Fathers’ rights in British Law – a political scientist’s frustration

Dr Bruce Newsome is a political scientist, a former policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, and a father. He has spent years investigating the injustices of the UK family court system and has written extensively on fathers’ rights. He sat down with me this week to explain what is happening to parental rights in Britain and what needs to change. I would urge you to watch the full interview here.

Newsome’s starting point is blunt. Family law in Britain, he says, “attracts very little attention, and this infuriates me”. The injustices are real and documented. The statutes, he explains, “do not recognise any rights for fathers or mothers in particular”. Instead, the law “sets up the inherently antagonistic position that one parent is… a primary carer and the other parent is a secondary carer” – a framework that in practice overwhelmingly disadvantages fathers.

The consequence, as Newsome spells out, is “not just a chronic problem of children growing up without parents, it’s children growing up without fathers”. That has “particular consequences such as propensity to crime, particularly for boys, and particular propensity to drop out of school”. Data drawn from the Millennium Cohort Study shows that by the age of 14, 46% of children in Britain are not living with both natural parents. Almost a quarter of families with dependent children are now headed by a single parent.

This matters, particularly now, because the Courts and Tribunals Bill is removing the legal presumption that a child benefits from contact with both parents. Clause 17 strips away the default assumption in section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989. Why remove the only statutory recognition that children benefit from knowing both parents? To ‘send a signal’, the Government says. That signal was articulated by Baroness Levitt KC: “Being a parent is a privilege, not a right”.

Meanwhile, the Re Y judgment of February 2026 laid bare a system in which a mother lost all contact with her children for five years on the evidence of an unregistered psychologist. Considering this, the Government should be focused on fixing broken processes.

Newsome has clear policy recommendations: “statute needs to be rewritten so that both parents are granted equal rights”, and he would “criminalise alienation”. Research from the University of West London found that 59% of separated parents report experiencing alienating behaviours. Even using the study’s most conservative measure, that projects to 768,000 families and over a million children affected. The government refuses even to recognise the problem.

At C4M, we know that strong nations are built on strong families. And real marriage is the strongest foundation any family can have. When a government chips away at parental rights while presiding over the lowest marriage rates since records began (excluding Covid years), it is not protecting children, it is abandoning them.