From The Daily Mail:

'A charter for philanderers': How Harman describes Tory plans
to give married couples tax breaks

Harriet Harman will today attack David Cameron's plan to give
tax breaks to married couples as a 'philanderer's charter'.

Labour's deputy leader will argue the Tory plans unfairly
discriminate against the single and divorced.

But men who leave their wives and marry again and again would
continue to benefit from pro-marriage tax reforms, she will say.

Miss Harman has for decades led a campaign to brand family
structure irrelevant, fathers unnecessary for childrearing and marriage outdated, and has dismissed Conservative support for marriage as 'hypocritical moralising'.

Today the Equality Minister, who has been married to union boss Jack Dromey for 27 years, will accuse Mr Cameron of suggesting that Britons whose personal relationships fail are responsible for societal breakdown and ruining children's lives.

The Tory leader told the Daily Mail last week that all married couples would be helped under plans to change the tax system in the first term of a Conservative government.

The pledge will be a central manifesto pledge, though there are doubts over how quickly it could be implemented, given the state of the public finances.

Today Miss Harman will tell Left-wing think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR): 'No one needs a Tory tax incentive to value their marriage.

'Dictating family structures makes those not in the traditional two-parent family feel they are being blamed and their children feel they are being told, "There is something wrong with your family and so there is something wrong with you".'

She will argue the Tory plans 'would give tax relief to the man on his third marriage but deny it to his first and second wives bringing up his children'.
Miss Harman will go on to accuse the Tories of lecturing people on how they ought to live their lives.

'People who are divorced and working hard to bring up their children feel they are being told they have ruined their children's lives and represent "broken Britain",' she will say.

Yesterday, Chancellor Alistair Darling criticising proposals from former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith for couples to be allowed to combine their tax allowances, saying: 'People at the top end would get thirteen times more benefit than the people on lower incomes. I don't think that's a priority.'

Mr Cameron yesterday insisted he would stick to his commitment to marriage, saying detailed plans would be published in due course.

Ironically, research by the IPPR itself has concluded that a stable family background means children are less likely to end up out of work, living off the state, becoming single parents or even smokers.

Children of married parents do better in exams, according to other studies, and are less likely to have psychological difficulties.

Labour has been accused of systematically undermining marriage by characterising it as a 'lifestyle option' and abolishing the married couple's allowance.

The Conservatives' family spokesman Maria Miller said: 'As so often with Harriet Harman, she's fighting the last war rather than the one we're in now.

'She is simply out of step with the British public, the majority of whom aspire to be part of a strong and loving family.

'If you look at the figures, around three-quarters of young people who are cohabiting want eventually to be part of a married a family.

'Over the past 12 years Labour has got family policy completely wrong. They have focused exclusively on children without acknowledging that the context of those children's family life was critical to their progress.

'It's the Conservatives that stand for families and understand how important a role marriage plays in providing stable family life.'