I guess we are no longer surprised that the government, led by The Harperson, does its best to write fatherhood out of the script. Men are the cause of the financial crisis (here), are no longer required on the birth certificate (here), and, as Melanie Phillips observed in her usual incisive style, have been reduced to ‘sperm donors, walking wallets and occasional au pairs’ (here).

In theory the church should do better. After all, it was Christ – alone of the founders of the monotheistic faiths – who majored on the fatherhood of God and introduced the possibility of a warm personal relationship with ‘Our Father which art in heaven’ (Matt 6:9; Mark 14:36; Gal 4:6; etc).

So I became concerned at church recently as we prayed through a prayer about Haiti which was projected onto the screen.

Like others I had watched with tears as the human tragedy of the Haiti earthquake unfolded. In particular I had identified with the panic and despair of fathers as they picked frantically with bare hand at the rubble of collapsed buildings, looking for their families inside: I too have young children.

In context the prayer was beautifully empathetic. Someone had emailed it to a member of the church at work and – at the urging of a Muslim colleague who perhaps had felt the compassion in the prose and shared the urge to appeal to the Almighty – he forwarded it to the company’s HR department who in turn published it for all the staff. Not bad for our secular age.

“Lord I thank you… because this morning I woke up and knew where my children were… because my home was still standing… because I am not crying as my spouse, my child, my parent does not need to be buried or pulled out from beneath a pile of concrete…

“Lord I cry out to You, the One who makes the impossible possible, the One who turns darkness into light. I cry out that You give those mothers strength, that You give them the peace that surpasses all understanding…

“(I cry out) that You may open the streets so that help may come… that You may provide doctors, nurses, food, water… Give them peace… hope… courage to go on… Protect the children and shield them with Your power.

“I pray all this in the name of Jesus.”

It was an admirable prayer that I, together with the rest of the congregation, entered into with full but heavy hearts, willing the Lord to answer urgently.

“But hang on,” I thought half way through, “what about the fathers? Why are we praying for mothers in Haiti but not their partners?”

I concluded sadly that the world often impacts the church more than vice versa, and the writer of the prayer – consciously or unconsciously – had simply bought into the secular mindset that ignores the primal social and spiritual importance of fatherhood.

So the invisibilisation of fathers continues apace. The cost to our society, and to the church if she follows suit, will be enormous.

We have two daughters at our local primary school and by God’s grace they’re thriving – thanks to an excellent head teacher and a committed staff team. Reflecting Newham, the school is richly diverse with over 90% of pupils coming from a variety of minority ethnic backgrounds. Nearly three quarters of the children have English as an additional language, many being at early stages of learning the indigenous tongue. Our daughters’ friends reflect this cultural diversity of course, which gives them a great social foundation for living in the 21st century global village. 

Following the Macdonald review and thanks to Ed Balls’ decisions (here), Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) is now high up the educational agenda with significant changes pending. My wife and I have already assessed the current SRE at our girls’ school and it seems sensible, sensitive to cultural diversity and not in need of change.

But UNESCO’s approach to SRE has shocked me rather more than UK government policies. This authoritative United Nations body has published an ‘evidence-based’ report ‘International Guidelines on Sexuality Education’ (here).   Its intention is to influence “educational, health and other relevant authorities in the development and implementation of school-based sexuality education programmes and materials… (The report) will have immediate relevance for… education ministers… curriculum developers, school principals and teachers.”

On page 54 this august body – drawing on ‘evidence’ from diverse cultures around the globe – tells us that learning objectives for children aged five to eight (yes, five to eight) should include the key ideas that “touching and rubbing one’s genitals is called masturbation; some people masturbate and some do not; masturbation is not harmful but should be done in private”!

I looked at our daughters aged seven and eight chattering away as they played happily together and I felt a primordial protective rage well up within me. How dare they try to soil my girls’ innocence and childhood with such grubby, sordid and contentious ‘education’? Teach them about masturbation? My fury hasn’t yet fully subsided.

Doesn’t every father of a five to eight year old feel the same anger when confronted with this official, inappropriate and depraved trollop?

Or perhaps the better ones amongst us manage simply to laugh… or cry.

Tonight is Halloween. Ugh!

Sometimes the much-criticised Met Police get it exactly right. In each of our two local papers this week they have taken a two-page advert warning that Halloween “can be a particularly distressing time of year for some of the more vulnerable members of our communities – especially the elderly.”

They also caution people not to throw things like eggs and flour – a theme taken up incidentally by a couple of responsible shops at the top of our road who – like fireworks – won’t sell them to under-18s. The police say eggs and flour “can cause a great deal of damage and misery… (and) can be classed as criminal damage.”

Of course our pre-teen daughters watch the TV and listen to the chat in the playground and want to join in the ‘fun’.

But why would we let them make light of the powers of darkness as if these aren’t real? Why would we allow them to participate in blackmail and threats – “trick or treat” – as if this isn’t learning to bully and torment? Why should they frighten the elderly and lonely? Why should they learn to rejoice in evil as if it’s good?

Halloween is a sick celebration at both a spiritual and social level. Again, I reckon the police have got it right. They suggest that if people want to party on Halloween night “why not just stay at home and having a Halloween-themed party with your friends and neighbours?”

Actually I think this suggestion should have the force of law. If we can ban smoking from public places, how much more should we ban Halloween from our schools and streets too?

I was surprised by a lump-in-the-throat experience earlier today.A week ago, 3rd September, we were remembering the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, and we heard once again grainy recordings Chamberlain’s voice telling the nation that Germany had not responded to the 11.00am ultimatum and that therefore “we are at war”.

Tomorrow we will remember the 8th anniversary of 9/11.

But today I attended a commemoration service for Canning Town’s own wartime tragedy when Hallsville School received a direct hit from a high explosive bomb in the early hours of Tuesday 10th September 1940. Officially between 70 and 80 people including many children died; locally it is believed still that the figure is far higher but the wartime government falsified the figures for the sake of public morale. Whole families who had been bombed out of their homes and who were sleeping at the school while waiting for evacuation were wiped out – transportation should have arrived the previous day, but apparently had been sent mistakenly to Camden Town.

In recent years the local branch of the excellent Royal British Legion has organised a Service of Remembrance on the anniversary of the incident at the war memorial outside the old St. Luke’s church on Tarling Road, and within sight of today’s Hallsville School just 300 metres away across the local park. I was asked to both lay a wreath on behalf of local people and do the Bible reading.

It was a glorious sunny morning, the leaves of the park trees were tinged in early autumn brown. Knots of older people stood or sat around reminiscing before the service took place. Some of them were pre-teens in 1940 and can still remember vividly the dark night the bomb fell. And a dozen equivalent pre-teen children from St Luke’s primary school were there too chatting away, with their bright promise of youth and life.

At 11 o’clock we started, singing lustily the traditional and emotive hymn, “Abide with me”. The haunting and similarly emotive bugler’s Last Post sounded out across the park, a reverent minute’s silence followed and then the Reveille was played.

Laurence Binyon’s poem came next: “They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn… At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we shall remember them.” We prayed the Lord’s Prayer, laid our wreaths on the memorial and then it was my turn to read from the Bible.

I glanced across the park to Hallsville School, looked at the old people worn down by the years but proud and dignified as they remembered lost family and friends, saw the fresh expectant faces of the school children, and I turned to the Bible text. It was the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want… Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.”

A lump rose in my throat, tears started to well up and I thought, “I’m not going to make it.”

I paused, took a breath, looked up and down again, was conscious of the Lord’s presence and the importance of the occasion, and started.

Just sixty seconds later I had made it; I had completed the task without sniffling! “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” I read, “and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

For all sorts of reasons I left the service thankful for God’s goodness and mercy.

In my last post I laid into the BBC for aiding and orchestrating the dominant social-liberal agenda. Now the BBC has bitten back. TV journalist John Ware has produced a couple of BBC 2 programmes, The Death of Respect (here), the first of which was broadcast last Thursday. In them he tracks changes to British values and behaviour over the past 50 years.Ware distances himself from the easy cost-free optimism of the liberals: “You may be one of those who pats the nation on the head and says, ‘There there, don’t panic. We’re not all going to hell in a handcart’,” he said before stating emphatically, “I am not.”

There was lots of informative stuff in the first programme, including highlighting the shame of increased poverty for many despite our apparently growing national prosperity. But what interested me on this occasion was how the melt-down of the family is clearly shown to be the cause of so much social dysfunction.

Listen to these conclusions from the programme: “Marriage is the most successful arrangement we have yet discovered for raising children” and “The consequence of children growing up in single parent families have been profound – a huge increase in emotional and behavioural problems and a welfare bill that just keeps growing.” And this from the BBC! And from John Ware, himself a divorcee he tells us.

The Christian Peoples Alliance has been saying exactly the same for years of course and I ran in the London Mayor election last year on such a platform: “Promoting marriage and the stable family as a long-term solution to youth crime, educational under-achievement and child poverty” was our top policy priority. The evidence for marriage is utterly overwhelming for those with eyes to see. But policy-makers at the Home Office and elsewhere are so locked into their blinkered liberal mindset that they cannot acknowledge the truth when it hits them on the nose.

However it seems the Beeb has now done us a public service and helped get the story out.

Or has it? Ware’s programmes are broadcast on Thursday evenings – at 11.20pm. Yup, the BBC has given these quality programmes a graveyard slot. Now I’m not naturally cynical or suspicious, but maybe my original strictures about BBC bias were not too far wrong after all. The programme schedulers have effectively buried The Death of Respect.

So it’ll have to be another late night for me on Thursday.

Sally and I attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Westminster Hall this morning, and I immediately came to understand why many Tory MPs voted against their own John Bercow for Speaker of the House of Commons.Greeting us as host, his speech to this packed and vibrant event was both offensively patronising and emptily formulaic as he referred woodenly to the “welcome tradition” of the Breakfast like it’s some sort of dusty museum piece. No spiritual insight there, just a misjudgement of the purpose and misunderstanding of the power of the event. It looks like we have a Speaker who’ll exactly match the bumbling Brown government.

We also listened to Lord Ahmed of Rotherham who has managed recently to (a) get the next Dutch prime minister banned from Britain by apparently threatening to call 10,000 protesting Muslims onto London’s streets (here) - “a victory for the Muslim community” he called the ban; and (b) get himself the unusual but not unknown record of being one of Her Majesty’s serving Peers of the Realm who has also been a jailbird (here). We were reminded of course that His Lordship has saved an English teacher from the explosive effects of innocently naming a child’s teddy bear ‘Muhammad’ in the Islamic north of Sudan (here). He also informed us that due to his status as a Peer he is now viewed by Muslims as the UK’s Grand Mufti who is called in to resolve tricky situations within the wider Islamic community.

Unfortunately his contributions at today’s seminar on ‘Leadership for change in the Middle East’ were banal, contradictory and devoid of positive leadership qualities.

If the contributions from the two politicians were unsatisfactory, those from two others were inspirational.

The colourful Camila Batmanghelidjh set up the outstanding Kids Company (here)  for vulnerable children 13 years ago in south London. She told us about the lone children she helps who live in chronic deprivation with little or no support from parents or other adults. Some are themselves young carers struggling to support siblings and many are forced into drugs, gangs and/or prostitution in order to survive. Appallingly we haven’t moved on from the shame of 19th century Dickensian London.

What struck me is the emphasis Camila puts on the devastating emotional deprivation of children who lack families. She is willing to talk openly about ‘love’ – a word that has long been erased from professional social workers’ lexicon. ‘Love is all it takes’ proclaims her website. In other words it’s not just about material deprivation or lack of education.

The social effects of the destruction of the family have not only been highlighted by Family Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge (here) and (here) but they also go a long way to explaining why, infamously, the UK is at the bottom of the Unicef table of children’s wellbeing in developed countries (here). We need to listen to people like Camila.

The other star was Indian-born evangelist and apologist Dr Ravi Zacharias who converted to Christianity after a suicide attempt aged 17. In a riveting anecdote-studded address he talked about our vertical accountability to God. Where this is lacking there is a horizontal bending of the rules – as amply illustrated by the expenses scandal in the Palace of Westminster where Dr Zacharias spoke.

I’ve been to four National Prayer Breakfasts and this was the most stimulating. It gave us many people and issues to pray about.

For Parliament’s sake we ought to start with John Bercow.

Christmas, we are told, is a time for families and friends. Especially it’s a time for children to enjoy the warmth of the home hearth, the embrace of the wider family of grandparents, aunts and uncles, the magic of Father Christmas, the sparkle of Christmas lights, the excitement of presents under the Christmas tree and the reassuring constant of the traditional turkey, Christmas pudding and Christmas crackers at the family table.

On Christmas Eve, amidst the pile of seasonal cards offering good wishes, our postman delivered a communication from the Child Benefit Office informing us of a small but welcome increase in our weekly payments. It added marginally to the family Christmas cheer.

But the envelope also contained a colourful Christmas card-size leaflet from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) promoting childcare. This was the asp amongst the roses – a dose of anti-children poison administered via cheerful cartoons of young children sitting in a line of cardboard boxes (“We play trains, Mum goes to work, Whoo whoo!”), playing drums and other noisy instruments (“We do music, Dad goes to the office, Rat-a-tat-tat!”) and messing around with bread dough (“We do cooking class, Mum goes to college, Mmmmm!”).

Of course there’s nothing wrong with the principle of affordable childcare. But the government sees us all as operational units, part of the staff and workforce of Great Britain Ltd, whose purpose in life is to produce goods and services that can be sold or used to help the economy.

Children get in the way of this great objective so they must be separated from their parents as soon as possible and parcelled off to the professionals. The government’s latest welfare reform plans announced earlier this month will require parents (mums of course) of children as young as one to prepare for work. And the state avidly promotes affordable childcare which, the DCSF leaflet tells us, ‘gives your children a great start’ that is ‘more fun for them’, ‘brilliant for them’ and provides ‘free early learning for them’. Whoo, whoo, whoo – and yippee too.

But at last other parts of government are waking up to the fact that the separation and break-up of families is contributing massively to the social problem of aimless rootless detached and disaffected youth. Absent fathers and, increasingly, absent working mothers are leaving the nation’s children in the hands of professional and emotionally uninvolved child-carers when young and at the mercies of latch-keys and empty homes when older.

The recent Cabinet Office paper Families in Britain, besides concluding that the children of married couples do better at school and have fewer emotional and behavioural problems, also acknowledges in Whitehall-speak that ‘an absent parent can be associated with adverse material and emotional outcomes’ for the children and ‘by definition lone parent families are cut off from some family functions’.

True, and if that is so what is the result when no parent is readily available for the child?

Affordable childcare can be helpful for families when used in proportion. But children’s first need is for parental time, commitment, emotional engagement and stability (known by ordinary people outside Whitehall as ‘love’) none of which can be properly provided by state-sponsored childminders.

It is revealing that the DCSF chose the family time of Christmas to send out its anti-children Christmas card. Government departments and ministries are regularly being reorganised and renamed as part of the ministerial game of musical chairs. Next time, how about the Department against Children and Families? Ed Balls will continue to be the right man for the job.

I suppose it’s inevitable. Our natural rage at the unbelievable cruelty meted out to poor Baby P has to find a focus. We must vent our anger so we call for blood. Besides the guilty parents, people in power are a natural target; someone must be pilloried, someone must be shamed and someone’s head must roll. So Sharon Shoesmith, director of children’s services at Haringey, has been suspended, and would have been summarily sacked if Children’s Minister Ed Balls had his way.

In Newham we’ve had our own experience of failure to protect a vulnerable child. On 7th January 2002, while the Laming enquiry into Victoria Climbie’s death a couple of years earlier was still sitting, two-year-old Ainlee Walker (Labonte) died at the hands of her Plaistow-based parents. She suffered from hitting, scalding, burning and starving, had 64 scars, scabs and bruises and was half the weight of the average child of her age when she died. It was utterly awful. It received huge publicity although it stayed in the shadow of the Climbie case.

On that occasion the subsequent enquiry report got it right, pointing up systemic failures in Newham rather than individual inadequacies. No-one was forced to resign.

It appears that, besides the parents, it was again the failure of the system that caused Baby P’s death, but this time it is a different kind of failure. With Victoria Climbie and Ainlee Walker it was failure caused by the lack of proper co-operation and co-ordination between the agencies working in the child protection field. With Baby P it is failure caused by the process-driven, box-ticking, target-meeting culture that dominates and controls local authorities and – in the case of children’s work – distances social workers from their clients.

The fact that the mother of all box-tickers, Ofsted, recently gave Haringey’s children’s services the maximum three star rating (and, astonishingly, was appointed as one of the three agencies that authored this week’s report on Baby P’s death) says it all. Haringey managed to correctly tick Ofsted’s boxes and meet their targets; hence the glowing report. But slavishly filling in monitoring forms and mechanically meeting targets doesn’t save babies’ lives.

We’ve got to create a climate where local leadership and initiative is valued and personal relationships are fostered. The social worker must become free from the strait-jacket of process and the tyranny of form-filling, and enabled to look flexibly at each situation on its merits.

The issue is partly about trust. If we think that social workers on the ground generally are trying to do a good job, we will trust them and encourage them. If we think that they are not and cannot, then we will continue tying them up in red tape and getting them to jump through bureaucratic hoops. Their energies will go into satisfying the pen-pushers rather than helping their clients, and their relationships with both managers and clients will be wooden and ineffective.

I guess the director had to go. But the central problem wasn’t Sharon Shoesmith.