You always have to be alert with this Government, whenever it does something about children. The new Children and Adoption Act exemplifies its tendency to reel and rock under populist pressures.
Populism presents itself as common sense - what you think without thinking, the thoughts that come from habits embedded in our culture. Populism always seeks to restore traditional authority, the old order.
The children's agenda has, more often than not, been animated by fear of children, or rather fear of what children might become.
The access/contact arrangements proposed in the legislation, which has just received its second reading, typically respond to pressure from traditional power - men - faced with the radical reform of their position within the family.
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