Help! There's a politician in my bed

Morals and marriage ... you can surely have one without the other, says Decca Aitkenhead

For 10 months, 150 busy individuals have been finding time to meet, to try to come up with some morals. These were published on Wednesday, and were swiftly swallowed into the mounting hysteria about our perceived moral decay. Charged with finding values to teach children in school, the forum had taken a good look at the world in which those children actually live, found it various, and declined to prescribe wholesale heterosexual marriage. "A moral crusade divorced from marriage!" headlines harrumphed, and the right-wing press returned with vigour to the shining path of family values.

Moral fibre, apparently, is the exclusive territory of the family values lobby. "Families are a good thing: official. Just in case you have been living on another planet for a fortnight, it may now be worth stating that we are all now agreed on this." Thus Janet Daley summed up the current "consensus" in the Daily Telegraph - and the all-party morality roadshow thundered on.

This is what it is saying. Society is suffering moral fracture. A breakdown in traditional families is largely to blame. Tidy nuclear families produce morally good citizens; broken families turn out tearaways. We must make people get married and stay that way.

And we will do this by telling them, in no uncertain terms, the error of their wayward lifestyles. The forum's bothersome refusal to endorse marriage has already been seen to by the Schools Curriculum Assessment Authority which commissioned the study; it has added a clause that children should be raised "with preferably both mother and father present in a happy marriage relationship".

It is reasonable enough to hold an opinion on "family values". It is bizarre to imagine you can prescribe it. The family-values crusaders sound increasingly like eccentric anthropologists, describing mysterious creatures with motives quite unlike anything we recognise. Who are these people who will be persuaded whom they will live and sleep with by appeal to the nation's moral fibre? Brides and grooms do not stand at altars, reflecting happily on the joy they are bringing to cabinet ministers.

IT IS remarkable, given the clamorous attention being paid to the matter, that no one any longer feels obliged to demonstrate that we are indeed living in a "no blame, no shame", morally defunct society. Nor is anyone explaining why they think broken families produce problem children. Is it because single-parent families are often overworked and overwrought? If so, perhaps we should address ourselves to making their lives easier. Or are we saying it is because their families are disfigured by fighting? In which case, it would be perverse to perpetuate these miserable homes.

Perhaps we are saying that, because these children's primary moral role models have proved themselves feckless, they grow up without a moral framework. There is a persuasive case for saying they may lack a model for long-term relationships as adults. But quite why their parents' failure to get along should make them incapable of telling right from wrong, or think it is OK to steal a Mars Bar or stab a teacher, is not explained.

But as everyone else is disregarding these small matters, let us do so too. Let us take the family-values crusade on its own terms. We can all think of worthy traditional families we know - model nuclear units rearing well-adjusted children, contributing commendably to society. Tony and Cherie Blair, with their three toothy childen, say. We might think it would be nice if we could all be just like them, and, if we could wave a magic wand, would see to it that we were. Unfortunately, telling everyone that it would be much better all round if they could only be like that, will have about as much chance of success as borrowing some two-bit magician's wand, and giving it a good shake.

People get married because they think it will make them happy. Sometimes they find they were wrong. If you discover your husband is a philandering, violent alcoholic, you are unlikely to stay with him for the sake of the nation. You may stay because you think things will get better; you may stay because you have nowhere else to go; you may stay because you decide, on balance, it is better for the children. In other words, families stay together because they think they will, overall, be happier together than apart.

We would all quite like to paint like Picasso, or sing like Billy Holiday, and society might be a nicer place if we all did. But it would be odd if the Government started introducing special Billy Holiday singing lessons in school, or constructed a tax system which favoured Billy Holiday-style singers. Likewise, one might like everyone to believe in God, and consider their reluctance to do so a cause for modern moral decline. But we can no sooner instruct people to believe in God, than tell them to sing like Billy Holiday - or to stay married.

Maybe the currently static debate might move on if we understood why the nuclear family is falling apart. In 1961, fewer than one in 10 marriages ended in divorce; today, it is more than four in 10. During peacetime Britain until the late 1950s, fewer than 5 per cent of children were born outside marriage. As late as 1970, just one in 10 couples lived together before marrying; the figure is now seven out of 10. A generation ago, Britain's divorce rate rested mid-table in European terms. It now comes top.

Received wisdom would have it that people used to stay married because it was far too embarrassing not to. A generous dose of social stigma worked wonders - but nowadays, all these pesky single parents go around smashing up families, simply because they can. What we need is a damned good whack of old-fashioned shame.

This is a curious logic. If couples only ever stayed together out of shame, and hot-footed it out the door at the very earliest socially acceptable opportunity, then presumably they were not very happy. This could hardly be said to be a golden age to which we should hark back, then, let alone wish to recreate.

And conventions have changed. The proportion of children born out of marriage now stands at almost one in three; this is nearly twice the number just a decade ago. One in five families is headed by a single parent - double the figure 20 years ago. One child in every 12 lives with a step- parent. We are talking about an enormous number of children now living in "broken" homes. If we are saying that their lives are already disturbed, where is the merit in compounding the problem by telling them what a bad lot they are?

When parents split up, the single most important influence on their children's happiness is understood to be the terms on which they part. Civil, relaxed parents who do not apportion blame make, we recognise, for well-adjusted children. And so it is, one would imagine, with society at large. If a child's family is at war with public opinion, if society illegitimises his home, condemns his parents, and brands him a future misfit, we should hardly be surprised if the child grows up ill at ease with that society.

Happily, most of those closer to the real world than moral commentators such as Ms Daley appear to understand this, and the forum's report was mercifully restrained on marriage. One faction's efforts to insert a clause which condemned sex outside marriage as "wrong" was thwarted, and in the end they settled for "valuing families as sources of love and support". What is really surprising - though few now seem to think so - is that marriage should be considered a "moral" matter at all.

"No one is saying that only married people are moral," according to Janet Daley. This is not actually true. If, as the family-values lobby likes to have it, marriage and morality are inextricably linked, that is precisely what they are saying. Yet it would be equally absurd to suggest that married people are all immoral. These statements are meaningless - because the debate is not about morals at all.

When rich families break up, we consider it a cause for commiseration, but not national moral panic. What we are actually worried about are poor families, because when they split up they cost us a lot of money. As no political party is inclined to talk much about money any more, moral crusades make a splendid substitute.

The challenge, if we are genuinely anxious about the future of families, is not to announce one moral solution. It is certainly not to condemn those who deviate. The challenge is to admit the futility of such prescriptions, accept the families people create for themselves, and assure children that their domestic arrangements are valid and valued.

Why do marriages break down? Three-quarters of all divorces are initiated by women. Marriage clearly isn't much good to a lot of them. Might it not make more sense to find out what is, than to try and shame them, hopelessly, into a return to something that wasn't?