“Ci ha chiamati una nonna. Doveva andare in ospedale per una operazione rischiosa. Voleva prima rivedere la nipotina, ci chiese di aiutarla. La situazione legale era difficile, non riuscivo a trovare le parole per diglielo.  È morta la settimana dopo”

FROM MATTHEW O’CONNOR, FOUNDER OF FATHERS 4 JUSTICE

Dear Friend,

Please, spare a few minutes to read this short open letter.

As I sit here and write I have just come back from taking some time out to recover from an exhausting first year and a half of Fathers 4 Justice.

Nothing in my life prepared me for what has been a shocking and profoundly upsetting experience which I don’t mind admitting has had a deep effect on me. The relentless stories of suffering, the suicide calls, grown men breaking down in tears on the phone, the deaths, the cries for help that we
couldn’t answer in time – yet every story is nigh on identical. It is about parents separated from their children by the Family Courts.

On my return to an office, some of you questioned our tactics in flour bombing the Prime Minister.

I can tell you that this was a carefully planned action in a co-ordinated strategic campaign by Fathers 4 Justice. It is one of many and I personally sanctioned it.

I gave us 3 years to change the law when I started F4J. We are now at a half-way point yet no political party has picked up, adopted or fought for our children’s rights to see both parents. Justice is left in our hands.

As a result of intense lobbying and our exhibition at the Tory conference last year, EVERY POLITICIAN, OF EVERY PARTY, IS AWARE OF THE DAILY ABUSE OF OUR CHILDREN BY THE FAMILY LEGAL SYSTEM. And now also, everybody across the globe has heard of Fathers 4 Justice.

Without radical action, without mobilising an army of 20,000 parents – which after last week’s events appears to be a stunning possibility, we cannot create the change we need. That change cannot come from within the system. Civil rights history teaches us that the politicians are always the last to
‘fall’ as the dynamics of social change are powered by unique protest engines like F4J.

The politicians didn’t much like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Ghandi let alone Jesus Christ! But their tactics and strategy of law breaking was instrumental, as ours will be, in felling the giant redwood of injustice. And when the family law tree is felled, it will take the years of pain, misery and abject suffering with it.

So I cannot stand by and let our children and our children’s children be failed by our politicians, our Parliament or our democracy especially giventhe urgency of our campaign. We simply have no time to lose while others still persist in a policy of jaw jaw. Wake up! We are at war, a peaceful war but a
war still the same.

Some may criticise our tactics but the real venom should be reserved for the politicians who day in day out, knowingly allow this to happen without lifting a finger to remedy the situation. The only condemnation can be of this democracy and a Pugin-designed Ivory Tower filled with barristers, many
of whom have their fingers in the till in the first place. Barrister Blair, Charlie Falconer, Michael Howard……the list goes on.

And before anybody starts moralising, let us not forget that the party of the Prime Minister, the Labour Party was born of law breakers. The Tolpuddle Martyr’s, the banning of the Labour Party at one point, the Trade Union movement. So why this pious indignation about a condom filled with purple flour?

Our democracy was forged by law breakers, the suffragettes and others. Lord Hoffman who currently sits in the House of Lords recently said ‘we have a long and honourable tradition of law breaking in this country.’ Have we forgotten our history? Fathers 4 Justice is now making history by being part
of that tradition.

My duty – and your duty – should be to ensure that the catastrophic consequences unfolding before our eyes of mass fatherlessness and family breakdown are addressed. This is a dysfunctional government creating dysfunctional families and a dysfunctional society. F4J is now even providing a social care function on some estates where fatherless kids are running out of control. We are being invited into schools to talk about our work and why the breakdown of the family is creating a culture of indiscipline in schools.

I sat in a hospital recently amid the adult casualties of family breakdown. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’ said Philip Larkin in 1974. Christ, and these were people pre the present system. In 2004 we can substitute the word government for mum and dad.

This crisis strikes right at the very fabric of our nation and our democracy. We send fathers off to fight a phoney war on behalf of a country that does not even afford them that most basic of rights – the right to be a father. What is this? This is not my country, not the country that I believed in or the party I was born and raised on.

I am honour bound, like many others to break the law, not least for my two boys. Fathers 4 Justice is committed to peaceful non violent direct action. We have 22 brave men and women facing trial, maybe imprisonment in the coming months. Like civil rights movements before us ‘sacrifice’ is the hub in the wheel of change.

Guy Harrison and Ron Davis are brave and courageous men who risked everything, whose homes were raided, whose liberty they laid on the line – for you, for me, and for our children. Your children, along with the many, many others in F4J. It is a crying shame that so few of us are prepared to fight for our children and that is why for the last 30 years, for all the pathetic tea parties and back slapping in between, we will face another 30 years of injustice without the struggle of Fathers 4 Justice – ordinary mums and dads doing extraordinary things.

If you think we are wrong. I ask you to think again. I am prepared to let history be our judge and I ask you to do the same.

Again, I am sorry if we have lost your sympathy but we cannot change the law with sympathy.

A grandmother called our office a few weeks ago. She was going in to hospital for a potentially life threatening operation to remove a tumour. She was beside herself with uncontrollable grief on the phone. She asked me what help I could give her to help her see her granddaughter through the courts. Given the circumstances of the case the answer wasn’t favourable. I could barely reach the words at the back of my throat to speak to her. She died the following week.

If you had seen what you had seen with our eyes. If you had heard what we have heard with our ears, if you had carried the crushing weight of human suffering on your shoulders, you would understand why we must break the law. And if that means prison. So be it.

Thanks you for reading this.

Best Wishes

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2012 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Per i bambini. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.