Why won’t Gareth Southgate say the M word?

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We know politicians are preoccupied with ‘the economy’, and as a former MP has said, this means they more often fail to understand where wealth really comes from.

Writing for PoliticsHome, Miriam Cates notes that the “source of a nation’s economic wealth is its people”. But Britain, like other developed nations, is running out of young people owing to “rock-bottom birth rates”. It means “there are now just three working-aged people for each pensioner, down from four to one in 1979”.

The problem is that successive governments have neglected the family: “There is only one institution that produces people, nurtures them and enables them to meet their potential as adults. That institution is the family.”

But as marriage rates plummet and divorces and separations rocket, “fewer families are being formed or enduring”, Cates says. The upshot is that the “number of babies born per year has declined by nearly 40 per cent since the 1960s”.

Cates is right to spotlight the issue of falling births and the importance of the family in addressing it. But she might have added that it’s not just any family set-up that provides the best conditions for helping children achieve their full potential. It’s man-woman marriage, which decades of research shows is the gold standard for children and parents alike. Married couples are more likely to stay together, have larger families and be happier, while their children are more likely to achieve higher academically and have better mental health.

Marriage was missed out when former England football manager Gareth Southgate drew attention to the UK’s “epidemic of fatherlessness” in his Richard Dimbleby lecture last week. Noting that an alarming 2.5 million children in the UK have no father figure at home, he stressed the importance of teachers and coaches in steering young men away from pitfalls like gambling and pornography, especially online.

But where was marriage? Southgate failed to mention the importance of dads sticking around, or the role of marriage in helping keep families together. He had a wonderful opportunity but he missed it.

Is marriage still a taboo not to be mentioned in polite company? If so, it’s a taboo that Western nations can ill-afford. As Cates says, true prosperity is rooted in strong families. And strong families, we know, are rooted in real marriage.