Ken Clarke knows Cameron's social engineering policy will be neither fair or effective

When Ken Clarke was Chancellor under John Major, he and the Prime Minister knew that the married tax allowance was becoming an outdated attempt to interfere with the social structures that were forming at the time.
More and more children were being born out of marriage, but into perfectly good homes. Just because marriage wasn't on the lifestyle agenda of the parents of those children, it couldn't possibly be argued that they needed to pay more tax to subsidise their married next door neighbours.
Nor did it look good encouraging failed relationships to stay together, prejudicing single parents or attempting to align the Government with ultimately a religious framework endorsed by institutions that still believe in magic.
However, while those heady days of a modernising Britain may seem a long way away under Brown's uninspiring, bank-manager-style Premiership, they will be revved swiftly into reverse thanks to Cameron and his social innovator, Ian Duncan Smith, a man so earnest in his own banality that you could believe he were a speech writer for Noel Edmonds on Deal or No Deal.
Duncan Smith's visits to "Real Britain" make him look like Alan Partridge stumbling through a Mumbai slum. Admittedly IDS was taking one for the team in a party that prefers not to mix with, be educated with or pay (against the minimum wage) the poor.
While taxing drugs like alcohol and nicotine may have a place in trying to curb a behaviour that then has to be supported by the society that provides it, to encourage marriage by the tax system is as misguided as China's attempt to reign in its birth rate by unfairly treating families who had girls.
Except it's not misguided, because we've been here before. What next? No sex before marriage, the shaming of children born out of wedlock, tightening the right of pregnant women to choose abortion - they all line up together giving the real picture behind Cameron's 1950s rose-tinted glass pseudo Utopia, where the rich don't get bothered and the poor stay out of sight.

David Cameron. He's pretending to be just like you. He even believes he's just like you. But he isn't.