Entitlement upon divorce should be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault were proved.
Furthermore, any marrying couple should be entitled to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 with regard to grounds and procedures for divorce, and any religious organisation should be enabled to specify that any marriage that it conducted should be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly.
Statute should specify that the Church of England and the Church in Wales each be such a body unless, respectively, the General Synod and the Governing Body specifically resolved the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses.
There should be similar provision relating to the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.
Never having needed to be consummated, civil partnerships ought not to be confined to unrelated same-sex couples, or even to unrelated couples generally.
That would be a start, anyway.
Peter Hitchens raised the most important point. He points out that Labour's absurd 1969 divorce law (which, like all Leftwing revolutionary acts, was done without giving any thought to the consequences) astonishingly makes no legal distinction at all between childless married couples and married parents.
ReplyDeleteIt is just as easy to divorce if you have five kids together as it is if you have none, under Labour's preposterous legislation.
The first step should be to address this in recognition of the fact that divorces that involve children impact on many more lives than merely those of the couple getting divorced.
Second, Hitchens makes a powerful Right-wing argument against divorce; that the 1969 law greatly increased the power of the state.
It did this by giving one partner the right to petition for divorce and, even if the other refuses, to have the state dissolve the marriage and seize that partners financial assets, and drag him (it usually is him, as women initiate most divorces) from his house and from his children.
Labours legislation meant an enormous increase in state power over private life, one of the worst things about it.
You do realise that there have been Governments since 1969 (and that the Home Secretary in that year is now universally regarded as never having been Labour at all, but that is an aside), don't you?
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