Our society is crying out for a legal
presumption of equal parenting. For the restoration of the tax allowance
for fathers for so long as Child Benefit was being paid to mothers. For
the restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility
treatment take account of the child’s need for a father. For repeal of
the 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. And for paternity leave to be made
available at any time until the child was 18 or left school.
That
last, in particular, 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.
And it includes
foreign policy, in no small part because those sent to war tend to come
from working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often
still happens earlier than has lately become the norm. Think of those
very young men whom we see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing
their tiny children. Yet our society urgently needs to re-emphasise the
importance of fatherhood. That authority cannot be affirmed while
fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars.
You
can believe in fatherhood, or you can support wars under certainly most
and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially in practice today
even if not necessarily in the past or in principle. You cannot do
both. Which is the conservative position? Which makes present in the
world the Fatherhood of God proclaimed by Jesus Christ, the fundamental
point of reference for all three of our political traditions?
Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas, over to you.
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