Go Together Like A Horse And Carriage?

The Coalition has been in chaos from the start. How long was it before the Chief Secretary to the Treasury had to resign for something that, if done by a Housing Benefit claimant, would rightly have resulted in a prison sentence? The allegedly predominant party's only distinctive policy at the General Election, some gimmicky rubbish about schools, has had to be abandoned in all but name because no one wants anything to do with it. And now this carry on over Child Benefit, obviously not even remotely thought through.

The people who abolished the Married Couple's Tax Allowance, in a Finance Bill voted against by every Labour MP, now propose to revive some form of it in order to "compensate" for the punishment of full-time homemakers who dared to ignore the hectoring demands of Harriet "Paedophile Information Exchange" Harman and Patricia "Paedophile Action for Liberation" Hewitt that they stop "doing nothing" and get themselves out to work.

It should not be necessary to have to spell this out, but clearly it is. Marriage is a public good. Having children is a public good. (If it matters, I am a childless bachelor.) They are obviously connected, but they are no less obviously distinct. The State should encourage and reward both, affirming the connection between the two by the fact that there would be double encouragement and double reward for those who did both at the same time. But the Married Couple's Tax Allowance cannot "compensate" for a loss of Child Benefit, any more than vice versa. That is why it must, and in fact would, be payable to married couples without children, just as Child Benefit must be, and in fact is, payable to parents without spouses. For example, widowed mothers. Or widowed fathers.

Speaking of fathers, now that Child Benefit is back on the agenda, who will call for the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is being paid to mothers, which would be yet another reason to keep Child Benefit, and thus also the fathers' tax allowance, universal? Not David Cameron or George Osborne, because the logic of that is also the logic of a legal presumption of equal parenting, of the restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child's need for a father, and of the repeal of ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as a child's parents on a birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed.

It is the logic of legislation for paternity leave to be made available at any time until the child was 18 or left school. That would reassert paternal authority, and thus require paternal responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence. That authority and responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver. That basis is high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment.

And it is the logic of requiring that all aspects of public policy take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. And coal, not dole. That latter was destroyed, of course, by Cameron's and Osborne's heroine, who had left her own small children to hired help while she pursued first her legal and then her political ambitions. Exactly the sort of behaviour that Osborne now proposes actively to reward through the benefits system.

"Why does the Government regard looking after children as work deserving of payment when it is done by someone outside the family, but not when it is done by the child's own mother or father?" That question, as timely now as it was then, was posed on the floor of the House of Commons in 1997. By the late Audrey Wise. A figure firmly of the Labour Left.