Family Matters

Today, the coalition government's one-man opposition, The dipstick Clegg, has spoken out against Conservative plans for married couple tax breaks. He believes it is wrong for the state to encourage a "particular family form" and berates the nasty old Tories for believing in such a thing.

Setting aside for a moment my belief that we should never pay people for breeding, if we want to encourage any particular family form it should surely be one that works. Otherwise, look what happens; humans being essentially a herd animal, the females will gather in grazing groups, circled by a pack of sex-crazed males competing to impregnate as many as they can. Under recent social reforms isn't this just what has happened on the sink estates where most of the unplanned sprogging-up is perpetrated?

A concerned voter, yesterday

The trouble with people like Clegg is that, although intelligent, he has an ideology. Ideology, like religion is lunacy and the left has way more than its fair share of that. What is it about the left wing that they cannot see the evidence in front of their eyes? Oh, sorry, I believe already made that point - faith. Like fanatical believers they assume that any dissent is a problem for the naysayers and set about trying to convert them.

Even people like David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker, whose arts I greatly admire, cannot help themselves being so rabidly debauched by their beliefs that anybody with an alternative view is a subject of scorn and contempt. They speak with conviction, yet display gross ignorance of the real drives of ordinary people; people they never get to meet because, humans being herd animals, etc...

The last government, as all socialist governments will, social-engineered with money. Lots of our money, plus a lot of borrowed money, whether we agreed with them or not. Governments who dole out the dosh in such causes point to their increase in popularity after they've done so . Duh-er! Who's not going to vote themselves more money? It doesn't make it right. While I wouldn't want to close the doors on people choosing whatever lifestyle they like, so long as it doesn't harm others, I think we all have to pay for our choices.

And insofar as the only reliable child-rearing model we have any evidence for - and a lot of it at that - is the nuclear family, why should the government pay for people to conduct their own social experiments on their innocent and often unplanned progeny? So, here's the deal: Scrap all forms of what used to be called 'child allowance' - nobody gets paid to proliferate - and apply tax credits to the married-with-children. There. Done.

You still have a free choice, but you just don't benefit from doing it your own way. I think that's fair; now go forth and multiply.