Some friends and their 2 year old child are coming to stay: since I know there’s a history of dietary problems I check what they can and cannot eat. No dairy (relatively straightforward) and then for the boy, ‘he doesn’t have sweet things, no chocolate, but he does like fruit’. And I find myself thinking, ‘poor kid, he’s missing out on a lot’.

I can understand concerns about allergies and a wish not to encourage bad eating habits, but I do think that an attempt to ban all sugary food (or all ‘unhealthy food’) by parents is unrealistic and possibly counter-productive. What happens when some kind friend gives this child sweets for a treat: are his parents going to object to a well-meaning gesture? What happens when he goes to birthday parties or starts school - must every mouthful be monitored to ensure it involves no dangers to sound principles? How much does not allowing something give it an excitement not otherwise available? L, thankfully was not one of the 70% of three year-olds who could identify the McDonalds logo. Instead, I have tried to keep eating fast food as merely an option, neither prohibited nor seen as a treat. We do not buy her sweets, but we get given enough to keep plenty in stock for intermittent consumption. At parties she may eat almost as unhealthily as she likes, but she can’t expect that kind of food regularly at home. We will have to see whether this works in the long run, but it seems rather more practical than food fundamentalism.

I have been thinking recently about a particularly irritating article by Roy Hattersley on religion and morality (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1969058,00.html). He complains that in a TV discussion about AIDS in the Third World, a Christian panellist, Anne Atkins, said that the problem would not have arisen if people had followed Catholic teaching on sexual behaviour. Hattersley goes on:

But it is not the sheer stupidity of the comment that should offend us. It is what it reveals about the workings of one sort of Christian mind. By all means succour the needy, but first point out the moral of their plight. The wages of sin is death.

We must hope that, in this particular at least, Ms Atkins's views are not representative of modern Christian thought. But she did demonstrate a universal truth. Religious convictions have a hard edge. Those who break God's laws must accept the consequences. It is no good people of the Atkins persuasion saying that they help as well as judge the sinners. Once there is the idea - even at the back of the censorious mind - that the victims have brought it on themselves, the relationship between helper and the helped changes.

I will say right away that I don’t like Anne Atkins or share her views and I don’t agree with the Catholic church’s stance on contraception. But Hattersley’s idea that it is censorious ever to think that people might be partially responsible for some of their own suffering is ridiculous. ‘Actions have consequences’ as L’s (non-religious) grandmother puts it. If a drunk driver injures himself in a crash, is it wrong for the paramedic cutting him out of the wreckage to judge him? Christianity doesn’t teach either that particular individual suffering is necessarily deserved or that wrongdoing will necessarily be punished on earth by God, but sins (in the sense of wrongful acts), do normally harm in some way either the sinner or his/her neighbour. Abstinence and faithfulness are part of the solution to dealing with HIV infection, as well as condom use.

Hattersley can argue that the ‘victims’ of HIV infection mustn’t be blamed for their sins because he doesn’t believe that unmarried sex is a sin. That is fair enough; he doesn’t have to believe that, as anon-Christian. But to claim:

It is no more reasonable to expect the people of Aids-ravaged areas to enter into formal unions than it is to argue that Bangladeshis on the Ganges delta could avoid flood and famine by migrating to higher ground.

is to say that people in South Africa, for example, are incapable of faithful monogamy, and to imply that for men in such areas to practice polygamy, to use prostitutes, even to rape young women in an attempt to ‘cure’ their HIV status must be accepted as blameless activities. In the specific case of the AIDS epidemic, I have some sympathy with Hattersley; I don’t think a focus on ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’ acquisition of the HIV virus is productive. But his wider belief that an ‘arbitrary moral code, which goes beyond care and compassion’ must be rejected threatens to make moral imbeciles of us all.

Hey, ho, here we go again. The Conservative party have rediscovered that married parents are better for children than cohabiting ones and therefore want to introduce tax incentives to encourage marriage. (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,1969105,00.html). Let’s quickly point out the obvious problems with this:

1) Are cohabiting couples readier to split up because they’re not married, or do they not marry because they’re readier to split up? In other words, is a ceremony and a bit of paper really going to make a difference to couples who are not particularly committed to one another?

2) Why do the Tories presume that relationships and family matters are influenced significantly by economic considerations? The fact that they are not is clear from the divorce figures. If people behaved in an economically rational way, 99% would not get divorced, because in 99% of cases both sides lose out financially with a divorce (The one exception would be where there are few assets and one spouse spends substantially more than they bring in).

3) How do they plan to use the tax incentives to encourage marriage? The only easy way to do it through the tax system is reintroducing the married couple’s allowance. However, this would involve a massive waste of money, because most of the money would go to people who would be married anyway (we would benefit, for example), and the income tax system cannot distinguish those who have children and those who do not. In addition, tax allowances benefit those on higher rates of tax most and those with very low incomes least. The only alternatives are to try and bolt it onto either child benefit (which would make a simple and effective payment more complex) or to use the child tax credit system. This would be the most targeted approach, but given the mess the system is in already (and the fact that the Conservatives object to the whole principle of this), this hardly seems a good idea.

So why are the Conservatives brining this old chestnut up again? Probably because they’re bankrupt of other ideas: there isn’t much more mileage in scapegoating lone parents for family problems and they daren’t look at issues of work and the family because they might then have to admit that modern capitalism is family unfriendly.