Political Penguin

The other month the Tories were playing to their more traditional audience by beefing up their position on marriage. More specifically on finally finding a policy of reintroducing the married couples tax allowance.

You see it’s all gone pear-shaped since Labour came to power. Their hellbent policies of trying to focus money towards people who actually need it, like young working couples with things like childcare costs and ever spiralling costs of getting on the property ladder has led to a breakdown in of morality in our society meaning that all these kids being raised by unmarried couples are going to turn out as hooligans, drug addicts and thugs.

The Tories are right, this could all be fixed by getting people to walk up the aisle together, don a couple of rings and erstwhile bad parents would miraculously be transformed into model members of society raising well-adjusted good children.

What the Tories are doing is making a value judgement on the circumstances in which people should raise their children. Personally I happen to disagree. I don’t think children are best raised by married couples, nor unmarried couples nor single parents for that matter. Children are best raised by good parents.

Myself and Mrs Penguin despite my referring to her in those terms aren’t married. We’d like to think we’re good parents. We take lots of time out to play with Little Penguin, do educational activities with him and give him a good healthy diet. We’re people of modest means, we don’t have sufficient resources to afford lots of field trips or toys but we do what we can within our means.

That’s not to say we wouldn’t like to at some point get married. We have no problems with our long-term commitment to each other, it’s just nasty horrible things like paying a mortgage, affording toys for the little one, travelling back and forth a couple of times a year to Mrs Penguin’s homeland to keep up with family get in the way.

Whatever criticisms might be placed at it, the tax credit system helps people like us out a lot. The Tories policy of abolishing tax credits and introducing a married couples tax allowance would not only not help us but would knock us back on a rough reckoning over a