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| Aid Groups Examine Tsunami Efforts 5 Years Later Save the Children releases report detailing results of its five-year-response www1.voanews.com |
Taking stock How to invest, after a decade of decline on the markets news.bbc.co.uk |
Feeling That Cold Wind? Here’s Why. Why has it been so cold this winter? It’s not global cooling. A mass of high pressure in the Arctic is the culprit. feeds.nytimes.com |
Family life is a vipers' nest politicians should not poke | Polly Toynbee Cameron's marriage tax break is unworkable and unjust. But before Labour gloats, beware: this is a banana skin for them, too'Is it fair that a wife abandoned by her husband loses her marriage bonus, while he takes it with him to marry for the second or third time?" I asked David Cameron at a press Âconference last week. ÂUncharacteristically he Âmuttered rather crossly that the "details" had yet to be worked out.What a rare ray of sunshine for Labour to watch such a seminal Cameron policy disintegrate so fast. This is not some oversight by his backroom number-crunchers. The problem is that the policy itself is impossible, a "No can do, Minister" moment when the world out there collides with the neat Westminster world of policy-making.His problem is insoluble. How can he offer a big enough marriage "bribe", while pledged to deep cuts? Anything less than a life-changing sum will be trifling when you consider what people are already prepared to lose. People walk away from relationships at huge financial cost and emotional turmoil, with men at risk of losing touch with children, losing a home and losing a slab of money. Women's incomes rarely recover. However much people see marriage as the best way to bring up children, it would take lottery-sized sums to keep warring couples together. Now backtracking, Cameron says even a small sum sends the right moral signal.Look at just how wicked this issue is. Cameron first promised on the Daily Mail's front page that his tax break would go to all married couples. Thereafter the Tories always referred to a transferable tax allowance, but that would go only to wives not working. That would cost nearly £5bn, and would be reserved only for the 41% of couples with a spouse at home, omitting couples with no earner. Yet Cameron vowed again last week to include: "All those who tie the knot or enter civil partnership would qualify." But how?In the tax system husbands and wives have separate assessments. When in 1990 the Conservatives gave women independent tax status, it was seen as a great feminist victory. But it also gave an income boost to two-earner couples – most of them among the better-off. If independence for women was fair in the tax system, why wasn't it fair to give independent rights to each partner in the benefit system too? Cameron complains about the "couple penalty" with the perverse incentive for couples on benefits to live apart – or to pretend to – in order not to be assessed together so as to draw two separate cheques. Disaggregating benefits would solve the marriage disincentive – but the Conservatives are not about to greatly increase the benefit bill to help the poorest. The transferable tax allowance, on the other hand, will pay out much more to the well-off than to the bottom tenth of families – a more comfortable Conservative policy.The Mail prevents retreat, so ÂCameron promises the marriage bonus in his first parliament – but with no details before the election. He won't get away with that: the white heat of a Âcampaign will force an answer from him. He knows there is none: either it's too costly or totally worthless, or both. Iain Duncan Smith yesterday said the bonus should go just to married couples with children under the age of three – but to whom? Only for first-time Âmarriages? What of the unlucky abandoned wife who finds another partner? What of the man leaving an abominable wife who finds happiness elsewhere? There is no logic: families take sides with their own blood.The state has already abandoned deciding who is to blame in divorce cases: judges have given up on adjudicating guilt. Has Cameron forgotten how politically toxic divorce can be? When John Major set up the Child Support Agency won't-pay fathers were outraged as they felt either "innocent" or "justified", as everyone does. Battalions of fathers (and a few absent mothers) still won't pay: forcing them might be a better divorce-deterrent – if carrots or sticks ever make a blind bit of difference. How odd that the party of the hands-off small state believes government can command near magical power over people's private lives. This is a vipers' nest that politicians should not poke.But before Labour gloats itself silly, this is treacherous terrain for them too. Even if Cameron's tax break is unjust nonsense, it proclaims that his party stands for marriage, and Labour doesn't. The government's green paper this week will support families of "all shapes and sizes" because that's how people live. But polls also show a lifelong loving Ârelationship is still the popular ideal – even among those who fail.Though Cameron's money would flow to the wealthy, the policy is directed at the poorest because they are the least married. There are often good reasons why: worklessness, debts, drugs, drink, gambling or mental illness can make a man no asset to a mother. The poorest families are those where fathers take too much of the income, leaving mothers with only child benefit. A bad parent may be much worse than none. Lack of married parents may be the least of a child's problems, not the cause. A wedding ring solves nothing. The rich divorce least – high-profile cases notwithstanding. Where there is serious money at stake, they tend to avoid it.Whatever the state of marriage, family still ties; blood binds thicker than glue in all surveys. But do politicians really value those ties? Fate is all but sealed by birth, so politicians strive to make those at the bottom "aspire" out of the milieu of their closest bonds. All parties prefer "social mobility" to creating a society without great gulfs in living standards, where people need not abandon family background to succeed. The painful wrench of those who leave beloved parents on lower rungs for high-flying lives that cut them from their roots is well described in bookshelves of biographies. It's not surprising many prefer not to strive to be better than their families. Meanwhile, well-off Âfamilies cement their children into perpetual privilege down the generations, regardless of merit. In other words, family can be a problem in ordering the good society: class and family are too inextricable to devise some "marriage" policy oblivious of how these connect.Most sensible people know all this and will mock Cameron for social absurdity and empty moralising, while Labour warns of yet another Cameron ploy that redistributes money upwards to the better-off. Yet Labour will struggle to win the pro-family trophy. This is quicksand for both parties.David CameronFamilyParents and parentingChildrenMarriageConservativesLabourGeneral election 2010Family financesPolly Toynbeeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Martin Amis: Ageing provocateur | Joan Brady As a award-winning writer in my 70s, I find Martin Amis's attack on 'worthless' old people as vile as any racismAs a writer who's just turned 70, I have to admit that Martin Amis has riled me with his remarks in the Sunday Times about euthanasia and what he sees as the worthlessness of old people. It's not just that he is suggesting that at my age I can or should no longer carry out my profession. He also seems to be casting doubt on my right to be alive at all.Ageism seems to me almost indistinguishable from racism, a point that couldn't be made clearer than he makes himself: old people are "like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops". That's what racists say about anybody with a different skin colour or an alien headdress: "They stink." True, there is such a thing as a smell of death. I know it all too well – I nursed my husband through a long and terrible illness – and very ill people of any age tend to stink of it, young ones as well as old ones. But people that are sick, no matter what their age, aren't eating out in restaurants and cafes or buying tufted carpets at Habitat.Ageists also tend to say the old are stupid. Here's Amis again: "Talent dies before the body." But what about the poet John Keats or the cellist Jacqueline du Pré? Their bodies gave out way before their talents. In my own field there are and have been many prose writers writing well past their 70s and into their 80s, some of whom have had a falling away of their talent, but many of whom, like one of Amis's heroes, Philip Roth, now 76, come roaring back. Lots of people go through bad periods at all kinds of ages. Lots of elderly writers are very productive and at the peak of form: PD James (89) and Ruth Rendell (79) come to mind at once.Which brings me to the question: Should people be allowed to work when they're older? Of course they should. It's idiotic to pension off people just because of age. True, some people do need pensioning off. Some of them need it at 40, some at 50. Some should never have been employed at all. And some should definitely be kept on at 70 or 80, especially now with the old skills in decline: writing readable sentences, manipulating basic Âmathematics, everyday diplomacy in interpersonal relationships.It's health that matters, not age. What people are capable of at any age depends partly on that and partly on luck. Some aren't ever good at anything. Some lose their capacity early. Some don't. But everybody who lives gets old.I remember Shirley MacLaine on the box talking to an interviewer about it. "You think it's not going to happen to you," she said, shaking her finger at the grinning younger man in the chair opposite her. "You just wait. It is going to happen." He didn't believe her. But by now, he's probably as old as Amis. I'm not saying it's pleasant to get old, to sense the edge coming closer, to know the body is weaker, the energy levels lower. But that's true of many athletes who have to retire at 30, crippled with arthritis. And many of the very old remain fit and well.To get personal about it, I've just turned 70, and my new book is a thriller called Venom, not exactly an old lady's kind of thing. I wrote it under difficult circumstances. I have a hereditary heart condition that flared up and called for major surgery. That was two years ago and I feel stronger than ever. I do Pilates and I box to keep fit and, to tell you the truth, my writing is better as a result.One of God's nastiest tricks is that often people don't realise they're getting old. My brother-in-law caught sight of an ancient man in a shop window and thought, "Jesus, look at that poor old fool". Then he realised that old man was himself. And here's Amis, talking like a callow teenager, who sees the old as a smelly, ugly invasion, blissfully unaware that he's already one of them.Martin AmisWelfareAgeingOlder peopleLong-term careAssisted suicideRuth RendellPD JamesJohn KeatsJoan Bradyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |