mundane level of the effect on the birth rate, NIC contributions and pension provision. SMHs cannot fund the welfare state into the future.
6. With money haemorrhaging to bale out social platforms will we have no money, as New Zealand found, and have to sell off its Navel and Air forces ?
Forty years from now will it be common for women to have several ‘50% shares’ of pensions from 5 or 6 former ‘partners’ ? Will women still be cosseted by the state as men are forced to sleep in the streets and rely on charity handouts ?
Is that the future they see ?
It is not difficult to understand why some commentators see cohabiting couple households as the 'problem family' for both now and into the future (Appendix C).
19. Brenda Hoggett & Ruth Deech
Brenda Hoggett & Ruth Deech should not be automatically demonised or viewed as any more malevolent than any other Law Commissioner. However, the individual contributions they both made during their tenure were horrendous. Collectively, the most significant outcome was the creation of ‘the underclass’ and human misery on a pandemic scale. In the eyes of many commentators the Law Commission’s conduct catapulted into that category usually reserved for genocidal maniacs.
Hoggett & Deech were only two minds among many others, who collectively shared the same cosmic stream and who must collectively share the guilt. They honestly thought that their sort of change could be brought about relatively painlessly.
Deech and Hoggett are useful gauges in that they are a generation apart yet both failed to learn from life’s history lessons and to understand that actions have consequences - sometimes unforeseen ones.
Both failed to appreciate that human frailties and greed exist not only in the past but always.
One of the duo, Deech, has now recognised her misguided ideals of divorce reforms were damaging while the other, Hoggett, once the arch-enemy of married couples is herself now resigned to marriage as her preferred option.
Brenda Hoggett
Brenda Hoggett was an ambitious provincial barrister who was appointed to the Law Commission as the Commissioner responsible for 'family law' in 1984. She held the same post as the present team leader, Mr. Stuart Bridge. She was well qualified to comment on marriage and divorce, having experienced both on more than one occasion. Her second break-up is thought to have coincided with a move to London from Manchester and a career elevation.
Unfortunately, she was the fox put in charge of the hen house. She is a confirmed radical feminist, the tenets of which bar her from drafting legislation impartially. When she became a member of the Commission in 1984, she declared that she was “a feminist of the kind who would like to see changes in the way society is organised”.
One can only wonder why the Law Commission would appoint a person with arguably messianic views. The relevance of this woman cannot be underestimated and her key beliefs can be found in her essay entitled 'Ends & Means: The Utility of Marriage' 1980). In it she points out that family law “no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriages or any other union”.
At the time this news was greeted with widespread astonishment, as if some great truth had been revealed. Only among men's and fathers groups did her remarks chime with their growing conclusion and therefore appeared unremarkable.
Hoggett had, by 1980, reached the conclusion that British society should no longer attempt to buttress marriage. But she went further. She also concluded there was no point in attempting to buttress cohabitation by the unmarried.
This is Hoggett’s first but telling contradiction of the Law Commission’s present endeavours. Her other contradictions extended to compensation to the unmarried.
Hoggett was of the view that “extending the same remedies to the unmarried” meaning the gifting of money, home and children to the female cohabitee, was to lose sight of the objective. Attention should, in her opinion, be concentrated on long-term cohabitation continued to serve any useful purpose at all (be they via marriage or marriage-like institutions),
These, it should be recalled, were the heady halcyon days of abortion on demand, of The Pill and ignorance of the increased probability that they both increased cancers and thromboses later in life. It was an era yet to be blighted by the long shadow of HIV and AIDS, where promiscuity could be safely encouraged and multiple, short-term, serial monogamy was 'de riguere'.
Four years later in 1984 Hoggett had moved to the Law Commission and it is from her period in charge that we owe much of the present package of divorce law reforms (however dysfunctionally and inefficiently they work in practice).
More recently, in 1992, Mrs. Hoggett underlined her commitment to dismembering marriage in an article entitled 'Family Law Reform: Where Will It End?' which surveyed the changes in family law over the past 30 years. (King's College Law Journal).
The contradiction for her and the Law Commission is that Hoggett questions whether it is ‘necessary, desirable or even practicable for the state’ to grant licenses to enter into relationships, yet nonetheless wants to interfere by de-constructing it, while the Law Commission, for its part, wants to regulate freely entered into cohabitation that then founder.
'Ends & Means: The Utility of Marriage' is a title that prompts several questions One is whether she uses ends and means within the ideological definition of the radical left, i.e. one justifying the other.
The second is Bentham's definition of 'utility', namely the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. If that was her aim it has not been achieved; her dream has soured.
Outcomes show that parties who divorce may feel an initial degree of happiness upon separation but it is short lived, superficial, and followed by increasing depths of poverty. For the children caught up in the process, unhappiness and failure is proven to dog them into adult life.
This cannot be the Benthamite utility Hogget was expecting but was it the dividend she wanted based on ‘the ends justifying the means’ ?
Perversely, for these contributions to our society Hogget who reverted to her maiden name to become Mrs. Justice Hale, was elevated to the House of Lords and has been made a law lord.
Ruth Deech
Ruth Deech was born in London in 1943, the child of Austrian Jews who fled Nazi persecution and sought asylum in England. Curiously, her secondary education was at a one of the foremost Christian schools, Christ's Hospital (aka Bluecoat). She left with no suitable or many school qualifications but with more than adequate ‘connections’ was accepted into St Anne's College Oxford (her well placed ‘patron’ who made this possible continued to assist her career development).
It was a belief that was well rewarded; Deech gained a First in Law in 1965. A year later at the age of 23 she was doing research for the Law Commission in London into divorce law, matrimonial property, and illegitimacy (1966-67). This is said to have prompted her interest in family law while doing research, though it must be remembered her father was also an attorney in Austria prior to 1937. Is it reasonable to suppose that the allegedly discriminatory nature of divorce in those days reminded her of the discrimination her father faced in not being able to practice as a lawyer after ‘annexation’ ?
It does seem a thin argument to justify her later conduct and one that cannot easily be reconciled within the Torah. It is an argument that lacks a degree of persuasiveness.
After 1965 she gained an MA from Brandeis University in the USA (this date appears to collide with her work for the Law Commission ?). She was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1967. She taught law in Canada (where she may have become radicalised) and then astonishingly three years later, in 1970, becomes a Fellow and Tutor in Law at St Anne's College aged 27.
Alone among former Law Commissioners Ruth Deech has now recognised that her participation in the reforms in the late 1960s were a mistake and ill-considered. In a Daily Mail article of 1995 she said looking back over the past 25 years she now realised that she and the Law Commission had “got it horribly wrong”.
The late Sixties and early Seventies were a time of change and experimentation. At one and the same time novel divorce reform legislation surfaced all over the Western World, particularly in English speaking countries. Countries as far apart as Reagan’s California and New Zealand the years 1969 to 1973 were key. All the legal changes bore strikingly similar, intentions, wording and alleged benefits. All the proposals, in fact, appeared to be copied. All have subsequently proven socially disastrous in the various countries and for same reasons.
All have proven expensive for the various Exchequers - in Jan 2002 New Zealand had to sell off its
entire Air Force of jet fighters and all its Navy frigates to maintain spending on social reforms – something we predicted in 1999.
By the time the Family Law Bill was under discussion in 1994 the scales had fallen somewhat from her eyes prompting her to publish a booklet called ‘Divorce Dissent’ that picked up on all the principle failings of the regime she had helped to concrete into place. In the autumn of her life Ruth Deech, who is also Chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, could afford to ruminate on her youthful excesses and confess deliberate falsehoods.
Though some may welcome her recantation she has not followed it through with the same society changing action of her reforms. Writing about one’s errors and then walking away is not a true act of atonement.
Nonetheless parliamentarians from both parties cited her extensively during the 1995 debate during of yet another divorce Bill. The claim was that as someone who had “apparently always opposed us on everything else and so cannot be accused of being a ….. stooge”.
Whatever her past ideologies and views on ‘family values’ may have been, Deech was compelled to write:
"Our ancillary relief is already a vengeful process and is based on the premise that all husbands should maintain their wives regardless of conduct, and regardless of her ability to keep herself. The pressure to settle in twelve months will make it worse in every respect.”
But in her letter to Mr. Leigh MP (Cons), Ruth Deech then reveals that she had not ideologically
fully reconstructed herself. Her main concern, and that of men such as Mr. Leigh, MP, was ensuring the flow of wealth from one party to the other was not compromised when she wrote:
“Mediators will perforce [i.e. willy nilly - Ed] lend themselves to this process of settling everything regardless of justice within 12 months. The wife who is reliant on Legal Aid will be at the mercy of the mediation process whereas the husband who can afford to pay a lawyer will be able to use ancillary relief for his own ends. Will mediators be able to tell wives about pension-splitting, the effects of the Child Support Agency, mortgage relief, intestacy law, joint bank accounts, etc? It is not surprising that where there is any money at all, ancillary matters can take more than 12 months."
– Hansard, 24 Apr 1996 : Column 505.
Strange Bedfellows
Thus an unholy alliance of opposites is created. Reform and policy formulation is captured by radical left-wing thinking which embraces the theories of radical feminism promoted by lobby groups Red Pepper, the Angry Brigade, WNC, Faucet Society, Women’s Aid etc. All men, in their view, have in the past been getting away Scot Free, now this generation of men must be made to pay.
The establishment forces, traditionally diametrically opposed to such ideological lobby group, hold the chivalrous male view that divorcing men should “do the right thing” and provide for their former
wife. Convergence becomes inescapable as both parties, for entirely different reasons, seek to skewer all husbands, and make them pay regardless of income. To achieve their ends radical feminists find themselves in bed with politicians and the judiciary.
Working to an Agenda
Polly Toynbee in television interviews at the time and in her The Independent article, explained that the break-up of a marriage should be a cause for celebration. When the Family Law Act 1996 (FLA 1996) received Royal Ascent she described it as the culmination of 30 years of relentless work.
When asked about the deterrent effect the FLA 1996 would have on the younger male generation Lord Scarman, the first chairman of the Law Commission, said he saw the FLA as providing ‘protection for both male and female’ spouses.
Later in that same conversation, when pressed about the quality of judgments he expressed satisfaction and a belief that courts were already open to the general public.
In words that predicted Toynbee’s response and knowing her agenda Deech had earlier written of the incremental step approach adopted over the decades:
“Every 30 years or so, when divorce is re-examined, well known social factors are blamed for the high divorce rate. In the 1950s it was blamed on lack of housing, youthful marriages, emancipation of women and high expectation by them.
In the 1960s it was blamed on the housing shortage, shot-gun marriages and the ability to legitimate children born out of wedlock by subsequent marriage, along with the availability of legal aid.
What has always been ignored is examination of the process of changing divorce law and the effects of the change on the public.
The relationship between the law and rates of break down of marriages is by no means straight forward but credulity is strained if one continues to acquit the law of any effect”.
The reader might have noticed that it is not “every 30 years” that divorce is re-examined, in fact. Since 1971 new legislation has been proposed and adopted almost every two years.
The technique of grinding down credulity in divorce (cited above), amounts to revolution by incremental steps that is today underway in the sphere of cohabitation.
Deech’s 1994 booklet concedes (p 10) that the Law Commission had knowingly used false / selective statistics to misleadingly make its case in 1969. She wrote that as a result of reliance on low levels of probity (i.e. low grade data) and the use of faulty information from the ‘social sciences’, the Law Commission ensured that it “led to wholly inaccurate predictions about the effects of the Divorce Reform Act 1969” - in short it was a social disaster.
To round matters out, the agreed compromise that ‘only the innocent party would be granted a divorce’ was swept aside in a secular free-for-all headed by the Law Commission.
‘Spin’ is not a new phenomenon but the public was incredibly naïve in 1969. It was ‘conned’ by the exaltations that reforms would actually strengthen marriage, bring greater stability and protect children; the same claims have made but never made a reality every time divorce reform has been mooted.
Today, in 2006, the public is no longer so naïve, but 25 years after the 1969 Act, so complete had been the ‘spin’ and deception that this speech from the Bishop of Oxford (dated 1994) reflects a typically held view:
I believe I speak for the majority of bishops of the Church of England in warmly welcoming Parts I and II of the Family Law Bill [to make divorce-on-demand a reality]
I am particularly sorry to have to disagree with the noble Baroness [Young] on this point.
It is indeed true that the number of divorces has risen steeply in recent years; but it is not inevitable that that trend will continue. Many noble Lords will have read the latest figures for the number of divorces, and in fact they have gone down by 7,000 a year, or 4 per cent. The initial rise in the rate of divorce when the law was changed had at least something to do with the great backlog that had developed of marriages that had indeed severely broken down and for which, sadly, divorce was the least bad course of action.
The Bishop of Oxford remarks in 1994 that divorce was down by 7,000 (i.e. 4%) is shown as an arrow in Fig 4.
The scenario promised by reformers in order to get the Bill passed in 1969 was that the temporary ‘blip’ seen in the 1947 to 1950 era would be seen again but only in the first few years of enactment. The impression given was that after the 1969 Act had been in operation for two to three years the ‘great backlog’ of loveless marriages would have been cleared and by 1974 or 1975 the numbers divorcing would be visibly declining to their 1960s level. In the event, the promised temporary blip became a permanent 30 year long stampede (see Fig 4 & Fig 19 above).
The fall in divorces referred to by the bishop must have been a 7,000 ‘blip’, for numbers have stubbornly refused to decrease. At best they can be said to have ‘plateaued’ - partly due to fewer people marrying.
Only the Law Commission could solemnly state, as if a throwback to Soviet propaganda, that:-
“the increases in the numbers of divorces does not, as is sometimes alleged, indicate a fundamental weakening of the fabric of society”. (Hansard 30 Nov 1995 : Column 732)
Deech gives us more insights about the true workings of the Law Commission than we know what to do with; how it misled and how it coldly ‘positioned’ public perception prior to draft legislation.
In her CPS booklet she reveals how:
· Skillful use of Legal Aid can be as effective as any piece of legislation
· “Due process” can be by-passed, for instance, when judges agree procedural changes between themselves.
· Internally agreed procedural changes can be as effective as any piece of legislation.
‘Special procedures’, which were introduced in 1973, now apply to 99% of all undefended cases. [p7]. They allowed the need for oral evidence to be swept away and divorce achieved merely by the presentation of documents alone without a court appearance.
The knock-on effect is that protection against being divorced against one’s will, in-built in the 1973 Act, was quietly abolished (it is thought that only seven cases of ‘hardship’ have been heard in court since 1971). In a twinkling, reconciliation which formed a main spar of earlier reforms became redundant. In a word, the bumbling bishops had been bamboozled.
In 1997 legal aid was withdrawn for undefended cases and financial provisions (both procedures favoured ex-wives), and the awarding of custody was separated from the degree nisi aspect.
This, Deech notes, suddenly made divorce very much more protracted and expensive. It probably also led to a strengthening of mother as the de fault child guardian pending a final outcomes. This could only influence subsequent CAFCASS Reports which tend to confirm the status quo.
Figures for Michgan (USA) show that in 2002 the trend in joint custody awards, at 23.44%, had increased slowly and as a result mother custody has slipped to 64.77% while father only custody was 10%. Compared to Britain, these are high levels of joint and father-only custody awards not seen in England since the mid 1980s. (see Annex E).
What does this hold for cohabiting in the future ? It tells us not to rely on governmental or any judicial promises - and certainly not to trust the assurances of the Law Commission. At best they will be adhered to for 2 or 3 years before some ‘technical adjustment’ have to be made.
20. Cohabitation in France
The Law Commission makes helpful reference to civil unions in France in footnotes to its 2006 and 2002 papers, e.g. Sharing Homes, a Discussion Paper (Law Com No 278, Nov 2002).
France’s recent legal changes (circa 1999) and the manner in which they were undertaken make for interesting reading in the present UK debate. Innately homosexual persons, and not those with mere affectations, normally make up about 2% of any country’s population - yet their influence in Britain, Canada, France, Australia, the USA, New Zealand etc, is out of all proportion to their number.
Known as ‘pacte civil de solidarité’ (PACS or PaCS), they are available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. It is a lesser form than marriage but brings certain rights and responsibilities that allow for two adults to organise their lives. There are 2.5 million French couples cohabiting outside marriage (4.1% of the Pop.), the highest rate in Europe outside the Nordic countries.
Legally, a PaCS is a "contract" which is stamped and registered by a clerk of the court. Somewhat confusingly, individuals who have registered a PaCS are still considered "single" with regard to family status for some duties, while for other purposes they are increasingly considered in the same way as married couples. PaCS replaced the older regime of certificat de concubinage the official term for heterosexual cohabitation (mistress) which carried only certain benefits for the other partner in the union, and did not settle any issue regarding property, taxes, etc.
PaCS impose the filing of joint income tax after 3 years. Additionally, an annual wealth tax (impôt sur la fortune) applies to the combined assets of both partners. Unlike married couples, PaCS enjoy no right of survivorship, have no automatic inheritance rights, no survivor’s pension and there is no provision for the joint adoption of an unrelated child or the second-parent adoption of the partner’s child. This seems utterly logical and fair given that they will never have the expenses of children and the need to provide for them.
Not surprisingly PaCS met with some controversy from “traditionalist”, the right and those that believed family values would be compromised and disastrous for French society. (France is, for most British palettes extremely secular in its political institutions).
A Deputy, Christine Boutin declared:
“Proposing to people of the same sex that they can live a caricature of family is a decision that lacks respect to them. They are given an illusion. Their suffering is covered by a veil of hypocritical modesty”
. .. .. All civilisations that recognised and justified homosexuality as a normal lifestyle met decadence.”
One immediately thinks of the Weimar Republic. The ‘normalisation’ of homosexuality by the host society remains a central ambition for gays and lesbians so that their peculiar lifestyle can be validated (it takes on an importance that heterosexuals cannot fully understand). This is not just true of France and England but of all advanced western democracies.
Nothing destroys the concept of marriage faster than gay and lesbian demands which paradoxically yearn to be cloaked in its respectability. Civil unions, cohabiting rights per se, inheritance tax avoidance and the right to immediately set about divorcing one another, allows gays and lesbians to display how alike to us they are - how normal.
British politicians pontificate on the liberalising of laws and rights for minorities but are too timid to state that civil unions amounts to no more than a cruel caricature.
In tautological terms that will be familiar to English ears the minister for justice (Grade des Sceaux) described PaCS as “a new way of conjugality, answering many needs and inscribed in continuity”.
What we have come to expect in England, namely, first getting the door open, is now underway in
France; the government has begun preparations to expand the rights granted under the original PaCS laws (sometimes referred to as ‘paving legislation’ in the UK).
In comparison to England a French parliamentary paper "Report on the Family and the Rights of Children" (Jan 2006) recommended increasing some rights given in PaCS in areas such as property rights, laws of succession and taxation, but it recommended maintaining prohibitions on marriage, adoption and access to medically assisted reproduction for same-sex couples.
The report also argued that the differences in rights between concubinage, PaCS and marriage reflect different levels of commitment and obligations on the part of the couples who enter into them.
The Law Commission could benefit from absorbing such an appraisal.
21. Intellectual Betrayal
The gross inadequacies depicted in the previous chapters, however, are simply waved aside by policy shapers and reformers. They are not seen as reasons for altering our present divorce system, even though their original stated reason for reform was always that it would help children.
The traditional role of the intellectual in society has been to deepen our understanding of place and time, and to awaken institutions, educators and politicians. However, this traditional role has been abandoned for one of self-glorification, televisual appearances promoting their latest book, moral and drug notoriety and - worst of all - mediocrity. Prof Normans Dennis has described the process of academics satisfied in seeking only ‘safe berths’ at universities.
The intellectual arguments used today are the same that were heard in the 1960s. They are not only tired but inaccurate. They can no longer be viewed as novel, or successful or generally beneficial to any sector of the population. In essence they have been a complete failure, and there is 30 years of human debris all around us to prove the point.
One of Britain’s foremost thinkers, Roger Scruton, has coined the term 'oikophobe' to describe intellectuals who hate nations or regard them as outdated. In his book, The Need for Nations, (pp.33-38) Scruton defines 'oiks' as having a 'hatred of home' which leads them to demand international or Europe-wide rule. 'Oiks' are so absorbed in their agenda that they are totally oblivious to the dangers of eliminating nations based on constitutional liberalism.
The nation state is the best guarantee we have of peace, prosperity and respect for human rights. Attempts to transcend the nation state by creating trans-national political blocs such as the former Soviet Union and the European Union result in unaccountable structures.
Both the idea of the nation and the family is under attack from groups that have much in common. They despise both nation and family as being a throwback, an atavistic form of social unity, that need to be broken down and replaced by the more enlightened.
Scruton itemise the profound disadvantages of living without nation states:
· the sense of belonging on which democracy rests would be undermined.
· individual freedom would be much diminished.
· fundamental protections would be undermined.
Instead of permitting parity between traditional and 'organic' intellectuals, and of creating both hegemony and a counter-hegemony, in the classical Gramsci tradition, modern Britain’s intellectuals have drowned out counter views. Academics of independent thought have been quietly eased out of university tenures across the country.
The brightest minds are being replaced by more compliant and complacent minds. Donald Dutton refers to this feminist protective reflex as an ‘in-group-v-out-group’ form of siege mentality that envelopes the group.
There is no Magna Moralia, no great ethical treatise, no viable world vision emanating from this ‘out-group’. This cannot be conveniently ascribed as some irrelevantly llofty, academic, or ethereal endeavour. It connects to real lives; it has bite.
The pangs of poverty, deprivation, family breakdown that flow from the bankrupt philosophies of a desperate intelligentsia, are instead muted by the ‘targeting’ of state benefits which is offered up as a solution. Well meaning state efforts - guided by the same intelligentsia - have only culminated in driving out the adult male from the family as a pre-condition for the paying of state welfare.
This has savaged not just large and average sized countries, e.g. USA, UK and Canada, but to a disproportionate degree the much smaller nations such as New Zealand.
American Black families in particular now suffer greater fractions than in 1900. Today, there are also fewer married Black Americans than in 1900. Was this planned or totally inadvertent ?
The American AFDC benefit regime was supposed to address low income poverty, but it made the problem of fatherless dependent children worse. Both the AFDC and the TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) which later replaced it have been subject to much coverage and will not be detailed here. Suffice to say that it did not drive down poverty but drove out the male partner thus lowering family incomes and promoted the double tragedy of social disintegration and accentuated class/race divisions.
Judicial Discretion
A radicalised conventional wisdom - as opposed to the usually conservative conventional wisdom – has become the norm in our society. Modern intellectuals are fearful of being controversial, i.e. not adopting this radicalised conventional wisdom. The prospect of being howled down by one’s peers is not appetising. As consequence many minds have been cowed into conformism.
Instead of academic precision or being judgmental, we lazily prefer to gift ‘discretionary powers’ to others rather than work through the possibilities and complications.
Paragraph 3.71 in the Law Commission’s proposals, for instance, quaintly believes that English family law tends to adopt discretionary rather than rule-based schemes because they work better. However, this fails to take into account our experience which tells us that discretion is abused as often as it is used. The result of discretionary powers means that judges and lawyers can do almost what the want and never be seriously wrong. They cannot be held to account for being incompetent or plain wrong. Discretion is, therefore, a disaster for the ordinary man.
Discretion may suit the legal profession because they have a degree of intellectual rigour and could
argue that in most cases they might have got things ‘about right’ but that in those cases that they got wrong they were not sloppy or slovenly but applied the ‘rubberised’ notion of discretion.
The new radicalised conventional wisdom sees itself as fashionably anti-establishment; in its extremism it flatly denies that the family is breaking down – merely that it is ‘only changing’. The fact that these reassurances have come from erstwhile dependable sources has served only to undermine what common sense tells us about rising crime and family breakdown. The perception that there has been a rise in crime is dismissed as another silly instance of 'moral panic'.
Norman Dennis demolishes these claims by carefully drawing attention to the inconvenient facts. In ‘Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family’, (1993) Norman Dennis develops the argument first advanced in his and George Erdos' seminal study, ‘Families Without Fatherhood’ (1992). He sees fathers and their permanence within the family unit as key to stability and improvement.
Prof. Halsey, another left-winger reportedly said, at a 1991 IEA seminar, that he ‘shuddered for the next generation' and feared “that many children brought up in one-parent families were not flourishing”.
Research findings by Halsey and Dennis that children from broken homes performed less well, provoked strong hostility from many (intellectual) quarters.
So wedded had the Social Science world become to a failed dogma that when journalist Melanie Phillips asked a prominent social scientist about the Halsey and Dennis’ claims, he released a stream of emotional invective that she recorded as:
“ … calling into question the mental faculties of those distinguished academics and asking excitedly: "What do these people want? Do they want unhappy parents to stay together?" After being pressed repeatedly to identify the research which repudiated the Halsey-Dennis thesis, he said, in summary, this: of course it was correct as far as the research was concerned, but where did that get anyone? Nowhere! Was it possible to turn back the clock ? Of course not ! And why were they so concerned above all else for the rights of the child ? What about the rights of the parents, which were just as important ?”
Shunned by the left-wing, in-favour academics, and assorted pundits alike, Norman Dennis, George Erdos and AH Halsey are nonetheless being proven right in their analysis as each month passes.
The real challenge has been to break through the barrier of political correctness which has:
a). closed the minds of the great majority of academics
b). mis-informed institutions.
c). crippled intellectual debate
d). suppressed Media dissection
We are all aware today that unemployment and poverty are frequently blamed for high crime levels it is difficult to believe that in 1970 the conventional wisdom was the reverse - it was the newly found affluence and low unemployment among the young that was the problem and high crime levels.
Melanie Phillips, pinpointed the left wing’s crisis as one where it had ‘elevated the pursuit of individual gratification into a noble and heroic ideal’; where no one lifestyle could be admitted to be better than any other for fear of offending minority sensibilities. The upshot was that gradually nothing and no one was allowed to be ‘normal’.
As a consequence the definition of ‘the family’ became blurred - a topic highlighted by Patricia Morgan in her book about the collapse of the family in New Zealand.
John Haskey, who for many years produced social statistics for the ONS wrote in a foreword that:
“For the best part of thirty years we have been conducting a vast experiment with the family, and now the results are in: the decline of the two-parent, married-couple family has resulted in poverty, ill-health, educational failure, unhappiness, anti-social behaviour, isolation and social exclusion for thousands of women, men and children.”
There is a conundrum at the heart of welfare policy in Britain. The government and most people declare support for stable family relationships; they also recognize that two-parent families provide the best life chances for children and the best chance to avoid long-term dependence on state welfare. Yet the government's attempt to reduce the poverty of lone parents and children through cash awards and work incentives actually discourages low-earning parents from forming committed two-parent families.
22. Maori Families
Nowhere is that conundrum better illustrated than in the application of welfare policy towards Maoris.
Nowhere is that intellectual betrayal so gross as in the promise made that when cohabitation finally dominates a better and brighter future is assured.
The Catholic Church is alive to the menace posed, but the dreamy parsons of the Church of England and their well-intentioned wives have yet to “lock and load”.
The message has not yet fully appeared in mainstream newspapers that marital formats, in large
measure, dictate outcomes. We are still at a stage where it is the exceptional single mother family fiasco/rupture that is reported with the implicit assumptions that all other single mother family are behaving ‘normally’
Nonetheless feminist tracts, now very dated, continue to feed and nourish an Arcadian vision of a fem-centric world of earth mothers and female goddesses.
Since their most recent of reincarnations (in the late 1960s) radical feminists have, have pilloried marriage as the patriarchal oppression and, for good measure, the site of violence towards women. If this were true, non-traditional marital patterns, e.g. cohabitation or concubinage, would a) have ceased completely long ago or b). be welcomed as a remedy by men and women alike.
The reality is that domestic violence towards women is a red herring and in any event is greater in non-traditional marital units including same sex couples.
Child neglect and abuse in these marital formats is equally at intolerable levels. In many ways the alternative lifestyle perpetuates anti-social behaviours that other polices seek to erase. (Appendix E, see also D1, D2 and F).
Radical feminists have an inaccurate and therefore skewed vision of Maori culture – it is not as they suppose an exemplar of ‘happy families’ without the bogey of marriage. The work of Stuart Birks (Massey University) and Patricia Morgan (UK) emphatically enumerated Maori culture as far from the often portrayed ideal of noble savage.
Hillary Clinton’s immortal catch phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” has been latched onto by radical feminists. They feel the Maori way of life as personified by Hillary Clinton’s slogan encapsulates all that is good about living without the structure and strictures of a marital code.
The free spirit of the Maori culture is applauded by reformers of marriage who idealise their ‘family fluidity’ and lack of corrupting artificial Western marital structures. But they remain silent about the battering that this lifestyle is taking in human lives. This free spirit is to mistake the freedom of choice to do nothing from poverty that disables a society from doing anything.
As disciples to an ideology there are certain things that cannot be admitted to the wider world.
The Maori village en masse does not look after each child; each parent looks after each child; and each child knows its parent and grand parents and uses them in times of stress as the first port of call.
Suicide, seen by all commentators as the world’s best barometer for social policy effectiveness, has soared among Maori men in the last 20 years in sympathy with greater break-up of families and single parenthood (more young men in Scotland take their own life every year than die in road accidents).
Male suicides world wide have increased over the last 30 years while female suicides have generally fallen.
However, New Zealand is out of step with the wider world both in numbers and severity of change.
For instance, some of the most relevant and shocking show that:-
· Male suicides accounted for 40% of all male injury deaths - in 1974 male suicides were 12 per 100,000 but by 1997 it was 23 per 100,000.
· Among females suicide accounts for 25% all female injury deaths.
· Overall the age group 15 to 24 years accounted for 26% of all suicides in New Zealand.
There are, nonetheless, common themes found in New Zealand and the wider world inasmuch that suicide in both adults and children are closely related to divorce and single parenthood. As single parenthood can at times involve temporary cohabiting an extension is to include cohabiting as a risk factor.
New Zealand is both a microcosm and a useful scale model inasmuch that it has 3 distinct ethnic groups and, fortunately, it keeps accurate and detailed suicide and social statistics.
Overview:
In New Zealand where cohabiting has increased dramatically, male suicides in the 20 – 24 age groups is 49 deaths per 100,000 (12 per 100,000 for women).
The suicide rate specifically among Maoris youth is greater at 59 per 100,000
The suicide rate among non-Maori is 35 per 100,000.
Maori suicides exceed that of the world top ten, e.g. Finland (33), Latvia (35), and Russia Federation (41), Lithuania (45).
Marriage decreases the suicide rate and marriage combined with parenting reduces it even further. This is the societal and public investment that is absent in cohabiting.
Maori Specific:-
New Zealand’s ‘Women’s Safety Survey’(1996) found that one act of domestic violence (using a very broad definition) in the preceding year was reported by 25% of Maori women but only 10% of non-Maori women.
A survey among 2,000 men found similar figures.
The Women’s Safety Survey failed to differentiate between married and cohabiting.
80% of all reported ‘violence’ is ‘family violence’ and or takes place in the home.
Women admitted they ‘hit first’ in 28% of cases and in 67% of cases immediately ‘hit back’.
The survey found that among 23% of Maori women admitted act of violence toward their current male partner.
The same survey found that among non-Maori women this figure was only 8%
In the comfort that wealthy industrialised nations can provide we are more attuned to problem solving by arbitration, self-control and compromise. We fail to see or value that violent homes can make for violent adults capable of defending family or tribal property and lands. We see only the negatives.
We fail to recognise that it can be a force for good. It can induce self-regulation and self-restraint where in the absence of which feuding, vengeance and tribal warfare become the accepted means of dispute settling in, say, Papua New Guinea (Patricia Morgan, Family Matters (NZ) p159).
World wide, cohabiting is shown to be deleterious for women’s psychological good health, i.e. morbidity and pathologies. There is less ‘depression’ or mental health issues among married couples. In a Western Australia survey, for instance, the levels of mental health problems among single women and single mothers was double that for married women.
"It's time social factors, like family breakdown and unemployment, are considered alongside the need to improve mental health resources.
Family break-up and separation from children were common causes, with separated men six times more likely to kill themselves than separated women.”
- Professor John Macdonald, Primary Health at the University of Western Sydney.
Modern Maori families give us access to what British society might regress to were cohabiting be adopted. To do justice to Patricia Morgan’s work would take a lengthy chapter, however, the most relevant and shocking are listed here as bullet points:-
- All western nations have witnessed ... [falling marriage rates, rising divorce, increased illegitimacy, falling fertility] … [but] In New Zealand these trends have been remarkable in their intensity.
- Using all the standard indicators, the family is now in worse state in New Zealand than almost anywhere else. The situation of the Maoris is a particular cause for concern. It is comparable to the American blacks, among who in large areas, the family based on marriage has virtually disappeared.
- Women born in the early 1940s had an average of 3.5 children while their mothers had 2.5 children. - this applied as much to Maori women as the white population.
- In 1961 the proportion of Maoris married by the time they were 21 was 22% for women and 8% for men. For non-Maoris it was 13% and 2% for females and males.
- The fertility rate among Maoris was 6.18 in 1962 and fell to 2.2 in 1980. By 2001 it has recovered a little to 2.5. The fertility rate among whites was 4.19 in 1962 and first fell to 2.01 in 1981 and has remained there ever since.
- By 2001 an estimated 27% of all New Zealand children under 16 lived in SMH (from 9% to 27%) but 44% of Maori children lived in SMH.
- As far back as 1987 surveys showed that up to 40% of children born into two parent families would by the age of 16 have experienced living in a SMH.
- Until around 1961 the number of divorces among New Zealand’s married women was 3 per 1,000. This increased to 13 per 1,000 after the Family Proceedings Act 1980.
- New Zealand is ahead of Britain in the ratio of abortions to live birth (22: 33 respectively. NZ has the worlds 3rd highest teenage births and the world’s 3rd highest teenage abortion rates (74 per 1,000 for Maoris and 30 per 1,000 for non-Maoris).
- In the 1971 census of NZ women aged 20 -24, 60% were married; by 1981 this fell to 41%; by 1986 it was 30% and by 2001 it was 9%.
- 1 in 5 pregnancies are ‘terminated’ with unmarried women accounting for 60% of all abortions - 70 % of whom are aged fewer than 25.
- In 1961 census 50% of men aged 25- 34 and 66% of men aged 35- 44 were married and raising 2 or more children. Between 1961 and 1997 the number of unmarried men aged 20- 24 rose from 63% to 93%.
- Maori cohabitation (among over 15 year olds) was already high in 1986 at 11%. By 2001 it was 17%. The number of one person households has doubled since 1971 (now 23% of all households).
- By 1996, 33% of Maori children lived in SMHs, compared with 14% in 1981.
- Those hostile to family values have used Maoris to argue that marriage is not traditional but a recent artificial construct. But Maoris do have legitimate and illegitimate categories and so do differentiate.
It is now customary that in debate we are asked to focus on ‘process’ and to ignore ‘structure’. For it is the ‘quality’ of parenting that counts we are told and not the structure in which it is given.
Sadly, as we can see from worldwide ‘outcomes’ of cohabitation and outcomes for fatherless children, this is tragically not true.
23. Lions Led By Donkeys
This phrase condenses the appalling slaughter and peerless incompetence of the First World War.
In that era nations were peculiarly blessed, principally Britain, Germany and France, with a brand of military commander ill-suited for the demands of mechanised killing.
Staff Commanders had only a rudimentary grasp of modern battlefield fluidity and were more accustomed to cavalry manoeuvres. It is not surprising that new weaponry with the capacity of firing 600 hundred rounds per minute neutralised troop advances.
These commanders were inflexible, lacked vision and repeatedly thought that just one more assault would see their forces prevail. Staff Commanders on both sides lacked foresight and consequently made catastrophic blunders.
They were the donkeys and the ‘squadie’ was the lion.
National prestige made it hard to contemplate retreat. Frequently there was no ‘Plan B’. They accepted mass slaughter as a price that had to be paid. By 1916 it had became the ‘norm’.
In this blessed state of stupor millions of soldiers, the lions, were needlessly sacrificed. Germany alone suffered eight million causalities by 1918.
On Armistice Day itself (Nov 11th 1918) when foot soldiers on both sides already knew the war was at an end over 23,00 men were killed between 5am to 11am.
There are parallels for the English speaking nations for this slaughter of 90 years ago. Our institutions are ‘officered’ by the same donkey mindsets of 90 yeas ago. English speaking nations are peculiarly blessed in having rights based on Common Law but cursed in having Law Commissions in the British mould determined to overthrow the sanity and fairness it brings.
The ‘Generals’ today are blind to the teenage wastelands their assaults for a better tomorrow are generating. They are in denial that they are in large measure responsible for the ‘underclass’.
Law Commissioners find it hard to contemplate retreat; accept defeat; and seem destined only to re-fight yesterday’s wars ? One more assault will see their goal achieved appears their modus vivendi.
By giving matrimonial rights to cohabitees do they think they are successfully grasping and addressing the modern fluidity of family dynamics ? Indeed, are they gullible enough to believe that such fluidity and dynamics are unique to our present time ? All the foregoing chapters prove this to be untrue.
Cohabitation is not ‘the tank’ that will end trench warfare and revolutionise marital affairs.
The Law Commission must now realise they have made catastrophic mistakes over the years. The parallels are the squandering of men’s lives caused by divorce, the decimation of marriage, the lifelong price children have to pay, together with the stultifying effect on wealth creating powers should be too painfully and too obvious to need pointing out to the Law Commission.
Metaphorically they have put millions of husbands to the sword and are content for future husbands to suffer the same fate. Ruth Deech calls our divorce regime ‘vengeful’, and she is right.
Therefore, when reform is in the air regarding the topic of cohabitation it is an appropriate juncture to scrutinise the competence, or lack of it, among the planners and commanders.
Social policy, as planned by institution, has become a by-word for wrong-headed, ineffective, clumsiness, costly overruns, failures to meet objectives and the worsening of most situations.
Society is only now beginning to catch up with men’s and fathers groups which have consistently been the market leaders in the analysis of social policy.
Their predictions and analysis, however, have been methodically shut out from the mainstream of consciousness. Only now that the situation has become so conspicuous and can no longer be masked are several of their strands for remedies being reluctantly accepted as probable solutions in mainstream thinking and government publications.
For a decade or more fathers groups have, compared with institutions, more correctly predicted what the upshots will be, highlighted the conceptual flaws and philosophical errors, correctly identified general weaknesses, and presented alternative to attenuate the impact of the failed polices.
Take for example the risk of poverty (see Fig 20 Manning & Brown, 2006). In the US the risk of Children experiencing poverty increases in any lifestyle ‘other’ than with two married parent families.
The equivalent British studies to the Carlson, 2006; Manning & Brown, 2006 are hard if not impossible to find.
When allegedly child poverty is the governments highest priority and child safety of prime importance in all government initiatives, it is amazing that it cannot judge ‘outcomes’ and encourage married couples over the cohabiting option (Fig 20).
An examination of how the ESRC spends its annual £100m research budget might demonstrate how
Disinterested it is in funding alternative views or confounding the failed propositions represented by the radicalised convention wisdom of the single mother as a ‘family unit’.
Fig 20
Source: “The conflation of marriage and cohabitation in government statistics – a denial of difference rendered untenable by an analysis of outcomes”, Bristol Community Family Trust; (UK) Harry Benson; Sept 2006.
Overseas studies continue to suggest that married families consistently do better than unmarried families on important outcome measures.
The chart above, of the Manning & Brown findings (Fig 20), illustrates the potential differences to be found when comparing the risk of poverty amongst US children by parental marital status. This reflects a human and not a uniquely national condition and can be safely extrapolated, in broad terms, to other nations with less detailed statistics, e.g. Britain.
In this US study the relatively low risk faced by all children with “couple parents” (the red and blue bars) would have concealed in most studies.
The averaging of data by aggregating “cohabiting biological parents” or “cohabiting step-parents”
into the married couple category is a corruption and stain on British statistics. As a consequence the true relatively high risk faced by children is never made public.
By contrast, the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study is an oasis of research study in an otherwise British desert. It is one of the few large scale longitudinal birth cohort study (some 15,119 parents).
The other most recent UK analysis of this kind, i.e. pro-family, and in the public domain was published on behalf of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) by Kathleen Kiernan, of the LSE, in 1999. The CASE study (funded by the ESRC) is therefore seven or more years old and relied on a relatively small dataset.
Despite being portrayed as inevitable it remains a fact that more people remain married than divorce (see ONS data on first-time marriages). Compared to married couples, cohabiting couples - irrespective of income group - are at least twice as likely to split up (6% versus 20%, see Fig 21).
Only re-married couples split-up at a rate that approaches the cohabitee frequency and numbers.
The risk of a cohabiting family breaking up is 3.5 times greater at 20% than a married couple at 6%. Marriage keeps families united according to research by the Social Justice Policy Group. They found
that couples with young children are five times more likely to split up if they are unmarried compared to those who have had weddings (Appendix L). This is not a new development but has been shown in innumerable studies over a great many years.
Fig 21. The overall risk of family breakdown by family type
|
Table 1
|
Married couple
|
Unmarried couple
|
Cohabiting couple
|
Closely involved
|
Just friends
|
Other
|
Total
|
Family breakdown risk
|
6%
|
32%
|
20%
|
76%
|
96%
|
94%
|
20%
|
Risk: Others vs. married couple
|
1.0
|
5.5
|
3.5
|
13.3
|
16.7
|
16.4
|
3.4
|
Source: Abbreviated Table 1. Bristol Community Family Trust; (UK)
|
Fig 21 shows ‘the risk’ of family breakdown for married couples is 1 compared to 5.5 times for unmarried couples and 3.5 times for cohabiting couples.
The independent influences of both income and marital status in family breakdown risk is depicted in Fig 22. Using a sample size of 15,119, it illustrates in graphical form the differences shown as a table in Fig 21, i.e. unmarried couples 32% risk (red bar) and ‘closely involved’ couples 76% (orange bar).
Fig 22.
Source: ibid, Bristol Community Family Trust; (UK)
The difference in family breakdown risk between married and cohabiting couples is sufficient that even the poorest 20% of married couples are more stable than all but the richest 20% of cohabiting couples (see Fig 23 risk of Couple Break-up by Income and Marital Status).
Fig 23
Source: ibid, Bristol Community Family Trust; (UK)
Despite a great deal of evidence that marriage benefits and protects adults and children, successive British governments have deliberately set out to erode and dismantle policy and mechanisms that distinguish married from unmarried cohabiting families.
Marital reformers and the Law Commission claim they want happy, well-rounded children. But their sincerity has to be seriously questioned when all they will ever produce as a result are cripples – human beings disfigured and permanently scared by a system that succeeds only in managing to caresses the ideological egos of the legislators.
The hypocrisy arises when the siren voices accentuate the importance they allegedly attach to ensuring optimal ‘outcomes’ for children in public policy. This is posturing and merely theoretical. The findings shown in chapter (Fig 20 to Fig 24) more than demonstrate that the lack of distinction between marriage and cohabitation in government policy and research is destructive.
Fig 24. Break up by age, by marital status and involving children
Source: ibid, Bristol Community Family Trust; (UK)
Moreover, the integrity of government advisors has further to be questioned by the persistent and erroneous use of ‘aggregating’ sub-sets in order to confuse and obfuscate - particularly when public pronouncements proclaim the paramountcy of transparency in all matters governmental.
Government would be better off being given no advice at all.
Birth statistics show that 95% of married and 91% of cohabiting mothers give birth to their first child in their 20s and 30s (Fig 24). While increased age moderates break-up rates the more unstable marital status is the cohabiting couple in the’ Teen to 30s’ category. (re: Bristol Community Family Trust data). When the risk of family break-up is plotted against child abuse, the greater vulnerability of children inside cohabiting family units is exposed.
Conclusion
In the opening pages we asked why reform was so zealously pursued when there was no overt public demand. We suggested part of the answer was obsessive institutions, MPs with compulsive fixations to leave their mark on the world, and/or an unfathomable mindset within Whitehall.
Head and shoulders above this throng is the Law Commission which wrote in “Sharing Homes; A Discussion Paper”, Law Com No 278 (2002);
“Moreover, the notion of the “traditional” family, based on one or two parents and their children living together in one unit, does not make allowance for multi-generational living arrangements within a family, where a home which may be legally owned by the head of the family is occupied by siblings, children, grand-children, and possibly even great grand-children, many of whom may be adults. As the population ages, there are many elderly siblings or friends who live together for comfort and companionship, and adult children who move in with their elderly parents to provide day-to-day care and support.” - Page 2
This world view is so alien that it is difficult for mere mortals to grasp what the Law Commission is driving at with any degree of certainty.
Inter-generational White households have always been the “norm”. Until the ‘family wage’ was abolished by the Equal Pay Act, it was not impossible or uncommon for households to comprise a nuclear family with children and grandparents.
The primary reason was that no income tax was paid by a married man in the middle and lower income bracket with two or more children (see “Freedom's Children”, report by Demos 1995).
It made economic sense for the state to gift marriage and married couples modest tax allowances and concessions to be self-sustaining. It was and remains a far cheaper option than the cross-subsidising we see today, especially among the non-married groups.
Moreover, how many households in Britain does the Law Commission think do not make allowance for multi-generational living ? In the 1920s and 1930s it was common for newly married couples to live initially with their parents. The emergence of higher wages in the1950s and 1960s, a huge post war re-housing programme and easier credit in the 1980s to 1990s made this avenue less obligatory.
Multi-generational living as a form of ‘living arrangement’ is today found almost exclusively among non-white families, e.g. Asians, who represent around 1% of Britain’s population (see also Maoris, above). The Law Commission offers the nation a self-fulfilling prophesy. Its proposals would see more singletons; Black and White single people with no intention of marring or cohabiting because of asset theft. Multi-generational living for all ethnic groups would mushroom not out of economic necessity but dint of the dread both options contained for young people, particularly males.
Has the Law Commission even considered this, or the impact of government policy that favours the building of one and two bedroom apartments over four bedroom family homes ?
Apparently not.
Fig 25. Individuals in the Bottom Income Distribution Decile (i.e. 1/10 or 10% - after housing costs, by Family Type (%age).
|
|
1979 *
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1988 -89
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1990-91
|
Pensioners
|
Couple
|
20
|
6
|
6
|
Single
|
11
|
8
|
5
|
Single persons
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No children
|
10
|
22
|
18
|
With children
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
Couples
|
No children
|
9
|
10
|
12
|
With children
|
41
|
44
|
49
|
|
|
100%
|
100%
|
100%
|
Source: Dept of Social Security, Incomes and Wealth. Table 5.19. and Social Trends Table 5.12. (see also "Farewell to the Family ?", P. Morgan. IEA)
* post Finer Report
|
It is reasonable to suggest that multi-generational living arrangements have been rendered impossible by government policy. In particular the switch in April 1990 from the ‘married man's allowance’ to independent taxation and personal allowances, which should have benefited husbands and wives but was instead construed to benefit ‘independent’ husbands and wives, i.e. cohabiting couples.
The outcome, in pay-packet and ‘feel good’ factor terms, was curious. As can be seen from Fig 25, the incomes of both single and couple pensioners had gradually increased between 1979 and 1991.There were fewer pensioners in the very lowest income category in 1991 than there had been in 1979 (a fall from 20 to 6 and 11 to 5). This is shown in Fig 25.
Under the old and rigid tax regime all other groups experienced the opposite in the same period (1979 -1991). More individuals moved into the lowest income bracket irrespective of economic times of constraint or plenty.
What is of concern in Fig 25 are those couples with children category. At 41% they were the largest sub-set facing poverty and before the Norman Lamont changes which should have rectified their position the level had worsened to 49% by 1991 (Fig 25).
Single mothers who have traditionally received immense levels of media attention about their levels of poverty moved from being 9% of the poor in 1979 to 11% by 1991.
The Lamont tax changes began to be effective after 1991. Any trend in cohabitation and marriage
rates or increased in child abuse or child poverty should be measured from 1991 (attributed to the changes of April 1990).
The raison d’etre of the Lamont changes was to put more money into the hands of working people by allowing them to shift allowances between the two spouses to minimise the impact of taxation.
Arguably the Lamont changes had no impact on the trend in lone motherhood (see Fig 3 above) but equally it did nothing to curtail it. They did nothing either to reverse the downward trend in the numbers marrying (Fig 8), though births outside marriage increased from 211,300 in 1991 to 237,900 in 1997 at a time when births inside marriage declined (Fig 9 and Fig 16).
In 1979 almost half of all “poverty” in Britain could be found in homes with husbands, wife and children and or unmarried mothers (41% + 9%).
By 1991 these two sub-sets accounted for 60% of poverty. Since then the situation has only deteriorated prompting the creation of the Working Family Tax Credit.
With the collapse of prudent family policies, the tax burden has been deposited on the very families meant to be assisted, with those on lowest incomes or with one main earner the hardest hit.
The nuclear family has to sustain the not inconsiderable costs of children but also the increasingly substantial costs of fuel, food and mortgage commitments. Progressively this has had to be based on a two–income strategy (“The Fragmenting Family: Does it Matter ?” Dr Patricia Morgan, IEA).
Cohabiting - and by implication lone motherhood - depends for its survival on the ‘tax take’ of others. Its survival oxygen is the subsidisation it receives from those least able to pay taxes.
Children represent income foregone and therefore married couples who are more usually in paid employment are doubly impacted by child rearing costs and paying taxes to those who are not married (and who, statistics indicate, are less likely to be in paid employment).
While it is true that, as individuals, the richest pay numerically the most in tax, it is poignantly true that those on the margins of an average industrial wage pay disproportionately more in taxes (more of their disposable income) into the Treasury coffers than the rich.
It is worth reiterating the views of John Haskey, who in “Experiments in Living: the Fatherless Family” wrote: “For the best part of thirty years we have been conducting a vast experiment with the family, and now the results are in: the decline of the two-parent, married-couple family has resulted in poverty, ill-health, educational failure, unhappiness, anti-social behaviour, isolation and social exclusion for thousands of women, men and children.” (pub. Civitas, Sept 2002).
Serial cohabiting, and its concomitant condition ‘lone parenting’, have never been economically viable as an alternative to marriage and are never likely to be. Though exalted opinion formers are reticent to confess it, cohabiting is generally so unstable that it is perhaps best described as episodic periods punctuated by lone parenting.
Yet since 1998 government has seriously compromised all family policy reviews. The Cabinet has been divided against itself over the value of marriage as a concept. A headline in the Daily Telegraph of March 11th 2002 read, “Marriage too risky for Cabinet to support” and sums up the dilemma.
In the 2002 Discussion Paper examples of how the Law Commission’s scheme for property ownership might work were set out (page viii). One example focused on a couple in their sixties whose son, now aged 22, comes to live with them. His parents have paid off the mortgage but he makes significant contributions to the household budget.
Should the son, the Law Commission asked, be allowed to inherit when his father died or be entitled to a share of the house anyway after ten years of living there ?
What can have motivated a hypothetical question ? The temerity of even considering attempts to alter time-honoured laws and traditions is stupefying. A normal person would know the answer without having to think twice.
Why is the Law Commission making everyone’s life so complicated ? We have a structure for inheritance precisely to avert any such blurring of the boundaries.
What is blindingly obvious is that the Law Commission is overly keen on, quote, “a property approach” to sharing out wealth among separating people. At Para 8 it declares how it has sought to grant a person who was not the owner of the home an ‘interest’ in it and set a value of that share.
Why is the Law Commission so overtly obsessed with other people’s property ?
Not for the first time the Law Commission is poorly informed where (at page 6) it states that today there is more cohabiting and that;
“It is quite clear that even among cohabiting couples of the opposite sex, marriage is no longer the norm”.
This is simply not true.
More than ever it illustrates the vein of deceitfulness within the Law Commission and validates Ruth Deech’s verdict that the Law Commission deliberately misleads by using faulty and even totally false data.
It remains a fact that the majority of cohabiting couples still want to marry.
Let it be made factually clear - marriage is still the norm and cohabiting while increasing is still a minority choice. It is not a leisure pursuit enjoyed by a majority. (See also Appendix M).
The secondary inference is that ‘marriage’ is no longer the norm among same-sex couples (re: ‘even among couples of the opposite sex). The Law Commission forgets that until the Civil Partnership Act 2004 cohabitation was the only ‘normal’ format available to homosexuals in the UK. It is the yearning to be normal and just like heterosexuals that fuelled their long and bitter campaign for same-sex unions. By this logic marriage must have value and status otherwise why would the same-sex lobby have pressed so ardently for it ?
Logic, as is evident in this detail, is occasionally ‘on ration’ among Law Commission thinking. Why else would it confer the clear choice of cohabitation or ‘marriage’ upon homosexuals but deprive heterosexuals of the choice by making the penalties the same for both (unlike for homosexuals).
If the Law Commission had any conscious any shred of decency it would long ago fallen on its sword.
Sadly, it is bereft of virtue and morals.
The Law Commission is sleep walking Britain into a future where Andrea Dworkin might have felt very much at home. The late but unlamented Andrea Dworkin had a vision of a lesbian’s Womanland where no men were permitted (May 2000). Bitter and twisted she may have been and farcical though the notion seems at first glance, if we take a reality check – today, in 2006 - we are uncomfortable closer than we might have imagined.
Four years later, in 2004, the BBC broadcast a series entitled “If”. Set in the year 2020 it portrayed society’s elimination of any input by men. Men were redundant for all life’s needs; they were superfluous to requirements and they were downgraded to a sub-specie. Using only present day science, and medical breakthroughs that are on the cusp of being achieved, the resultant social morality was one where the Final Solution was disguised in the sub-text.
Fortunately radical feminism has no grasp of economics or accountancy thus rendering the ‘If’ scenario of academic interest.
The concept of human progress by invention evades them and they have no concept of wealth creation, only the redistribution or other people’s wealth.
But even to fantasise with discarding or down grading one half of the population smacks of gender supremacy and apartheid. It is dangerous and sexist and would have dire financial implications.
It is so juvenile an idea that it is easy to deny, nonetheless it is an idea routinely encountered in feminist essays and one wonders why it is not entirely disowned once and for all.
The dire financial implications show up in the most basic of measurements, e.g. National Insurance Contributions. The men in work contribute disproportionately to the ‘welfare state’ and take out less than women (see Fig. 26).
Fig. 26. National Insurance Contributions (in millions). Class 1 ONLY
|
Year
|
All Men
|
Married Women
|
Single/Div Women
|
TOTAL
|
% paid by men
|
1991
|
12.78
|
5.37
|
4.22
|
22.3
|
57.3
|
1992
|
12.29
|
5.36
|
4.07
|
21.7
|
56.6
|
1993
|
11.94
|
5.39
|
4.04
|
21.3
|
56.0
|
Source ONS Table 3.12 p 61 ‘Social Trends’
|
In employment terms men are 4 times more likely to be unemployed than women and for longer durations and across all age groups than women. Yet paradoxically, men are less likely than women to be a drain on the welfare system.
· Men are less likely to seek medical attention or use hospital resources.
· Because they die younger and work for more years, men are less likely to receive a state pension that reflects the amount they have contributed.
· The opposite is true of women.
· Women live far longer than men but do not fund their own pensions. Women are subsidised, and have been for years by men, i.e. since 1947.
· Both private pensions (if he has one) and the state pension continue paying his wife until her death yet few wives take out polices to cover their spouses (and feminists complain about poor levels of pension cover for women).
· When men divorce they lose their children for no good reason and no one notices that most child homicides and severe abuse cases are committee by mothers.
· If women attempted to stand on their own feet economically, they would soon topple over so the state has to support them. Does society do this for men ? No.
· Men have no control over reproduction.
· Men have no say in choosing to abort to abort,
· They have no veto whether they accept becoming a father, and thus no say in whether they should pay CSA or not.
Men are being marginalised, suffering ‘taxation without representation’. They are told they must pay even though the choices have been made by others.
In the main, men as a specie are held in contempt by politicians and academia.
They are deemed disposable, especially by the media.
Curiously, all these power centres have been ‘sensitised’ not to offend Blacks, Jews, Homosexuals etc, but by some logic this courtesy is not extended to Men.
This ‘disposability’ is never more in evidence than when declaring ‘war on terror’.
Only the heroism of 9/11 and 7/7 remind us that we abuse the selflessness of men and ignore their self-sacrifice and investment in our society at our peril.
END
Appendix A
Wife forced to sell her home to settle with ex-husband
By Catriona Davies, (Filed: 26/05/2006)
[Emphasis added ]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/05/26/ndiv26.xml
A wealthy woman who married her lodger claimed yesterday that she would have to sell her "magnificent" country home to fund the £3.65 million divorce settlement.
The Court of Appeal ruled yesterday that Heather Martin-Dye, 54, should pay another £650,000 on top of the £3 million she has already paid to her former husband Philip, 55.
The couple met when Mr Martin-Dye, a former British Airways pilot, began lodging at his future wife's home, Green Lane Farm, in Shamley Green, Surrey, which is now worth £4 million.
They soon formed a relationship, married in 1987, and had a son, Freddie, the following year. Mrs Martin-Dye already had a daughter, Isadora, from her first marriage.
Mrs Martin-Dye had bought the farm estate, which also includes two cottages, stables and 41 acres of land, with her first husband, with whom she ran a computer software business. She now runs a livery business from the stables.
Following the couple's divorce in 2002, Mrs Martin-Dye was awarded 57 per cent of their £6.3 million joint assets to his 43 per cent because she had brought 90 per cent of the wealth to the marriage.
However, there was a dispute over whether Mr Martin-Dye's £900,000 BA pension fund should be regarded as a capital asset to be divided. It was far higher than his wife's £100,000 fund.
The district judge and High Court judge both ruled that the pension funds were capital assets, but three Court of Appeal judges yesterday reversed that decision.
Instead of dividing the capital in the pension funds, Mrs Martin-Dye will get 57% of her former husband's £37,000-a-year pension payments, and he will get 43% of her £5,800-a-year pension.
Because of the change in the calculation of the total combined assets, Mrs Martin-Dye will now have to pay a further £650,000 in the divorce settlement.
After the hearing, she claimed that she would have to sell the Green Lane Farm, described by the district judge as a "magnificent" country home. Mrs Martin-Dye said: "I am dismayed. To have to sell it to pay off my former husband is heartbreaking.
"The result has come as a shock. When we were first married I owned most of the assets, but I am now having to pay my ex-husband so much money that I must sell my family home and down-size.
"This judgment has pauperised me. From being a strong independent woman with multi-million pound assets, I am now reduced to the level of a maintained ex-wife."
Mr Martin-Dye said outside court: "I am relieved this is all over because it has been going on now for two-and-a-half years.
"I do not see it as a victory because this is the result I should have got at the outset of these proceedings. But in the light of what has been happening in the divorce courts recently, I see it as a small triumph for man."
He said he had "worked hard" during the marriage as an airline pilot, property developer and running a kitchen business.
Mr Martin-Dye's solicitor, Henry Brookman, said the case set a precedent in that the courts could no longer equate pension values with other capital assets.
Costs of the case, which the couple will share, are estimated at around £1 million. Lord Justice Thorpe, giving the court's ruling, said -pensions had become an "increasingly important ingredient within the range of financial investments made by prosperous families".
He said the judges in the courts below had treated the pension rights as property assets and this was not a fair result.
Pensions should not be split between the parties taking their estimated value, but as a share of the income they generate, he ruled.
Heather Martin-Dye bought the farm estate with her first husband, but must sell it to settle her divorce.
Appendix B
Custody ruling deals a blow to house husbands
By Matt Born, Daily Telegraph, April 19th 2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/04/19/ncust19.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/04/19/ixnewstop.html
THE principle that children should be raised by their mothers won the overt backing of the Court of Appeal yesterday after it rejected a house husband's attempt to win custody of his two children.
The father, who had raised the children in their £1 million home while his wife enjoyed a successful career on a salary of £300,000, argued that he was the victim of sex discrimination.
But the court refused him leave to appeal against a High Court decision which granted custody to his estranged wife. Lord Justice Thorpe, sitting with Lord Justice Buxton, said that despite the "unusual" role reversals in this case, they could not ignore the "realities" of the "very different" traditional functions of men and women.
The father, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had wanted the children to live with him in London while his wife, the family breadwinner, continued to maintain them.
He also opposed her plans to give up her career and move hundreds of miles away with the children, who are both aged under six. Richard Tott, the father's barrister, asked the court to imagine the situation in reverse.
He said that if a male breadwinner proposed giving up his job, taking his children out of private education, moving far from London, and replacing the mother as the primary carer, "his application would be looked at with extreme scepticism".
But in his ruling, Lord Justice Thorpe said that this submission seemed "to ignore the realities involving the different roles and functions of men and women".
The judges heard that after the couple split up last year in "fraught circumstances" each had applied for custody.
The husband moved out of the family home, while the mother cared for the children briefly. However, they soon reached an agreement to share time with the children. The husband moved to a nearby rented house, paid for by the mother.
But the mother now wanted to give up work in order to spend more time with her children.
His belief that her desire was genuine was the decisive factor in rejecting the father's claim, Lord Justice Thorpe said. He said it was "not uncommon" nowadays for those who have "sacrificed the opportunity to provide full-time care for their children in favour of a highly competitive profession" to think again about their priorities.
The judge added: "[They] question the purpose of all that striving and whether they should re-evaluate their lives before the children have grown too old to benefit."
Appendix C
One 'problem family' costs £250,000 a year
by Denis Campbell and Ned Temko, The Observer, Sept 3, 2006
[Emphasis added]
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,1863841,00.html
Problem families whose members commit crime, live on benefits and have poor health cost the state £250,000 a year each, research for the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit has found.
Officials working on the government's Social Exclusion Action Plan say the figure is a realistic assessment of how much it costs to deal with a family living in deprivation who are responsible for antisocial behaviour.
The £250,000 figure includes NHS treatment, money spent prosecuting and punishing law-breakers, social security benefits, call-outs by emergency services, damage in their neighbourhood and the cost of keeping a young person in care or a secure unit.
A total of £57.9bn is spent every year trying to tackle or prevent problems associated with the social exclusion of about 1.3 million poor Britons who have multiple problems. That includes £1.9bn on looking after the 60,000 children who are in care and £30bn on benefits for those who are 'high-risk and high-cost'.
Tony Blair will stress the cost to society, both financial and practical, when he delivers a lecture on social exclusion to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on Tuesday.
Appendix D
Marriage decline means fewer women murdered
22 February 2000, THE INDEPENDENT, London, 22 February 2000
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freedomcafe/message/227
The decline in marriage is having another unexpected effect on Western society a decline in the murder rate as fewer husbands have fewer opportunities to kill fewer wives.
A study of the dramatic decline in murder rates in the United States has found that a decrease in the proportion of young people marrying has led to a significant fall in the number of young wives being killed. This has had a significant effect on the nation's murder rates, according to Richard Rosenfeld, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St Louis.
"Fewer marriages means fewer opportunities for spousal violence," he told the meeting. He said that the US had experienced a 20-year decline in murder rates, which vary significantly from one city to another.
Professor Rosenfeld described the fall in homicides as "substantial, widespread and enduring" and said there was no evidence that it was coming to an end. The other factor is that there are more young American men in prison than ever before, with a tripling of the imprisonment rate between
1980 and the mid Nineties.
He calculated that one homicide was prevented for each increase of 670 prisoners. "When you multiply 670 times the $20,000 (£12,500) it costs to house one prisoner in America you get $13.4m dollars, exclusive of legal costs. The question becomes, is that too much to spend to avert one homicide?" Professor Rosenfeld said.
There is a third factor that may also be influencing the decline in murder rates: America is finally becoming civilised, he suggested. "More prisons and fewer families don't fully explain the decline. What we may be seeing in the United States is a real and sustained intolerance for unregulated violence. Historians call it a 'civilising process'," Professor Rosenfeld told the meeting.
Appendix D 1
Partners pose most risk to women of violence
London Reuters, Thu Oct 5, 2006 7:02pm and The Scotsman
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/05102006/325/partners-pose-most-risk-women-violence.html
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1479562006
Women are more likely to suffer physical and sexual violence from their husbands or partners than other people and the violence is more severe in rural areas, according to research published on Friday.
The World Health Organisation report analysed the extent of violence against 24,000 women in countries in Asia, Africa, South America and Europe.
More than a quarter of the women questioned in 13 of the 15 sites included in the study had experienced physical or sexual violence by their partner at least once in their lives.
"The findings show that, across a wide range of settings, women are more at risk of violence by an intimate partner than from any other type of perpetrator," said Dr Claudia Garcia-Morena of the World Health Organisation.
The prevalence ranged from four percent in cities in Japan and Serbia to more than 30 percent in rural areas in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Peru. The violence was most severe in rural rather than urban settings, the report said.
Men described as controlling were the most likely to be violent against their partner.
Sexual violence usually consisted of forced intercourse. Physical violence ranged from pushing and slapping to being kicked, beaten, choked, burnt and threatened with a weapon.
"The findings confirm that physical and sexual partner violence is widespread," Garcia-Moreno said in the study published in The Lancet medical journal.
But she added that violence against women is not inevitable and must be addressed.
Women in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand and the United Republic of Tanzania were questioned for the study.
The researchers said the results provide the countries with information to initiate changes and to assess what interventions are needed to reduce violence against women.
NB. British statistics show that women are overwhelmingly murdered by ‘intimates’ i.e. their own daughter, son, mother, father, uncle, lover, boyfriends etc, etc. Rarely to the point of zero by outsiders. Homicides of men far outnumber that of women and only a significant fraction are by ‘intimates’ - most are by ‘strangers’.
Appendix D 2
Judge links crime to broken homes
A leading crown court judge has sparked controversy by claiming many
offenders come from single parent families.
A leader in the Sun argues that “the judge is right” (Sun, p.24, p.6 [leader];
Mail, p.20; Express, p.6 also cover the story.
[Emphasis added]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4416946.stm , 08 Nov 2005
Judge John Curran told a youth conference on crime that single teenage mothers often made bad parents because they were too young to have children.
The judge made a wide-ranging attack on the breakdown of family values during his speech in Cardiff.
The single parent support group Gingerbread Wales has criticised the judge for generalising.
Judge Curran told the all-Wales high sheriffs' seminar on tackling crime and anti-social behaviour: "This is not a case of 'judge slams single mums'.
"Many of the parents who create this kind of environment for their children are themselves very young and inexperienced and are just plain ignorant of what is required to bring up a happy, well-adjusted child."
He said that the vast majority of separated parents raised their children successfully, but added: "A depressingly common theme of the early lives of offenders is the separation of the parents at a very early stage of the child's life.
"The fact is, however, that all too many of those who end up in the criminal justice system do so against a background of an absent parent - usually the father."
'Broken home'
He said a "disturbing number" of single mothers were in their teens and under the age of consent at the time of conception "or even the birth".
Young offenders' fathers were "frequently young offenders themselves, and either not on the scene at all or, if they are, setting a positive bad example by their behaviour".
He urged parents not to feed their children junk food or be "parked" in front of the television all day, and said they required "constant love and attention".
"It's got nothing to do with money or throwing expensive presents at Christmas at the child."
The judge also said parents must recognise that children took priority in a relationship and they had to learn to "stick together" until the children were adults, unless a relationship was abusive.
Judge Curran, who has 40 years experience in criminal law, said "the broken home" was at the root of much of the crime he saw.
"It's rather an old-fashioned term I suppose but I've got to the stage in life where I regard being old-fashioned as a virtue and so I'll stick to it," he said.
'Generalising'
Margaret O'Sullivan, from the support group for lone parents Gingerbread Wales, told BBC Radio Wales: "I don't think the judge should generalise, saying it's always children from single parents that get into trouble.
"A lot of lone parents aren't young single mothers."
She said she had suffered from vandalism and burglary caused by children from two-parent families.
"I don't think if there is a father around it always means that the children are good. It depends on the role model in the family as well," she added.
Children's commissioner Peter Clarke, said he agreed with some of the things the judge said, but told BBC Wales the most important thing for children was to have "parents who provide the guidance which will allow them to grow up into young citizens".
Teenagers questioned in Bridgend, south Wales, had mixed opinions on the judge's views.
One boy commented: "I think being a teenage parent is too young because you can't look after a baby on your own. You're not old enough."
However a teenage girl said: "I don't think it matters if you're a teenage mum as long as you're good to your children and caring.
"My mother was 18 when she had me. I feel she's given me good discipline - she taught me what's right and wrong."
Story - BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/wales/4416946.stm
Appendix E
Boarding school for care children
28 August 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5293424.stm
A pilot scheme to educate some children in local authority care at state and private boarding schools is being considered by the government.
Schools Minister Lord Adonis said it would be “money well spent” if exam results improved but only a small number of children would be affected. The charity Barnardos has suggested eight out of 10 children in care leave school without qualifications.
The charity's head, Martin Narey, said this idea could help some children.
Individual needs
Lord Adonis told the BBC: "In the discussions we've had it's a number of schools both state and private, that already have expertise in this area, that are keen to explore the potential for expanding this but I should stress that we are talking about small numbers.
"We certainly do not see this as an answer for the great majority of looked-after children.
"We need to see that the solutions that we have are fit for the individual child.
"But for some children it may well be that the stability which can be brought about by boarding schools, which can cater for their particular needs, will be a great improvement on the status quo."
Stability
Mr Narey said: "One of the advantages is that it might be much easier to find them stable foster arrangements, because foster parents would find it much easier if they were taking children just in holidays rather than 52 weeks of the year.
"So some stability would be brought into their home and their educational life which could make a difference..."
On Monday the Institute of Public Policy Research suggested children in care should be given £20 a week to pay for after-school activities to encourage them to achieve better exam results.
The think tank puts the overall cost of the scheme at £27.4m, which it said would work out at £1.32 a year to the average taxpayer.
Appendix F
Single mothers’ benefits ‘cover-up’
by David Leppard and Robert Winnett, The Times, October 17, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-523-1314096,00.html
THE government has been accused of suppressing an official report that suggests Labour’s generous welfare benefits encourage single motherhood.
The study, which took the Office for National Statistics (ONS) two years to compile, has not been published and is deemed politically sensitive, according to a senior insider.
A draft report on “living arrangements in contemporary Britain” - seen by The Sunday Times - reveals that one in four single mothers may have opted out of a traditional family environment for financial reasons.
It says the women have a “regular partner who lives elsewhere” and there are “financial disincentives” that encourage couples to live apart.
Ministers have already been accused of pressuring the independent ONS into producing politically helpful statistics. The latest disclosure by senior ONS officials suggests potentially damaging information is being withheld.
The controversial study was carried out by John Haskey, the government’s leading expert on the family. Haskey, a research fellow at Oxford, recently told friends: “It’s my baby and it’s being aborted. The pressure to toe the line comes down from the top.”
Haskey found that 1.2m couples in long-term relationships choose to live apart — but the rate among single mothers is almost twice the national average.
Critics have long said that Gordon Brown’s reforms to the tax and benefit system — rewarding single mothers with larger handouts — are a key cause of divided families.
David Willetts, the shadow work and pensions minister, said: “The tax and benefit system should go with the grain of human nature but instead this research is evidence that it is stopping people from forming stable couples.”
More than 830,000 lone parents live on welfare benefits, claiming income support, child allowances and housing benefit costing a total of £14 billion a year.
Previous studies have shown that lone parents who marry stand to lose between seven and 28% of their income. Haskey’s research suggests more than 200,000 may be choosing to live apart to maximise their benefits. Others may be defrauding the system by failing to declare cohabiting partners.
Robert Rowthorn, professor of economics at Cambridge, said: “The system of benefits offers a very strong incentive for people to remain as lone parents. I am sure Gordon Brown’s system of tax credits has made it worse.”
An ONS spokesman said: “We will be publishing the article when we are satisfied that the statistics are of publishable quality. For the ONS, there are no political issues whatsoever.”
Appendix F 1
Crime statistics 'were distorted by politics'
By Robert Verlaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent, The Independent, Feb 13th 2006
[Emphasis added]
http://newssearch.looksmart.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20060213/ai_n16057336
The Government misled the public over the success of its anti-crime policies by distorting research that contradicted its political aims, according to leading criminologists.
Ministers' obsession with spin means that academic studies which failed to support government policies were being suppressed, said the criminologists, many of whom have worked for the Government.
One former Home Office researcher is so concerned about the distortion of research that he has called for a boycott of Home Office research.
[See also Appendix D’s ‘favourable looking statistics’ - Ed]
The Home Office spends £20m on research papers each year, which are supposed to offer independent analysis of subjects such as crime and asylum so that appropriate policy can be drawn up in response.
In one paper, the Keele University criminologist Professor Tim Hope revealed that research he carried out into an anti-burglary project showed it would have increased the level of crime by almost two-fifths.
This result was "something of an embarrassment" to the Home Office, which never publicly commented on it and did not select the findings for a full report, said Professor Hope. "It was with great sadness and regret that I saw our work ill-used and our faith in Government's use of evidence traduced."
The Home Office commissioned further research on the same anti- burglary scheme - which focused on making homes more secure - and analysed it using different techniques.
"Through various manipulations of the data, the Home Office method does what it can to capitalise on chance, producing much more favourable findings overall," said Professor Hope. "But for individual projects, the method produces considerable distortion."
Dr Reece Walters, a senior lecturer at Stirling University, accuses the Home Office of "rubber-stamping the political priorities of the government of the day" and calls for a boycott of Home Office research. Dr Walters writes: "Its research agenda is motivated by outcomes that are of immediate benefit to existing political demands. It is embedded criminology." Another writer claimed that an influential study which is being used to support millions of pounds of public spending was "flawed". Paul Marchant, a chartered statistician, of Leeds Metropolitan University, criticised a 2002 Home Office report which concluded that better street lighting led to reduced crime.
"My ongoing debate with the authors and the government body involved is that the use of statistical methods in this study lacks sufficient rigour and so the claim is not supported by the data," he said.
The criminologists' papers were published in Criminal Justice Matters, the magazine of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London.
A Home Office spokesman said: "The Home Office has not yet seen these allegations. However, our research is commissioned from leading scholars, as a result of competitive tendering, and is subject to external and independent peer review. Nevertheless, the Home Secretary has been concerned for some time that Home Office statistics about crime have been questioned and challenged."
Copyright 2006 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.
All rights Reserved.
Appendix F 2
Home Office accused of 'political bias' in research
By David Barrett, the Scotsman, Feb. 2006
[Emphasis added]
http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=223312006
THE Home Office was accused of distorting its research for the government's political ends yesterday, with one Scottish criminologist calling on academics to boycott the department.
The Home Office spends £20 million on research papers each year, which are supposed to offer independent analysis of subjects such as crime and asylum, so that appropriate policy can be drawn up in response.
This month's edition of the academic journal, Criminal Justice Matters, accused the department's research programme of "rubber-stamping the political priorities of the day".
In one paper, Professor Tim Hope, of Keele University's criminology department, revealed that research he carried out into an anti-burglary project showed it would have actually increased the crime by two-fifths.
This result was "something of an embarrassment" to the Home Office, which never publicly commented on it and did not select the findings for a full report, said Prof Hope.
"It was with great sadness and regret that I saw our work ill-used and our faith in government's use of evidence traduced," he said.
The Home Office commissioned further research on the same anti-burglary scheme - which focused on making homes more secure - and analysed it using different techniques.
"Through various manipulations of the data, the Home Office method does what it can to capitalise on chance, producing much more favourable findings overall," said Prof Hope. "But for individual projects, the method produces considerable distortion."
Another author writing in the journal, published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London, called on academics to boycott participation in Home Office research.
Reece Walters, of Stirling University, said: "It is clear that the Home Office is only interested in rubber-stamping the political priorities of the government of the day.
"To participate in Home Office research is to endorse a biased agenda and I say academics must boycott the seeking of, and participation in, Home Office research."
Damian Green, the Shadow home affairs minister said: "The fact that leading criminologists are questioning the reliability of the Home Office's research is a damaging blow to the government's credibility in this area."
A Home Office spokesman said: "The Home Office has not yet seen these allegations. However, our research is commissioned from leading scholars, as a result of competitive tendering, and is subject to external and independent peer review."
This article: http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=223312006
Last updated: 13-Feb-06 01:39 GMT
Appendix G
Four Out of Five Migrants ‘Take more from the
economy than they put back’
London Evening Standard, 29th August 2006
[Emphasis added]
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23364888-details/Four+out+of+five+migrants+%27take+more+from+economy+than+they+put+back%27/article.do
Four out of five migrants take more from the British economy than they contribute, a report has warned today.
The analysis demolishes the Government's key claim that migrants pay more in taxes than they take back in public services.
Instead, a small number of very high earning foreign workers are masking the fact that 80 per cent of immigrants are taking more out of the economy than they contribute over their lifetimes.
Only one in five is earning the £27,000 a year required to make a positive contribution over the course of their lifetime. It means that, if they settle here, they will cost the taxpayer money.
The report's author, Migrationwatch UK, said it proved the case for only highly-skilled economic migrants - such as doctors and engineers - to be allowed to settle in Britain. It heaps even greater pressure on Home Secretary John Reid to call an end to Labour's 'open door' migration policy.
Sir Andrew Green, Migrationwatch chairman, said: 'The Government and its supporters repeatedly trot out favourable looking statistics which seek to give the impression that immigration in general has a very positive effect on the UK economy.
[See also Appendix C – C 2 re: ‘spin’ and ‘favourable looking statistics’ –Ed].
The reality is that immigrants are extremely varied. A minority are highly skilled and highly paid but a large majority will end up as a cost to the taxpayer if they settle here permanently.'
The Government calculates adult migrants make-up 10.6% of the population, but contribute 10.9% of the country's Gross Domestic Product - its total economic output.
This is the basis for its claim they make a 'small but positive' contribution to the economy.
But, using the Government's own Labour Force Survey, Migrationwatch says this calculation fails to show the full picture. To make a positive contribution to GDP over the course of a person's lifetime, they must earn £27,000 a year. This is the equivalent of paying £7,600 a year in income tax and other taxation, and would cover the costs of healthcare and other public services into retirement.
Only 20% of migrants achieve this. But, many of those that do - such as financiers, engineers and NHS consultants - earn large amounts of money. This makes it appear that migrants in general are making a positive contribution to GDP when, in fact, they are only a small minority of the total number.
Some eight out of ten earn less than £27,000, with a large number - including many eastern Europeans - on the minimum wage of less than £10,000 a year.
Britons are in the same position, with eight of ten of those born here not earning £27,000 and higher earners paying the majority of the tax bill.
But the difference is that the government can choose which work-related migrants are allowed to settle in the UK, and therefore has the option to select only those who will provide a boost to the economy.
Migrationwatch says that, as a result, only those earning more than £27,000 - and who are filling a vacancy that cannot be taken by an EU citizen - should be allowed to settle here by the Government's new advisory panel on immigration.
The panel, announced by John Reid last month, is to set an 'optimum level' of economic migration to the UK when it finally meets in two years' time. Any limit will exclude asylum seekers, and those given permission to live here for family reasons.
Sir Andrew said: 'To most people the measures we are suggesting are simple common sense. This research demonstrates once more that there is no economic case for massive immigration into the UK.
'The Home Secretary is right to say that we need to balance economic gain against social costs.
'The social costs of the present massive levels of immigration, including their impact on infrastructure and public services, far outweigh any possible benefit.'
The Government is powerless to restrict the number of migrants moving to Britain from within the EU, including Eastern Europe. More than 600,000 have flooded in from the former Eastern Bloc since the controversial expansion of the EU two years ago.
Up to 300,000 Romanians and Bulgarians are expected to follow when they join next year, unless the Government restricts their right to work here.
The study will add further fuel to the immigration debate, which has led to demands from former Labour Ministers to limit the number of new arrivals. Ex-Minister Frank Field said that, even without any new arrivals, there are not enough houses in the UK to adequately house the current population.
Former Home Office Minister John Denham said that Britain was already struggling to cope with record levels of immigration and was not ready for fresh waves.
The Conservatives have called for restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians. The Government has hinted limits could be imposed, but is yet to reach a firm decision.
A Home Office spokesman said it could not comment on the report in detail, as it had not yet seen it.
But he added the contribution made by migrants to British life could not be measured simply in terms of economic output.
It added a new points-based entry system for economic migrants would take into account factors such as salary, and whether an applicant is highly-skilled.
Appendix H
‘Violence blamed on teenage mums’
Study claims that immature young parents with poor discipline techniques are creating aggressive children
Mark Townsend, Sunday October 16, 2005
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1593326,00.html
Britain's high rate of teenage pregnancies is a principal factor in the cause of violent crime, according to a controversial report by a leading criminologist.
Speaking before the launch of one of the largest ever studies into violence, its author George Hosking said that parents under 16 were contributing to 'a cycle' of aggression that meant people were 25 times more likely to be a victim of violence than 50 years ago. His comments were denounced by many as demonising young parents.
Hosking referred to evidence that a person's propensity to violence is determined by the age of three. He said that teenage parents can lack 'emotional maturity' and misjudged attempts at discipline could lead to their children developing violent tendencies. A strong, healthy relationship between parents and babies is vital to reducing aggression, he said.
'More and more children are being born to younger parents who have no reference to draw on in how to handle a baby,' said Hosking, a clinical criminologist and chief executive of the Wave Trust, a charity dedicated to tackling the root causes of violence and which this week will unveil its nine-year study into the issue.
He added: 'Lower emotional maturity, lower emotional reserves and experience or maturity that people can draw on as parents play a role. People treated particularly badly under the age of three were more likely to go on and abuse as adults. Early intervention is required to stop a cycle of violence from developing.'
Despite government attempts to tackle teenage pregnancies, Britain still has one of the highest rates in Europe. Latest figures reveal that the rate of under-16-year-old pregnancies in England and Wales has increased.
Although Hosking said he wanted to avoid being seen as critical of parents, his views will be interpreted by some as yet another attack on teenage mothers and fathers.
Catherine Evans of the Brook Centre said: 'There is a real risk of demonising teenage parents who are doing their very best for their children. They need support rather than being undermined or criticised. Teenage parents themselves are likely to have fewer educational opportunities and that is likely to have a knock-on effect on the outcomes of their children, but I am not aware of any evidence on the effects of teenage pregnancies.'
However Norman Wells, director of Family and Youth Concern, a research group that looks into the causes of family breakdown, said: 'It certainly could be a factor. It shows the importance of addressing the high rates of out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies that we have in this country.'
The Wave Trust report, which analysed scores of academic studies into the causes of violence, claims that people are 25 times more likely to be a victim of violent crime now compared to the Fifties. Based on official police statistics, the study calculated that in 1950 there were 47 violent offences per thousand people compared to 1,158 for 2003/2004.
Hosking, who is 61, added: 'When I was walking around in the Fifties compared with walking around now we are looking at levels of risk and violence way beyond what was present at that time.
'Comparisons are now being made using the Nineties as a yardstick, yet violence then was many, many times higher than in the Fifties. We should be looking to that decade for a normal, acceptable level of violence,' said Hosking.
The increasing risk of violence contradict the findings of the British Crime Survey, which indicates that violent crime is going down. A spokesperson at the Home Office would not comment without having seen the methodology used by the Wave Trust.
However, he said: “The British Crime Survey is regarded internationally as the most reliable measure of trends of crime. It shows violent crime is actually falling and has reached its lowest point since 1981.”
Appendix I
Breach of Promise
Law Reform Commission of Ireland
The Law in Other Legal Systems
CHAPTER 2
(a) England and Wales
In the late 19th century, several Bills were introduced by Private Members in the House of Commons, seeking to abolish the action for breach of promise, but they did not become law. The subject was examined by the English Law Commission, which published its Report, entitled “Breach of Promise of Marriage”, in 1969. The Law Commission considered that the present law gives opportunity for claims of a “gold digging” nature. (This is the reason why legal aid was never made available for such actions.) The Commission also referred to the argument that;
“the stability of marriages is so important to society that the law should not countenance rights of action the threat of which may push people into marriages which they would not otherwise undertake”.
The Commission, whilst conceding that this threat might not be a major factor in practice, stated:
“[I]f, as we believe, it is important that parties should be free to terminate an engagement, then it can hardly be thought desirable to retain the contractual effects of an agreement to marry”.
The [Law] Commission examined five proposals for reform that had been canvassed.
The first was to abolish the action and provide no new remedy. This was rejected on the ground that it would result in injustices in regard to property questions.
The second was to retain the action but to limit it to the recovery of special damages. This was rejected on account, inter alia, of the difficulty of defining “special” damages so as to exclude compensation for such matters as loss of prospects of marriage.
The third proposal was to abolish the action and to create a new procedure for adjustment of gains and losses limited to those transactions that would not have taken place had no marriage been in contemplation, if the nature and size of the transaction resulting in gain or loss were “reasonable in all the circumstances”.
The general aim of the Court should be, so far as possible, to restore the parties to the position they would have been in had they not become engaged, except where a party had made an overall gain, in which case the gain should be shared. The adjustment scheme should be subject to a general provision that it should not apply where it would be inequitable. In this regard the English Commission considered that,
“although the mere withdrawal from an engagement should not be regarded as a 'fault' and penalised, it might be inequitable in some circumstances to overlook the conduct of one party”.
The Commission had earlier suggested that the adjustment scheme should apply in all cases where an intended marriage failed to take place, such as where the engagement was terminated by mutual agreement or where one of the parties died.
The Commission in its Report rejected the adjustment scheme for four reasons:
(a) It would involve accounting difficulties unless prolonged enquiries into the parties' expenditure were made.
(b) The introduction of such a scheme would actually “be using a very large hammer to crack a very small nut”. Even if community of property were to be proposed later by the Law Commission for married persons, it would be inappropriate and unacceptable to impose it upon engaged couples.
(c) The scheme “might well bring into court more cases than at present”, the concept of fairness being so vague. Since acrimony surrounded some terminations of engagements, it would be better for the law to provide “a reasonably certain basis on which the parties may be advised what arrangements are open to them”.
(d) Public opinion might oppose such a detailed examination of private affairs.
The fourth proposal considered by the English Law Commission was a modification of the third, namely, to replace the action for breach of promise by a system of adjustment of losses only. It rejected this proposal for substantially the same reasons as it rejected the third proposal.
The fifth proposal was to abolish the action for breach of promise, replacing it by a procedure for settling property disputes between the parties. This proposal was accepted by the Commission.
The Law Commission 1969 stated:
“The special relationship between engaged couples may lead them to enter into informal transactions concerning the acquisition or improvement of property, whether owned or purchased by one party or by both, and whether intended for their common use or otherwise. Such transactions will often be very similar in nature to those between married persons. There is a strong case for applying the same principles of law to disputes between ex-fiancés as those which apply to disputes between husband and wife”.
Appendix J
Widows, and To Prove a Marriage
“Irregular marriages” - widows and orphans left penniless because the
proper procedures had not been followed.
See also Appendix H re: "irregular marriages," I marry you." "You and I are man and wife".
In the second, "I will marry you," or, "I will take you to be my wife"--
ROBB v. ROBB et al
(1891), 20 O.R. 591 Ontario Common Pleas, Robertson J., 2 February 1891
Husband and wife--Indian marriage--Evidence of lawful marriage-- Declarations of deceased husband as to -Legitimacy of children.
http://library.usask.ca/native/cnlc/vol03/613.html
The question to be disposed of arises under the will of John Robb, and involves the question of the legitimacy of the infant defendant.
Both real and personal estate is devised and bequeathed under the will to the son William George Robb, subject to the following:
5. "I also will and bequeath, that if my said son Wm. Geo. Robb, should die unmarried, leaving no legal heir before the death of my wife, she shall by this my last will, have full power to dispose of all my real estate wherever it may be in Canada, or elsewhere, and divide the proceeds equally between her relatives and mine, giving to my relatives the half to one or more to those she may think in her opinion most deserving of it. Provided that if my son should marry and have an heir, all my real estate, but what is mentioned in section second of this will, I leave to my son and his heirs, and all moneys on accounts due to me at my death, securing to my wife the amount mentioned in this my last will, for her support during her life."
The will bears date 24th June, 1872. The testator died before 1st July, 1886. The son, William George Robb, also died on or about the about the 4th November, 1888, intestate, leaving him surviving, the infant defendant, who claims to be his legitimate child, which, however, the plaintiff and the other defendants deny. The facts, as regards the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the infant, are as follows:
Some time previous to the year 1869 the deceased, William George Robb, left Ontario and went to British Columbia, and there, in 1869 or thereabouts, was married to an Indian woman named "Supul-Catle," daughter of "Wah-Kus," the chief of the Comox tribe of Indians, whose wife (the mother of "Supul-Catle") was "Klach- Woshum-Keach," and the only wife "Wah-Kus" had at that time. Robb was married to "Supul-Catle" according to the Indian custom and paid the father, "Wah-Kus," $20 in half-dollar pieces. There was a feast given by "Wah-Kus" in honour of his daughter's marriage with a white man. The giving of presents to her father and the relations of the woman, and the acceptance thereof by him.
At the time of this union, that is, of the alleged marriage, between Robb and "Supul-Catle," British Columbia was a British colony, independent of and forming no part of the Dominion of Canada, and had a legislature of its own, and all the functions of self-government to the same extent as other British colonies where responsible government exists. The Comox tribe of Indians, as I understand it, were and are a nomadic band, which frequents British Columbia; and there is no evidence before me to show whether they are Christian or Pagan; but I think I can fairly assume from what has appeared, that they are the latter.
In Campbell v. Campbell, above referred to, it was held that a connection commencing in adultery, which however was not pretended in this case, may on ceasing to be adulterous, become matrimonial by consent, and may be evidenced by habit and repute, the parties being at liberty to intermarry; and further that the alteration in the character of the connection from adultery to matrimony need not be indicated by any public act, or by any observable change in the outward demonstration.
And the Lord Chancellor there held that proof of the legitimacy of the offspring is proof of the legitimacy of the marriage. (and according to Lord Mansfield, C.J., in the Berkeley Peerage Case, 4 Camp. 401, at p. 416), "If the father is proven to have brought up the party as his legitimate son, this is sufficient evidence of legitimacy till impeached, and indeed it amounts to a daily assertion that the son is legitimate."
In Eversley on Domestic Relations a short sketch of the origin and growth of the laws of England, respecting marriage is given, and inter alia that learned author says: "The tendency in England, as far as legislation has hitherto progressed, has been to regard marriage less as a religious obligation and more as a civil contract; for matrimony with all its requirements was formerly looked upon as a spiritual act within the province of the courts Christian; but the spirit in which modern legislation affecting it has been conceived, clearly evinces that its temporal and civil motive is to be held paramount and the basis of present and future change:" (p. 16).
Again, "as time went on the Church clothed their contract more and more with the character of a religious ceremony, and treated it less and less as a civil contract affecting the state in which the parties lived. But the consensus of the parties was the vital and essential portion of the contract, and these who had no impediment barring their union, might by agreeing to take each other as man and wife, contract a good and effectual marriage.
The effect of the consensus of the parties being the important (and essential element in forming this vinculum, and the ceremonies attending the formation but incidents, was that frequent marriages were made in which the consent of the parties was expressed, but not by any outward manifestation of religious rites:" (p. 17).
On the whole, I am of opinion that it must be declared that the infant defendant Sarah Jane Robb is the lawful daughter and the only "legal heir" of the said William George Robb, and as such is entitled to take under the will of her grandfather, John Robb, set out in the statement of claim; and I declare accordingly. The costs of all parties to be paid out of the estate, as between solicitor and client.
Appendix J 1
Addendum 2007
We have stated that legislation is not the answer. We have also stated that there should be no interference with the present status quo regarding inheritance and succession.
The Law Commission will probably justifies introducing its 2006 reforms on the back of this 2007 Scottish case. Ironically Scotland pioneered what the Law Commission has in mind for England. It passed laws to make it easier for female cohabitees to claim on the estate of male partners.
The intention was to allow female cohabitees to benefit directly, unhindered and unencumbered. But in the first test case involving ‘SL’ (a deceased father), more problems were created than were solved.
It became a 3 cornered fight between 1. the estate 2. the mother and 3. the children.
New family law could bring legal misery
By Bob Burgess, The Southern Reporter, 20th April 2007, Scottish Borders
FAMILIES could be facing heartbreak as a result of what a top local lawyer believes is bungled legislation rushed through by the Scottish Parliament.
And the local sheriff – who is handling what is believed to be the first case to be tripped up by the new law – has alerted lawyers about problems they are likely to face.
Sheriff Kevin Drummond says the public too must be made aware of hidden pitfalls in the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006.
Part of the act deals with how estates of people living together are dealt after one dies without having made a will.
Until the legislation was brought in a surviving partner had no legal claim on the estate.
That has now changed. But what was being seen as a step forward is creating an expensive headache for one family in the Borders.
And there are fears that this difficulty will be repeated across Scotland.
The live-in partner of SL, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was killed in an accident last year. He had not made a will. SL, the mother of his children, then made a claim under the new act, but that same legislation also states that if a death is intestate – that is, without a will – the estate passes to the children.
- - snip - -
Appendix J 2
“Jumping the broomstick”
Early Marriage and Divorce Practices in England
- according to Jane Griffiths MP (Reading, East), Lab
House Commons Debate, 24th Oct 2001, Vol 373 cc 320-7
“Before Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act 1753, people's relationships could be recognised in several different ways, which attracted some legal and social consequences. One of the most widely known practices was jumping the broomstick. A couple jumped over a broom that was leant against their front door, thereby gaining certain legal rights and responsibilities. Divorce was certainly easier in those days because the relationship was undone by jumping back over the broom in the presence of witnesses. There is no indication of the means used to resolve arguments over the distribution of assets held in common, although probably there were no assets.“
Appendix K
Pagan and Invalid Marriages
ROBB v. ROBB et al
(1891), 20 O.R. 591 Ontario Common Pleas, Robertson J., 2 February 1891
Husband and wife--Indian marriage--Evidence of lawful marriage-- Declarations of deceased
husband as to -Legitimacy of children.
http://library.usask.ca/native/cnlc/vol03/613.html
Lord Howell, in his celebrated judgment in Dalrymple v. Dalrymple, before referred to, in discussing, what are termed "irregular marriages," and which are known by the name of Sponsalia per verba de præsenti, and Sponsalia per verba de futuro cum copula, in the first of which such words were used, as "I take you to be my wife." "I marry you." "You and I are man and wife." In the second, "I will marry you," or, "I will take you to be my wife"-- said: "Different rules relative to their respective effects in point of legal consequence, applied to these three cases--of regular marriages--irregular marriages--and of mere promises or engagements.
In the regular marriage everything was presumed to be complete and consummated both in substance and in ceremony.
In the irregular marriage everything was presumed to be complete and consummated in substance but not in ceremony; and the ceremony was enjoined to be undergone as matter of order.
In the promise or sponsalia de futuro, nothing was presumed to be complete or consummate, either in sub- stance or ceremony. Mutual consent would release the parties from their engagement; and one party, with- out the consent of the other, might contract a valid marriage, regularly or irregularly with another person; but if the parties who had exchanged the promise had carnal intercourse with each other, the effect of that carnal intercourse was to interpose a presumption of present consent at the time of the intercourse, to convert the engagement into an irregular marriage, and to produce all the consequences attributable to that species of matrimonial connection." (p. 65).
This was the state of the canon law before the Council of Trent, which compelled that council to introduce the necessity of marriages among Roman Catholics being celebrated in the presence of the parish priest, after due proclamation of the banns, or the obtaining of an episcopal license.
But the marriages not celebrated in the presence of the church, etc., were only deemed irregular, were dis-countenanced, and were visited with punishments, and ecclesiastical censure, etc. Morally speaking, however, they were good, as far as they went, in the eyes both of church and state, and the issue were legitimate--In a word, as said by Willes, J., in Beamish v. Beamish, 9 H. L. Cas., at p. 306: "The general law of Western Europe, before the Council of Trent, seems clear. The fact of marriage, viz., the mutual consent of competent persons to take one another for man and wife during their joint lives, was alone considered necessary to constitute true and lawful matrimony." And this is the law of Scotland at the present time.
If I understand the case Re Bethell, 38 Ch. D. 220, correctly, it appears to me that the marriage there would have been held good and valid, had it not been for the fact that polygamy existed in the Baralong tribe into which Bethell married; and it was on this ground, that he, as a Baralong, had the right to take more than one woman to be his wife, that his marriage with "Teepoo," according to the usage and custom of that tribe, was declared invalid according to the law of England, because it was not formed on the same basis as marriages throughout Christendom, and was not, in its essence, "the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others."
Then again, in that country polygamy was legal. In British Columbia, at the time of the marriage between Robb and "Supul-Catle," it was illegal; but as before stated, I do not base my judgment on that ceremony at all, for the reasons already given, and had Re Bethell been free from the evil of polygamy, I think it would have been declared that the union between Bethell and Teepoo would have been a valid marriage, as it was formed--in so far as the mutual consent of the parties was concerned, followed by cohabitation and the birth of a child--on the same basis as marriages throughout Christendom are formed.
Appendix L
Marriage 'keeps families united'
BBC, 7th September 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5323798.stm
Couples with young children are five times more likely to split up if they are unmarried compared to those who have had weddings, the Tories claim.
Some 32% of unmarried parents split up before their child is three, a study of 15,000 people recited by the party's Social Justice Policy Group suggests.
The government had tried to "airbrush out references to marriage", group chairman Iain Duncan Smith said.
Labour did not comment on the claims by the former Conservative leader.
The study was written by Bristol-based pro-family campaigner Harry Benson and was submitted to a group set up to tackle problems such as family breakdown, crime and drugs.
Conservative leader David Cameron promised it would "come up with the right policies to help communities to turn themselves around".
'Vital to well-being'
"Family breakdown leads adults and children into poverty and other social problems," Mr Benson wrote.
"Any government that wants to reduce poverty and inequality for both children and adults alike has to address the issue of marriage, and what it is that makes marriages work better than the alternatives."
Mr Duncan Smith claimed the study showed "the government's assumption that children's outcomes are solely dictated by socio-economic factors is wrong".
"The structure within which they grow up and are nurtured is vital to their well-being," he added.
"The government's corresponding attempt to airbrush out references to marriage from family research is a form of censorship."
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/5323798.stm
Appendix M
Just as marriage is coming back in vogue …
… more and more it is women who don't want to wait around for
the "happily ever after", writes Miranda Devine.
Miranda Devine. Sydney Morning Herald, August 24th 2006
[Emphasis added]
<http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/just-as-marriage-is-coming-back-in-vogue-133/2006/08/23/1156012607354.html>
WHEN 42-year-old mother of two Helen Kirwan-Taylor wrote a newspaper article last month saying she finds motherhood boring, she became the most vilified woman in Britain. "Sorry, but my children bore me to death" was the title of her article in the Daily Mail in which she confessed to hating reading bedtime stories and spending two hours texting her girlfriends while watching a movie with her children.
Readers condemned her as a selfish princess who shouldn't be allowed to have children. But her confession also broke a taboo around the modern female's dissatisfaction with family life. Whether it is offloading the kids to day care or filling their hours with structured activities, mothers may be losing the art of enjoying their children.
But to William Doherty, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, Kirwan-Taylor's crie de coeur may have been part of a healthy backlash against "excessive child-centredness".
Doherty, who is in Sydney this week to speak at the National Christian Family Conference, is the marriage therapist who coined the term "overscheduled kids" to describe the phenomenon of children whose parents make them the centre of the universe.
But at a forum on marriage yesterday he explored the more fundamental problem of modern families - marriage breakdown.
It is not so much female unhappiness with motherhood that is causing problems for children, but the increasing willingness of mothers to walk out on marriage. As the latest Bureau of Statistics figures show, more than ever it is women who are the ones filing for divorce. The shift of power in marriages over the past 40 years has led to a stampede of women leaving the institution. How to put the genie back in the bottle without reversing female emancipation was the question hovering in the background at the forum.
Doherty says the first "divorce generation" of young people, now in their 20s and 30s, "still aspires to marriage, across all income levels". We live in such an "atomised world" where wider community social connections and extended families are disappearing so there is more hunger than ever for the intimate institution of marriage. Certainly, a rise in marriage rates here and in the US, and corresponding dip in divorce rates, would suggest marriage is coming back into vogue.
Anne Hollonds, the chief executive of Relationships Australia, says she perceives a real desire by people to form a "solid, sustainable relationship". There has been a 50% increase in inquiries about her pre-marriage education courses this year. "These are younger people in first-time marriages, who are highly educated and value education as a means to ensure success in later life."
[NB it is contentious whether ‘walking out’ is a sign of empowerment or extended immaturity. It would be more accurate to state that the first "divorce generation" appeared 40 years ago and that they are now in their 60s. It would be more accurate to assert that the “first children of the divorce generation now in their 30s or early 40s.” – Ed]
Appendix N
Composition of Law Commission (2006)
|
The Law Commissioners are:
|
|
|
|
The Honourable Mr Justice Toulson,
|
|
Chairman
|
|
Mr Stuart Bridge
|
|
|
|
Professor Hugh Beale QC, FBA
|
|
|
|
Dr Jeremy Horder
|
|
|
|
Mr Kenneth Parker QC
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The team that is planning to re-allocate assets in favour of female cohabitees is composed of the following:-
|
|
Name
|
|
Occupation
|
|
Mr. Stuart Bridge
|
|
Family Law Commissioner
|
Female:
|
Judith Cairns
|
|
lawyer # 1
|
|
Julia Jarzabkowski
|
|
lawyer # 2
|
|
Joanna Miles
|
|
lawyer # 3
|
|
Cheryl Morris
|
|
lawyer # 4
|
|
Wendy Mathers
|
|
Research Assistant
|
|
Stella Rozanski
|
|
Research Assistant
|
|
|
|
|
Male:
|
Matthew Jolley
|
Team Manager
|
lawyer # 5
|
|
Joel Wolchover
|
|
Research Assistant
|
|
Michael Ashdown
|
|
Research Assistant
|
|
Daniel Robinson
|
|
Research Assistant
|
NB The age of staff members is not known
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
- - ooo0__ (o)__ 0ooo - -
Annex A
Canada has discarded its Common Law heritage in favour of a codified alternative where the apparent rights of every citizen is enshrined, protected and promoted
[Emphasis added]
Equality, as defined by:
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Section 15 guarantees women and men equality before and under the law without discrimination. It applies to all legislation, policies and practices, and supersedes all other legislation. Equality does not mean treating all groups alike to achieve true equality; it is frequently necessary for policies and programs to treat different individuals and groups in different ways. Both the intent and the result of a policy should ensure the equality of women and men.
Policies that appear to be "neutral" can lead to discrimination if, in their application, they have a disproportionate impact or adverse effect on women.
. . . . and from the foreword
"Gender-based analysis is integral to the development of policies, programs and legislation. It should result in policies, programs and legislation that are inclusive and consistent with the spirit and content of the Charter. Gender-based analysis leads to informed policy-making and good governance."
Source - "GENDER-BASED ANALYSIS: A GUIDE FOR POLICY-MAKING", Canadian Gov't.
Annex B
Table 1. Contact and Residence applications made under Sect 8 of the Children Act 1989.
|
Disposal of selected applicants in private law in all tiers of court, 2002
Nature of application
|
Applications withdrawn
|
Orders refused
|
Number
of ‘No
Order’ orders
|
Orders
made |
Parental responsibility
|
773
|
290
|
132
|
8,240
|
|
|
|
|
|
Section 8
|
|
|
|
|
Residence
|
1,536
|
158
|
431
|
30,006
|
Contact
|
2,373
|
518
|
945
|
61,356
|
Prohibited steps
|
300
|
40
|
77
|
8,889
|
Specific issue
|
207
|
33
|
67
|
2,940
|
Total
|
|
|
1,652
|
|
Source: Hansard, 24th May 2004 : Column 1318W.
|
Table 2 Selected Children Act 1989 statistics for all tiers of courts in England & Wales
|
Residence orders
|
Contact orders
|
Year
|
Withdrawn
|
Refused
|
No. of ‘no orders’
|
Orders made
|
Withdrawn
|
Refused
|
No. of ‘no orders’
|
Orders made
|
1992
|
3,529
|
658
|
1,990
|
16,424
|
4,940
|
1,092
|
2,955
|
17,470
|
1993
|
4,720
|
972
|
2,239
|
22,264
|
7,962
|
1,956
|
4,044
|
27,780
|
1994
|
5,503
|
1,004
|
2,436
|
24,012
|
8,943
|
2,113
|
4,166
|
31,506
|
1995
|
5,427
|
806
|
2,345
|
25,376
|
|
|
|
|
1996
|
5,483
|
857
|
3,027
|
27,432
|
|
|
|
|
1997
|
5,042
|
837
|
1,578
|
26,883
|
|
|
|
|
1998
|
5,051
|
865
|
1,689
|
30,398
|
|
|
|
|
1999
|
4,093
|
619
|
1,116
|
21,286
|
|
|
|
|
2000
|
3,078
|
491
|
941
|
25,809
|
|
|
|
|
Source: Lord Chancellor’s Dept, Oct 25th 2001 (see LCD email 2/2/02).
|
Annex C
Divorce Rate 1971 - 2006
England and Wales rate at 26 year low
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=170
Table 3
In 2007 the provisional divorce rate in England and Wales fell to 11.9 divorcing people per 1,000 married population compared with the 2006 figure of 12.2. The divorce rate is at its lowest level since 1981.
For the sixth consecutive year both men and women in their late twenties had the highest divorce rates of all five-year age groups. In 2007 there were 26.6 divorces per 1,000 married men aged 25-29 and 26.9 divorces per 1,000 married women aged 25-29.
Since 1997 the average age at divorce in England and Wales has risen from 40.2 to 43.7 years for men and from 37.7 to 41.2 years for women, partly reflecting the rise in age at marriage.
One in five men and women divorcing in 2007 had a previous marriage ending in divorce. This proportion has doubled in 27 years: in 1980 one in ten men and women divorcing had a previous marriage ending in divorce. Sixty-nine per cent of divorces were to couples where the marriage was the first for both parties.
For 68 per cent of divorces in 2007, the wife was granted the divorce. For all divorces granted to an individual (rather than jointly to both), behaviour was the most common fact proven.
United Kingdom:
Between 2006 and 2007, the provisional number of divorces granted in the UK fell by 2.6 per cent to 144,220, from 148,141. This is the third consecutive fall in the number of UK divorces and the lowest number since 1977 (138,445). The figure is 20 per cent lower than the highest number of divorces, which peaked in 1993 (180,018).
The provisional number of divorces in England and Wales fell by 3.0 per cent to 128,534 in 2007. The number of divorces in Scotland decreased by 1.9 per cent from 13,014 in 2006 to 12,773 in 2007. Conversely, the provisional number of divorces in Northern Ireland increased to 2,913 in 2007, a 14 per cent increase from 2006 (2,565).
Annex D
Table 4. Number of Divorces made absolute - House of Commons Research Paper 96/42
|
1938
|
1943
|
1944
|
1945
|
1946
*
|
1947
*
|
1948
*
|
1949
|
1950
|
1951
|
9,970
|
14,887
|
18,390
|
24,857
|
15,634
|
60,254
|
43,698
|
34,856
|
30,870
|
28,767
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1952
|
1953
|
1954
|
1955
|
1956
|
1957
|
1958
|
1959
|
1960
|
1961
|
33,922
|
30,326
|
28,027
|
26,816
|
26,265
|
23,785
|
22,654
|
24,654
|
23,868
|
25,394
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1962
|
1963
|
1964
|
1965
|
1966
|
1967
|
1968
|
1969
|
1970
|
1971
|
28,935
|
32,052
|
34,868
|
37,785
|
39,067
|
43,093
|
45,794
|
51,310
|
58,239
|
74,437
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1972
|
1973
|
1974
|
1975
|
1976
|
1977*
|
1978
|
1979
|
1980
|
1981
|
119,025
|
106,003
|
113,500
|
120,522
|
126,694
|
129,053
|
143,667
|
138,706
|
148,301
|
145,713
|
Source: 1938 – 45 ‘Annual Abstract of Statistics’, (1953 – 1955), page 60.
[*] Special Procedures or ‘ Quickies’ – introduced in 1947 and again in 1977.
NB The 1947 record level of divorces was only surpassed in 1971
|
Table 5. Divorces made absolute 1962 to 1977. England & Wales[ NB Record level (1977) 120,053]
Table 6. Dissolution of marriage selected years.
Source: 1938 – 45 ‘Annual Abstract of Statistics’, (1953 – 1955), page 60. [ NB.1946 - 48 Quickies].[ NB 1937 = 10,350 divorces]. Record level 60,254 (1947).
Annex E
Fig 19. Michigan (USA) 2002.
Appendix
The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle’s Polis
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521849340&ss=fro
D. Brendan Nagle is professor of history, emeritus, at the University of Southern California.
Excerpt:
Among ancient writers, Aristotle offers the most profound analysis of the polis household and its relationship to the state. The household was not the family in the modern sense of the term, but a much more powerful entity with significant economic, political, social, and educational resources. The success of the polis in all its forms lay in the reliability of households to provide it with the kinds of citizens it needed to ensure its functioning. In turn, the state offered the members of its households a unique opportunity for them to flourish. This book explains how Aristotle thought household and state interacted within the polis.
“The understanding of the nature of the “state” as it is now emerging from various studies of the polis also helps to situate Aristotle’s oikos in its historical setting. Unlike the modern household, the oikos, as I argue in Chapter 1, was a far more powerful institution with far greater resources and correspondingly greater responsibilities than its modern counterpart. Just as modern citizenship is a weak reflection of polis citizenship, the modern household is but a shadow of the powerful institution that was the ancient polis household. This understanding may help throw into relief Aristotle’s assertion that the household, and not some intermediary association or the individual, was the fundamental building block of the polis.”
Although advocating an ideal, Aristotle also recognized that human flourishing could take place to some extent even under deviant constitutions, that is, in those poleis that fell short of the ideal. Even in these deficient states the household had its share of moral worth.
UN, "The World's Women", 1995 - Trends and Statistics." (UN)
After 1945 to rebuild the population child benefit was paid in full only after the 2nd child, not as at present, the first and then doubled for the second.
Lord Filkin, the then Minister with responsibility for the area asked the Law Commission to review the law and to suggest possible reforms. The terms of reference for the project are contained in the Law Commission's Ninth Programme of Law Reform, which is available at http://www.lawcom.gov.uk/docs/9th_Prog_Final(2).pdf
Section 9(1)(b) of the Family Law (Scotland) Act 1985, Scotland, see para 5.26
‘Emperor’s New Clothes’, Dr. J Campion, Cheltenham Group, 1996.
“Funding Fluid Families” R Whiston. Nov 1998, Appendix A “Rough Guide to the Cost of Single Parenthood”.
John Milton (1608-1674) a Puritan poet. In a fervently religious period he wrote ‘Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’ (1643). followed by ‘Areopagitica’ in 1644, which is a sweeping history of censorship from antiquity to modern times, establishing the democratic right of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.[ Shrew - an offensive term for a woman who is regarded as quarrelsome, nagging, or ill-tempered] http://www.thoemmes.com/404.asp?404;http://www.thoemmes.com/encyclopedia/swift.htm
For 2006 purposes the definition of ‘Home Sharers’ has changed. It now also includes all “couples who do not live together and other, non-intimate home-sharers. In contrast, cohabiting couples is a relationship that entails a certain emotional intimacy and intensity, often accompanied by the parties sharing a view of their relationship as a joint venture in life.
“Promoting Inter-Agency Working in the Family Justice System” (LCD March 2002). Introduction written by Mr. Justice Thorpe; candidly admits the systemic failure of all the organs [national and regional court committees etc] designed to shore up the divorce and custody regime. Accepts the family court regime is in chaos, at the brink of collapse and that another public inquiry will magic away the problems.
Sprawson was made head of the Child Benefit Policy section of the Department for Work and Pensions ("the Department") in 1999. His role was “to manage the development and maintenance of policy on Child Benefit and Guardian's Allowance, and to give advice to ministers on those matters”.
See ONS ‘Women's Statistics’ - Blue book. See also ‘British Social Attitude Survey 1989’.
At the 12% and 8% levels and using Fig 3 as a baseline the totals would be 56,000 and 13,200 respectively.
BHPS- British Household Panel Survey, also ONS ‘Social Trends’, Page 45.
Items 11, 12 and 13 derived from “Estimates of Cohabitation - dis-aggregating the cohort into sex, marital status and age groups”. ONS Population Trends, No 95, Spring 1999. (p 9 - p13).
Items 19 to 22 taken from Office for National Statistics; ‘Focus on Families’; 7th July 2005.
‘Farewell to the Family’, Morgan P, IEA and The Observer, Sept 3, 2006, ‘An estimated £1.9bn is spent on looking after the 60,000 children who are ‘in care’ and £30bn on benefits for those who are 'high-risk and high-cost'.
ONS; Focus on Gender; 8th January 2004. Before 1990 ONS never asked women questions about cohabiting and births.
“Cohabiting” was not included in ONS surveys, e.g. The Family Expenditure Survey (FES) until 1990. (OPCS No 71).
OPCS (ONS) "Population Projections" 1987-2027 Series - PP2, No 16. Life Expectancy.
The Fisher equation of exchange states MV = PT, where M is the money supply x V , the velocity of circulation = P, the average price level x T, the number of transactions. In this instance we are referring to serial fathers and fathering. The collapse in the value of marriage is off-set by the number of cohabitation transactions.
In the USA about 50% of White children born since 1980 will spend at least some of their live in single parent households the figure for Black children is 80%.- United Nations Children Fund
The Ritchie Report, Dec 2001, largely blamed deep-rooted segregation.
For example, the Socialist Workers Party, the Anti-Nazi League, the Anti-Racist League, etc.
“World Watch magazine, “…. men often abandon their wives and children because of increasing economic pressures” this is especially true in poor countries.
1961 oral birth control pill introduced. Abortion legalised in 1967. There are now 190,000 abortions in Britain every year. The average completed family size (CFS) has fallen from 2.4 to 2.1 and is at 1.9.
1969 No-Fault divorce. 1976 Cohabitation laws. 1991 Child Support system. made synchronised appearances in California, USA, New Zealand, Australia, UK, etc, etc.
“Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936”, Wendy Zeva Goldman, 1993. A review by Christine D. Worobec Journal of Social History 1995
The fate was grizzly of those jurists and legal activists who drafted the legislation repressing family life. Fro example, Alexander Goikhbarg, Aron Sol'ts, Evgenii Pashukanis, and Aleksei Kiselev were all purged in the 1930s for their drafting of the anti-family legislation of 1918, 1925 and 1926.
Source, Brian Jenkins, an actuary, Toronto, Canada, Monday, January 2, 2006
In part the Irish Civil War was a ‘class war'. In that regard it was distinct from the Spanish Civil War. The enemy was seen as the large landowners known as the Anglo-Irish because of their historical and wealth connections to Britain and the often impoverished Protestants (Loyalists). In the devastation, over 190 “stately homes” and the estates of the Irish landed classes were laid waste. Arguably, it bears similarities to the Congo/Rwanda conflicts. The cost of the war crippled the fledgling Irish Free State for many years. In return for not having to pay its agreed share of the Imperial Debt (under the 1921 Treaty) estimated at between £5m and £19m, e.g. for Irish pensioners and war pensions, the Free State agreed to waive all its claim to Nationalist areas in the predominantly protestant Northern Ireland (i.e. Ulster). A pledge later disregarded by the IRA.
‘Seven Years in the Lives of British Families’, report produced by the Institute for Social and Economic Research
“The CSA – a burden on the state”, by Robert Whiston. See Appendix D, “Rough Guide to The Cost of Single Parenthood”, Pub’d UKMM. Nov 1998.
Married Woman's Property Act 1882, is often cited, wrongly, as a break through or starting point for women’s equal rights. In fact it had always been possible for a-women to own and control property. The 1882 Act merely consolidated preceding Acts, e.g. 1870 Act, confirming that status. Omitted in all commentaries is that it was designed by rich women exclusively for wealthily women, and was never intended to be emancipatory.
Broadly speaking, in day light hours to avoid kidnapping and forced marriages being later held by an ecclesiastical court to be valid ‘in the eyes of God. See ‘irregular marriages’.
Lord Justice Robin Dunn commenting on the pre-1969 era reports “maintenance for wives was usually wholly inadequate for their needs. `Ancillaries' as they were called were dealt with by the registrars …. The so-called `one-third rule', which fixed the wife's maintenance at one-third of the husband's gross income, was applied more or less rigorously by the registrars, although they were always at pains to say that the rule did not exist”.
Judicial Statistics Annual Report 2004 show that in 2002 the number who filed for divorce but then changed their mind was greater than the total number who were granted divorce in the years 1954 to 1962 (177,223 filed less 147,465 granted = 29,758 withdrawals).
The Kitty Mellish case (1710-1747) is an exception - Court of Arches and Court of King’s Bench - a libertine lover of the daughter of da Costa a rich Anglo-Jewish tycoon, sued her for £100,000.
Court room dramas centering on common-law marriages still occur - usually in regard child support. One famous case is Jennings v Hurt, the Supreme Court 1989. Ms. Jennings, who gave birth to a son while living with Mr. Hurt She said they had "a spiritual marriage, that we were married in the eyes of God," while he was filming the movie, "The Big Chill" there in 1982 and 1983. Mr. Hurt obtained a divorce from the actress Mary Beth Hurt, circa Jan 1983. Apart from questions of possible adultery and child support, if Miss Jennings view is to be believed there is a possible hint of bigamy.
Charles Dickens, FRSA author (7th February 1812 - 9th June 1870).
The civil system (secular) took over the Canon Law of the Ecclesiastical Courts after 1857.
The 19th century legal commentator, Sir Henry Sumner-Maine, described marriage as a "status" with a recognised role within society. But even then, he noted a slide toward a contractual dimension - in harmony with the Industrial Age. What would he make of it now in the ‘Post Industrial Age’ ?
She was elected Principal of and St Anne's College in 1991. She is married to a solicitor, she has a student daughter and is active in matters concerning women, divorce, higher education, careers, childcare and student welfare. Ruth Deech initiated Oxford University's Equal Opportunity Committee and has been a member of various university committees concerned with student health, childcare and freedom of speech. As chair of the Admissions Board she biased Oxford away from those with high qualifications and towards those of children from state schools. She is a Trustee of Jewish Continuity and a Governor of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
New Zealand scrapped its Air Force strike capability in 2001. In Dec 2005 Defence Minister Mark Burton announced that the sale of the 34 aircraft to the U.S. company Tactical Air Services for 155 million dollars ($109.9 million) and was an ‘excellent outcome’. - Agence France-Presse, www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=1096702&C=airwar
‘Divorce Dissent: Dangers in Divorce Reform’, Centre for Policy Studies, London, (23 pages), Jan 1994. pp 7 – 15.
‘Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows’, The Tempest, by William Shakespeare – a shipwrecked man finds himself seeking shelter beside a sleeping monster.
‘Divorce Dissent: Dangers in Divorce Reform’, Centre for Policy Studies, London, Jan 1994 (p 12).
See D Borrillo, “The ‘Pacte Civil de Solidarité’ in France” in ‘Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships: A study of National, European and International Laws’ (2001) 475, 476. ‘Egalitie’ bars special legislation applying only to minority.
Receipt of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependant Children) is 1,700% more frequent among illegitimate children of never married mothers than among legitimate children raised by intact married couples. Source: Robert Rector, US
Congress. [ AFDC, UK equiv. is Income Support]http://www.house.gov/ways_means/humres/106cong/6-29-99/6-29rect.htm
“Family Matters: Family Breakdown and its Consequences”, Morgan P, (p 5). To be termed a ‘family’ implies 2 parents with children, connected by marriage and blood and spread over 2 to 3 generations. The term ‘married couples’ implies childlessness. Also US Census has a ‘non-family’ category for economic units of one parent.
“Experiments in Living: the Fatherless Family”, by Rebecca O'Neill (pub. Civitas) Sept 2002.
Germany alone would produce over 100,000 Maxim machine guns during Word War 1
Now Professor of Social Policy, University of York and CASE Associate. E-mail kk500@york.ac.uk. CASE was established in October 1997.
Kathleen Kiernan “The Legacy of Parental Divorce” CASE, 1997. “…. dissolution will impact psychologically on any children - even of the tenderest ages“.
A report by Helen Wilkinson, and, Geoff Mugan examining trends in the 16 to 34 age groups using the British Household Panel Study In 1950, the average married man with two children paid no income tax on his wages if he earned less than 105% of the “national average industrial wage” – Demos. (Today, it is about 35%)
Hansard, HC Debate 08 June 1989, vol 154 cc207-8W 207W 208W. A husband and wife will each have their own personal allowance and the new system will continue to recognise marriage through the married couple's allowance. The personal allowance and the married couple's allowance will together be equivalent to the present married man's allowance – Norman Lamont MP, Chancellor.
“Sharing Homes; A Discussion Paper”, examined the property rights of those who share homes. It covered not only “couples”, married or unmarried, but also friends, relatives and others who may be living together for reasons of
companionship or care and support. http://www.lawcom.gov.uk/docs/lc278.pdf
Based on John Haskey’s findings which have not gone unchallenged - see “Cohabitation in Great Britain: past, present and future trends – and attitudes” (2001). ONS ‘Population Trends’ 103, 4
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