A Prime Opportunity

David Cameron should now introduce a legal presumption of equal parenting, restore the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is being paid to mothers, restore the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father, and repeal of ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as a child’s parents on a birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed.

But above all, under his current circumstances, he should legislate for paternity leave to be made available at any time until the child was 18 or left school. That would reassert paternal authority, and thus require paternal responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence. That authority and responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver. And that basis is high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment.

All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. And coal, not dole.