25. Cohabitation in the UK - A Legal and Political Jihad Against Males

Robert Whiston FRSA; October 2006

In returning to the topic of legitimising cohabitation the Law Commission is attempting to complete what for them is ‘unfinished business’.

The Law Commissioners are once again trying to launch another frontal assault on a target which, over the last 20 years, they have failed to overwhelm.[1]

In the absence of any public clamour for change this behaviour, if not obsessive, is certainly taking on the air of a hobby horse. For some reason yet to be revealed, marriage is viewed as an ideological irritant.

The only success the Law Commission has savoured in a 20-year-long campaign is the incremental erosion of marriage as the pre-eminent vehicle of choice into which children are born.

The Law Commission fails to face up to the inevitable fact that the consequences of their proposals substantially reduce people’s sense of liberty and freedom of choice.

To give mature adults the choice between a). marriage and b). cohabitation but with the same rights on separation as marriage, is no choice at all.

If, for various reasons some heterosexual couples wish not to marry they have (at present) the options of cohabiting or recording their commitment more formally at a Registry Office. These are the same options offered to same-sex couples now that they can have their ‘unions’ legally registered.

Is the Law Commission proposing that homosexual and lesbian couples should loose their right to cohabit and be given only the option of registering their union ? No, they are not. But apparently this is precisely what the Law Commission intends for heterosexual couples

Choices are being expanded, it would appear, for homosexuals but closed for heterosexuals.

Heterosexuals may have a choice but it is in name only.

Worse is to follow. The astuteness of Law Commission will effectively be taking advantage of inexperienced young adults who are not mature enough or cognisant of the price they will be forced to pay when they enter a period of cohabitation which they may view as a ‘trial marriage.

These young men, and it will be only men, stand to be ‘fleeced’ when they innocently enter into cohabitation and later in life are fleeced a second time as they pass through the divorce courts.

The argument that they can avoid such a fate if they don’t marry is made obsolete by the new proposals. They will be fleeced as if they were married and there is every possibility that with the frequency and transience of cohabitation they could well lose all their accumulated assets 6 or 7 times in their lifetime. This is a wholly destructive prospect for society to consider. The collateral damage will be enormous.

Society at large and politicians in particular are at last waking up to the long term costs of these failed policies. The consequences for the state are simple. Subsidies to Single Mother Households (SMH), and by implication cohabitation, cost the British nation over £13 billion pound every year (at 1996 prices).[2]

Theoretically the Law Commission should be diametrically opposed to Talibanisation. Instead it is endorsing the same sort of policies that jihadists would inflict under of the rigidity of a Kaliph.

Having time and again been thwarted in their ambition to sweep away marriage, the Law Commission remains unrepentant. They appear to be unaware that the breakdown in cohabitation shows a strong ethnic prevalence.

Had the Family Law Act 1996 not proven unworkable we can only guess at what life would be like under its proposed tyranny - replete with its quagmire of ‘property adjustments’ (i.e. transfers through legalised confiscation) to a new class of people, the ‘associated person’.

Footnotes

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[1] ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’, Dr. J Campion, Cheltenham Group, 1996.

[2] “Funding Fluid Families” R Whiston. Nov 1998, Appendix A “Rough Guide to the Cost of Single Parenthood”. Source: Cohabitation: a State-Sponsored Slither into Slothfulness; A submission by Robert Whiston FRSA in reply to the DCA Consultation Paper (UK): "Cohabitation: the Financial Consequences of Relationship Breakdown”; ‘Consultation Paper No 179; July 2006 (Contents :: 1. A Legal and Political Jihad; 2. The ‘Home Sharer’ Proposition; 3. Property; 4. Fact file; 5. Cohabiting Patterns; 6. Ethnicity; 7. Race and Riots; 8. Illegitimacy; 9. Impact of Cohabitation; 10. Soviet Experience; 11. Social Dynamics; 12. A Look at Ireland; 13. Increased Social Instability; 14. Gresham’s Law; 15. History of Marriage; 16. Breach of Promise; 17. Common Law Wife; 18. Irregular Marriages; 19. Brenda Hoggett & Ruth Deech; 20. Cohabitation in France; 21. Intellectual Betrayal; 22. Maori Families; 23. Lions Led By Donkeys; 24. Question and Answers; Annex A 65; Appendix Index)

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