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David Blunkett and the Family

norman dennis, 6 December 2004

David Blunkett is daily exhibiting a startling obtuseness about a distinction that lies at the heart of government–that between the public and the private. It is this, more than anything else, that has exposed his incapacity as a senior politician at the heart of national affairs, whatever his past achievements or present merits. Religion and secular morality define and attempt to control all public affairs. Politics define that small area of public affairs that are appropriately controlled by the coercive powers of State. Day-to-day politics are mainly arguments about where the line should lie in the light of current circumstances and knowledge.
Forty years ago, circumstances and knowledge seemed to indicate that sex could safely be privatised. They could be removed from public censure and praise, and notably from the rewards and punishments administered by the government. The condom and the pill between them seemed to have separated sex from both procreation and disease.
The surge in lone-parent families, with the expense of housing and maintaining mothers and their children being thrown onto the State meant not a reduction, but a vast expansion, in the involvement of the public in what has been primarily a matter for the spouses. The most public of institutions, the prisons, have being filling with the casualties of families without fatherhood. The surge in sexually-transmitted diseases has also made its own enlarged claims on public intervention in the interests of the sufferers’ health.
Instead of simple assumptions about paternity that minimised the need for the law to intervene, public disputes about the rights and duties of the all sorts of divorced fathers, cohabiting fathers and one-night-stand fathers have had to be dealt with by more and more lawyers in an ever-larger public court system.
But to these disputes Blunkett has added an almost entirely novel one: the right of an adulterous woman’s lover who can prove paternity in the courts, to use the courts and the apparatus of the State to control from the outside the child’s family the upbringing of the child he had no right by religion, custom or the promises made in a civil marriage, to bring into the world.
What makes the Blunkett case far more important and far more public than any previous sexual scandal involving senior public figures, who simply knew and eventually acknowledged that they had misbehaved, is that he is seeking to establish through the courts, as a principle of national life, that the lover of another man’s wife, if he demands it, must be publicly granted and publicly guaranteed a permanent right to a place in that man’s family. Blunkett is publicly proclaiming that it his wish to make this social monstrosity the public norm.
And on what basis does he pursue this course? On the basis that it is nobody’s business but his own, and the public should do the decent thing to a wronged and misunderstood man, and respect his privacy.

1 comment on “David Blunkett and the Family”

  1. It seems to me that the politicians of all persuasions are nowadays very much like the Nazi Party – a definite case of “Don’t do as I/we do, do as I/we say” where their public pontification and their public behaviour are diametrically opposite and their decisions are destroying the very things they claim are so important to them.
    The Blunkett episode and his using his position of Home secretary to impose his own wishes and desires on the whole affair (if you will excuse the choice of words) smacks of the attitude of “The law, common morality and common sense don’t apply to me”.
    The lunatics HAVE gained a very firm grip on the running of the asylum. Just don’t try this yourself …

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