Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. Photo credit: Simon Gosney.
Welfare reforms, marriage and the underclass have all come under scrutiny in the past week. Whilst the Government estimates there are 120,000 “troubled families” in Britain, who cost the taxpayer £9 billion a year, the Works and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has supported marriage in a Social Justice Stratgey Paper. It says that children enjoy a better life if they have “the same two parents.” Marriage has become more fashionable recently, with the number of weddings rising 3.7 per cent in a year, reported The Daily Mail. This Paper is intended to be the blueprint for the Government’s tackling of the root causes of poverty. It calls for an end to spending “dysfunctional money”, reported the Press Association, on short term difficulties, and focus on “early interventions” to aid families.
The goverment has also put through its Welfare Reform Bill, with a Universal Credit and a £500 a week cap on benefits per household. It’s aimed at making it more sensible to work than to remain on benefits. Knotty problems, all of these social ones. So what are people saying?
“We know that children raised by parents reporting high relationship quality and satisfaction tend to have higher levels of wellbeing, while intense conflict between parents has been shown to be detrimental to children’s outcomes,” said Iain Duncan Smith, quoted in The Daily Mail.
But don’t cap benefits! The Mirror wasn’t very happy about Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare proposals: “what is fair about grabbing as much as £68 per week from single parents in full time work?” It’s just a “cloak” for attacking low income families. And whilst the paper backed the “remoulding of the welfare state to encourage work”, such policies are simply Victorian.
More needs to be done! David Cameron should be joining up his policies, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. Charlie Taylor, the government’s expert adviser on behaviour, and Louise Cameron, who heads the troubled families team, were both appointed after the riots. Both have frontline experience with the underclass, and both think the same: “that to create order out of chaos the Government must help to put clear boundaries in place both at home and at school” – even if this means being called a “nanny state.” But, though they both deal with “unemployment, addiction, truancy, family breakdown and poverty”, they’ve never met. Troubled families don’t split their lives into conenient deparments – they just need help. These people aren’t “squeezed in the middle, but trodden under foot.” The PM should “make it clear that dealing with the underclass is a national priority.”
We must focus on the right priorities! And look at all this fuss about gay marriage, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. By supporting it, Cameron is ensuring that he won’t get “insulted in BBC studios.” But it isn’t a “legislative priority for the general public.” The public doesn’t like being “preached at in favour of gay rights.” The actual number of civil partnerships in this country is “less than one per cent of the number of marriages each year.” There are qualifications when it comes to marriage: you must be an adult, you can’t be married to another; you can’t be closely related; and you have to marry someone of the opposite sex. And plus, marriage “affects everything – what buildings we live in, who cares for us, why and how we earn, save and spend our money, whether we have children and how we bring them up.” It’s not a “private thing.” “Marriage is a great, big, deep subject. There is no crying need to change it just because a vociferous lobby says we must.”
