On balance at the moment I can't quite see why people who want the same rights as married couples shouldn't just get married (where this includes civil partnerships). It's not like you have to make a big expensive party of it. Mind you I'm more inclined to reduce some of the rights for married couples.
*actually reads report*. Ah, I see they're talking specifically of rights to wealth when a partnership breaks down. That's difficult. I'm sure a lot of people do end up feeling hard-done-by when they've been sharing finances and split up. And it's hard to always come to an amicable agreement. I note I'd probably have ended up with a greater share of the wealth from the house if we'd been married. I'd hate to have had to taken it to court though.
I don't think there's anything at the moment stopping unmarried couples writing some sort of contract between then when pooling finances in order to ensure that something sensible happens when they split up. I'm pretty much of the opinion that anything like the plans outlined should be opt-in rather than opt-out - ie the default remaining as it is at the moment.
The conclusions section mentions "the possible lack of enforcability of Living Together Agreements" and refers to this Law Commission report (I think) (http://www.lawcom.gov.uk/docs/cp179.pdf) which I've not read but is said to advocate making such agreements unambiguously enforceable. Not that that would make much difference to people who didn't make one.
Oops, just realised I was horribly unclear there, I meant I read the BBC report on the research, rather than the research report itself.
If your "should be able to get extra legal rights by mutual agreement without getting married" just means the ability for agreements to be enforcable then that's fine.
And then you either make an agreement, get married, or live without.
I can't quite see why people who want the same rights as married couples shouldn't just get married
A fundamental disagreement with the way civil marriage is based heavily on Christian ideas of marriage? The way Civil Partnership just Isn't Quite The Same? The way the government is no-way-no-how going to let me marry three men and them marry other people and so on and so forth (there are, er, about 10 of us) even if we all wanted to be committed in that way (which I'm not saying we do)?
There's nothing to stop me writing any sort of contract I please with anyone I please (so long as it does not require the parties to it to commit any offence) - that's not the same as saying that I'll be able to go to court and have our contract enforced; it's not the same as saying that when I'm seriously ill my parents won't be contacted against my wishes... it's not even the same as saying that my obnoxious parents couldn't contest my will so that they get my money (if they were mean enough) when I die.
I think what I'd prefer is that everyone who wants to write such a contract be allowed (and provided legal aid for, if they are poor) to do so and that all such contracts be enforced; perhaps the government might offer tax incentives for including particular clauses in your contract - but I'm not very much in favour of that (I am in favour of giving the custodial parent(s) of children tax breaks but not in a way connected to the married-ness of the parents).
I note that I don't actually object to the idea of people being able to form contracts which grant each other rights, as I said above. I just don't see why cohabiting couples should be given extra rights automatically. Either make a contract by getting married, or make a contract outside marriage. But if you want *exactly* the same rights as married people just get married dammit.
Automatic wossnames would be impossible I think - you'd have to at least declare that you were 'cohabiting' (rather than house-sharing). I think lots of people want some (or even all) of the rights associated with marriage (some of which are handed out by the government at present and not available to unmarried people) without the baggage that comes with marriage.
Ideally I suppose I'd like a three-part system: firstly voluntary civil partnerships for everyone (with a very wide range and not exclusively for actual and implied sexual relationships, e.g. some recognition that adults may effectively be living in partnership with parents who they are looking after, or that friends may be living together and as mutually dependent as husband and wife). Secondly, involuntary civil partnerships for the parents of children, and thirdly "marriage" meaning whatever religious types want to get up to in the privacy of their own church/mosque/temple or whatever, with no bearing on the couple's legal status.
involuntary civil partnerships for the parents of children,
I can see that there might need to be some sort of acknowledgement of parenthood in law, but making an involuntary partnership between the parents would be impossibly horrible to make work. Rapists, and people who have both adopted parents and biological parents are the two largest problems I can think of immediately, but I'm sure there's many more.
I'm thinking much more of a set of legal obligations than a traditional marriage, though, and aimed more at giving children claims over both their parents than at giving parents claims on each other. Obviously there'd have to be some exceptions, and it's hardly likely that I'm going to be in the position to change family law anyway.
Fairy neff. I probably mis-interpreted the word "partnership" to mean a partnership between the parents, rather than a partnership between the child and its parent.
Even so, there are people who would be really annoyed if there was a compulsory legal tie between them and their parent. Agreed, said people are probably annoyed there's a biological link between them and their parent too, but this could make things worse for them. Yet a partnership that the child could end would lead to mad power games to bully the child into divorcing the parent if the parent did not want the partnership.
Do you envisage this partnership ending when the child hits 18?
Well, it would have to be to some extent a partnership between the parents too, since they have a child in common. I think it's far too easy at the moment in separated couples for one parent (usually the father) to say "I don't want to take any responsibility for my children" and on the other hand for one parent (usually the mother) to exclude the other parent from taking responsibility. There needs to be some legal recognition that regardless of current relationships of cohabiting or marriage, and regardless of whether there's shared residence or not, the parents of dependent children (so yes, ending at 18) do have a partnership of sorts and that has to be the case regardless of what they want. Obviously in cases of abuse and so on, there would have to be the ability to end the relationship, but children can't choose to "divorce" a parent they just don't like if their parents are married and living together, and I don't see why that should be significantly different if their parents are separated. I think a lot of the bad feeling that goes on (and again, I'm not talking about cases where there has been actual abuse) is due to the fact that the parent with residence thinks they can cut the other parent entirely out of their life by alienating them from their children.
my relationship situation does not fall into your narrow categories, you bourgeois oppressor!
I think damerell and I are agreed that even if we could agree on a location where we could both live we would want to murder each other in the first 48 hours. ;)
But there should be more rights for co-habiting groups.
But there should be more rights for co-habiting groups.
What sort of group rights? Aren't most of these rights of individual members as against others? The only one I can think of otherwise is 'to avoid inheritance tax'...
"Cohabiting couples who separate should be given the same rights to each other's wealth as married couples who divorce" was my starting point; presumably it would be a more complicated exercise to extend such things to groups of more than two but I don't see why it should be actually impossible.
It wouldn't be impossible, but it would be nonsense to describe that as giving rights to the group, since it's a zero-sum game. It is arguable giving rights to the inviduals, but even then it's actually just placing them in a legal relationship by force which they would have had the legal right to create of their own free will anyway.
Other than the assets thing, I'd be concerned about next-of-kin rights. As I understand it, if you are cohabiting, it doesn't matter if you have been together for 20 years - if something happens to your partner that requires next-of-kin type permission then legally you are not next-of-kin and therefore have no say.
Yeah, next of kin and inheritance are two good reasons to consider getting married (if you're not a believer in marriage being a good thing in and of itself).
I'm wary of anything that doesn't make sense applied to co-habiting non-couples. Sharing houses with friends and randoms is something that society will need more of if housing keeps being crazy, and it's one thing to say "I'm happy to live with you" and another to say "I'm happy to live with you and if we fall out that gives you rights to half my house and my pension". Aside from the impossibility of declaring whether two people living together are a couple or not except by their own declaration - so the rights would be kind of "opt in" if you had to sign to say you were a couple instead of just friends?
Commitments should be opt-in, not smuggled in. If you made co-habiting rights opt-out, then people who thought they were just considering the implications of physically living with someone might not consider that they were signing away their future too.
I think it's over-simplifying to say the commitments should be opt-in. To be able to opt in you need to know that you've not already got whatever legal protection it was you were thinking of (apparently quite a few people believe there is such a thing as common-law marriage), that you can opt into such things, you need to find out how you go about it, you need to get round to it, and you need both partners to agree.
For a well-informed middle class person in an evenly balanced relationship none of this should be remotely difficult, of course. But of the LTC's sample: “10% said that their partner would not agree, 10% felt that they could not afford legal advice, and 9% said that they were afraid it would cause problems in their relationship”. That's nearly a third of the respondents who'd apparently like to opt in but apparently feel that they cannot.
Declaration isn't such a bad way to distinguish couples from friends living together; indeed it would amount to forcing an explicit statement of opt in or opt out in each case. There are downsides to lying either way, and if you lie you both have to lie, making it unlikely that you'd do so unless the downsides were about equal for both members of the couple.
Abolishing inheritance tax, or allowing housemates to inherit without tax, would stop people claiming to be in relationships when they weren't in order to avoid it. Something else would have to go up but probably not by very much. (I don't feel very strongly either way about inheritance tax personally, so this isn't “...and that's why we should modify/abolish this odious tax” or anything, it's just an observation; though I'll admit to a bias in favor of simplicity.)
PS. You did ask for my view, and the above covers a reasonable amount of it. I do agree with the idea of people being allowed to run their relationships how they like, but the LTC report does make me suspect that there's room for improvement to the “default” situation that applies to people who don't take any special action.
Kinda tricky to answer many of the questions in the poll if like me you don't believe that married (or co-habiting) couples should have any more rights or protection under the law than any other members of society.
I don't believe the government should have any truck with "marriage", but of course if individuals want to get married, then that's a private contract and that's fine. If the government thinks it's a good idea to offer tax incentives to the married (and I guess the biggie here is gifts and inheritance AFAIUI) then that's fine, but I don't see what it has to do with marriage. Just file a form JDT113a at your tax office (and this could declare an arrangement between you and your spouse, you and your daughter, or you and your bestie, whatever. At most one such arrangement per person). Personally I don't think that cohabiting or marriage should confer any sort of tax advantage (and in particular, no inheritance tax advantage), but I'm happy living in a society that does otherwise.
Marriage is a contract of mutual support and shared arrangments, the divorce courts should be open to anyone that can show they had a similar contract (written or unwritten) even if it wasn't marriage. I just skimmed the article and I guess it's saying the same thing. Not really sure I count access to a court as "right", but I suppose so.
In a society with not enough houses for everyone, it's easy to see how the government might want to incentivise people sharing houses.
On Radio 4 the other week there was a discussion about people who had stopped cohabiting because the benifits for living singly (one assumes single parent benefit, as well as some council tax stuff?) were worth about 5K to them, which was a sizable proportion of their total income. Tax shouldn't drive people to not live with their kid when they want to...
On your last point I also think that tax shouldn't drive people to not live with their kid when they want to.
In a society with not enough houses for everyone, isn't there already an incentive for people to share, without government involvement? Namely, _there aren't enough houses_. Of course what actually happens in societies where you can more or less freely buy and sell land is that all the houses end up owned by an elite. *sigh*. I'm being devil's advocate. Of course there might be good reasons to encourage people to cohabit, but I don't think that cohabiting in itself should confer a tax advantage.
That 69% figure neither supports nor refutes my claim. What we need to know is what proportion of the population is housed by that 69% of the housing stock and how that varies with demographic.
No, your original claim was about houses: that houses get owned by an elite. A majority of houses are owned by the people living in them. The proportion of people housed thereby wasn't in your original claim.
However, you can make some inferences from some of the other figures in the linked document, if you add some other demographic info and do Bayes on it. For example, "80 per cent of households comprising a couple with dependent children" ... "80 per cent of Indians and 70 per cent of White British people and those of Pakistani origin" ... "81 per cent of pensioner households" (were owner-occupiers). That isn't really consistent which the characterisation of home-ownership as restricted to the "elite".
Using http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_social/Social_Trends34/Social_Trends34.pdf p26 I get a figure that roughly 50% of households consist of couples, and p153 I get the figure that roughly 80% of couple householders (children or otherwise) are owner occupiers, so at least 40% of houses are owned by a couple who are living in that house.
If 69% of the housing stock was owner-occupied by the top 2% of the population by income, then that would constitute ownership by an elite would it not?
Of course, I don't believe that there are sufficiently few houses in britain that 69% of them could be occupied by an elite, but the 69% figure alone does not give me enough information to infer that. As you point out you need more information and when that information is presented in an annoying way you have to do Bayes on it.
I'm interested to note that of your married correspondents some have ticked only "married" and others have ticked both "married, cohabiting" to mean the same thing. Makes the graph rather meaningless.
See this is another reason why it's silly to base things on whether people are cohabiting. I suspect you'd still have joint finances of some sort even if living at opposite ends of the country though.
And I know married people don't have to be cohabiting, I just think the fact that a bunch of people all in the same situation ticking different combinations was interesting, and skewing the graph somewhat.
In what sense - that marriage entitles you to live with someone who doesn't want you to, or that it entitles you to retrieve your spouse and make them live with you? I can't see either of those getting past ECHR...
Couples with children… [x] Should (morally) get married, or equivalent, or have a really good reason not to.
Personally, I feel marriage ought to be a religious ceremony and/or a romantic announcement and/or a big party and/or a contract people enter into. If the government wants to create a standard template contract they recommend, so be it, but I don't see why people who sign their standard version should enjoy any privilege over people who customise it.
I suspect much of the current legal reasoning dates back to the old bread-winner-and-housewife system.
I want to express some disagreement with people who think that the law should not have any role in regulating peoples' personal relationships.
The problem with this is that like other libertarian views it has an element of, "I don't care about anyone else, I'm all right". It's nice to imagine that responsible adults could think through the consequences of their actions, come to reasoned and written agreements, which they then stick to. But although you might do that (or accept the consequences if you don't), most people neglect to do that, and when they get into trouble it's not very helpful to say, "you should have drawn up a contract to cover situations X, Y, and Z beforehand."
I'll give three examples.
First, a married spouse automatically becomes next of kin for the purposes of things like transferrable pensions, agreeing funeral arrangements, medical operations if incapacitated, organ donations, etc. When your spouse is lying unconscious in hospital, it's too late to draw up a contract. The law really has to have a sensible position here. (I'll note that this is the issue that is most important to people campaigning for same-sex marriage rights.)
Second, a married spouse automatically inherits from their intestate husband or wife. (And in England and Wales, the marriage cancels any previous wills.) Most people neglect to make wills, and yet it's very common for one spouse to be financially dependent on the other. When your spouse dies, it's too late for him or her to draw up a will.
Third, a married couple can own property jointly without needing to enter into any kind of formal agreement to do so. When you're separating, it's probably too late to make a contract pointing out that you paid the rent on the understanding that you had a share in your partner's car.
Since it's common for people to cohabit for long periods without getting married, the law is going to have to take some position on these issues. It's all very well to say, "people should get married (or contract civil partnerships, or make their own written agreements)" but if in fact people continue to neglect to do so — and of course they will — then cases are going to keep coming up where the law as it stands is grossly unjust. I don't have any worked-out plan of my own for how the law ought to work: I just object to the idea that doing nothing is the right thing.
That's three distinct issues IMO which should be covered seperately.
Inheritance: there's a very longstanding contractual means for fixing this, the will, and a "traditional" set of defaults. We don't need a new mechanism, but it might be worth changing the defaults.
Next is rights of the couple against third parties. This is a reasonable place to introduce new intermediate law.
However, everyone can own property jointly without entering into a "formal" agreement, so long as they enter into some sort of agreement, which can be verbal. It's reasonable to sue for part-ownership of property which was jointly bought, or had that sort of understanding surrounding it. You then bring in the bank records showing that only one partner paid rent and the other paid insurance+repayments for both on the car, and you have something that looks like a case.
What the civil partnerships thing is trying to assert that relationships don't exist in a vacuum and society gets a say in that disposition. Given that we've been moving in the opposite direction for 50+ years, is this really a good idea?
Are we talking about the same thing? Civil partnerships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_partnerships_in_the_United_Kingdom) are marriage for same-sex couples. But ewx is talking about the proposed extension of some aspects of law to couples who are neither married nor in civil partnerships, and I was commenting on that.
Anyway, assuming this was just a slip, I'll go on:
That's three distinct issues IMO which should be covered separately.
They are three issues showing that the law has to take a position on what rights and responsibilities people have with respect to each other. They all show situations in which it can be unjust for the law to take no action. So they go together.
Inheritance: there's a very longstanding contractual means for fixing this, the will, and a "traditional" set of defaults. We don't need a new mechanism, but it might be worth changing the defaults.
I think we're in agreement here. It's the default position (that is, unmarried partners have no rights in case of intestacy) that's the problem.
It's reasonable to sue for part-ownership of property which was jointly bought, or had that sort of understanding surrounding it. You then bring in the bank records showing that only one partner paid rent and the other paid insurance+repayments for both on the car, and you have something that looks like a case.
Perhaps you can say more about this. It sounds a plausible enough theory, but do you know of any cases where this has happened?
What the civil partnerships thing is trying to assert [is] that relationships don't exist in a vacuum and society gets a say in that disposition. Given that we've been moving in the opposite direction for 50+ years, is this really a good idea?
With the caveat about "civil partnerships" I noted above, I disagree with this paragraph. Have we really been moving away from idea that society gets a say in peoples' relationships? Some trends point one way (greater acceptable of unmarried and same-sex relationships), but some trends point the other way (less acceptance of marital rape and corporal punishment of children). I don't see any clear pattern overall.
Where there is an obvious trend, it's that it is now much more common now than fifty or a hundred years ago for people to have long-term relationships without getting married. However, this doesn't mean that unmarried couples have no need of protection under the law. They have exactly the same needs as married couples, they just don't have the magic piece of paper. So I think it's right for the law to take account of the changed social landscape.
A couple of people upthread have said that cohabiting couples should write their own contracts. I'm curious: have you tried this? If you have, how did it work out?
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 11:50 am (UTC)Cohabiting couples with no children...
[ ] Should get married or not expect extra rights.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 11:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 11:57 am (UTC)*actually reads report*. Ah, I see they're talking specifically of rights to wealth when a partnership breaks down. That's difficult. I'm sure a lot of people do end up feeling hard-done-by when they've been sharing finances and split up. And it's hard to always come to an amicable agreement. I note I'd probably have ended up with a greater share of the wealth from the house if we'd been married. I'd hate to have had to taken it to court though.
I don't think there's anything at the moment stopping unmarried couples writing some sort of contract between then when pooling finances in order to ensure that something sensible happens when they split up. I'm pretty much of the opinion that anything like the plans outlined should be opt-in rather than opt-out - ie the default remaining as it is at the moment.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:50 pm (UTC)If your "should be able to get extra legal rights by mutual agreement without getting married" just means the ability for agreements to be enforcable then that's fine.
And then you either make an agreement, get married, or live without.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:46 pm (UTC)A fundamental disagreement with the way civil marriage is based heavily on Christian ideas of marriage? The way Civil Partnership just Isn't Quite The Same? The way the government is no-way-no-how going to let me marry three men and them marry other people and so on and so forth (there are, er, about 10 of us) even if we all wanted to be committed in that way (which I'm not saying we do)?
There's nothing to stop me writing any sort of contract I please with anyone I please (so long as it does not require the parties to it to commit any offence) - that's not the same as saying that I'll be able to go to court and have our contract enforced; it's not the same as saying that when I'm seriously ill my parents won't be contacted against my wishes... it's not even the same as saying that my obnoxious parents couldn't contest my will so that they get my money (if they were mean enough) when I die.
I think what I'd prefer is that everyone who wants to write such a contract be allowed (and provided legal aid for, if they are poor) to do so and that all such contracts be enforced; perhaps the government might offer tax incentives for including particular clauses in your contract - but I'm not very much in favour of that (I am in favour of giving the custodial parent(s) of children tax breaks but not in a way connected to the married-ness of the parents).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 02:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 03:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:31 pm (UTC)I can see that there might need to be some sort of acknowledgement of parenthood in law, but making an involuntary partnership between the parents would be impossibly horrible to make work. Rapists, and people who have both adopted parents and biological parents are the two largest problems I can think of immediately, but I'm sure there's many more.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:48 pm (UTC)Even so, there are people who would be really annoyed if there was a compulsory legal tie between them and their parent. Agreed, said people are probably annoyed there's a biological link between them and their parent too, but this could make things worse for them. Yet a partnership that the child could end would lead to mad power games to bully the child into divorcing the parent if the parent did not want the partnership.
Do you envisage this partnership ending when the child hits 18?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:01 pm (UTC)I think
But there should be more rights for co-habiting groups.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:09 pm (UTC)What sort of group rights? Aren't most of these rights of individual members as against others? The only one I can think of otherwise is 'to avoid inheritance tax'...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:28 pm (UTC)Commitments should be opt-in, not smuggled in. If you made co-habiting rights opt-out, then people who thought they were just considering the implications of physically living with someone might not consider that they were signing away their future too.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-27 08:10 pm (UTC)I think it's over-simplifying to say the commitments should be opt-in. To be able to opt in you need to know that you've not already got whatever legal protection it was you were thinking of (apparently quite a few people believe there is such a thing as common-law marriage), that you can opt into such things, you need to find out how you go about it, you need to get round to it, and you need both partners to agree.
For a well-informed middle class person in an evenly balanced relationship none of this should be remotely difficult, of course. But of the LTC's sample: “10% said that their partner would not agree, 10% felt that they could not afford legal advice, and 9% said that they were afraid it would cause problems in their relationship”. That's nearly a third of the respondents who'd apparently like to opt in but apparently feel that they cannot.
Declaration isn't such a bad way to distinguish couples from friends living together; indeed it would amount to forcing an explicit statement of opt in or opt out in each case. There are downsides to lying either way, and if you lie you both have to lie, making it unlikely that you'd do so unless the downsides were about equal for both members of the couple.
Abolishing inheritance tax, or allowing housemates to inherit without tax, would stop people claiming to be in relationships when they weren't in order to avoid it. Something else would have to go up but probably not by very much. (I don't feel very strongly either way about inheritance tax personally, so this isn't “...and that's why we should modify/abolish this odious tax” or anything, it's just an observation; though I'll admit to a bias in favor of simplicity.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-27 08:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:53 pm (UTC)I don't believe the government should have any truck with "marriage", but of course if individuals want to get married, then that's a private contract and that's fine. If the government thinks it's a good idea to offer tax incentives to the married (and I guess the biggie here is gifts and inheritance AFAIUI) then that's fine, but I don't see what it has to do with marriage. Just file a form JDT113a at your tax office (and this could declare an arrangement between you and your spouse, you and your daughter, or you and your bestie, whatever. At most one such arrangement per person). Personally I don't think that cohabiting or marriage should confer any sort of tax advantage (and in particular, no inheritance tax advantage), but I'm happy living in a society that does otherwise.
Marriage is a contract of mutual support and shared arrangments, the divorce courts should be open to anyone that can show they had a similar contract (written or unwritten) even if it wasn't marriage. I just skimmed the article and I guess it's saying the same thing. Not really sure I count access to a court as "right", but I suppose so.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:55 pm (UTC)On Radio 4 the other week there was a discussion about people who had stopped cohabiting because the benifits for living singly (one assumes single parent benefit, as well as some council tax stuff?) were worth about 5K to them, which was a sizable proportion of their total income. Tax shouldn't drive people to not live with their kid when they want to...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 02:11 pm (UTC)In a society with not enough houses for everyone, isn't there already an incentive for people to share, without government involvement? Namely, _there aren't enough houses_. Of course what actually happens in societies where you can more or less freely buy and sell land is that all the houses end up owned by an elite. *sigh*. I'm being devil's advocate. Of course there might be good reasons to encourage people to cohabit, but I don't think that cohabiting in itself should confer a tax advantage.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 03:07 pm (UTC)69% of houses are owner-occupied (http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/facts/index43.aspx?ComponentId=12642&SourcePageId=19659)
Cohabiting, like saving, is heavily discouraged by the benefit system.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 04:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 04:44 pm (UTC)However, you can make some inferences from some of the other figures in the linked document, if you add some other demographic info and do Bayes on it. For example, "80 per cent of households comprising a couple with dependent children" ... "80 per cent of Indians and 70 per cent of White British people and those of Pakistani origin" ... "81 per cent of pensioner households" (were owner-occupiers). That isn't really consistent which the characterisation of home-ownership as restricted to the "elite".
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 04:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 04:57 pm (UTC)Of course, I don't believe that there are sufficiently few houses in britain that 69% of them could be occupied by an elite, but the 69% figure alone does not give me enough information to infer that. As you point out you need more information and when that information is presented in an annoying way you have to do Bayes on it.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:57 pm (UTC)(Interestingly, I wonder if there's a pattern between more traditionally minded people just ticking "married"... but probably not.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 02:17 pm (UTC)And I know married people don't have to be cohabiting, I just think the fact that a bunch of people all in the same situation ticking different combinations was interesting, and skewing the graph somewhat.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 04:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 03:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 01:14 pm (UTC)[x] Should (morally) get married, or equivalent, or have a really good reason not to.
Personally, I feel marriage ought to be a religious ceremony and/or a romantic announcement and/or a big party and/or a contract people enter into. If the government wants to create a standard template contract they recommend, so be it, but I don't see why people who sign their standard version should enjoy any privilege over people who customise it.
I suspect much of the current legal reasoning dates back to the old bread-winner-and-housewife system.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 10:12 pm (UTC)The problem with this is that like other libertarian views it has an element of, "I don't care about anyone else, I'm all right". It's nice to imagine that responsible adults could think through the consequences of their actions, come to reasoned and written agreements, which they then stick to. But although you might do that (or accept the consequences if you don't), most people neglect to do that, and when they get into trouble it's not very helpful to say, "you should have drawn up a contract to cover situations X, Y, and Z beforehand."
I'll give three examples.
First, a married spouse automatically becomes next of kin for the purposes of things like transferrable pensions, agreeing funeral arrangements, medical operations if incapacitated, organ donations, etc. When your spouse is lying unconscious in hospital, it's too late to draw up a contract. The law really has to have a sensible position here. (I'll note that this is the issue that is most important to people campaigning for same-sex marriage rights.)
Second, a married spouse automatically inherits from their intestate husband or wife. (And in England and Wales, the marriage cancels any previous wills.) Most people neglect to make wills, and yet it's very common for one spouse to be financially dependent on the other. When your spouse dies, it's too late for him or her to draw up a will.
Third, a married couple can own property jointly without needing to enter into any kind of formal agreement to do so. When you're separating, it's probably too late to make a contract pointing out that you paid the rent on the understanding that you had a share in your partner's car.
Since it's common for people to cohabit for long periods without getting married, the law is going to have to take some position on these issues. It's all very well to say, "people should get married (or contract civil partnerships, or make their own written agreements)" but if in fact people continue to neglect to do so — and of course they will — then cases are going to keep coming up where the law as it stands is grossly unjust. I don't have any worked-out plan of my own for how the law ought to work: I just object to the idea that doing nothing is the right thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 03:56 pm (UTC)Inheritance: there's a very longstanding contractual means for fixing this, the will, and a "traditional" set of defaults. We don't need a new mechanism, but it might be worth changing the defaults.
Next is rights of the couple against third parties. This is a reasonable place to introduce new intermediate law.
However, everyone can own property jointly without entering into a "formal" agreement, so long as they enter into some sort of agreement, which can be verbal. It's reasonable to sue for part-ownership of property which was jointly bought, or had that sort of understanding surrounding it. You then bring in the bank records showing that only one partner paid rent and the other paid insurance+repayments for both on the car, and you have something that looks like a case.
What the civil partnerships thing is trying to assert that relationships don't exist in a vacuum and society gets a say in that disposition. Given that we've been moving in the opposite direction for 50+ years, is this really a good idea?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-31 07:19 pm (UTC)Are we talking about the same thing? Civil partnerships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_partnerships_in_the_United_Kingdom) are marriage for same-sex couples. But
Anyway, assuming this was just a slip, I'll go on:
That's three distinct issues IMO which should be covered separately.
They are three issues showing that the law has to take a position on what rights and responsibilities people have with respect to each other. They all show situations in which it can be unjust for the law to take no action. So they go together.
Inheritance: there's a very longstanding contractual means for fixing this, the will, and a "traditional" set of defaults. We don't need a new mechanism, but it might be worth changing the defaults.
I think we're in agreement here. It's the default position (that is, unmarried partners have no rights in case of intestacy) that's the problem.
It's reasonable to sue for part-ownership of property which was jointly bought, or had that sort of understanding surrounding it. You then bring in the bank records showing that only one partner paid rent and the other paid insurance+repayments for both on the car, and you have something that looks like a case.
Perhaps you can say more about this. It sounds a plausible enough theory, but do you know of any cases where this has happened?
What the civil partnerships thing is trying to assert [is] that relationships don't exist in a vacuum and society gets a say in that disposition. Given that we've been moving in the opposite direction for 50+ years, is this really a good idea?
With the caveat about "civil partnerships" I noted above, I disagree with this paragraph. Have we really been moving away from idea that society gets a say in peoples' relationships? Some trends point one way (greater acceptable of unmarried and same-sex relationships), but some trends point the other way (less acceptance of marital rape and corporal punishment of children). I don't see any clear pattern overall.
Where there is an obvious trend, it's that it is now much more common now than fifty or a hundred years ago for people to have long-term relationships without getting married. However, this doesn't mean that unmarried couples have no need of protection under the law. They have exactly the same needs as married couples, they just don't have the magic piece of paper. So I think it's right for the law to take account of the changed social landscape.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 10:20 pm (UTC)