Forget race or class, marriage is the big social divide

parliamentary education committee on the underachievement of working-class white boys. But this isn’t about race. The boys don’t underachieve because they are white. Their skin colour is merely a marker by which we can see that a certain cohort is doing worse than another.

And despite received wisdom, it’s not just about poverty, school funding or investment. Children of other ethnicities who are equally poor, and even potentially at the same school, will likely do considerably better.

It’s not even about class, which seems to be the latest factor on which the fickle finger of blame is falling…

But there is a 40-year trend that perfectly maps onto almost every aspect of this problem. It’s not much admired in modern society, but then data doesn’t really care for middle-class sensibilities. Children tell us it’s important while adults seem ever more squeamish about it. It’s marriage rates.

They’ve been steadily collapsing since the 1970s. Not just declining but falling off a cliff. Even at the height of the second world war, one of its previous lowest points, the male marriage rate was almost triple what it is today. We claim to value our families but imagine the response if something we truly cared about, like employment rates, were doing the same…

If we care about kids, we should care about marriage. Alarmed wedding bells should be ringing and ringing hard.