Family Values
Civitas, 19 January 2010
‘We haven’t done enough in the past to support dads… All the evidence is if fathers are properly engaged and involved… then… they’re supportive to their children, they do all the things which then lead to better child outcomes.’
Question: Guess who said that?
Clue: It is the very same government minister who also condemned as ‘social engineering’ Conservative proposals to give married couples tax breaks, and also condemned museums for issuing ‘family tickets’ on the grounds that they did not reflect ‘the complex reality of 21st century families’.
Answer: Children’s Secretary Ed Balls whose government has presided over a two thirds increase in the number of unmarried couples living together and an 8 per cent rise in single parent families.
My long career as a mental health nurse taught me that nearly all mentally ill people come from families where there were significant family problems , notably broken down family relationships . Where is the proof that families with married parents are healthier than other types of families ?
And the reason Labour doesn’t support Dads and Families is because they have been in hock to the feminist movement which says a woman is ‘entitled ‘ to have children if she wants and doesn’t ‘need’ a man. This gets translated as ‘ I will have children and they don’t need a Father ‘. Anything that runs counter to this is contrary to the militant feminist orthodoxy which has been prevalent around the Cabinet table and amongst the Islington Intelligentsia ( aka the Guardianistas and the BBC ), and is therefore heresy. I very much doubt that Harriet Harman would agree with Balls. He has only seen the light because the hangman approaches in the form of an Election.