Give Us Fathers, Not Big Brother

Peter Hitchens is on dazzling form with this:

This week we have a rare glimpse of the true agenda of our new, modernised rulers. They have disclosed their secret, virulent loathing of fatherhood.

They wish to abolish independent, free families headed by husbands, and have us all dependent on the nosy-parker state.

They pretend to be pro-family. But, very occasionally, they have to admit what they are really doing, so as to slip it through Parliament or the civil service. It's always in some tiny sub-clause.

For instance, a little-read November 2003 document led to a ban on the mention of marriage on government forms. Effectively this ended any official recognition of the status of 'husband' or 'wife', a change partly to blame for the tragic collapse in the number of marriages revealed this week.

Now we have the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, only seven years after the last one on this subject. Before that, in a 1990 Act, Parliament still dared to say that a child needed a father.

It declared: "A woman shall not be provided with treatment services unless account has been taken of the welfare of any child who may be born as a result of the treatment (including the need of that child for a father)."

But now the words 'a father' will be replaced by 'supportive parenting'. Next, what the law said as recently as 1990 will be unsayable in a public place. Opponents of this change will, as usual, be falsely smeared as bigots.

In fact, the change - never openly argued for by its supporters - is a revolutionary blow at the foundations of British society. It is driven by the thinking of a few Marxist weirdos, including Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse.

Their wild and twisted ideas were popular among students 40 years ago, when our present generation of MPs, broadcasters and civil servants were lazing on the lawns of their universities. Once before, these people let their cat out of the bag for a swift, frightening moment.

Still to be found in the archives of The Times for February 1980 is a letter from Helen Brook, who spent much of her life obsessively pressing contraceptives first on unmarried women, then on schoolchildren. The triumph of her creepy beliefs has brought about a pandemic of unwanted pregnancies and abortions,the very things she claimed to be preventing.

She let her real aim be known when she wagged her finger warningly at those who dared get in her way, hissing: 'From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions - objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.' She knew power was on her side.

When, back in 1967, she offered contraceptive 'help' to under-age girls - behind the backs of their parents and their GPs - most normal people viewed her actions as shocking. In 1995 (under a Tory government, of course) she got the CBE. Now her view is the law of the land.

And it is clearer every day that, as the family grows weaker, the parental State is coldly weighing up what is best for us all, with its armoury of identity cards, DNA databases, fingerprints, CCTV cameras and interfering social workers.

We have more or less banned smacking, so tender are we, but have created a feral society swirling with gun and knife crime (and, of course, boot crime, which is just as dangerous if you get your head kicked as if it were a football). And it can only be controlled by a authoritarian state.

We have got rid of fathers, and will soon make them illegal. And instead we shall have Big Brother.

As with this week’s Spectator editorial, the message is starting to get through. Abhorrent though human-animal hybridity is, it is scientifically quite complicated. But the abolition of fatherhood is not.

This evil Bill must be stopped. And it can be.