The Cost of Cameron's Marriage Dowry

David Cameron has been promising to give tax breaks to married couples, you may have picked up on this. What you won't have missed is how he is intending to pay for this, because he hasn't told us.

Today the Guardian has looked at the options and just how unfair or untruthful David Cameron is likely to have been with his pledge.

Firstly the most obvious thing is to allow transferable tax allowances between couples. According to treasury figures this would cost a total of £4.9 billion, which in or current climate, especially with the Tories promising to accelerate spending cuts seems a high price to pay. Also such a scheme would only benefit couples where one partner is earning less that £6,435 a year. It really does favour the couples where a wife can stay at home, but does nothing to help two hardworking parents who both work full time to support their family.

However, the Tory think tank the Centre of Social Justice run by former leader Iain Duncan Smith is urging Cameron to only limit such a transferable allowance to couples with children under the age of three. Is is any wonder that Cameron isn't prepared to come clean about his policy? His bribe is to all married couples but his advice is actually to limit it still further to just that three year period.

The CSJ had first proposed the transferable allowance in 2006 but today in their Green Paper on the Family they say:

"In the long term we recommend the implementation of a transferable tax allowance for all married couples, but in the current financial climate we recommend a staggered implementation. We believe that as a priority, a transferable tax allowance should be introduced for married couples with children aged 0-3, the formative years of a child's life."

This will cost £600 million but is nowhere near the promises that Cameron has made in recent weeks. Of course he also had added on civil partnerships to his scheme, even if a same sex couple had children they may be from a pre-existing relationship and not count towards the under three threshold, or be adopted and not give the break for the full or any of the 3 year period. It also means of course that a mother in an abusive relationship with an infant could flee and struggle with the tax hike as not all marriages live up to the Tory idyll.

Yesterday defending his claims that he wasn't guilty of 'social engineering' David Cameron said:

"I will celebrate our commitments. I believe we need to try and build a society that is more about "we" that about "me" where we celebrate togetherness."

Seeing as his tax proposals so far benefit married couples, or with inheritance tax the super-rich 3,000 including George Osborne and David Cameron, doesn't seem to not be much about "we" and somewhat about "me". The Tories are also going to freeze all public sector pay over £18,000, or in other words even if you earn over £8,000 less than the national average, while giving away these tax breaks to others.

David Cameron also said:

"The tax burden for everybody is going to go up unless we get public spending under control. We should be trying to help couples with children."

The Lib Dems have realised that the tax burden is unfair, but rather than focus on couples with children who need help we are focusing on the poorest in our society. Raising the tax allowance to £10,000 will raise 4 million out of income tax altogether, including most of our pensioners. It also means those that have to scrimp at save at the bottom end of the ladder will get help. The Tories are not making promises to the poorest apart from the fact that your tax will go up, but if you're married with kids we'll try and help you out.

UPDATE: I'm quite glad that Cardiff Blogger has also called it a half-baked idea emphasising the element of the CSJ document that seems to suggest the allowance will make people get married quicker.

Friday Blog Love: Where I Agree with Tony Blair

Now the title of this piece may be somewhat of a revelation to any who didn’t see my Tweet from Wednesday evening. But I was talking about a particular article that featured from the first Prime Minister in the UK to give an interview to a gay publication, not just give an interview but be the cover man.

On the occasion of that publication, Attitude, celebrating its fifteenth birthday they had a little bit of a retrospective in all sorts of ways including having the former Prime Minister back for another interview. Having missed his first interview in 2005 I may have been too busy with one election or another, I found myself agreeing with him for quite a lot of what he said*. Thankfully before Ruaraidh Dobson accuses me of being dead wrong (again) I’d like to point out that the area under discussion was equality of sexuality which has seen robust advances under the Blair years; not the various policy areas that I and the rest of Liberal Democrats still vigorously oppose the Blairite doctrine.

Like Blair I find myself in a similar position in one way as a person of faith with an interest in the politics of sexuality, and the aim to improve things socially in that area as far as possible. However, of course and any who saw my last full speech at a Lib Dem conference will attest while he can remain objective in his viewpoint mine is a bit more subjective. For years I was like one of those that Blair described as having a dialogue within religious circles about sexuality and faith, although a lot of that debating from my teenage years into my middle to late twenties was going on in my own head.

While for many years I mulled over the option as being an either or in relation to my faith and who I found myself to be it took a lot of searching to find out that both was an actual option. One thing I hope that people like Iris Robinson can come to understand in the long-term. Blair says in the interview:

"For many people in the world of religion, they have found they’re facing the same challenge as everybody else is in changing times, when it comes to the role of women, the issues to do with sexuality, and so on. But the problem within the institutions of organised religion as opposed, for example, to those in politics, is that those attitudes get mixed up with those of doctrine. For something that is religious in nature, it can be far harder for them to break with the past. They’re hard – they’re really difficult. Because people are debating – what is the word of God? If something is expressed in a particular way in the Bible or the Koran or elsewhere, can you possibly contemplate a process of modernisation where attitudes change over time? But my own view is
that it’s better to have these views debated within religious circles than to pretend that they don’t exist.

"...also to treat religious thought and even religious texts as themselves capable of evolution over time. You have to understand the context and the society in which they were expressed. So, when people quote the passages in Leviticus condemning homosexuality, I say to them – if you read the whole of the Old Testament and took everything that was there in a literal way, as being what God and religion is about, you’d have some pretty tough policies across the whole of the piece."

If you just look at the raft of legislation that has come in under Labour since 1997 and consider if the 1997 brand of Conservatism that was on offer would have made such in roads. 1997 homosexuals weren't allowed to serve in the military, teachers were unable to defend gay pupils in the classroom, there was a status of legal homophobia in the workplace and in failing to recognise partners. So great strides were being made towards equality (despite at the same time the liberties of us all being eroded simultaneously).

Blair says the highpoint of the various pro-gay legislation that he oversaw come into being was the introduction of civil partnerships. However, these are separate arrangement and still not equal. The equal marriage campaign is seeking for Scotland to:

1. Lift the ban on same-sex marriage and mixed-sex civil partners



2. Allow religious and humanist celebrants to legally solemnise same-sex marriage



3. Put an end to the discrimination faced by transgender people and their partners

As Ruaraidh said earlier this week that this is something that the Scottish Liberal Democrats could well take a lead. As Tony said in the interview we have come a long way from the 80s when if you campaigned for gay people expected that, well, that you were. The generation that make up LYS are the first generation that such a suggestion does not go hand in hand with campaigning. I'd be delighted to see them take this step forward backing up the Homophobia is Gay campaign and the policy they moved which got passed on the blood ban last month.

Is it doable? I think so. I think this statement of Tony shows that we are on an evolutionary trend where we can get this done.

"This process of evolution and change [in religious thought] carries on the whole time. Otherwise, you end up pitting religion against reason, and that is the single most dangerous thing you could ever do. Because in the end, if you force people to choose between religious faith and reason, they will choose reason. But that is not, in fact, what should happen. Religious faith and reason are actually in alignment, in my view – or, at least, that is the argument."

So while I'm quite certain that Ruaraidh would happily tell me I'm dead wrong in holding on to my religious faith, I'm sure he'd also the one of the first to ask me about the debates I've had with myself to deal with moving this debate on.

*You do have to register to read this link but it is free to do so.

Warren: It's Marriage Not Relationships That's the Issue

With less than a month to go to the inauguration of the first Black President of the United States, Rick Warren the pastor who some has, in the eyes of some been controversially, chosen to pray at that historic event has made a statement on gay marriage.

He said in the podcast released on Monday:

"I have in no way ever taught that homosexuality is the same thing as a forced relationship between an adult and a child, or between siblings. I was trying to point out I'm not opposed to gays having their partnership. I'm opposed to gays using the term marriage for their relationship."

Strange then that in the past he has made such comparisons of homosexuality with paedophilia, polygamy and incest, as he equated all four together only last week when he answered a question with a clear "I do".

He also said that while he doesn't equate homosexual relationships with incest or pedophilia, that he opposes redefining marriage just as any conservative Christian would. Problem with using such phraseology as that is very similar to what the conservative Christians in the American bible belt were saying about inter-racial marriage up to 41 years ago in 1967, when the Supreme Court overturned bans in Loving v. Virgina. Thing is he is opposed to Proposition 8 in California, which again was a redefinition of marriage.

Is Rev Warren, also opposed to the 1967 Supreme Court ruling? I don't think he is and am not accusing him of such. However, the thing is that laws are transitory the US has Supreme Courts at state and federal levels to past judgements on such things.

As any fan of The West Wing will know the USA hasn't always looked favourably on minorities. The rules of the Census as outlined in Mr. Willis of Ohio pointed out how the original wording from the founding father's appropriated proportions only of slaves or descendants of slaves towards state and national totals. So the rules move, the fact that Warren also quotes the extremely low church based guesstimate of 2% gay population rather than any scientifically sampled survey does not give his affectations any merit. Afterall the church is supposed to stand up for the underdog and the oppressed. Yet not as often in the past they are the oppressor and the big guys pulling their disproportionate weight.

His Larry Ross a spokesman for Warren's Saddleback church tried to ease things over by saying the church's view that Scripture prohibits sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman.

Anyone can attend Saddleback worship services. But the church article had said that gays "unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted" as members. One wonders just how many Saddleback members have or are having heterosexual relationship in a lifestyle not conforming to the churches view. But that is an investigation for another day.

Bush Seeks to Ban Gay Marriage

After years of speculation as to which Republican would have the audacity to attempt it in the land of the free, step forward George W. Bush. The leader of the war on terror has announced a new front as he attempts, yet again, to constitutionally seek a ban on gay marriages. This comes less than two years after Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a lesbian daughter, spoke out against such a ban when Bush had previously backed a motion calling for a federal ban.

This could be an attempt to shore up key grass root Republican votes following recent opinion polls the latest of which had the Republican congress on only a 27% approval rating ahead of November's mid-term elections. One pollster Charlie Cook said:

"It's bad. It's very bad. All the diagnostic indicators suggest that 2006 will be Armageddon for the Republicans."

However, many people put Bush's victory over Kerry down to the ballot initiative in Ohio to ban gay marriage which brought out the narrow Republican victory there which secured Bush four more years. If Ohio's 20 electoral college votes had gone the other way Kerry would be the current occupant of the White House.

So is the resurection of this policy, plus repealing the estate tax and the congressional right to ban flag burning a sign of election year panic?

None of the three is currently expected to pass, but it is a marker for the nation.