Entitlement upon divorce should 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.
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It's still amazing to think that Labour's 1960's abolition of lifelong marriage among the poor (as new figures show marriage in Britain is now almost exclusively the preserve of the rich) made no distinction in divorce between married couples with children and without.
ReplyDeleteAs Peter Hitchens told Owen Jones in their newly released uncut video interview: "I always tell left wingers I am prepared to concede Thatcher did great social damage to this country only if they will admit that Harold Wilson and Roy Jenkins did equally great social damage to Britain.
So far I haven't had any takers."
Indeed, Mr Hitchens.
Id say the same.
There is very little history of the poor's ever getting married in Britain, or at least in the Protestant sections of English society.
DeletePeople assume that their ancestors before the late nineteenth century, at the earliest, were married, and theologically perhaps they were. But legally, huge numbers of them were not. The paperwork was prohibitively expensive. Almost exclusively the preserve of the rich, indeed.
The Jenkins social changes were not only opposed, but even noticed, by scarcely anyone at the time. Check the papers. There is almost nothing about them, just as there was almost no parliamentary opposition to them. At that time, they would have happened whoever had been in office.
They formed no part of Jenkins's reputation for decades thereafter; that was all about his time as Chancellor. They did not even preclude his winning, holding, and very nearly holding again, a largely Catholic Glaswegian seat for the SDP. Admittedly, that was an aberration. Catholics still mostly vote Labour even now, and they did so almost universally in those days, well after the late 1960s. That historical norm will reassert itself in 2020.
Thatcher, of course, was surrounded by people who wanted to abolish the legal concept of marriage altogether. According to Cameron's recent Conference speech, same-sex marriage is one of his party's greatest achievements. That party gave that speech four standing ovations.