No one knows what to do about the Child Support Agency. My critique last week prompted the comment: what is the alternative? It is apparent that no-one really has one.
Moving the CSA's functions to the Inland Revenue seems obvious, but even the advocates of that option caution that the Revenue messed up tax credits and is burdened by the merger with Customs and Excise. Could the Revenue cope?
Meanwhile, bounty hunters are to be dispatched to track down the 100,000 men not paying child maintenance.
This rough justice masks a deeper disrespect in Government circles for those caught in the CSA trap - people on benefit. Or to be more precise, mothers on benefit. But perhaps their dilemmas are telling us something important about ourselves as a society.
First, a third of non-resident parents (a.k.a fathers) contribute nothing to their children. But the CSA debate is not about fathers, it is about a failed state agency that attracts the derision that used to be reserved for the railways and mothers-in-law.
So, the readiness of a third of fathers to disappear from their children's lives isn't a conversation worth having, it seems, except in the raging columns of the patriarchal Daily Mail.
The Government's reckless moralising about parenthood has always been rather misogynist. It is really about mothers; it is mute about fatherhood, whatever that means, as Prince Charles might have put it. Why? Could it be that this Government will only tolerate a debate about masculinity when it is about low-life men, and not the cultures that sponsor ordinary, boring, regular mainstream masculinities?
We are talking about a third of non-resident fathers.That constitutes critical mass among non-resident dads, enough to qualify as mainstream. Is it inconceiveable to launch a great debate, a cultural revolution among men in general, and their collective responsibility for children?
Second, the CSA crisis draws attention to a historical anomaly. Children are deemed the private burden of parents, and yet they are wrapped in public regulation, from tax, to school, immunisation, road traffic...
But public regulation does not seem to extend to shared public responsibility. The CSA crisis exposes the limits of that private deal between men and women, sometimes merely a sexual moment. It should prompt a new paradigm about public parenting - a tax regime that collects and re-distributes adequate income to all children and their carers.
