RE: Encourage marriage by reducing the cost of weddings

There seems to have been a lot of confusion surrounding my post advocating a Cameron government's investigating measures to reduce the cost of weddings.  Perhaps the following will help.

Many of you appeared to regard the concept as somehow unConservative or even plain ridiculous.  Well, first there are those commenters who oppose all government action to encourage marriage - indeed some of the most libertarian of you, I think, oppose state marriage altogether and believe it should be restricted to private religious ceremonies.  Well, ok.  I'm unlikely to persuade you of a general policy interest in marriage.

But that isn't the view of most of you - indeed, I doubt it is even the view of most of you that felt vigorously opposed to the ideas I floated regarding weddings.  After all, the Conservative Party's position is to encourage marriage, including by giving it financial recognition in the tax system.  So I don't see what could be ridiculous about the general policy objective.

So, perhaps it was the specific ideas floated.  Well, the first one was to check whether the relevant markets are competitive.  Is it unConservative, now, to hope that firms actually compete and markets work well?

So, perhaps it was the idea of regulating prices even if the market is competitive, because of the positive externalities of marriage?  I guess some of you think it is intrinsically unConservative to favour green taxes - taxes on pollution etc..  But most of you don't.

You think it intrinsically unConservative to investigate no-frills stakeholder products?  So the Conservatives won't be regulating for any stakeholder pensions, then?

Or perhaps your key objection was to the idea of providing thousands of pounds as a "getting married benefit"?  But if providing ongoing marriage tax breaks or marriage benefits isn't unConservative, why would it be any less Conservative to ponder whether it might not be better to provide such benefits up-front?

Lastly, I wonder whether some of you felt that, somehow, it was silly to suggest that people are deterred from marrying by the cost of weddings?  But the Conservative Party believes that a subsidy for marriage worth £20 per week might make a worthwhile difference, and at the margin mean some people would marry that otherwise would not.  So how could an up-front cost of £10,000 count as irrelevant?

I meant my proposals quite seriously.  I believe that the cost of weddings is a pernicious and damaging disincentive to marry, and leads to a material extension in cohabitation periods and thence to less secure relationships.  If you don't agree, please explain to me (a) what proportion of people feel obliged to have excessively extravagant weddings if they are going to marry at all; or (b) why you think a wedding cost of £10,000 or more is irrelevant to people's decision of when to marry.