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Why UKIP is backing 50:50 shared parenting for separated dads

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UKIP gave its backing to 50-50 shared parenting for parents who separate, at its party conference in September, a move that has proved popular with many fathers’ rights campaigners. We asked the party’s Deputy Chair, Suzanne Evans, to share her personal reasons for supporting fathers’ rights.

—This is article #32 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys

Why is UKIP putting a commitment to 50-50 shared parenting in its Manifesto for the 2015 General Election? Because, quite simply, it is the right thing to do.

It is also long overdue. Do we live in a society where – in principle at least – there is gender equality, or not? Do we live in a society where fathers are increasingly being encouraged to take a more active role in children’s lives, by taking paternity leave and so on, or not? Of course we do, so why the status quo on this key issue should currently be so inadequate is beyond me.

I first encountered the problem of fathers being excluded from their children’s lives over ten years ago when I was dating a lovely man who had a daughter he had not seen since her mother had started a new relationship. He would show up to collect his daughter as per their agreement, but no one would be at home.

Mum’s new partner was less than friendly; he went to quite extraordinary and frightening lengths to put pressure on him not to see his little girl for no other reason than he and mum would find it inconvenient.

My father died when I was six

Even when he was diagnosed with cancer, his ex-wife still refused to let him see his daughter. The court process was utterly useless, not to put to fine a point on it, and he died having not seen his own child for some three years. Attending his funeral was bad enough; under these circumstances it was utterly heartbreaking.

My own father died when I was six. While my mother was brilliant – everything a good mum should be – it was tough growing up without a dad and in a family where life had suddenly been turned upside down.

While I’d be the last person to suggest warring couples should stay together ‘for the sake of the children,’ as I think that too can do horrendous psychological damage to young minds, it seems to me common sense that in most cases children will benefit from having two parents in their lives.

http://youtu.be/aNH5wH_J_F0

Everyone benefits when dad’s involved 

Parenting is a tough job at the best of times, even when two people share responsibilities. As a single mum myself, I know it can sometimes be overwhelming doing it on your own.

Frankly, not only do children benefit from having two responsible, loving parents, the parents’ will benefit from continuing to support each other through shared parenting after divorce or separation too.

Of course there will always be fathers and mothers who for very good child protection reasons should not have unfettered access to their children, and UKIP’s position should not be seen as watering this down at all.

A child’s welfare must always come first and we would certainly not shy away from depriving any parent proven to be abusive or a danger to children of their rights.

Grandparents need better rights too

Our policy is purely to address the imbalance in current parenting arrangements; to make sure good fathers are treated equally by the system; and to back up parents refused access to their children by former partners for no good reason.

A UKIP government will also give grandparents visiting rights. They too have built up often very strong and loving relationships with their grandchildren and to be suddenly cut out of their lives does neither them or the children any good.

We know we can’t stop families breaking up, and we know we can’t force all parents to take their responsibilities seriously after relationships break down, but at the very least we can stop penalising those who want to do their right thing by their children.

 —Picture credit: Flickr/David Precious

To find out more about UKIP’s support of 50:50 shared parenting see Suzanne Evans speech to the party’s Doncaster conference “a safety net not a hammock“.

insideMAN does not support a political party and we are happy to receive articles about men, masculinity and manhood from writers of all political political parties 

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

Eight reasons British women are more left wing than men

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Last week’s Heywood and Middleton by-election saw 58% of women but only 38% of men saying they’d vote Labour, providing more proof that men are more right wing and women are more left wing. So why are women more left wing than men?

The Labour Party’s claim that the Conservatives are anti-women has been a common political theme since the last general election. In reality, to paraphrase the pollster Lord Ashcroft, the Conservatives aren’t unpopular with women, they’re unpopular with everyone and seem to be attracting equally low numbers of male and female voters.

The Labour Party, in contrast, does have a gender imbalance in its supporter base. It attracted just 28% of male voters at the last general election and lost to UKIP amongst male voters in the recent Heywood and Middleton by-election (41% to 38%), though it held onto the seat by attracting far more female voters than UKIP (58% to 21%).

British women, it seems, are now more left wing than men. So why is this? Here we provide eight possible reasons.

1. Young women are more idealistic

Both men and women seem to get more right wing the older we become. According to YouGov, 38% of young men and 34% of young women support UKIP or the Conservatives compared with 56% of men over 60 and 57% of women over 60.

Meanwhile on the left of politics, 48% of young men and 54% of young women support Labour or the Lib Dems, compared with only 39% of men and 39% of women over 60.

So women’s greater leaning to the left seems to be limited to the younger generation.

2. Women care more about health services

When asked about specific issues, men and women have similar concerns such as the economy and immigration. One area that a higher proportion of women consistently highlight as a concern is the health service. One poll found that 35% of women name “improving the NHS” as one of their top three political priorities, compared with 26% of men.

Another survey found that men were twice as likely to support a 5% cut in NHS spending. As the NHS is traditionally seen as being a greater priority to the left than the right, women’s leftward leaning could be the linked to their concern for the NHS.

3. Women don’t support war

Another area of policy where there is a significant gap between men and women is in support for British troops engaging in war. According to Peter Kellner of YouGov: “there seems to be something close to a cast-iron rule, when it comes to military action, there is a persistent gender gap of around 20 points”.

Women Men
March 2003: % supporting British participation in Iraq war 43 63
March 2011: % supporting British military action in Libya 37 53
Jan 2013: % supporting help for France in Mali 35 58
Jan 2013: % saying Prince William should serve Afghanistan 53 68

Source: YouGov

As the doves on the left of politics are generally considered to be less willing to engage in warfare that the hawks on the right, women’s reluctance to support military action may also shape their left-wing politics.

We should remember, however, what George Galloway, MP, had to say on the matter:

“[We were told]…for years in the Labour Party, if only we could get more women into parliament there’d be fewer wars, less aggression and all of that. There was 101 ‘Blair babes’ elected in 1997 and all but three of them voted for every war that Tony Blair took us into.”

 4. Women think about family more

According to Dr Rosie Campbell, women are more inclined to view politics through the lens of family life. In one set of focus groups, Campbell recorded 77 mentions of family from women, compared with 11 men. Lord Ashcroft Polls also found that only women mentioned “family” in their top 20 words when asked to describe the characters of Cameron, Clegg and Milliband.

Could it be that women are more left wing because the left is seen as having more family friendly policies in relation to issues like childcare and parental leave?

5. Women are more censorious

Dr Rosie Campbell’s work has also highlighted that women tend to be more authoritarian than men. For example when asked if the censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral values; women are twice as likely to strongly agree while men are more than twice as likely to disagree.

Could the left’s greater interest in censoring lads mags and Page 3 be drawing more women to the left of politics?

6. Women prefer the public sector

The majority of public sector workers are women and the majority of private sector workers are men. On this basis, it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that men are nearly three times more likely to strongly agree with the statement: “private enterprise is the best way to solve Britain’s economic problems”.

As the political left which is historically seen to favour the public sector over the private sector, maybe this is why women are more likely to be left wing?

7. Women are more unionised

Men have traditionally dominated the trade union movement. Ten years ago this was still the case with 3,752.000 men being a member of a trade union in 2004, compared with 3,587,000 women. In the intervening decade, women have begun to outnumber men, with the figures for 2012 showing 3,142,000 male union members and 3,613,000 female members.

Could women’s increased involvement in the trade union movement be at the heart of women’s greater tendency towards the left of politics?

8. Women are more reliant on state benefits

Women are more likely to be reliant on welfare benefits than men, according to the Fawcett Society, who estimated that around 20% of women’s income is made up of welfare payments and tax credits compared to 10% for men.

Maybe this is why more women than men oppose freezing welfare benefits and reducing child tax benefit. One benefit that women are more supportive of cutting than men is unemployment benefit. This may be explained by the fact that it is one benefit that more men rely on than women.

As the left is generally seen as being more generous with welfare payments, this may be one reason why more women vote for parties on the left.

For more on this subject, see our article men are more right wing and women are more left wing.

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Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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Are men more right wing and women more left wing?

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Does the fact that more men are voting UKIP reveal a masculine tendency towards right-wing politics, asks Glen Poole?

Last week a stark gender divide in the nation’s political beliefs was revealed when a poll taken prior to the Heywood and Middleton by-election found that 20% more men would vote UKIP than Labour (41% v 21%) while 20% more women would vote Labour than UKIP (58% v 38%). As a result, the female electorate won the seat for the Labour Party.

This wasn’t a one off result. Men and women in the U.S.A have been voting for the “masculine” Republicans and the “feminine” Democrats along gender lines for 50 years now. Obama won the 2008 election by one percentage point amongst men and 12 points amongst women, while Clinton’s lead amongst women in 1996 was event bigger at 18 per cent.

Women in the UK have been slower to make the leftward shift, with 20% more women voting for Margaret Thatcher than Michael Foot in 1983 and 10% more women voting for John Major than Neil Kinnock in 1992. It wasn’t until as recently as the 2005 election that a “women to the left, men to the right” gap began to open up in the UK, with more men than women deciding to vote for Michael Howard.

By 2010, Labour was haemorrhaging male voters, with only 28% voting for Gordon Brown. Meanwhile, women’s combined centre-left vote (Labour and Liberal Democrat) was 57% compared to 50% for men.

Looking at the combined right-wing vote, 38% of men and 36% of women voted Conservative in 2010 and men were 50% more likely to vote for one of the “other” parties, with UKIP and the BNP on the right collecting most of those votes. More recently, a 2013 YouGov found that 52% of Conservative voters and 57% of UKIP voters are men.

VOTING BY GENDER AT UK GENERAL ELECTIONS 1974 TO 2010

Con (m) Con (f) Lab (m) Lab (f) *Lib (m) *Lib (f)
1974 32 39 43 38 18 20
1979 43 47 40 35 13 15
1983 42 46 30 26 25 27
1987 43 43 32 32 23 23
1992 41 44 37 34 18 18
1997 31 32 45 44 17 18
2001 32 33 42 42 18 19
2005 34 32 34 38 22 23
2010 38 36 28 31 22 26

*Includes Liberals/Alliance and Lib Dems

Source: Ipsos MORI

IT’S RAINING MEN 

Much has been made of the Conservative’s apparent woman trouble since the last general election, particularly by Labour whose deputy leader, Harriet Harman, famously claimed “it’s raining men in the Tory Party”.

There is some evidence for such claims, with one Guardian/ICM poll revealing that Labour had a 7-point lead over the Tories (36%-29%) among men and 26 point lead (51%-25%) among women. What the media didn’t report was that those figures also showed that while the Conversatives had a 4% male-female gender gap (29%-25%) the Labour Party recorded a 15% female-male gender gap (51%-36%). Based on these figures, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to claim that “Sisters are doing it for themselves” in the Labour Party.

Several analysts (see Kellner, Ashcroft and Wells) have challenged the theory that the polls reveal a significant gender issue for the Conservatives, pointing out that the small polling samples have large margins of error; though this didn’t stop Cameron appointing an adviser on women’s issues.

So what does this tell us about gender and politics? One thing is clear, men and women consistently vote for all of the main parties, as YouGov’s analysis of men’s and women’s voting intentions over a 5 month period shows (see below), the gender differences are often unremarkable.

VOTING INTENTIONS BY GENDER (SEPT 2013 TO JAN 2014)

Con (m) Con (f) ukip(m) ukip (f) Lab (m) Lab (f) Lib (m) Lib (f)
Jan 14 33 33 13 12 38 40 9 9
Dec 13 33 33 13 11 38 40 9 9
Nov 13 33 32 13 11 38 40 9 10
Oct 13 33 33 12 10 38 41 9 9
Sep 13 33 33 13 11 37 40 9 10

Source: YouGov

Irrespective of their voting intentions, there is evidence to suggest that even on the right of politics, female Conservatives tend to be more left wing than male Conservatives. So why is it that women tend to be more left wing than men? We explore this question in our companion article: Eight reasons why British women are more left wing than men.

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Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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Being anti-circumcision does not make you antisemitic

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Last week a Times journalist admitted that she finds the practice of male circumcision to be “abusive and barbaric”. What gave this revelation an additional charge was the fact that it came in an article about antisemitism, writes Glen Poole. 

Deborah Ross is a secular, cultural Jew who has experienced anti-Semitism herself and says it is in the Jewish character to be “poised for and fearful of anti-Semitic repercussions”. At the same time, she freely admits she didn’t circumcise her son because she finds the practice abusive.

Does this mean Ross is secretly antisemitic herself?

In some people’s eyes if you hold the belief that taking a knife to the foreskin of an eight-day-old baby boy without anaesthetic is barbaric, then you are antisemitic. According to the European Jewish Congress President, Moshe Kantore, for example, those who want to ban unnecessary male circumcision in Europe are “sending out a terrible message to European Jews that our practices, and therefore our very presence on this continent, is treated with disdain.”

Benjamin Albalas, President of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece also believes that trying to end the practice “is a sign of anti-Semitism” as does the columnist Tanya Gold, who wrote in The Guardian last year that a ban on male circumcision would be antisemitic.

The UKIP factor 

I have no doubt that that Gold, Albalas and Kantore genuinely believe that ending unnecessary male circumcision is antisemitic, it is their heartfelt, subjective belief. And if we looked closely we could no doubt find some antisemitic people who are also anti-circumcision. Last year, for example, the Jewish Chronicle reported that people who vote UKIP (a party that has faced continued accusations of racism) are more likely to oppose circumcision and if we dug deep enough we might find some antisemitism behind that statistic.

Taking the nation as a whole, 38% of people support a circumcision ban and 35% are against it, with 27% still undecided. Does this mean that nearly 40% of the British public is antisemitic? Of course not, because being anti-circumcision is not the same as being antisemitic. You can be both, neither or one or the other. You could be an antisemitic Muslim, for example, who stands shoulder to shoulder with his Jewish brothers when it comes to defending the right to perform religious rituals on boys’ genitals.

Are Jews who oppose circumcision antisemitic? 

In reality, there is no one singular Jewish view on the practice of circumcision. Some Jews campaign against it; some will only perform it in medical settings with anaesthetic; some want to continue circumcising boys without anaesthetic in religious settings and some still defend the practice of Metzitzah B’peh where blood is sucked from the circumcised baby’s penis.

Attitudes towards male circumcision sit on a continuum ranging from those who believe anything goes to those who believe in an outright ban, with various compromising (or compromised) positions along the way. Tanya Gold, for example, believes that the practice of Jewish mohels (ritual circumcisers) sucking on baby’s circumcised penises and giving them herpes in the process is “repellent”. She says “no circumcision should be performed without medical qualification; those who disagree, including Jews, should think again”.

The anti-circumcision campaigners that she calls antisemitic would agree with her, but they think that regulation and legislation should go further still. Meanwhile, the orthodox Jews who want to preserve Metzitzah B’peh may think Tanya Gold is antisemitic for wanting to ban their ancient Jewish rituals.

People have a right to think differently 

What some people along the continuum of circumcision beliefs, like Tanya Gold, are essentially saying is that if your belief is more interventionist than mine, then you must be antisemitic. This is an unsustainable position to take. Jewish campaigners against circumcision, like Eran Sadeh who wrote for us last week are not antisemitic, they just dare to think differently and that is a freedom that all good people should fight to preserve.

Anyone with a decent dose of empathy can understand why this is an emotive subject for Jewish communities to confront and everyone with a rational mind should also be able to reach the conclusion that daring to think differently about male circumcision does not make you antisemitic.

Acknowledging that people have a right to hold different beliefs is the antithesis of antisemitism. When we think that other people’s beliefs and actions are causing harm, it is our duty to speak out. If your think that circumcising Jewish boys is harmful to Jewish boys then raise you voice, it isn’t antisemitic to want to protect a Jewish baby from harm.

And the same applies to Muslim boys, American boys, African boys and other boy who is at risk of unnecessary male circumcision. If you think it’s harmful, speak out, it isn’t wrong to have an opinion. And if anyone tries to label you antisemitic, tell them that the Jewish journalist Deborah Ross thinks circumcision is “abusive and barbaric” and she said so in an article all about antisemitism.

—Photo credit: flickr/emmanueldyan

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