This morning, the Today programme interviewed David Laws MP, the Schools and Families spokesman for the Liberal Democrats. He brought real clarity to the muddled Conservatives policy of tax breaks for married couples, saying…

We’re deluding ourselves as a nation if we think that some sort of small tax break [...] is really going to make a fundamental difference to parenting or marriage.

Equally dismissive of Ed Balls’s Guide to Being a Father initiative announced today, he went on to say…

I would put all of this money into the education system. […] Focusing that money on [disadvantaged] children, giving them skills and aspirations, and giving them as much stability as we can and the life skills that they need, will do far, far more to promote responsible citizens and good stable families than all of this tinkering around.

Asked about using tax policy for social engineering, he again hit the nail on the head…

We have as politicians to be realistic about what we can achieve. We have a great enough problem sorting out the problems in the education system which we can perhaps do something about if we get all the right policy levers in the right place. We have precious little chance of persuading people through some trivial change in the tax system to get married […] and we’ve got to be realistic about that.

David Laws summed up the relevance of marriage to good parenting when he said…

The key thing is whether there is stability and whether there is love and that can often be highly associated with marriage but it’s not exclusively associated with marriage.

That this common sense is even a matter of discussion is galling, common sense that is echoed in Charles Leadbeater’s more general New statesman article about re-evaluating our relationship with money…

What we most value – love, dignity, good conduct, pride, trust, friendship, care – does not come from money. If we were to try to use money to buy any of these things most people would think we were mad.

But not, it would seem, the Conservatives!