News from the New Party

Repairing the family

The recent spate of murders in South London has generated plenty of debate about the state of our society, the reasons why such awful things can occur and what should be done about it. The availability of guns and drugs, the pernicious effects of gang culture and the breakdown of family life have been cited by most contributors to the debate. These are all important points, but gang culture, drug culture and gun culture are all to a large extent mutually reinforcing factors: the single underlying problem which enables the other three factors to thrive is the social breakdown caused by the collapse of the family itself.

Some, among others David Cameron, have criticised absent fathers and called for fathers to be compelled to exercise responsibility towards their children. This is done presumably to ward off the frequent charge that standing up for the nuclear family necessarily implies criticism of lone parents (and especially single mothers). Yet demonising fathers is as unhelpful as stigmatising mothers. The fact of the matter is that welfarism has been consistent in its approach over decades: in attempting to support children in "broken homes" a support regime has been put in place which now makes it feasible for women to contemplate life as a single parent as an option. This has been the effect of the policy of both main parties: the Child Support Agency, introduced by the last Conservative government, was never more than a manoeuvre to take as many lone parents as possible out of the benefit system. The result, even leaving aside the wholesale failure of that doomed organisation, was to turn fathers into "walking wallets" (in Melanie Phillips' phrase), and therefore an even more useful source of income for aspiring professional lone parents,

The point here is not to assert that absent fathers should not be obliged to support their children, nor even that lone mothers are milking the system - there are after all plenty of lone mothers who work and plenty who receive no support payments from their former partner. However, the net effect of the policy of successive governments has been to create a situation in which the presence of two parents in a family is no longer regarded as a necessity. Fathers have become optional.

This is a deep-seated cultural change and one that will not be resolved by tinkering with laws or the benefits system, nor even by offering tax breaks to married couples. In the view of the New Party most of the families worst affected by family breakdown are in any case on low incomes and should not be paying tax at all. One would also have to doubt the wisdom and the motivation of someone whose decision on whether or not to marry is swayed by the offer of a tax bribe.

The New Party believes that all policy should seek to strengthen the family unit rather than weaken it. Improvements to housing and schools are important in this respect, but we also believe that there should be an assumption in favour of the equal responsibility of parents in the event of relationship breakdown, with mandatory mediation if required (unless there is an overriding cause mitigating against this, such as domestic abuse) . In jurisdictions such as Florida, where such a regime is in place, parents are helped to focus more on the needs of their children than the emotional and practical fall-out from their own relationship. We also support increased involvement of parents in schools, and public funding for parenting groups. These policies do not amount to a complete solution to the problems of family breakdown, but they are a step in the right direction. Rebuilding shattered families will lead in the long term to rebuilding shattered communities. We can only hope that this will lead to a restoration of civilised conditions even in those parts of the country where society now appears to be in the advanced stages of collapse.