From yesterday’s Telegraph:<\/p>\n
Mr Duncan Smith has made uncompromisingly clear that, in his commission’s view, it is the breakdown of the two-parent family and the decline of marriage that is at the heart of this collapse of values in British social life – and heaven be praised, Mr Cameron has indicated that he endorses this conclusion.<\/p>\n
This is not to be construed – as everybody keeps hurrying to point out – as some sort of moralistic condemnation of existing single parents or an attempt by politicians to impose a particular pattern of personal life on the entire population.<\/p>\n
It is simply a statement of hard fact based on overwhelming empirical evidence: children are far less likely to fall into crime and addiction, to fail at school and to end up as teenage parents if they are raised by two parents who remain together.<\/p>\n
And those two parents are far more likely to remain together if they are married than if they are cohabiting.<\/p>\n
The statistical support for these propositions is now so crushing as to extinguish any rational argument to the contrary.<\/p>\n