How can he expect fathers to 'take responsibility' for their kids when the law won't support them and always presumes the kids should be with the mother..?

Errant Fathers - Letter To David Cameron

Dear Mr Cameron,
  I am a single father and I fully agree that children absolutely need their fathers, and that errant fathers should be far less common. However, I must point out that the statements you have recently made on this subject are unbalanced, and because of that, are far less constructive than they could have been...

Legal Bias

By failing to see one of the main causes of this problem - which is the current legal bias towards mothers - you are failing to see perhaps the single most compelling solution...

The law in the UK has become so hugely biased towards the mother, that it not only 'gives the signal', but actively enforces the position that the mother, not the father, has default responsibility for the children. Fathers have virtually no rights of access to their children above what is decided by the mother.

The organisation 'Fathers For Justice' (which I am incidentally not a member of) does not exist for vanities sake...

My Son Could Be Taken From Me At Any Time, And There's Not A Thing I Could Do...

Despite having a legal document - signed in court - stating that I have 'equal parental responsibility' for my child...

I have had personal experience of the utter unfairness of this situation. Last year my ex threatened to move to Norwich - a 2 hour drive from me, and take my son with her. My son lives with me for more than half the week. He is settled into an excellent school and has the support of family and friends in the locality.

When I rang the CAB to find out what I could do to stop this from happening - the lady told me she would have to do some research and call back. When she did, she said she was almost in tears, and told me there was basically not a thing I could do... She recounted some of the examples she had read and it seems that even if the mother has just got out of prison, she can demand - and usually get - custody of her children. Furthermore she can deny access for the father - with no recourse to logic or common sense.

Fortunately this has not yet transpired.

Marriage Has Been Destroyed By Bad Government - Not 'Errant Fathers'.

The undermining of the institution of marriage is - as you have stated - another one of the nails in the coffin of a decent childhood, but the working public did not cause this - politicians did.

Rather than railing about 'errant fathers' perhaps you should be saying what you are going to do to restore the legal status of marriage, and to give fathers equal rights of access...

As a politician, one can do two things:

• You can make statements about things
• You can propose policies

The statement you made was, in effect, placing much of the responsibility for the failure of families on the father. Demonising fathers - many of whom have been actively prevented from being part of their childrens life is plainly wrong.

Expecting those with a wayward tendency to be responsible for thier children is simply naive considering that the law states that even those who desparately want responsibility are at the mercy of the mother's judgement and a blatantly unfair and closed family courts system.

I cannot get responsibility for my child legally unless his mother gives it to me.

The law states that the father is not responsible for the children!

Please, You Do Your Job And We'll Be Able To Do Ours!

It is government's responsibility is to ensure that legislation is beneficial to society and not damaging, and government (not just the Labour one but the Tories before them) has failed miserably in that responsibility.

The effects of government's failure to do their job competantly are now seen in society. To blame the effect of incompetant legislation on the effect itself is disingenuous and ultimately compounds harm on harm.

We need better from you David. I desparately want to vote for you and get the idiots out, but at the moment you're still saying some very immature things... You need to be pointing out the problems in the bedrock, not the superficial stuff. We're all sick to death of superficiality.

I believe It would be more appropriate for you to be making statements like:

• You will balance the legal rights of men and women so they have equal rights and responsibilities for their children.
• You will change legislation to restore the status of marriage. (That also means stopping divorce style payouts for co-habiting - or at least reducing them considerably.)

As these are all a matter of law or principle - and they fall squarely within your remit. Whereas berating fathers who have had all their rights stripped from them - seems to me utterly inappropriate.

An Example From The F4J Website:

http://fathers-4-justice.org/f4j//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=43

If you see your children, make sure they don't enjoy it

In another recent judgment, the Judge observed that whilst the child enjoyed seeing the father, this also upset the mother. This in turn led to the child feeling guilty for having good times with his father. The outcome was that the father was prevented from seeing his child as it was judged not to be in the child's best interest.

Reply From Cammo (actually - David Beal)

Well, the big-cheese is too busy to respond personally - too busy sacking members of the party who irresponsibly tell the truth about racism in the army apparently...

Dear Sir,
  Thank you for taking the trouble to write and for highlighting your own situation, following David Cameron's speech on children recently.

We realise that most fathers who are separated from their child’s mother do an important job and often have to wrestle with a system that seems to be against them. David completely agrees that this needs to be looked at very carefully and is something our Social Justice Policy Group are actively reviewing.

As David said in his recent speech, we want to see as many children as possible looked after by both parents. When parents separate, it is important that fathers are not cut out of their children’s upbringing and we understand that more work is needed to redress the balance. As I say this matter is being looked at by the Social Justice policy group and their full details are on this website;

http://povertydebate.typepad.com

Thank you again for your email.

Yours sincerely,

David Beal
Correspondence Secretary
David Cameron's Office
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA

www.conservatives.com

Obviously, this was not good enough - so I replied...

See Letter #2: Parental Responsibility

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