Dale Vince believes that “we all have a right to move on and not be looking over our shoulders”. He isn’t specific, unfortunately, about quite who “we all” are. All people? All men? All fathers? All parents? Vince moved on in 1984, when his son was a year old. He didn’t move on leaving the baby alone in an empty house. He cannot possibly believe that “we all” have a right to do that, can he? He moved on leaving his son and also his stepdaughter in the care of their mother, which rather put the kibosh on Kathleen Wyatt’s right to “move on” herself. So it seems that by “we all” what Vince means is “I”.
Moving on worked out well for Vince. He lived as a new-age traveller for eight years, his trailer powered using a wind turbine. From these modest beginnings, he established the green energy company, Ecotricity, which has gone on to make millions for him. Why he doesn’t see that his freedom to make his own fortuitous choices in life was dependent on Wyatt remaining his son’s primary carer is anyone’s guess.
But he doesn’t. On the contrary, Vince insists that he owes nothing to Wyatt, because he didn’t have any money to give her when the kids were children. He says that by retrospectively making a claim, she is “cashing in an old lottery ticket”. He seems entirely unaware that it was he who cashed in a lottery ticket, by starting a family then moving on.
In defence of his position, Vince has forced Wyatt to go all the way to the supreme court. This week, it ruled that Wyatt does have the right to seek a settlement, and the case is now to be heard in the family court. Vince complains that the case has already cost him £500,000 in legal fees. If he prefers to give the money to lawyers rather than to the person to whom he owes a carefree youth making experiments in living that turned out to be lucrative, then more fool him.
Vince, ever the guardian of the safety of others, warns that: “This could signal open season for people who had brief relationships a quarter of a century ago.” But that is an absurd claim. Parenthood isn’t a “brief relationship”, even if Vince got to live his life as if it were. When you start a family with someone, that person becomes part of your family, and you become part of theirs. Divorce may end the legal relationship between two adults. But it doesn’t hack branches off family trees. Nothing changes those. Genealogical fact simply isn’t something you can “move on” from.
A separated family is still a family, and like all families, these can be happy or unhappy, depending on how willing people are to try to be fair about how much they give and how much they take. No one leapt to her defence, a couple of weeks ago, when a judge told Tracey Wright that she should “get a job”, because it was obvious that Wright wasn’t at all interested in being fair to her former husband.
He had applied to the courts for a reduction in the £75,000 a year he’d been handing over to the mother of his daughters for six years, because she appeared to believe that this arrangement ought to go on indefinitely. The sum is now to be reduced over another five years, while Wright starts the task of supporting herself.
Wright, in contrast to Vince, seems to think she should have the right to refuse to move on. The pair are at the two extremes of the same problem. Much as it grieves me to admit it, the problem is that these uncouplings have not been conscious. Vince needs to become aware that if somebody else brings up your child for you, then you should show some gratitude and generosity to them. If you can’t do that at the time – well, it’s never too late. Wright needs to become aware that gratitude and generosity are precious things that should not be abused.
It was a good laugh when Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin announced that they’d be separating, but in a considerate and careful way. But there the entertainment ended, because neither of them show any sign of heading to the courts, and hence to the front pages. Divorces are only ever high-profile when there’s lots of money involved, which makes it seem like normal people with normal finances have little to learn from them. But these two cases, particularly, are very illuminating.
To me, they capture the central paradox of family-starting, which is that there is never a guarantee that a couple will stay together, and always a guarantee that even if their relationship lasts five minutes, the family it created remains until-death-do-us-part. Never set up home with someone who might be unable to accept that at some point you might not want to live with them any more. But never start a family with someone who thinks a family is something you can “move on” from either. Vince and Wright have taken different things from their former partners. But they’re both takers. That’s never an edifying spectacle.
• This article was amended on 27 March 2015. An earlier version said ‘He seems entirely unaware that it was he who cashed in a lottery ticket, by starting a family then casually absolving himself of all responsibility for looking after it’. However, the judgment says from about 1994, when Dane was 11, Dale Vince, occasionally gave his son ‘pocket money during periods of contact; that once he bought a computer and a desk for him’.
Source:- http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/13/dale-vince-moved-on-from-child-divorce
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