International Men’s Day — House of Commons, 2020-11-19
Topic: Civil Rights
Philip Andrew Davies (Conservative, Centre-right): As I have said before, there are many areas where men are disproportionately affected that do not get enough focus in the House. This debate should be about highlighting those areas. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) for his speech. Unsurprisingly, I completely agree with him, particularly with regard to the points he made about the disadvantage and poor outcomes, especially in education, of white working-class boys—something that the politically correct lobby has brushed under the carpet for too long Just this week, Bradford Council has consulted on its latest equality plan. It has set targets for people in jobs, including one for 65% of its top 5% of employees to be female. I do not believe in quotas and targets. I believe that each job should be awarded on merit and merit alone, but even if we go along with all this so-called equality, where on earth is the equality in that target? The leader of Bradford Council represents a ward in my constituency with a high proportion of white working-class people in it, yet she is completely silent about that in her so-called equality plan, despite the fact that she must know the disadvantage they face My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield brilliantly defended good dads, and I want to echo that message. I know of men who have had their lives ruined because of a relationship breakdown, which has needlessly led to a whole family breakdown and, in some cases, a mental breakdown, too. I have talked about parental alienation before and do not apologise for mentioning it again. It is quite simply abuse, and the many people who have written to me with heartbreaking personal stories show how this happens all too often. It is abuse against the alienated parent—not just men—and against the sons and daughters of the parent. It also affects a whole host of people in the wider family I am pleased that the Government have taken some of my points on board and included parental alienation as an example of abuse in the draft statutory guidance for the Domestic Abuse Bill, which is going through Parliament. I hope the Government will continue to look at ways to prevent this, as it would make a huge positive difference to so many if it could be stamped out Finally, that leads me on to suicide. Men’s suicide has been a common theme of all the past debates on International Men’s Day, and rightly so. Suicide rates among men are three times higher than for women in the UK. The connection between relationship breakdown and suicide risk in western countries has been studied, and the data from those studies indicates that, unsurprisingly, relationship breakdown elevates suicide risk in both sexes, and more so for men. None of the studies apparently investigated the specific effect on the likelihood of suicide of fathers’ separation from their children, despite charities reporting that it is the overwhelming source of distress. It is quite clear to me that we need to do a lot more to ensure that fathers are not stopped from seeing their children, to save lives. In these covid lockdown times, it is too easy to imagine how this will be causing even more mental health problems and, unfortunately, more suicides.