The family is the basic unit of society. If it breaks down, society does too. But how to reverse present trends when family policy is such a battlefield? The author and journalist Melanie Phillips focuses on the need to affirm and buttress marriage. If you want to understand the paralysis that seems to afflict politicians over family policy, you need look no further than the controversy over the recent behaviour of the Foreign Secretary. The furore over his affair with Gaynor Regan has illuminated some of the confusion in the public and political mind. Adultery by a politician, we are told, is no longer something the public worries about. Yet it clearly is, or else Robin Cook would not have been forced to choose between his mistress and his wife when the press got hold of the story.

In trying to formulate policy on the family, the Government is unable to see its way clearly because of the conflicting and contradictory messages sent by behaviour stretching all the way from Westminster and Whitehall to the meanest housing estates in the land. Family policy is the principal contemporary moral and cultural battleground in a war which is essentially over marriage ? the M-word, or the love that now dare not speak its name.

It is permissible for policy-makers to talk about supporting the family as long as the family is interpreted as any kind of relationship, and supporting it is interpreted as providing help with parenting. If you start talking about the need to promote, support or privilege marriage, however, you tend to get booed off the stage. You lose your friends, people stop talking to you, or you become the target of apparently unconnected attacks. So many people, particularly within the intellectual classes and especially the media, are into serial dysfunctional relationships and have a vested interest in suggesting this is a normal and desirable way to live.

Until very recently the malign effects generally inflicted by divorce upon children were denied. Indeed, it was said that it was better for children if their unhappy parents parted. A few years ago the myth was exploded. Deprived of such spurious justification, anti-family campaigners have rethought their tactics. So fatherhood is now acknowledged as important ? but its obligations can apparently be discharged perfectly well at a distance from the family. At the same time, fathers must turn themselves into hands-on carers. Male breadwinning, it is said, is absolutely inimical to adequate fatherhood because it takes the man away from his children; breadwinning by mothers, on the other hand, is absolutely essential to enable women to gain independence from men.

Meanwhile, in the courts, family lawyers are progressively giving cohabitation the same privileges as marriage. The removal of fault or indeed any grounds for divorce has made marriage even more meaningless, since that contract can now be unilaterally repudiated. The tax and benefits package discriminates against married couples and favours single individuals, including lone parents. The autonomous individual, independent of constraints of duty, responsibility, rules, sanctions or social disapproval now reigns supreme. There appears to be a starling ignorance of the great antiquity of marriage, which may have taken different forms across cultures and changed over centuries but remains the supreme constant in cultures across time and place.

The breakdown of the traditional family is the single greatest issue of our time, and the most difficult. It is impossible to have a dispassionate policy discussion on the subject, because those who argue with most fury against the traditional family almost always do so not on the basis of evidence ? which stacks up against them ? but from private positions of great pain, guilt and anguish. Some intact families are awful, of course, and many lone parents do very well by their children. But in general most children do worse, relatively speaking, if they come from fragmented or reconstituted families, and tend to repeat the pattern in their own inability as adults to form permanent relationships. Many adults also get hurt by marriage breakdown. Life after betrayal or desertion is no picnic.

There are always going to be situations where marriages break down and where parents must sadly part. But the point is that it is sad. It is a misfortune for most, if not all, concerned ? not, as is often suggested, a neutral or desirable lifestyle choice. Stable family life is the bedrock of securely attached individuals and the resulting co-operative social order.

There is a rising tide of juvenile distress and disorder throughout the Western world which cannot be accounted for by poverty or unemployment. It is more likely to be due to a collapse of social bonds, with family break-up at its heart.

The collapse of the family means the erosion of those networks of trust, responsibility and commitment that make up civic society. The child whose parents are split asunder by adultery has its assumptions about trust, fidelity and commitment destroyed. The child who has no father in place but endures instead a series of intermittent boyfriends visiting its mother can develop little idea of what commitment or responsibility really entail.

The key difficulty lies with the concept of commitment, which means undertaking to restrict one?s freedom of action in a greater cause. But to the absolute individualist, any such restriction is by definition oppressive. Commitment therefore has become a negotiable commodity. The commitment of adults to each other or to their children lasts precisely as long as is convenient. It is then redefined to suit altered circumstances.

Such redefinition finds its most common expression in cohabitation, which we are told is just as good as marriage in that parents who cohabit can be just as committed to caring for their children. But most cohabitations break down or mutate into marriage because marriage still means something (just about). Only a tiny number, some four per cent, of children not being brought up by their own married parents live in stable cohabiting households (and most of them seem to be in the media, politics or academia).

For all its difficulties, marriage remains a near-universal aspiration. But it is fragile, and if it is to thrive it must be buttressed through a concerted and conscious effort by law, economics and culture. Clearly, marriage and the stable family have been undermined by huge cultural pressures which must be beyond any one agency such as the State to reverse. But the State does play a significant role in helping shape that culture.

That can be done in a number of ways. Put simply, there should be incentives for behaviour which broadly promote social outcomes, and corresponding disincentives for behaviour which does the opposite. So, for example, the tax and benefits system should favour married couples with children over unmarried. Married couples with children have lost out most heavily over the past 20 years; the state has thus bizarrely penalised the family structure most likely to produce beneficial effects.

Links between acts and their consequences should be restored so that personal behaviour is seen to matter again. Divorce law should see the reintroduction of the concept of fault; it is fundamentally unjust that people who are the victims of their spouse?s betrayal or irresponsibility should be further penalised by losing their children and their house. The Child Support Act should be changed so that people who have walked out on their marriage are penalised more heavily than their abandoned spouses or those who were never married in the first place (who should nevertheless pay something).

The current thrust of family law to promote equivalence between married and cohabiting couples should be reversed. Lone parents should not be treated as a homogeneous group. Teenage mothers, instead of being given the council flat and panoply of benefits that tell them they are entitled to the same lifestyle as married couples or individuals without responsibilities, should be offered places in mother-and-baby homes where they can be cared for and taught how to mother their children.

Government grants for sex education programmes in schools should be reserved for those organisations which teach the advisability of sex within marriage. Similarly, grants for marriage guidance should only be given to organisations which can demonstrate that they really do try to save marriages, as opposed to the vapid relationship counselling which merely speeds unhappy couples into parting.

Those who put forward such arguments are assumed to be illiberal for two main reasons. First, they are condemned for wanting the State to intrude into private lives. Secondly, they are held to be intolerant of those who do not conform to the married lifestyle norm.

Both criticisms are misguided. The first is based on the fallacy that marriage and family life are a private affair. On the contrary, marriage represents the intersection between public and private morality. Society has a stake in it because through marriage individuals undertake crucial social responsibilities, mainly the legal, moral and economic responsibilities for the children of the marriage. Benefits granted in respect of marriage arose out of recognition of the self-sacrifice and costs that such commitment and childbearing imposed. This was not unfair favouritism, but an acceptance that not all environments were equally safe for childbearing. Unfortunately, family relationships now centre round private sexual acts which have become divorced from their consequences and redefined in terms of pleasure, hedonism and self-gratification.

The second charge, of intolerance, rests on a confusion between tolerance and indifference. Tolerance presupposes disapproval. There has to be a norm of behaviour from which deviation can be tolerated. If there are no norms, there cannot be tolerance, merely indifference. Liberal values never envisaged that tolerance should mean no discrimination between right and wrong behaviour, or good and bad. How can it be moral or compassionate to tolerate teenage girls having a succession of babies by different boys; or to tolerate the damage done to children by family breakdown; or to tolerate the betrayal of trust by the husband or wife who commits adultery and deserts the family?

The stage is now set for a behind-the-scenes battle over marriage. The signs are that the Prime Minister, along with a mere handful of his colleagues ? Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Paul Boateng ? are pressing for a family policy that explicitly upholds marriage. Against them are ranged the majority of the Cabinet, government advisers and the Parliamentary Labour Party (among all of whom there is a very high proportion of irregular family arrangements). Across the way, William Hague has started to try to reclaim the purloined precious centre ground by making a speech proclaiming the importance of supporting marriage and apologising for the fact that the Tories notably omitted to do so throughout their 18 years in power.

Whether the Government is sufficiently alarmed by Hague?s bold clarity to resolve its own vacillations over the family remains to be seen. On past evidence, however, it seems likely that the Prime Minister will try to fashion a family policy that will seek to please everyone or at least those whose votes may go either way at an election. But the idea that you can have, side by side, marriage for those who want it and unmarriage for those who don?t want it is a myth. Marriage is being dismantled by the doctrine of equivalence, which demotes it from the foundation stone of a civilised society to just another lifestyle choice, to be discarded along with those who rely on its support. People who imagine they have pursued their inalienable right to personal happiness by throwing marriage away get enraged by the reminder that there are adverse consequences for others. If religious leadership is to mean anything at all, it surely has a primary duty to help people realise the true nature of their responsibilities, and not provide alibis for evading them.

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