Should, in the event of family breakdown, fathers have rights of access to their children equal with those of the mother? At the moment in British law they don’t. And today, despite much speculation otherwise, David Norgrove’s report on “family justice” explicitly ruled out any such equality being a goal government should set itself. Nor is there any likelihood that the current government will put aside Norgrove’s advice and legislate for anything like equality in this area. Why not? In Norgrove’s words, because ‘fundamentally, this is not about the rights of parents, it’s about the welfare of children and we should be focused entirely on that’. Yet that’s not good enough. For what it’s worth, it seems entirely right and proper to me that mothers take priority over fathers in this most dismal of circumstances. And it seems utterly self-evident that were there ever to be granted an arid legal right to ‘equality’ in this sphere, practice would test it to destruction soon enough. Which is to say, in the real world, those fathers entitled to equal access wouldn’t actually seek it in anything like the numbers such a right would presuppose. But that’s not the point. Or rather, it’s not the point I want to make about David Cameron’s ‘Tory’ government and the doctrine of ‘equality’. For if the rights, or more properly, needs of children rightly trump it, why not those of everyone else? If you want good surgeons, scholars, parliamentary candidates, soldiers or company directors, why shouldn’t you be entitled to get them without the government – this government – intervening, either though moral suasion or criminal law, to insist upon some specious sense of ‘equality’ being met first?
The truth is, if in something as primeval as the very fount of the social order itself, the family, we’re prepared to give primacy to the best person at the moment of the hardest choice, it ought to be only common sense that we’ll behave likewise in all other, vastly less important fields of life. So why don’t we? Why do we have such a panoply of laws and public rhetoric about discrimination, sexual, racial or otherwise, all serving the doctrine of equality, but not when it comes to children? I’ve no idea what the consistent progressive argument for this state of affairs is, but I’ll suggest this: ‘equality’ will, if recent history is any guide, come in this sphere too, and a thoroughly bad, unTory thing it will be when it does. The only thing surer is that David Cameron and his spiritual heirs will be the keenest converts to this cause.