Graeme Archer's Diary: Cohabitation, Archer's Conjecture, cats

The Law Commission has renewed its calls for legislation to provide “partnership rights” for couples who have been cohabiting in an unmarried state. Their concern is with the legal status of the “injured party” in a broken-down common-law relationship, after said partnership ends, and they want to give such people legal claim on the property of the partner they have left/been left by. I don’t know where to begin with the mess of this proposal. Practically all pair-bonding sexual partners have always been able to regularise their legal commitment to one another: we called it marriage. Some grotesque inequalities were tidied up for gay couples with the advent of civil partnerships, although oddly heterosexual couples were forbidden to register CPs. (So in fact we’re now in the ridiculous situation where gay people can get married, but mustn’t call it that (though guess what – we do! Ha ha!), while straight people can’t form civil partnerships, if they want to get married but avoid the cultural connotations of that word.) The Law Commission’s “solution” – which, farcically, is presented as a tidying up exercise – merely adds another tier of legal distinction and polices that most private of spaces: the bedroom habits of private adults.

Apart from anything else, such a change will increase the atomisation of society: for who in their right mind, if not ready to become married/CP’ed, would henceforth share their home with someone, if that very act would lay them open to legal forfeiture of that property, if the relationship doesn’t work out? Statistically we know that this outcome (failure of the relationship) is more likely than not. So our legal guardians have managed to come up with a proposal that will undermine the status of marriage, that doesn’t fix the remaining odd distinctions between the legal status of “marriage” and “civil partnership”, that will increase distrust and the level of human misery between adults, and will increase the proportion of the population who are tied up in legal dispute. Windows will be made into the souls of cohabitees, by the state: the status of their sexual relationship will be held to have induced a legal responsibility.

“What about the children?” – when I wrote about this matter last year on Your Platform that was the (obviously well-meaning) response of some people. The protection of children from non-married relationships is usually given as one of the reasons for these proposals. I’m not a lawyer, but fathers already have very clear legal responsibilities for their offspring, and children exist as legal entities in their own right, without reference to the marital status of their parents. So this is a red herring. The proposal is nothing more than an almost unimaginably huge extension of state intrusion into the lives of private citizens, one with obvious destructive consequences. One more private space – for most people, the most private – is to be policed, and behaviour regulated through property forfeit.

I’m sure there are some areas of interpersonal relationships that would benefit from a Law Commission study: as a dispassionate observer, might I suggest that we examine the treatment of parents by the family court system? Or the treatment of fathers in divorce cases? There seems to be sufficient evidence of maltreatment of well-meaning individuals in this system to warrant reform. (On a related note: last week I used poor Shambo as a hook on which to hang a lesson in the correct application of the probability calculus. Roy Meadows, of course, is probably the most famous witness to misuse that calculus, with such disastrous results for one tragic family. Perhaps the evaluation of “expert” witness evidence might be critically appraised by the Commission, before it worries itself over sexual relationships and bedroom arrangements?)

If people require legal recognition of their responsibility towards one another, they can choose to be married. If one half of a couple does not wish to enter into that contractual state, then the other half has a choice: stay, or go. No-one has the right to another’s property on the basis of consensual sex. But the Commission prefers to police the sex act – willingly entered into between two unmarried individuals – and to call for that act to have implications (independent of children) for the ownership of those individuals’ property. Is this not some sort of totalitarian madness? How did the ratchet slip so far?

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I’m behind the week’s news, having spent most of the last seven days in a country house in deepest, rural Hertfordshire (I thought “country house in Herts” sounded proper old-school Tory, no? OK, I was 20 minutes from King’s Cross on the fast train … but mobile reception was a bit shaky and there was no wifi!). Who, or what, is Ali Miraj? I’m hoping his surname indicates that he’s not quite real, or perhaps not quite all there. Miraj (and I fear Brady) are examples to illustrate what I’m going to call Archer’s Conjecture: that the lack of a mathematical or scientific background to the education of most politicians leads them to conflate their personal dogma with their party’s creed, because so many of them don’t seem able to differentiate between something they wish to be true and either its logical truth or the empirical basis for the declaration of its truth. Thus the righteous, ideological anger over “grammar” schools, as though selection at 11 has been a sine qua non of Toryism since the Glorious Revolution, even though Tory activists strongly campaigned for an end to the eleven-plus in the first place. It also seems the case that the more a politician conflates his or her belief with the evidence for that belief, the less kind s/he tends to become to others (every messianic Blair requires an earthly enforcer like Campbell). What is a truth, and one that is not being universally acknowledged enough at the moment, is that candidates, journalists and websites that go around bad-mouthing our leader are only going to deliver a stronger Labour party. Which would make me laugh if I wasn’t banging my head off the desk in the impotent, silent, classical fury of the Tory activist down the years.

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Incidentally, my train left London for Hertfordshire from Platform 10. It was a lovely journey.

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My cats have asked me to mention them in this column before I get sacked. Every week you blether on about Keith (they say, apparently) but you’ve never mentioned us. OK. They’re very nice cats. My friend Alexander Ellis, our capable and tremendous candidate for the GLA in north-east London (who had a great party last Saturday, the sort of thing a diarist would mention if he hadn’t got so giggly on Alexander’s prosecco, and therefore forgetful of the scintillating political discussions) always says “Dogs are socialists, cats are Tories”. Discuss.

Comments

[Didactophobe]

“Dogs are socialists, cats are Tories”

Dogs are likeable but stupid creatures, for whom loyalty to the pack and its leader transcends individual thought, desires and feelings, not to mention logic and common sense.

Cats, meanwhile, are intelligent and know their place at the top of the food chain. They are capable of love, affection and loyalty at a deeper level than dogs because it is based on enlightened self-interest rather than blind obedience.

Ultimately, this leads to a much more fulfilling relationship between feline and human or, on occasion and with carefully selected friends, between feline and feline.

Didactophobe agrees with Alexander's thesis.

[M. Anon]

Spot on regarding Ali Miraj and Graham Brady. Second the banging of activist head against brick wall at stupidity of those who should know etter.

[Sally Roberts]

Spot on also Graeme regarding the State's disgraceful intrusion into that most private area of our lives!

[Matt Wright]

Agree that the law commissions proposals are a nonsense although there will be lots of money for the legal profession if they went ahead,

Matt

[Scotty]

Excellent article Graham, agree with your points regarding the renewed calls for a change to the legislation on cohabiting couples. last week someone called me fatuous, illogical and idiotic because I thought that civil partnerships strengthen the institute of marriage, while on the other hand this government and the Law society are undermining marriage and trying to impose state control.