Why Mrs May’s so keen to kill off marriage

WHEN will people grasp the difference between what the Tory Party says it is, and what it actually is? It is not as if it tries hard to hide it. Here is a clue. It is not conservative at all. It is a machine for obtaining power. It would cheerfully guill otine t he Queen i n Trafalgar Square if it thought that by doing so it could keep or gain office.

That is why it has spent the past 20 years becoming more Blairite than New Labour.

It helps to pay attention. Last week’s single most far- reaching act by the May Government was to strike the final death-blow at the institution of marriage.

You would have thought a selfstyled ‘Conservative’ Party would like marriage. It is all about private life, the keeping of promises, and saving what we can of the Christian religion in a society that prefers to worship at shopping malls and football stadiums.

But Theresa May, who can seldom stop herself mentioning that she is a parson’s daughter, chose her party’s conference to declare that she now backs civil partnerships for heterosexuals.

Unlike her grotesque attempts at dancing, this attracted little attention. That is a pity.

After a period of ‘consultation’ in which conservative voices will be sneeringly ignored, this change will happen. And Britain will have roughly the same attitude towards family life as the old Soviet Union did – a temporary contract in a world where everyone’s real parent is the almighty state.

Civil partnerships are st ate licences for co- habitation. They are deliberately stripped of any remaining religious content. That is why radicals have been campaigning for them for so long. There is no room in them for the ‘sexist’ distinction between husband and wife. And they will be easier to get out of than a carleasing agreement.

But they will give those who enter them the same legal rights, in terms of pensions, inheritance and next-of-kin privileges, as those who make the much deeper commitment of lifelong marriage, still just about available at a church near you.

From now on, the only people who live together, but will not be able to get these protections, will be brothers and sisters, who continue to be driven from their former homes by inheritance tax when one of them dies. So why bother with the tougher option? Just as bad money drives out good, these feeble half- commitments will supplant marriage for most.

THE change, designed for the convenience of adults who don’t want to be too bound by a deep pledge, will leave almost no barrier between children and the mighty forces of the government on one hand and greedy commerce on the other. It is the fulfilment of a prophecy made by the contraceptive fanatic and ultra-liberal moral reformer Helen Brook, who proclaimed in 1980: ‘ From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions – objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.’

If the Tory Party believed in anything, it would never have accepted this revolutionary change, or many of the other ghastly, Left- wing things it does to try to keep its ratings up. But it believes in nothing. And that is why it could so very easily lose the next Election to a Labour Party which does believe in something.