62% of 15-year-old boys have a smartphone, 57% live with their father
Not a hugely surprising one mind. 99.9% of boys have clothes, 57% live with their father anyone?
62% of 15-year-old boys have a smartphone, 57% live with their father
Not a hugely surprising one mind. 99.9% of boys have clothes, 57% live with their father anyone?
Typical of the perversity of the Daily Fail (with its primarily bourgeois female demographic) it implies the problem is with men not “doing their duty”. Not a mention of fathers being absent due to the mothers divorcing them or refusing them access to their children.
@IanB
i know you don’t read the Daily Mail, but it’s a bit bizarre to suggest that it doesn’t criticise the behaviour of single mothers.
Interested-
It’ll slag off slags. It won’t slag off the divorce-tastic middle class females it panders to. Dacre knows his onions.
@Ian B but Fathers for Justice are in the Mail every other day.
I agree with you if what you’re saying is that the law and the family courts are biased against men, but not that there is some massive ‘radfem’ conspiracy at the Daily Mail.
They’re a newspaper. You shouldn’t expect consistency, not least because the world they report on is inconsistent.
So today they’re reporting men should support their kids (with which, what’s not to agree?), tomorrow it will be an op-ed on how fathers are denied access by scheming mothers.
Of course, life would be better for the kids and the blokes if we still lived in a society roughly modelled on the 10 Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount… but I repeat myself!
I’m forever amazed that a sizeable number of Tory MPs believe that a £2,000 transferable tax allowance will make a difference to this statistic.
The perpetuation of this myth is how they get away with their torrent of bilge.
“It means that where one person in a marriage does not use their full income tax allowance, currently set at £10,000, they could transfer up to £1,000 to their partner, helping to reduce their tax bill by as much as £200 a year.”
Oh wow. You could save up to £16.67p a month? I hope the churches and registry offices are prepared for the massive spike in weddings!
OTOH, most single mothers are single mothers by choice, and the resulting financial rewards of enhanced welfare entitlement or child support are considerably greater than £16.67 a month.
So not only will this policy change make a difference equal to the square root of fuck all, but its timing – five years after David Cameron became Prime Minister, and just before the next election – tells you just how much the Tories believe in their own rhetoric about the importance of families.
If we really wanted to discourage the break up of families we’d stop women automatically getting to keep the kids in the event of divorce, and stop all welfare payments to single mothers. But that would be politically costly – safer to bung married couples the price of a Happy Meal a week, and make concerned noises.
The revenue’ll soon get that money back next time the Chancellor puts up VAT on fuel.
@Steve
‘If we really wanted to discourage the break up of families we’d stop women automatically getting to keep the kids in the event of divorce,’
But that doesn’t happen. Much like Ian B’s absurd suggestion that the DM is not a newspaper, these sorts of arguments don’t really help our side of the argument. Let the left concentrate on propaganda.
(I agree with your basic point, mind – the Tories are, at best, proggy-whipped by the BBC and the Guardian into supporting positions they shouldn’t go anywhere near.)
Re custody of kids, in most cases the women get the kids because it makes sense and the fathers don’t want them (in the sense that they don’t want to give up work to care for them full time, they just want fair access to them, which the courts are getting better at ordering).
It’s exactly the same as the reasons women earn less than men.
Women tend to have given up work to care for the kids, men are on a career path.
Interested – what doesn’t happen – that women automatically get the kids after divorce? It does happen though – not officially, but in everyday practice.
Why do you suppose approx. 66% of divorces are initiated by women? They know they are virtually guaranteed to come out of it better off than the poor bastard they’re divorcing.
the Tories are, at best, proggy-whipped by the BBC and the Guardian into supporting positions they shouldn’t go anywhere near
They seem to really believe that it’s smart politics. That’s the problem with being a clever Oxford PPE grad – it makes it easy for you to outsmart yourself.
Not only is the Mail a newspaper, it’s an extremely valuable newspaper. A must read.
It shows people are, indeed, capable of believing mutually incompatible things simultaneously. Enormous numbers of people.
If you can’t appreciate this, you haven’t a prayer of understanding people.
B(N)IS
I do appreciate that. It’s why I weep in the night.
Interested-
I was being snarky. It’s a comment section.
@IanB, you are under the mistaken assumption that newspapers inform readers about the news. They don’t. They never have. They only tell readers what they want to hear and gossip.
Is it actually true that just over half of 15 yo boys live w/ their father, I would have thought that figure too low.
Strangely enough, I was called by the Office of National Statistics last night. I have been helping in a survey over the last year. There’s always a “killer question”, an outlier or apparent non-sequitur that is the real reason for their survey.
Last night they asked me whether I lived with both parents when I was 14 ( I didn’t, parents divorced 2 years earlier).
I spent the rest of the evening puzzling over why they wanted to know, it was 30-something years ago…
Personally I blame Thatcher.