Do fathers no longer have ANY rights at all?

Fathers denied legal rights to see their children after a break-up. Grandparents dismissed as causing ‘damage’ to their grandchildren when they ‘interfere’ in divorces.



The reforms to family law proposed by the Government’s adviser on families reads like some poisonous feminist tract from the Sixties.



David Norgrove’s Family Justice Review is a misguided piece of outdated, sexist nonsense which enshrines in law a mother’s unassailable right to raise her children — alone.

Misguided: The Family Justice Review by David Norgrove is outdated, sexist nonsense

Mr Norgrove decrees that fathers should have no legal right to enjoy time with their children when a relationship ends. He even says that for a father to have a ‘meaningful relationship’ with his children after his marriage breaks down can do ‘more harm than good’.



He claims his review is all based on what’s ‘best for the child’.

Yet he ignores decades of research that shows children from broken homes benefit from maintaining a stable, constant relationship with their mothers and their fathers, as well as with their extended family.

As Iain Duncan Smith says — and countless parents who’ve been through the agony of a divorce know — these reforms would ‘fuel the epidemic of fatherless families’.

And there is a terrible irony here: successive governments have, quite rightly, gone to huge efforts to ensure fathers from broken relationships support their children financially. Now they are being told that, despite that support, they will have no legal right to any access.



Few of us have been untouched by the break-up of a family, whether our own, our children’s or a friend’s.



I’m not saying all fathers are paragons — the sad truth is that both mothers and fathers use their children as pawns for maximum leverage in divorce negotiations. It’s just that the law as it stands gives women the upper hand.



In the bitterness of a divorce, some women use every dirty trick in the book to deny decent men access to their own children. I have even known normally sensible women, egged on by their divorce lawyers, to claim falsely that their husbands abused them, so as to deny them access to the children.



I’ve seen successful career women claiming poverty or even quitting work to screw every penny out of their children’s father, yet still deny him access.



Guilty till proved innocent is the dictum for dads in the Family Law Courts.

David Cameron has long promised his will be the most family-friendly government in history. He can prove it by condemning Mr Norgrove’s unjust Anti-Family Review and enshrining in law the right of every decent father to a fair share in the raising of his children.

Amanda Knox was seen with a mystery man on the anniversary of Meredith Kercher's death

Meredith Kercher’s family marked the fourth anniversary of her death with utter sadness. ‘We now live without reason,’ says her sister Stephanie, who lit a candle at 9pm on the anniversary of her death.

Meanwhile, Foxy Knoxy celebrates her freedom and the date of her friend’s death in a public clinch with a new man. If nothing else, she is guilty of gross insensitivity.

A pale Kirsten Dunst seen enjoying the sun in Las Vegas

Tans are out. The new fashion for women, as demonstrated by Kirsten Dunst in a teeny black bikini at a swimming pool in Las Vegas, is for alabaster.



Kirsten, the reason we slather ourselves with St Tropez before a holiday is that we normal-sized women look like beached whales without a tan.

Whenever we hear of a person who lives past 100, we always want to know the secret to a long and contented life. The Duracell sisters Hilda Greening, 107, Jean Underwood, 104, and Mary Hunt, 97, sum it up succinctly — they were all happily married.

Stung by criticism that cuts have disproportionately hit working mothers, Home Secretary Theresa May announces her new initiative — a Dragons’ Den-style mentoring campaign to help women set up their own businesses.

Politicians just don’t get it, do they?

Ordinary women with kids and part-time jobs don’t have dreams of running a company. They just want to keep their families afloat.

John Bercow is unfairly slammed for spending £3,700 on two bespoke suits for his duties as Speaker of the House. Give him a break — pygmies can hardly buy off the peg.

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls defends his offensive gesture in the Commons to the PM —which looked like a Nazi salute — as being a way of showing that the economy is flat-lining.

With those weird swivelling eyes and a despot’s zeal to take over the world, Balls looks more like a member of the Hitler Youth than a future British leader.

Kirstie Allsoppy!

The way to keep a man is to cook for him says Kirstie Allsopp

The secret of a happy relationship, says the TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, is never to talk about serious issues with your man until you’ve fed him.



After seven years with him, she’s desperate to marry Ben Anderson, the father of her two children. But he says he can’t ‘find a time’.

She defends him by saying that he buys her expensive presents.



That’s what men do for their mistresses, Kirstie.



Perhaps rations of bread and dripping in the Allsopp household would bring him to his senses.

A recent report says it’s actually women, not men, who dislike being cuddled — putting to bed, so to speak, the notion that females crave affection as opposed to sex in the bedroom. Rubbish! We all know that when he says ‘I just want a cuddle’, that’s the last thing on his mind.

Not so equal rites

Lynne Featherstone MP is keen to see gay weddings allowed in churches

Despite guarantees it would never happen, the prissy and odiously politically correct Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone has announced that gay civil partnership ceremonies will be allowed in churches.



Why? Stonewall, the gay rights lobby, has not campaigned for it, though they obviously welcome the move. None of my gay friends, even those in civil partnerships, have been asking for this change.



How long will it be before we have a test case under the Human Rights Act to force churches to marry gay couples?



Let’s just hope the first case concerns a couple who want to get married in a mosque.

Mr Demi Moore woke up one night and wrote a long list of how he could save his marriage. He pledges to cut back on Twitter and devote more time to Demi and their shared Kabbalah religion.



But where on that list was his promise not to share a hot tub with a bevy of naked groupies and then have sex with one of them?

According to his sister, Apple boss Steve Jobs’ final words before he died were: ‘Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow!’



‘This is what I learnt (from his death),’ she said. ‘He was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.’



Having watched my own brother die from cancer — he also left a wife and children — I can assure you that there is no ‘Wow’ factor in death.

Backbone is the real X Factor

Kitty Brucknell has been accused of racial abusing another X Factor contestant

The X Factor’s Derry Mensah says he is so shocked after fellow contestant Kitty Brucknell called him an ‘evil black b******’ that he’s ill with stress. ‘I’m still in shock — it was very hurtful,’ he says.



Appalling though the comment was, such sensitivity does not bode well for a young man who wants to be a pop star.



At this rate, he’ll be checking himself into the Priory after the first bad review.

On a trip to Denmark to promote Unicef’s work for the starving in Somalia, Prince William was given a taste of Plumpy’nut, a high protein, peanut paste designed to help feed malnourished children. He immediately offered it to Kate. Perhaps even he’s worried about his shrinking wife.

Silly Steph is so dippy

Gleefully predicting a double-dip recession just days before it was announced that the economy actually grew (albeit modestly) in the third quarter of this year, the BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders used her ‘Stephanomics’ blog to warn us all of impending disaster.



How can we take her seriously when she miscalls the economy so badly and shows off on a blog with such a silly, self-aggrandising name?

