We'd prefer the horse and no carriage

Marriage has had a schizophrenic week. It began on April Fool's Day, when the 200-year-old marriage regulations were liberalised, allowing people to wed outside the registry office in "approved places" such as hotels or the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. It ended with the Chancellor taking £86 from married couples under 65 in yet another invisible tax hike.

With one hand, the Government offered inducements for couples to tie the nuptial knot, while with the other, it cut one of the last fiscal incentives to reward them for doing so.

For some, this will simply be another sign of a government that has lost coherence or direction. For others, it will confirm the continuing tension between the two wings of modern conservatism - the one traditional and reactionary, the other libertarian and hostile to state interference in personal liberty.

For most of the past 16 years, the rhetoric of family policy has belonged to the traditionalists. At every Conservative Party conference, ministers felt the need to call for measures to prop up the family. But this week's events suggest the libertarian wing is gaining control of policy, with yet another retreat from the tradition of state support for marriage, a tradition which goes back as far as 1920, when the Married Man's Tax Allowance was introduced.

The moralistic wing will see the Government's actions as a betrayal. Major will be caricatured as party to an unholy alliance with libertarians and feminists. But the traditionalists' problem is that Government policy in this area has been futile and ineffective.

It is ironic that the same Conservatives who argued that governments could do little to plan the economy or engineer society were so enthusiastic about the state's capacity to engineer family life. "Marriage" allowances have had little, if any, effect on people's actions. They did nothing to slow down the divorce rate, which rose six-fold between 1961 and 1991, so that today one in four children in England and Wales may well see their parents divorce before their 16th birthday. And while traditionalists like to pin these trends on the declining real value of the married couples' tax allowance, this only occurred after 1990. The divorce epidemic came first.

Clearly, the institution of marriage has an image problem. It is simply not proving attractive enough to persuade the significant minority (almost a third) of people aged between 25 and 34 who are currently cohabiting to rush to the altar, and begin to reverse adeclining marriage rate which was halved between 1971 and 1991.

But is there an alternative? One obvious answer is for the state to free up the marriage market. At the moment, the marriage business is a heavily regulated affair taking place in churches or under the aegis of state officialdom. That's why deregulation of marriage - allowing other people to be licensed as marriage-makers, as well as religious representatives or officials of the state - might be an idea whose time has come. It's a natural extension of consumer choice and the Government might just find there are people out there dying to shop around for their own personalised marriage ceremony.

You see, though the traditionalists don't like to admit it, marriage and cohabitation aren't necessarily in tension. They are frequently complementary. Many young women today cohabit not as an ideological statement, as living together might have been for feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, but because to do so is wise. For many, cohabitation is a prelude to marriage - 58% of couples marrying today have lived together first, a figureexpected to increase to eight out of 10 couples by 2000. Because people cohabit first, the meaning of marriage has changed. It is less about marking the beginning of a life together than an important staging post in a life already shared - an opportunity to celebrate and confirm a successful relationship.

But the institution of marriage and its rituals don't easily cater for people's own (frequently secular) values. Our options are incredibly limited. For many, church weddings are empty ceremonies, not least because of the frequency with which vows made in front of God have been broken. To my knowledge, the Unitarian Church is alone in allowing experimentation with the rewriting of the marriage vows, but within legal limits.

The increasing secularisation of society also means that church weddings may be losing out to civil marriages. But registry offices seem antiseptic and bureaucratic, like a visit to the tax office or the DSS rather than the place to make one of the most important commitments in your life. And that's why this week's reform of civil marriage - much needed as it was - is feeble tinkering with an antiquated system.

True, people can now marry in "approved places" with the help of "marriage entrepreneurs" but there are still far more places where you can't marry than where you can. You can't, for example, marry in your own home. Nor can consumers south of the Scottish border marry outdoors. You can't marry in your favourite park, on your favourite hill, your favourite beach, the place you first consummated your love for each other. And crucially, you still have a limited choice of who conducts the marriage.

But many people want their own personal day to remember. The Humanist Association, arts groups such as Welfare State International and Michael Young's Family Covenant Association are all developing alternative ceremonies to mark our crucial rites of passage across the life cycle - birth, marriage, death. But they have no legal authority to marry people. Elsewhere, such as in Canada and Australia, thousands of "celebrants" (ordinary people licensed to conduct marriages) are listed in their Yellow Pages. But the British state refuses to recognise the Humanist Association's list of like-minded folk.

Wholesale deregulation of civil marriage ceremonies could be an exciting step. The funeral supermarkets in France (soon to come to Britain) could be joined by marriage supermarkets. There might be ceremonies at M&S or Centerparcs, marriage parties at McDonalds, weddings literally wherever you like. Romantics would no longer need to jet off to Las Vegas. A whole new industry could be born.

Better still, competition might reduce prices. The average white wedding in the South East costs almost £8,000. And deregulation would legitimise the cottage industry of "marriage makers" already helping people devise their own rituals.

So maybe John Major should risk the wrath of the traditionalists in his party and advocate full-scale deregulation of marriage in the next Queen's Speech. He could present it as his latest flagship Tory reform. And far from being the final nail in marriage's coffin, deregulation might prove to be its best chance of revival - a way of bringing marriage back to the people.