Some of our politicians and correspondents are proposing to start a serious discussion on divorce.

I would venture to ask: has the discussion ceased in the last decade or so? Or, do we need to have a signal from some quarter to begin (or continue) to discuss divorce?

It is interesting to know that their counterparts in other countries are proposing a different agenda for discussion.

'Marriage is the new moral high ground' was a heading featured on telegraph.co.uk on July 15, 2007. How true it is, even for Malta.

Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the British Conservative Party, led a Social Justice Commission which compiled a 275,000-word document containing 190 recommendations for addressing problems of social decay: problems like high crime rates, low aspirations, low educational attainment and high dependency on the State.

All these themes are also pertinent for our country.

One of these recommendations was a change in the tax and benefits system to provide incentives for couples to get married and remain married. What is of most interest is not the detail of the recommendations, but the signal which they send out, namely that political parties openly compete for the moral high ground as a means of fixing the 'broken society'.

Duncan Smith's political opponents tried to sow doubts and some even attributed the term 'moralising' to his recommendations.

He refuted these attacks by quoting the experience of other European countries: "... the Germans, the French, the Italians, the Spanish and even the Norwegians and the Danes provide some form of tax incentive to those who marry, not available to those who cohabit." Public policy cannot be neutral between marriage and cohabitation.

Rob Rowthorn is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge. He notes that there are over 20 studies which show that married spouses enjoy better physical and psychological health, and they report feeling happier than unmarried people.

Moreover, he continued to state that married and cohabiting couples have markedly different effects on the outcomes for children born into the different domestic arrangements. It is important that the divorce issue is put into context and analysed holistically from the public policy point of view.