Lord Bailey on the rich keeping marriage for themselves
Here is a figure that ought to trouble us. Among mothers with young children, 87% of the highest earners are married; among the lowest earners, it’s just 24%. Marriage – the lifelong union of one man and one woman, and still the gold standard for families and society – has quietly become something the comfortable keep for themselves while the poor are told it is old-fashioned. Lord Bailey of Paddington – Shaun Bailey, the Conservative Peer who came up through youth work – grew up on the wrong side of that line, and he sat down with me to say so plainly. Watch our conversation here.
Bailey does not argue from theory. “I come from your archetypal single parent black immigrant family”, he says, and he draws a hard lesson from it: “one of the major reasons we have those poor outcomes is because of the lack of marriage”. His own community, he says, pays the price: “We are far more exposed to domestic violence, far more exposed to poverty and far less exposed to the positive long-term reliable love that marriage provides.” The tell is at the top: “rich people have many more choices particularly socially but yet they choose to get married. That says something about the power of marriage.”
He is blunt about fathers: “You’re a father for life. You have to stick around, at least financially, if not emotionally”. The consequences are snowballing. In April, the Centre for Social Justice reported a generation of ‘Lost Boys’: only 27% of boys aged 10 to 15 now say they are completely happy with life, down from 36% 15 years ago, with male role models vanishing from clubs and schools. Everyone agrees boys need role models. Bailey says the part the fashionable elites leave out: boys need fathers, and he has watched boys who grew up without one conclude for themselves that “part of being a good father was being married”.
To the young he offers a challenge, not a lecture. He asked his own niece, who wanted children but was unsure about a husband, one question: “Why don’t you deserve that level of commitment?” She had, he says, “never even looked at it from that point of view”. He tells boys that character comes first, and it starts small – one lad told him the best thing he could offer a wife was that he was kind. “Bingo”, Bailey replied; his own wife had said the same. And to anyone who dismisses a wedding as ‘only a piece of paper’: “No, it’s not. It’s a public declaration to you, your partner, and your community, and most importantly, children if you have them... that you are going to try to stay together.”
His name for all of this is “reliable love”, which he calls “the most precious commodity on God’s good earth”. He would even “reward marriage in the tax system”, reasoning that married people “live longer, pay more tax, spend less time in jail, less time in hospital, and are happier”.
At C4M, we refuse the idea that marriage is a luxury for the well-off. It is the birthright of every child and the best chance every couple has, whatever their postcode or their pay. Please watch Lord Bailey make the case and send it to one person who needs to hear it – a son, a niece, a friend who thinks a wedding is just paperwork.