Families Need Fathers is to Fathers4Justice as Sinn Fein is to the Provisonal IRA.
Father 4 Justice is an Anti-Woman Domestic Terror Organisation.
Familes Need Fathers is their Political Wing.
Bob Geldof KBE has firm and proven ties to both groups, produced documentaries attacking mothers and women in general that downplay genuine and valid legal concerns about child protection and safeguarding, and is known to have been a major donor in the past.
Both groups will say they are unaffiliated with one another, but this is a lie.
Their monthly newsletter, McKennzie has overtones of NAMBLA (aka the North American Man-Boy Love Association), especially in regard to it's overtly cryptic Classified Ads section.
Familes Need Fathers is to Fathers4Justice as Sinn Fein is to the Provisonal IRA.
"In the fantasy novels, Harry Potter lost his parents."
Yes, because they were both murdered. By an aggrandised psychopath and Magickal race theoritician, for refusing to rally to his banner, join his cause and oppose his Sorceror Supremecist Revolution by means of Civil War, political assassination, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Exactly the same as all of Paula Yates' children, actually...
Perhaps they just threw that one in as an in-joke.
This week, J.K. Rowling showed a wobble - whilst doing extensive press relative to her (I believe sincere) support, in the form of a million pound donation to the subversive Crown campaign of anti-independence black propaganda, the Better Together campaign, she did so whilst expressing alarm at the sheer hardline level of brutality and fundamentalism the (seemingly never-ending) propaganda campaigns by both sides has now produced.
This is of course intentional - the longer wars last, the more nasty, bitter and corrupting they are, especially for the winning side.
I suggest that these two events, within days of one another, in regards to Rowling's charitable giving habits and public advocacy are not unrelated, but rather than the one comes by way of a warning, in this case to "Shut Up & Write, Bitch" (just keep sending the cheques) for her lack of militancy and perceived disloyalty on the other:
"Attack the one you can't reach - and protect the one, who IS The One, by paying other people to do the attack. Check?"
- Bro. Steve Cokely
"On the journey to raising my son alone I would have never predicted, imagined, realised or foreseen the amount of unspoken prejudice and lack of status and loss of financial stability, employment, childcare problems, little maintenance, a loss of home and respect that I was about to face on becoming a single parent for the first time at 29 with a 4 year old child. Make society realise that we didn't all get pregnant just to get a council house or to sit back on benefits. And most of us know who the father of our children is."
- Gingerbread member, April 2011
"...thanks to charities like Gingerbread and their President J.K. Rowling, over 4 million children have lost their father"
- Fathers4Justice Black Propaganda.
This is a lie. They have not "lost" their fathers - they do not currently reside full-time with their biological fathers. Many do not live with their mothers either. Some are orphaned. Far too many are trapped in the Local Authority Don't Care system.
But in no sense are their fathers (many of them mere sperm donors) "lost" - they have not gone missing.
Harry Potter's father was assassinated for his political beliefs - as was Harry's mother, in the same incident.
But Fathers4Justice would take the view in that fictional scenario that the bitch got what was coming to her.
They don't care about mothers, or families, or even children.
They care about fathers.
They only care about Men.
"Nearly twenty years ago (it’s a shock to me to write that, because it still seems quite a recent occurrence) I became a single parent. Like the vast majority of single parents, this had not been my plan. My much-wanted daughter had been conceived and born while I was married, but the failure of that relationship saw me living shortly afterwards on state benefits in the coldest winter Scotland had seen in quite a few years. I had been living in sunny Portugal prior to my return to the UK and the snow was merely the first shock to my system.
I had imagined that I would be back at work fast. Indeed, it was because I expected to be employed outside of the home again that I was working so hard to finish the children’s novel I never told anyone I was writing (not wishing to be told that I was deluded). As it turned out, my belief I would shortly be back in paid work turned out to be a much bigger delusion than the hope that the novel might be published.
I was a graduate and I had been in full-time employment all my life; I did not want my daughter to grow up in poverty, but my district health visitor told me that I would never get state-funded childcare ‘because you’re coping too well’; free nursery places for very young children were reserved at that time for children deemed ‘at risk’. I can’t argue with the prioritisation of children whose mothers weren’t coping, but I had nobody else to look after my daughter. My sister worked full time, my mother was dead, I was in a strange city: where was my daughter supposed to go while I earned a living?
I ended up working a few hours a week at a local church, where I overhauled the filing system and did a bit of typing. The (female) minister let me bring Jessica with me. I was paid, deliberately, exactly that amount that I could keep without losing benefits: £15. For all of this, I was immensely grateful.
My overriding memory of that time is the slowly evaporating sense of self-esteem, not because I was filing or typing – there was dignity in earning money, however I was doing it – but because it was slowly dawning on me that I was now defined, in the eyes of many, by something I had never chosen. I was a Single Parent, and a Single Parent On Benefits to boot. Patronage was almost as hard to bear as stigmatisation. I remember the woman who visited the church one day when I was working there who kept referring to me, in my hearing, as The Unmarried Mother. I was half annoyed, half amused: unmarried mother? Ought I to be allowed in a church at all? Did she see me in terms of some Victorian painting: The Fallen Woman, Filing, perhaps?
Single parents were not popular in certain sectors of the establishment or media in the mid-nineties. I could not raise a smile over the government minister of the time singing a merry ditty about ‘young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue.’ Newspaper articles discussed single mothers in terms of broken families and anti-social teenagers. However defiant I might feel about the jobs I was doing round the clock (full-time mother, part-time worker, secret novelist), constant bombardment with words like ‘scrounger’ has a deeply corrosive effect. Assumptions made about your morals, your motives for bringing your child into the world or your fitness to raise that child cut to the core of who you are.
Then, in a sudden, seismic and wholly unexpected shift, I found myself in the newspapers.
There was still no escaping the Single Parent tag; it followed me to financial stability and fame just as it had clung to me in poverty and obscurity. I became Single Parent Writes Award-Winning Children’s Book/Earns Record American Advance/Gets Film Deal. One of the first journalists to interview me asked me whether I hadn’t felt I ought to be out looking for a job rather than ‘sitting at home writing a novel.’ By some miracle I resisted the almost overwhelming temptation to punch him and subsequently decided to channel my frustration a little more positively by becoming a Patron of what was then called the National Council for One Parent Families (now Gingerbread).
In spite of the fact that I became a Married Mother again in 2001, I remain President of Gingerbread, a superb campaigning organisation for single parents and their children. Unfortunately, their work is as necessary as ever today, in a recession much worse than the one I faced when I returned to the UK in the 90s.
According to a Gingerbread survey in 2011, 87% of single parents think there is a stigma around single parenthood that needs to be challenged and one in three say that they have personally experienced it. I find the language of ‘skivers versus strivers’ particularly offensive when it comes to single parents, who are already working around the clock to care for their children. Such rhetoric drains confidence and self-esteem from those who desperately want, as I did, to get back into the job market.
A statement by a government minister late last year that ‘people who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks – they’ve got least to lose’ speaks to a profound disconnect with people struggling to keep their heads above water. In some cases – and I was once one of those cases – what you might lose is enough food to eat, a roof over your head: the fundamentals of life and existence, magnified a million-fold when it is your child’s health and security you stand to lose.
In the midst of all this, a further uncertainty is looming large for families already on the brink: the spectre of universal credit, the government’s flagship reform of the welfare system. Already Gingerbread is highlighting serious concerns. It’s all in the detail: the gaps in childcare provision for many of the poorest families, single parents under 25 to lose vital support for their children, the harsh truth that more single parent families will lose than gain under the new system – including many who work. This detail becomes hugely important if it’s the difference between eating three meals a day or going without.
Meanwhile the government mantra that work is the best route out of poverty is ringing increasingly hollow, with nearly 1 in 3 children whose single parent works part-time still growing up in poverty. Rather than focusing on ever more ‘austerity measures’, it’s investment in single parent employment that will allow single parents to work their own way out of poverty and secure real savings from the welfare bill. Nothing outlandish: affordable childcare , decent training, employers embracing flexible hours, and a long, hard look at low pay. I certainly identify with the results of a survey among single parents conducted last year which revealed that childcare costs remain the biggest barrier to work, closely followed by a shortage of flexible jobs: exactly the problems I faced when Jessica was young.
Government has the potential to change the lives, not just of single parents, but of a generation of children whose ambition and potential must not be allowed to dissipate in poverty. In the meantime, I would say to any single parent currently feeling the weight of stereotype or stigmatization that I am prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life. Yes, I got off benefits and wrote the first four Harry Potter books as a single mother, but nothing makes me prouder than what Jessica told me recently about the first five years of her life: ‘I never knew we were poor. I just remember being happy.’
