Cameron: Traditional values

London, July 11: The Tories announced yesterday that they want to offer financial incentives to make marriage more popular, believing traditional family life to be the best way of tackling the growing social ills of a society where nearly half the babies are born out of wedlock.

The Conservative leader, David Cameron, who has an impeccable family life himself with a wife and three children, promised to remove the anti-marriage bias in the country’s tax laws which appeared to make it more profitable for people to remain single parents.

A central recommendation, which is among 190 measures contained in a report yesterday from a Tory social justice policy group, is a tax allowance of £20 to a married couple if either the husband or wife stays at home to look after the children.

Another is requiring couples to state whether they are married in government forms.

Although Cameron stopped short of accepting the recommendations on tax, his reaction to yesterday’s report will go down well with Muslims and Asians in general: “If we get the family right, we can fix our broken society.”

Muslims simply cannot accept Britain’s new laws which have given “civil partnerships” between homosexuals equal status with marriage, though others consider this progress towards a more equal society.

Hindus have been less vocal in their criticism but also do not like the concept of equality for homosexuals.

But Indian homosexuals and lesbians, of whom there are some, would like India to go down the same route as Britain as far as human rights are concerned.

However, neither the Tories nor Labour have a policy on what to do about the growing number of professional Indian women, mostly in their thirties and early forties, who remain unmarried. Either they have not found someone who is quite right or have been so busy in pursuing ambitious career paths that they just have not had time to locate suitable matches.

Also, a significant number of Asian women have been blackmailed by their parents into not marrying so that their daughters can act as unpaid nursemaids during their declining years.

A typical comment today was: “I take my parents back and forth to hospital. Then I go shopping, then I cook. Then I wash my father and take him to bed. Then I feed him. Once, when I was going out with friends, my mother said: ‘It’s OK for you to enjoy yourself. But when you return at midnight, you will find my dead body by the door.’ I stayed at home. Today, I really have no friends, let alone a boyfriend.”

Government policy has focused, instead, on preventing some ultra-orthodox Muslim (and a few Punjabi) parents from persuading very young daughters into “forced marriages”. Where the daughters have resisted or found boyfriends themselves, there have sometimes been “honour killings”.

Despite these aberrations, Asian family life is still held up as the model for wider British society – and probably rightly so. Although there are exceptions, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi children are almost invariably born to married parents.

This is not so for the rest of society, a truth recognised in yesterday’s 671-page landmark Tory report aimed at tackling social and family breakdown in Britain.

Cameron, who is 43, married Samantha Sheffield, daughter of Sir Reginald Sheffield, 8th Baronet, in 1996. Their first child, Ivan, was born in 2002, with cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy.

The Camerons also have a daughter, Nancy, born in 2004, and another son, Arthur, who arrived on St Valentine’s Day last year.