Say marriage works, and watch what happens.
On Monday morning, a politician told Times Radio that children raised by married parents do well at school. By lunchtime, a national newspaper had branded those remarks as “highly controversial”. Not aimed at his housing plan, but at the marriage comment.
C4M is not party political – our supporters come from every party and none, and we take no side on any party’s housing policy. Marriage is our cause. We will speak up whenever any party or politician speaks for it, and we notice what happens to them when they do.
This time the politician was Richard Tice, Reform UK’s Deputy Leader, defending his party’s plan to give social housing priority to married couples with children, among others. Times Radio asked if a married couple would come ahead of a single person. “Yes, that is the preference,” he said. Pressed again – “in an ideal world, it is well known that... children in married couples... will do really well at school”. This made headlines for The Independent within two hours.
This was attack without argument. The attacks went for the plan’s nationality and employment rules. The marriage part, nobody argued with. That’s because they can’t. So instead, there was the follow-up question Times Radio highlighted – where would same-sex married couples rank? Tice side-stepped it.
Our answer has never changed – marriage is the voluntary, exclusive, lifelong union of one man and one woman. The union of a man and a woman is the kind that creates children – no other union is. This definition benefits the child – but redefining marriage broke the child’s link, in law, to their biological mother and father.
If anything, Tice understated the benefits of man-woman marriage. On schooling, roughly three-in-four boys born to married parents reach a pass in GCSE English and Maths. For boys born to a single parent, it is fewer than half. Last month, the Centre for Social Justice published analysis of 3,286 couples across 14 years of parenthood. Among the poorest fifth of households, parents who marry are significantly less likely to break up than never-married parents in the richest fifth.
Tice is not alone in speaking out on marriage issues. Suella Braverman, the party’s education spokesperson, told The Sun – “Young people are coming out of university unable to get on to the housing ladder. Unable and unwilling to get married, unable to start a family.” Unable to argue, her critics went for her “Mickey Mouse courses” remark instead. And when Nigel Farage said last September that “the most stable relationships, the ones that last the longest, tend to be between men and women”, a Labour MP called it “vile homophobia”. None of them argued with the marriage sentence – because they can’t. Instead, they go for pejorative labelling.
Highlighting these comments is not endorsing anything else their party says or does.
Whitehall is not ignoring marriage – it is all over it. Marriage-style rights for cohabiting couples were consulted on until 14 August. Another consultation, rewriting how weddings are conducted, runs until 24 September. And the draft Conversion Practices Bill threatens to criminalise people who insist marriage is the term describing what only one man and one woman can do.
However, there is real hope in all of this. Whitehall has spent the summer consulting on everything around marriage. The press spent the week labelling the people who speak for it. But neither could argue with the evidence. Our job is to keep making the case for marriage in public until the labels wear out. And together, we will.