04.04.1996

On the hit list again

Junior health minister John Bowis’s new adoption bill may seem at first glance eminently reasonable. Especially given the debates that went before.

But we should be careful in breathing a sigh of relief. John Redwood’s scapegoating of single parents has been taken firmly on board in the thinly veiled rhetoric of the bill. So too, it seems, by all the bourgeois commentators, who have focused on the problems of placing children in adoptive families but have totally accepted the anti-single parent agenda.

John Bowis’s concern to “promote adoption” as an alternative to “bringing up an unwanted child” is accepted as perfectly reasonable. He is, after all, not talking about forcibly taking children away from their parents ... yet.

The very fact that children of single parents should be considered “unwanted” is horrific enough in itself. For many the love of a child is the only genuine love they can experience in the inhumane conditions of society today.

Single parents are targeted as ‘unsuitable’ in an attempt to shroud the real problems - the harsh reality of bringing up children for anybody today. It has come to something when children are considered a burden. When people are unable to extend their love due to being overwhelmed by the nightmares of unemployment, lack of childcare facilities, isolation and poverty.

Charles Murray in America provides a pseudoscientific argument terrifyingly reminiscent of the eugenics movement. His book The Bell Curve is not the ravings of a mad scientist but is being used as a rationale for the Republican political agenda - benefits create dependency, therefore get rid of them and only the fittest will survive.

There is a lot more behind John Bowis’s bill than bourgeois pundits are able to admit. Just this week single parents are again in the front line of attack. It is proposed that those who are supposedly ‘defrauding’ the much hated Child Support Agency should have 40% of their benefit removed indefinitely and should be subject to unannounced swoops on their homes, according to an unpublished memorandum sent to the Commons social security select committee.

Creeping social engineering by an intrinsically antisocial state is already having disastrous effects for human beings, but worse nightmares are already forming part of the accepted political dialogue.

Linda Addison