If only my wife had been Hungarian... our four sons would have slashed the Utley family tax bill

FOR as long as I can remember, Conservative politicians have paraded as champions of marriage and the family, proclaiming these to be the most precious of all institutions and swearing to uphold and support them.

They have a mighty funny way of showing it. Indeed, throughout my 65 years on this Earth — almost two-thirds of them under Tory-led governments — state support for traditional families has been steadily whittled away.

When I was growing up, my stay-at-home mother received a tax- free family allowance for each of us four children. My father could also claim income tax breaks to help him provide for his dependent wife and young.

Add to this the fact that by today’s standards housing was cheap, and one way or another — with many sacrifices here and there — my father’s modest salary as a 30-year-old journalist in the early Fifties stretched to buying a home that would cost several millions today.

He even had enough left over to send three of the four young Utleys to independent schools.

No such luck for those planning to start families in 2019. Yes, after a great deal of horse-trading with the Lib Dems, David Cameron finally kept his oft-repeated pledge to help married couples — and stay-at-home mums in particular — by making tax allowances transferable between husbands and wives (or civil partners). But there are two massive catches.

Expensive

The first is that to be eligible for the socalled Marriage Allowance, one partner must have an income of £11,850 or less. The other is that only £1,190 of a partner’s personal allowance is transferable.

This means that the maximum anyone stands to gain from Mr Cameron’s lipservice to supporting marriage and stayat-home mums is a miserly £4.58 a week!

Let’s face it, this won’t buy many packs of Pampers. Let alone will it go far towards the cost of a four-bedroom, Victorian villa in Islington, North London, like the house in which I was born.

To be fair, husbands, wives and civil partners can also benefit from the separate Married Couples Allowance, which can reduce a tax bill by between £336 and £869.50 a year.

But since one partner has to be at least 85 years old in order to qualify, I think we can safely say this won’t help many parents of growing children at a time in their lives when money is tightest.

In fact, far from welcoming additions to the next generation of Britons, recent Conservative administrations seem to have gone out of their way to discourage couples from having more than a couple of children at most.

For example, since 2017 Child Tax Credit has been payable in all but a handful of cases only for a maximum of two children. Have any more, and you’ll get no further help from this quarter. Or take child benefit. Not only does the rate at which it is paid drop off sharply after the first child — from £20.70 to £13.70 per week. These days, it is also subject to a swingeing tax charge if either parent earns more than £50,000 a year.

The upshot for a mother or father of four who earns £60,000 a year — a comfortable income, certainly, but hardly a king’s ransom for a couple with four demanding young to feed, clothe and house at today’s prices — is an annual tax bill of £3,213.00 to be paid on child benefit of £3,213.60.

In other words, such a household will be better off to the tune of precisely 60p a year, under this government run by ‘the party of the family’.

If you don’t believe me, go to the Government’s own website and feed the figures into its child benefit calculator.

No wonder so many mothers these days feel forced to go out to work — including many whose every instinct tells them they’d be far happier bringing up their own children at home, instead of handing them over each morning to (fantastically expensive) child-minders.

If you ask me, the tax- and- benefit system’s active discouragement of breeding may also go some way towards explaining why, horrifyingly, 185,000 women a year in England and Wales feel driven to the heart-rending decision to terminate their pregnancies. But that’s a controversy for another day.

Today I ask you only to compare Whitehall’s attitude to the family with the remarkable policies announced this week by Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.

Surrender

Under plans he outlined in his state of the nation speech, mothers who raise at least four children will get a lifetime’s personal exemption from income tax. But that’s only the start of it.

Families with three or more children will also qualify for a subsidy of 2.5 million forints (£6,900) towards buying a sevenseater vehicle. Meanwhile, women under 40 who marry for the first time are to become eligible for low-interest loans of 10 million forints (£27,600).

Suffice it to say that this all makes the net 60p a year in child benefit, claimable by that middle- class British mother of four, look very silly indeed. And I don’t say this only because my wife and I happen to have four sons ourselves. Before I go an inch further, I must stress that I’m no fan of Mr Orban, a sinister figure of the far Right whose politics are hideously reminiscent of his country’s support for Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Indeed, there’s a deeply unpleasant whiff of Hitler’s drive for ‘racial purity’ in his visceral hostility to immigration and his insistence that ‘Hungarian children’ alone are the key to solving his country’s demographic problems. ‘Migration for us is surrender,’ he says.

I should also acknowledge that the crisis in Hungary is rather different from ours. While our population is rising too sharply for most voters’ comfort, swollen in part by migration from Eastern Europe, Hungary’s is plummeting.

Not only is its fertility rate a mere 1.45 children per woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Numbers have also been depleted by the mass emigration, under the EU’s freedom of movement rules, of some of the brightest and best of Hungarians to richer countries such as Britain.

But one thing we have in common is that our populations are ageing fast, as average lifespans grow longer, and limited numbers of people of working age have growing armies of oldies like me to support.

Loyalty

With all 28 countries in the EU now experiencing fertility rates below the level needed to balance deaths with births (in Hungary, 131,00 died in 2017, while only 94,000 were born), you don’t have to be an Orbanista to see that migration is in many ways an unsatisfactory solution.

Like it or not, it is simply a fact of life that homogeneous nations — whose people share a language and loyalty to a common culture, history and traditions — are easier to govern than more diverse populations. Indeed, the paradox is that the more liberal an immigration policy, the more illiberal a government has to be to maintain law and order.

Speaking for myself, I don’t care a jot what colour my fellow subjects happen to be, or what creed they profess, as long as they respect our laws and system of government, try to learn our language and don’t foment hatred of our way of life.

The great majority of migrants to this country fulfil all these criteria, making a hugely valuable contribution to our society. But there’s no denying that many don’t.

All right, I grant you that being born in the UK is no absolute guarantee of loyalty to Britain. Think of the Jihadi bride Shamima Begum and the repellent creeps who radicalised and corrupted her.

Come to that, think of Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and their lifelong love affairs with terrorist enemies of the West.

But the citizenship we are born with is as good a start as we can get to feeling patriotic affection for our country and its people. That aside, the self-reliant family is the most cost- effective and humane welfare system known to man.

For the sake of Britain’s future, let’s have more babies — and fewer abortions.

As for the Tories, it’s high time they set about justifying their claim to be the party of the family.