Family vs Wealth?
"If it comes to a collision between our wealth as a nation and the wellbeing of families, I choose families." David Cameron, 16 Feb 2007
Deborah Orr in today's The Independent questions the impact that the Conservative leader words will have on the factors driving this week's big issues of child poverty and gun crime:
"David Cameron, at least, is willing to go on the record and talk about some of these issues. Unfortunately, what he is saying makes little sense. Cameron's suggestion that government support for marriage can be any more than a gesture in the short to medium term is utterly facile. How can he imagine that the young people who have experienced family breakdown over generations can be equipped to respond to tax incentives to marry? How can he imagine that men who make their living in the black economy can be made to pay child maintenance through direct debits from their wages? How can he imagine that this will inspire a desire to behave as a loving hands-on dad?"
So, what do readers of this blog think will make a real Difference?
2 comments:
David Cameron has given his answer in today's Telegraph:
prison reform and welfare reform.
As he says, "the dividing lines are clear: an old-fashioned Labour approach which is top-down, short-term and centralising, or a modern Conservative approach which is bottom-up, long-term and trusts in local action."
"Marriage — the institution that this government has done its level best to strangle and bury in quicklime ten feet down — has shot back onto the political agenda. And the person who has propelled it there is the modernising David Cameron." (Melanie Philips in today's Daily Mail.) The Conservative leader says he'll support marriage through the tax system, reversing Labour's approach of providing financial incentives for lone parenthood and penalising married parents.
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