David Willett - outlined Tory plans today
Tory ministers yesterday previewed a green paper which proposes more rights for dads to see their kids. The reforms would be good news for fathers if they were not set amongst a series of potentially unhelpful family policies which would cancel out any potential benefits of the plans.
Speaking to The Guardian, the shadow minister for employment and skills David Willetts laid out the paper’s vision. In it the party proposes making it easier for grandparents and fathers to stay in contact with children when marriages break up and outlines plans to provide more help for fathers in struggling relationships. The long-called for fatherhood reforms, however, are packaged in with a raft of other measures designed to ’strengthen’ the family; with increasing the number of marriages in the UK at the heart of the paper.
While the promise of fairer treatment of dads will come as good news to those such as Fathers 4 Justice who have been long campaigning for fairer rules on fathers seeing their kids, the fact that these concessions are to be packaged in with reforms based around marriage is a clear insight into backwards Tory party policies and a case of one step forward, two steps back.
While the party under the lead of David Cameron is desperately attempting to prove its modern edge by offering ‘modern’ reforms, papers like this reveal that while the Tories claim to be forward looking, they are fundamentally the same right-leaning group unable to break from the past.
By pushing an outdated 1950s view of society where the nuclear family is God, single fathers are only pushed onto the fringes of society and seen as an undesirable outcast from the ‘normal,’ ‘loving’ family.
Their outdated views, while appealing to the party’s core voters close to a general election, only go to stigmatise dads who are no longer with their partners, thus cancelling out the benefits of the proposed changes in the law.
With one third of marriages now ending in divorce, it is time for the Tory party to change the way it sees the world and propose some reforms that actually change the status quo without harking back to an imagined Utopian age which is damaging and ultimately unattainable.
