Kemi is right: Children need their fathers

Kemi Badenoch endured all the expected criticism from the Left when she dared to step into the mine-strewn territory of single parenthood.

“Where are the dads?” she asked in one newspaper interview about her campaign to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader. “Why are the dads not there? Why are they not looking after their families?”

This was part of her criticism of the John Major government whose “back to basics” strategy, according to Badenoch, placed too much emphasis on single mothers and not enough on the absence of fathers from family life.

It’s a sensitive area of policy because such language can easily be interpreted as an attack on families with only one parent, or even on the black community, which is often criticised for the lack of an adult male role model in many families. The high level of gang and knife crime, particularly among inner city black youths, is often blamed on the abandonment of their families by fathers.

Badenoch often claims she doesn’t want to be the “black candidate” in this contest and has eschewed the entire concept of identity politics, emerging as the last government’s fiercest culture warrior when it comes to Critical Race Theory and trans ideology. But talking about the importance of family at all in these offence-aware times is a political risk.

She’s right to do it, however. The problem is whether she or her future shadow cabinet can come up with any realistic policy solutions that haven’t already been tried and seen to fail. If she can’t, what is the point of raising the issue in the first place?

As a Labour MP I had my own tussle with this particular facet of the then nascent culture wars. In 2009 I wrote a blog post condemning others on the Left for their – to my mind – irresponsible cheering on of young girls who become parents while still at school. Such young women have been proven to undermine their own life chances in terms of future employment, prosperity and relationships, as well as those of their children. 

Teenagers, and girls in particular, should be told from an early age that while the choice was theirs, the wrong one would have dreadful negative consequences for their future.

Such was the outrage among party activists at my heresy (the chief accusation was that I had made a judgment on others’ life choices) that I felt obliged to hold a special meeting of local members to thrash out the issue. One contribution from a well-respected local councillor was to the effect that young children’s life chances and safety were actually improved if their mother had a succession of boyfriends. 

At the time I relied heavily on the support and advice of my parliamentary colleague, the late Frank Field, whose expertise in this area was unsurpassed, and who was hated by the same critics who were now targeting me, and for the same reasons. Frank’s understanding and experience of life in his Merseyside constituency had brought him to the same conclusions that I had reached years later. It is a great pity that Frank is no longer with us to advise Kemi Badenoch.

Badenoch has stated what is already known by most of us: in general, a child’s development, his future educational and career prospects, are better than those of his peers if he has a happy, stable home life. And those prospects are even healthier if he has two parents, including a male role model. 

This should not be controversial. Indeed it is not. But there are those whose entire world outlook, not to mention their careers as publicly-funded, non-judgmental, professional affirmation-givers, depends on shutting down any such dangerous language as soon as it begins. And so, more than a decade ago, I found myself in hand-to-hand combat in the comments sections of various websites with people on the Left who were happy to see thousands of young women consign themselves to lives on benefits and low-paid work provided their “esteem” remained unaffected.

The question I asked fellow Labour members at the time was a simple one, and I have yet to receive an answer: if teenage motherhood is so great, why does every government, both Labour and Conservative, have an official target for its reduction?

Badenoch was right to ask “Where are the dads?” Their absence harms society as a whole, not just the children they have abandoned. Exclusively celebrating two-parent families is not something any politician should do, because of course there are many single parents who do a fantastic job in raising their families. And a bad marriage is bad for everyone concerned.

But that is rather beside the point. Men should live up to their responsibility to stick by their partner and their child but in far too many cases do not. That should be something that our political leaders should condemn. But rhetoric and complaint are not enough. Unless they can also solve it, they might be better advised to say nothing at all.