The post that follows is a guest blog post by Nick Langford. Nick is a regular commenter on this blog. He and I have disagreed about many things in the comments threads, but always (I think) in respectful if robust language. I am happy to extend the opportunity to Nick to write a one off post – as per usual I don’t agree with all of it. Nick has asked for a debate, and so to kick it off my comments, are at the end of the post.
Hunger 4 Justice – Nick Langford
I am extremely grateful to Lucy for allowing me to write a guest post on her blog; I hope it will provoke some interesting debate. We need a debate.
On Sunday 10th July Matt O’Connor, the founder of Fathers 4 Justice, commenced a hunger strike outside the house of the Prime Minister, David Cameron. Such an action is clearly a dramatic departure from the style of campaigning normally associated with F4J, featuring middle-aged men in lycra. This is campaigning of a more serious, sombre character, and O’Connor’s supporters wore dark suits and black ties.
The action was prompted by two factors; the first was Cameron’s failure to honour the commitments made by the Conservatives prior to the Election regarding the family justice system. The second was Cameron’s Sunday Telegraph article on Father’s Day.
The Conservatives’ pledges – not widely reported but presented to F4J in a meeting with Henry Bellingham, Shadow Minister for the DCA – conformed closely to what F4J had been campaigning for. They began with moving parental disputes out of the courts and promoting early intervention and mediation through “Australian-style” family hubs, a proposal also made by Sandra Davies of Mischcon de Reya and by Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice.
There would be a legal presumption in favour of automatic shared parenting within a context of equal parental responsibility and a new definition of cooperative parenting to ensure parents knew clearly what was expected of them before they entered the courts, denying them the option of prolonged litigation.
Contact orders would be made enforceable and there would be zero-tolerance of excuses, delay and false allegations, including (controversially) the withdrawal of benefits from parents who unreasonably withheld access.
Above all the Conservatives committed themselves to reducing the intolerable cost to the economy caused by family breakdown and prolonged litigation at taxpayers’ expense and to ending the ruinous destruction of children’s aspirations and potential.
What impressed F4J was the clear grasp of the issues Bellingham demonstrated, and the work and research which had manifestly gone on behind the scenes. He promised an urgent and thorough review of family justice with an interim report in the Autumn of 2010. In an email to F4J on 3rd May Nick Clegg gave his backing to this review.