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Party political wedding
The solution is to scrap all tax allowances and simply tax us less
National Marriage Week. How the heart sinks. William Hague supported it, and the media have been full of it. Mr Hague took the opportunity of announcing new policies to use the tax and benefit system to encourage marriage. At the same time a lot of publicity was given to a survey claiming that women are fed up with family life; seven out of 10 feel the demands are too great, though eight out of 10 believe marriage is essential to stable family life. Another investigation, by the Mental Health Foundation, claimed last week that the breakdown of the traditional family is a major cause of unprecedented levels of mental illness among children. One in five children under 18 supposedly suffers from what's annoyingly known today as a mental health problem.
There you have it. The same old, familiar, intractable set of problems. Even if the studies sound deeply unreliable, we can all see some truth in them somewhere. Working mothers are often exhausted, their children often neglected, their marriages a burden. Middle-class working women often live the lives of overworked Victorian skivvies. The network of social support that families used to provide is frequently full of holes, perhaps beyond repair. That is partly because women who work no longer have time for anyone or anything outside their own front doors. It is also because since the war the welfare state has usurped the role of the family.
Now, at last, the family has been recognised for what it always was - the best and most efficient form of social security. The state, which for so long displaced the family, is now at last anxious to reinstate it. Politicians, for good reasons and bad, want to. Mr Blair wants to. Mr Hague wants to. The only difference between them is that Mr Blair makes meaningless nice noises, while Mr Hague has concrete proposals about the tax and benefits system. But I feel it is all doomed to failure.
The real problem is politicians' irresistible impulse to tinker. What we have now is a mish-mash of tax and benefits, demands and allowances; every time a problem emerges or an injustice is denounced, yet more tinkering goes on, yet another allowance is created, another special case, another tax break, an increase in child benefit. What it gives with one hand the state takes away with the other, in transactions of ever-increasing complexity.
William Hague himself said last week that he thinks that a good start in supporting marriage would be to juggle tax and benefits to favour married couples. For instance, he suggests letting married couples transfer an unused tax allowance if one partner stays at home to look after children or invalid relations. Of course that would support stay-at-home married mothers (or fathers), and it is a courageous suggestion; however, it would be shot down by unmarried people with families, by the childless, by the gay adoption lobby and by liberals everywhere.
What's wrong with it, and what's wrong with all these tinkerings, is the assumption behind them. It's an assumption that even Conservatives make, despite years of Thatcherism. How often does one have to say this? It's the assumption that it is the business of the state to interfere, more and more, in our private lives. Yet we all know that the more the state interferes, the more it tinkers with one unintended consequence after another, the more Hydralike anomalies that appear, the more bureaucracy that breeds, the worse will be the problems and the higher the taxes. The obvious solution is for the state to stay out of our private lives, scrap all tax allowances and simply tax us less. Let us keep more of our earned income. Let us have less government, more freedom and more personal responsibility. Let us make our own compromises with life.
The state really should not be encouraging anybody to do anything, other than to keep the peace and to obey the law. For years it has been encouraging welfare dependency and single parenthood and divorce, by making tax and benefits concessions to them all. That was clearly a disaster and should have been warning enough about the unforeseen dangers of state intervention. It would be so much better, and simpler and fairer to bring down the entire Gothic edifice of allowances and group benefits and special dispensations.
It's true that a lower standard income tax rate would yield less revenue, but then so much less would be needed, (the tax and benefit system would be so much cheaper to run). It's also true that many people would find themselves ineligible for benefit, but that would be a very family friendly policy. People would be driven to rely on families, wherever possible. People would be forced to accept that it takes two people at least, and a long time together, to bring up children. They would have to accept that it is not the job of the state to stand in for an absent father or to provide subsidised childcare: with more disposable income they could pay for their own, or not, as they chose. Divorce and deliberate single parenthood would still be an option but not at public expense. Benefits would go only to sick and disabled individuals and to those in unmistakable need.
This would mean that we could afford some of life's essentials, such as good schools, good health services and adequate old age pensions. But politicians cannot be dissuaded from tinkering, or from thinking they know best. How the heart sinks.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, February 14, 1999
