Danny Kruger is proving as difficult to Reform UK as he was to the Conservative Party. On Monday, the great “pronatalist” voted yet again for the two-child benefit cap, which as much as anything else is a demonstrable driver of abortion, while all other Reform MPs abstained apart from Robert Jenrick, who had to make up for not having known which lobby was which last time. Notice that no such obligation was felt to apply to Suella Braverman. She had not voted against it by mistake, so her penance was to abstain. But Kruger is a true believer.
Yet Kruger is correct to say that this society was “suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy”, and his choice of words is apposite. He is getting there. Pray for him. Already, he did vote against his then party’s Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020, and he is immensely courageous to make divorce the issue. The problem is that Nigel Farage is divorced from his first wife, separated from his second wife, and cohabiting with a woman who is not his wife. Richard Tice is divorced, and he cohabits in Dubai with a woman who has certainly been married to the father of her children, as she may still be.
Lee Anderson is on his second marriage. Donald Trump is on his third, as is Kruger’s old patron, Boris Johnson, who has twice left his wife for a next wife who was already pregnant, something that even Henry VIII only ever did once. Nancy Reagan was the second Mrs Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher was the second Mrs Thatcher. Unsurprisingly, Kruger has not been appointed to Farage’s “Shadow Cabinet”.
Still, Kruger has opened up the debate. 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; the General Synod has been flexing its muscles on marriage of late, even if it will have same-sex marriages as soon as a member of the Royal Family wanted one, and no one will leave, because they never do.
The Methodist and United Reformed Churches also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, which should be amended to apply this provision to those bodies unless, respectively, the Methodist Conference or the General Assembly resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority. And there should be such an amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, with no need of a get-out clause.
None of this would be done by Reform. Likewise, the Greens are trying to corner the pro-drugs vote, but what we need is a party that understood that there could not be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy.
Radical change has always been impossible when the workers, the youth and the poor have been in a state of stupefaction, and that is being contrived again. For example, Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Are those now the views of Kruger? Of Braverman? Of Ann Widdecombe? The breakup of Reform will not be amicable.
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