But that same attitude is becoming increasingly commonplace in our public life. At the beginning of March, Prime Minister in waiting, Gordon Brown, again ruled out tax breaks to encourage marriage. Earlier the Education Secretary Alan Johnson gave a speech in which he was reported as ‘attacking marriage’, saying that children can be brought up just as effectively by single mothers. Now, whereas individual cases might happily buck the trend, the clear evidence of all the research is that ‘children of two-parent families just do a lot better on every measurement than those from single parent or step-families’ (Robert Whelan, Civitas).