Steve Bell, brilliantly, conflates the Fathers 4 Justice and the Toffs For Hunting in The protesters in the Commons
As far as the Fox Hunting issue. Banning fox hunting is the right thing to do, but not at the expense of Parliamentary time for legislation that improves the human lot.
That having been said, one of my reasons for banning hunting is the evidence offered up over the years of hunts going wherever the scent takes them - across railway lines, through school playgrounds, across arable land etc. More prosaically, when I was doing agricuture audit, I decided to shut my mouth and open my ears on the issue, and to my astonishment as a Townie, I discovered that livestock farmers viewed hunting as an impractical way of culling foxes.
As for the Fathers for Justice, it has been quite amusing reading in the tabloids - the tabloids, not some feminist liberal chattering class paper, the tabloids - about the nature of some of these guys: convictions for assault and criminal damage against the mothers of their children, convictions for indecency, neglect of the children of their current relationship, boasting of sexual conquests in front of young children...Delightful.
Apropos of the Buck House protest, Jimmy said that on TV they showed a group of Batman's supporters cheering him on, including one drinking from a can of beer. My instinct as a politician/protestor is to laugh at the bad PR. His instinct as a father is a somewhat deeper condemnation.
Of course, there are situations - of which I have anecdotal evidence -where non-custodial fathers struggle against the efforts of the mother to even get to see the children, and they have my sympathies. But the thrust of these people's campaign is that the system conspires to prevent them from seeing their children except, perhaps, in supervised access. They ignore the anecdotal evidence of the courts failing to restrict the access of violent or abusive fathers, to the despair of the mothers, who have witnessed the violence and abuse.
And then there are non-custodial fathers who fail to understand their responsibilities, believing that all they need to do is shower their child with presents and trips to McDonalds and that makes them a father. Even though they don't know the names of their kid's teacher or best friend, or don't see the point of visiting the kid if it's recovering from an appendectomy.
And then there's the 'silent majority' who struggle to make those horrendous round trips every other weekend, who make those, ultimately unsatisfactory phone calls, and who spend their time trying to maintain their relationship with their children rather than staging stunts.
