The kind of men you may want your daughter to marry are often in short supply.
Lone parent lobby groups once complained that Tory politicians appeared to have single mums in their sights. Remarks by John Redwood and Peter Lilley were often unfairly cited as justifying the complaints. In 2002 David Willetts announced that the Tories had been at war with lone mothers and declared that that war was at an end.
Conservatives got into trouble because they were rightly concerned that..
(1) children in lone parent families usually suffered from the absence of one of their parents and...
(2) lone parenthood was financially costly.
The Centre for Policy Studies has estimated that the direct welfare costs of maintaining the average lone parent family are over £100,000. Overall, Britain’s more than three million lone parent households are five times as likely to be demanding government welfare benefits than couple-headed households. But if a prudent conservative is concerned about the costly phenomenon of lone parenthood (costly for children and the taxpayer) he is immediately assumed to be antagonistic to individual single parents – many of whom perform heroics for their children and many of whom have been abandoned by their children’s fathers. This is a minefield for politicians.
Professor Robert Rowthorn of Cambridge University has helpfully suggested that policymakers interested in addressing the growth of lone parenthood should focus on “measures to increase the supply of “marriageable” men who can provide viable partners for potential mothers”. Rowthorn calls for the creation of “more and better jobs for men, especially in the old industrial areas where lone parenthood is so prevalent”. He hopes that this will transform “not very desirable partners” into marriageable men. The lack of a job is certainly one feature of an undesirable male partner but there is also the general irresponsibility of the large numbers of men who have not matured into the kind of adult citizens able to form healthy marriages.
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