Monday 6 May 2013

Don't judge my family

I've just signed the petition against the Conservatives' proposed Marriage Tax Allowance, which they want to push through before the end of this parliament in 2015.

This allowance would pay £3 a week to people who are married, where one partner doesn't go out to work - regardless of whether or not they have dependent children.

Julianne Marriott, Campaign Director of Don’t Judge My Family, persuasively argues that only one in three of the families who would gain from this policy have children, and fewer than one in five have children under five years of age.

The main beneficiaries will be people who are both fortunate enough to (still) be married and rich enough that they can afford for one of them not to work - in other words, the already affluent and comfortable.

Those who pay for it will be those on lower incomes who both have to work to make ends meet; the divorced (whether or not they wished their partner to leave them - I certainly didn't); and the struggling single parents. 

As Oscar Wilde said: "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". For David Cameron and his cynical Conservatives, the price of marriage is £3 a week, and they have no idea of the value of real families, in all their shapes and sizes.

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Here we go again

Once again the Government is consulting on combining the dates of two elections so that they fall on the same day.  In this case it's the district council elections in 2014 (for those local authorities that have them next year) and the elections to the European Parliament.

I oppose this.  It springs from a mindset of 'democracy is an expensive nuisance, so let's penny-pinch on it as much as we can, and let's not expect too much of the voters by asking them to express an opinion twice'.

Different elections attract different electorates, who come out and vote for different reasons.  Combining elections muddies that distinction, and results in people being elected - or not - at one tier or the other, or even both, for reasons completely unrelated to their record or their manifesto.

I'd rather see local councillors elected by people interested in their local authorities and casting their votes on that basis - and similarly for the European elections.  If the election dates are combined, we run the risk of losing many good councillors, and gaining many poor ones, not on the basis of their local track record but on a national debate about a whole other level of government on which they have no influence at all.

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