The Bedrock of a Stable Society

Georgia L Gilholy writes:

This week marks five years since the UK went into lockdown, a moment that has prompted widespread reflection on how much has changed since 2020. But it also marks another significant anniversary—one that has reshaped British society in quieter yet perhaps even more profound ways.

This year will also mark half a decade since the government announced plans to introduce “No-Fault” divorce in England and Wales, with the law coming into effect in April 2022. This was presented as a victory for the vulnerable, a way to make separation “less painful” and remove unnecessary conflict between separating spouses.

When these reforms were first proposed by the Conservatives, I was firmly opposed.

Three years and three more Prime Ministers on, I remain just as skeptical.

These reforms prize the wishes of adults over the needs of children. The vast array of studies that indicate children benefit from an intact family—unless abuse is involved—were ignored in favour of making marriage easier to walk away from.

Other research has concluded that some half of people who chose to divorce admitted to regretting the decision once the dust had settled. You can bet before ending the marriage, they were 100% convinced it was the only way forward, later realising their mistake.

Prior to 2022, divorce required proof of “unreasonable behaviour” such as abandonment or adultery, or a two to five-year separation. Now, the lifelong contract of marriage can be ended in just six months, without a single reason given.

This is not progress. It is the denigration of marriage into a form of government-regulated cohabitation, leaving spouses with less legal protection in their own homes than tenants in rented accommodation.

It is now completely legal for one spouse to unilaterally abandon a marriage without citing any grievance. This permission can easily be used as a psychological weapon, particularly by abusive partners.

While no-fault campaigners complain that the old system was “vindictive,” what if legitimate grievances do need to be aired? Under this new framework, spouses who have suffered real harm lose their ability to formally present this in court.

In particular, these changes put those vulnerable due to health issues or finances at heightened risk. The obvious example is when one half of a marriage—usually the wife—has given up employment to raise children. In the past, the legal recognition of fault meant that a spouse who had been abandoned had some ability to contest the terms of the divorce.

Now, this has been erased.

This concern was serious enough that even feminist groups in the US protested against No-Fault divorce. The National Organisation for Women objected that the law permitted an “at-fault” party to obtain a marital dissolution where alimony, maintenance, and property division would be decided by a judge—without considering “the facts, behaviour, and circumstances that led to the break-up of the marriage.”

A Richmond School of Law review into the US system concluded that No-Fault divorce “has failed,” producing both a higher divorce rate and fewer safeguards for dependent women and children. Yet, instead of learning from these failures, the UK government eagerly imported them.

Those celebrating this legal watershed presume that claiming “fault” in divorce proceedings was an unnecessary source of conflict between separated couples. But this overlooks a basic reality: divorce is inherently painful. The breaching of such an intimate commitment—especially when children are involved—suggests two people with inherently conflicting or diverging priorities.

Moreover, there is no evidence that reducing the barriers to divorce improves children’s well-being. Quite the opposite. A vast array of studies indicate that fractured families are more likely to experience poverty, alongside mental and physical health issues.

A 1994 study found that children of separated parents had lower self-esteem than those whose parents sometimes argued but remained a couple. It noted that: “Separation and divorce do not necessarily reduce damaging conflict… as a generality, the reverse may be true.” Not to mention the fact that family breakdown already costs the British taxpayer an estimated £51 billion per year.

The new system also reduced the minimum time frame between the start of proceedings and a conditional divorce application to 20 weeks. Yet, since records on the matter began in 2003, around 10 per cent of couples who begin divorce proceedings do not complete them in any given year.

Out of parents who said they were unhappy after the birth of their first child, over two-thirds reported being happy a decade later, with 27 per cent admitting to being “extremely happy.” If this many marriages were saved by longer reflection periods, surely reducing the time frame is not in society’s best interest?

Even putting aside the financial and moral defects of No-Fault divorce, it is striking how out of step these reforms were with public opinion.

Polling done before the laws were proposed in 2020 showed that seven in ten Brits were in favour of maintaining fault grounds, while three in five agreed that “divorce is too easy.”

Yet, like so many post-war cultural innovations, No-Fault divorce prioritised the desires of adults over the well-being of children.

Three years in, it is clear that these changes have not improved family stability, nor have they made divorce any less painful. If the goal was to make marriage easier to leave, it has certainly succeeded.

But at what cost?

Marriage is not simply a private arrangement between two completely independent individuals; it is the bedrock of a stable society. The idea that making divorce easier would somehow lead to better marriages was always a fantasy. As a culture, we should not be making it easier to dissolve lifelong commitments.

Campaigners on the left and the libertarian right alike claimed that the previous system unjustly stigmatised divorce. But the truth is, we need more divorce stigma, not less.

Like the bloodthirsty Bolsheviks, who introduced No-Fault divorce upon the birth of the USSR, our government has cut a great road through our law without considering the consequences.

Who knows what further damage to our social fabric will unravel in the years to come?

Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated couples. But now that they are available to opposite-sex couples, then divorce can and should be made far more difficult, since anyone who had not wanted that could always have had a civil partnership instead.

Any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce. Entitlement upon divorce should in any case be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault were proved.

Furthermore any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses. There should be similar provision relating to the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.