Wednesday 17 February 2010

Caution!

Right. Presumably, you're sitting down. If you aren't, please do so. Make sure you aren't swigging a cup of tea or anything because I'm about to say something startling.

The Graun is making some sense in attacking Tory policy here:

Cook writes about the influence on the party of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), the thinktank set up by Iain Duncan Smith, and he says that some Tory officials do not believe the claims made by CSJ about marriage. The CSJ says children whose parents are married tend to do better (which is true). It also claims that those children do better because their parents are married (which is highly questionable). Cook, who used to work for David Willetts, quotes an unnamed party official as saying:

The CSJ claims that there is evidence marriage helps the poor. But you have to chase down a jungle of references to find anything serious. It's mostly rubbish that doesn't overcome the self-selection problem [that couples who choose marriage are more likely to have qualities that make it easier to stay together and be good parents]. We have repeated some wholly indefensible claims.

Cook also quotes another unnamed party official as saying that loads of CSJ research is "ropey".


Now, Iain Duncan Smith used to be known as "the quiet man", and would that he still were. But since he is no longer leader, he has managed to usurp a load of policy areas and driven his awful ideas into Tory policy:

4. The CSJ says it has now produced 70 Conservative party policies.

Cook says that at one stage Tory family and welfare policy was "outsourced to the CSJ".


And you can bet they're all pretty shit.

Watch that self-selection thing: it's the kind of tactic New Labour would have used to drive policy and just look how well that turned out for us.

3 comments:

Uncle Marvo said...

Ah yes, and people prone to lung cancer are more likely to smoke.

50% of this is statistical rubbish. The other three-quarters is mathematically flawed.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Agreed on the self-selection point, however, having read all 130 pages of the recent CSJ thingy, the actual background research is excellent; some of the ideas very good but they then chicken out of recommending doing it; and some are downright f***ing awful, like saying the taxpayer should subsidise mortgages because that helps people 'save'.

UKIP's welfare policy is much better.

WV: grain

Nick39 said...

little-c conservatives tend to miss the point on marriage. The toothpaste can't be put back in the bottle with tax breaks. To recover marriage 1.0 would require a wholesale dismantling of matriarchy and a return to patriarchy, including:

1. Removal of all benefits to single mothers in all cases
2. Removal of needs-based housing
3. Slut-shaming by government, media and neighbours
4. Wide window to challenge paternity
5. End of alimony and other divorce-theft tools
6. Make family courts subject to English consititution for a change
7. Social shaming of cads
8. Punish cuckoldry with prison sentences
9. Remove pro-female discrimination in the workplace, starting with subsidised childcare
10. Remove the various transfers of wealth from men to women, starting with culling all the public sector paper shufflers

Plenty more, but the collapse of marriage is due to the success of feminism in freeing women from all of their responsibilities while concurrently stealing resources from men to pay for ameliorating the consequences.

big-C conservatives haven't got the stomach for the changes required.