Lloyd Evans

Balls’s god delusion

Ed Balls has had enough.

• From magazine issue: 23 January 2010

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The greater fallacy is the ‘god delusion’ to which commissars like Balls are prone. They flatter themselves that the answer to every problem is the ministry and its omnipotent cohorts. Ministries are extraordinarily self-centred organisms. They’re too ready to believe that a press-release aired is a problem solved. And they adore large bureaucratic gestures. Balls plans to print 600,000 copies of a ‘Dad’s Guide’ which will help new fathers understand their obligations. Soon, he hopes, our runaway dads will be poring over government tips about ‘why dads matter’, ‘sharing chores’ and ‘keeping a good relationship with mum’. All sensible, intelligent advice, no doubt. But Balls and co haven’t twigged that the dads they want to target — unemployed, drug-addicted, sexually nomadic — are completely unresponsive to sensible, intelligent advice.

In any case, the values Balls wants to instill in fugitive fathers are not specific to parenthood. Discipline, self-sacrifice, ‘sharing chores’, loyalty to one’s kin, living within one’s means — these are the duties of good citizenship. A dad who believes parental responsibility ends the moment the condom bursts isn’t going to become a good citizen overnight just because some minister somewhere wants him to do so and has written 120 pages of stuff begging him to change his ways. If a government decree could turn sin into virtue, we’d have cracked wrongdoing in Sumerian times.

What Balls seeks here is the illusion of action. Vast quantities of cash, ink and paper are about to go up the chimney so that the minister can hail a successful ‘outcome’ expressed in a happy statistic. The number of parenting manuals is about to double. One for mum, one for dad. Balls can then claim to have increased his efforts to tackle bad fathering by 100 per cent, while 600,000 glossy tomes head for landfill. The real Balls ‘outcome’ is this: all the good parents have clubbed together to pay useless bureaucrats to let bad parents off the hook.