The ring of truth

No one believes Gordon Brown is in favour of marriage: just ask his ex-girlfriends. The bachelor with a "Budget for families" is an easy target for moral-values vigilantes. Last week he abolished the Married Couples' Allowance - "the last recognition," the Shadow Chancellor said, "of marriage in the tax system." Mixing metaphors, muddling thought, Simon Heffer in the Daily Mail deplored the Government's "death sentence on a vital part of the bedrock of our society". "Married couples used to get a little pat on the back from the state," claimed Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph, "and Gordon has snatched it away."

Marriage is indeed moribund - but Brown is not to blame. On the contrary, when historians look back on his Budget, I suspect the Chancellor will be hailed as the grand matchmaker: every groom's best man, who helped restore respect for marriage to a society which was losing it. Tax breaks neither hallow marriage nor preserve it; but the interference of the state has profaned and debased it. Now, unwittingly, by edging the state away from the marriage bed, the Chancellor has given true wedlock its best boost for centuries. Marriages are made in heaven, not in tax havens. Morally improving unions, which keep lovers in love and make society more stable, are contracted without calculation of the tax bill. They happen beyond concern for the kind of mean-minded respectability that carries the stamp of the state.

Because of social change and transformed values, the "honourable estate" of wedlock has become irrelevant and unrevered. Ours is a singles-bars society, of lonely hearts, quick-fix sex and impermanent relationships. Marriage can be a form of temporary concubinage, lightly initiated, easily ended. Instead of lifelong union, it is, for many newly-weds, an introduction to serial polygamy. Except for bestiality, child-abuse and the more flamboyant kinds of incest, every sexual union is now blessed by society, irrespective of the degree of formality with which it is started or solemnised. Marriage seems conspicuously unnecessary. A Conservative Party leader can fornicate at a party conference and still get an ovation from the moral majority. A prince can shack up with his future wife to universal applause, while royal siblings and in-laws flaunt adultery and treat marriage with open contempt. The "defender of faith" can choose a divorcee as a virtual maitresse- en-titre and perhaps demand formalisation of a union his church condemns as illicit. American presidential pecadilloes accompany 70 per cent approval- ratings in a country notorious for social conservatism. For marriage lines, the writing is on the wall.

If we want couples to stay together and make and honour mutual promises of love, support and sharing, we should dismantle the state-run marriage business of cheap licences and cash-back fiscal doles. No social need is served by rewarding wife-batterers, adulterers, bigamists, bolters and the many-times divorced, merely because their misdemeanours are practised in defiance of a licence. We need a fresh way of looking at marriage. It needs to be privatised, taken out of the sullying hands of the state and restored to the people. Grown-up individuals can be trusted to make with their partners the bargains which suit them. They can record them privately in secular contracts, or solemnise or sacralise them, if they wish, according to the rites of the religions in which they believe.

There is no good reason why the modern state should have any part in regulating, recording or overseeing the arrangements couples make. A visit to a register office adds nothing to the moral stature of sex. The sincerity of the vows lovers exchange, the depth of their mutual commitment, the resolve with which they intend to endure hardship together and sacrifice for each other: these are the ingredients which make a difference. They are known to the parties concerned, and to God, if He is watching. A registrar contributes only embarrassment, usually with an unctuous or intrusive manner in an ill-fitting suit. Nowadays, the legal status of a lovers' contract is hardly affected by the register-office encounter. Palimony is good coin. The pre-nuptial agreement is a better guarantee of the parties' rights than the ceremony. What is surprising about civil marriage is not that it is dying out but that it still survives at all.

Historically, over the last couple of hundred years, bureaucracies got involved in the marriage business for three motives. First, they were jealous of the exclusive power churches claimed to legitimate sex. As secularism grew, functionaries filched the functions of priests. Secondly, in some countries, officials itched for information about citizens - the policeman's prurience to know who lives with whom. Finally, they wanted to protect women, in societies without sexual equality, from the consequences of their own folly. Women who gave themselves to men, without the protection of a well-attested contract, exposed themselves to the cautionary fate of the victims in penny-dreadfuls: the foggy, foggy dew, the self-interested embrace, the price of sin.

None of these considerations applies today. Religious organisations no longer normally have any power over private lives and there is no need for the state to offer an alternative way of making sex respectable. Women think for themselves, make their own choices and look after their own interests. They do not need to be nannied into marriage by over-protective legislators. In the age of easily accessed information, we need inviolable personal data, kept out of the hands of bureaucrats. It would be an outrageous impertinence for the state to claim that its marriage registers confer any special dignity or validity or benefit on the unions inscribed in them.

Of course, the state has a continuing role in adjudicating and enforcing all contracts - including the agreements men and women make to live together - when invited to do so by one or both of the contracting parties. But there is no need for registration by state officials: a contract to buy a pair of shoes or service a washing machine can be referred to the court or arbitration board, if necessary, without prior registration by the state. So could a marriage contract. In practice, the law has repudiated responsibility anyway: either party to a state-endorsed marriage is allowed to drop out capriciously. You might therefore just as well dispense with state registration and make a contract of your own devising. At least the law will then back you up if your partner breaks the terms agreed.

Nor is there any reason for the tax system to favour state-endorsed unions over others, unless to bolster a tendentious view of sexual propriety, or discriminate unfairly against people who prefer to pledge mutual trust in other ways . Compared with other ways of starting life together, civil marriage does little to make a union more stable, spouses more loving or children better brought-up. Even if it were in the interests of the state to encourage marriage, fiscal incentives would be a dire way of going about it. No one should decide to make a self-denying pledge to another person for the sake of a few pounds' worth of tax allowance. No one is likely to be deterred from matrimony by the loss of incentives worth the price of a few drinks at the reception. Fiscal determinism is an article of faith with some economists, but it can't keep alienated ex-lovers together. Matters of heart and soul are decided intuitively, impulsively, blindly. Cupid is lavish with arrows but keeps no accounts.

The state should get out of the marriage market altogether. Instead, the system should encourage parents to stay with their children. The virtues commonly ascribed to "traditional family life" - a stable environment, available love, a framework in which family members of different generations can support each other - are a consequence not of marriage but of the exchange of parental sacrifice for filial feeling. The Chancellor is now directing the funds at his disposal in the right direction. To raise children is one of the great blessings and burdens of life: a show of appreciation from the state hardly enhances the blessing but it may help to ease the burden a little.

Brown's Budget has destroyed the last, faint reason why anyone might want to contract a civil marriage. As a result, the Chancellor has restored marriage to the sacred sphere. This is where it belongs. You may see marriage as a vocation, confirmed by divine grace, or as a sacrament which sanctifies human love, or as a contract to be solemnised by a community of belief, or as an affirmation of a fact of nature to be celebrated under the sun and sky, or as an act of faith in practical human virtues, elevated by the witness of friends. But in every case what makes it a marriage is sincerity of purpose and inflexibility of commitment. In the near future, civil marriage will disappear. An offensive department of the bureaucracy will be wound up. But marriages of true minds will continue and their sanctity will deepen. Fiscally disinterested, free of bureaucratic meddling, marriage will be a better, purer, more durable institution. Married people will be enriched by more than the mean measure of the taxman's hand-out.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is the author of `Truth: A History', published by Black Swan Paperbacks.