When rusty scissors just won't cut it

Sonia Poulton seethes about feckless fathers in today's Daily Mail - prompted (as is so often the case when fatherhood pops up in the tabloids) by the extreme case of one Jamie Cumming, a 34-year-old who's about to have his 16th child, by the 14th woman he has impregnated.

Few could disagree with Ms Poulton's outrage, and there's little doubt that 'the system' should come down harder on such 'deadbeat dads'. What's missed out here - and is so often omitted from policy and media analysis - is that the 'the system' fails almost completely to engage with fathers. Not just the feckless ones, but all of them.

The answer to this is not to take a pair of rusty scissors to Mr Cumming's nether regions, tempting as it might be to do so. It's something much more comprehensive. Check out this blog from the Fatherhood Institute, written around the time of the summer 2011 riots, to get a sense of where we might start.

A very modern bravery

In an editorial in this week's Spectator, the magazine's editor Question Time regular Fraser Nelson says David Lammy MP is 'brave' to talk about the importance of fathers in his book Out of the Ashes: Britain After The Riots.

Mr Lammy was brought up by his mother, and a line of argument in the book (which I haven't read by the way - and I'll wager Mr Nelson hasn't either) is, apparently, that the absence of fathers from many young boys' lives probably goes some way towards explaining why the riots happened.

According to Mr Nelson, such a claim could 'cast him out as a heretic' from his own party.

Poppycock - politicians of every hue talk about 'absent fathers' all the time. What marks Lammy out is that a) he has, having been born black and brought up in Tottenham, a very personal perspective on the rioters' issues, and b) he puts his money where his mouth is by heading up the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood, which goes some way towards putting fathers and fatherhood on Britain's political map.

If that's bravery, let's commend it!