Daily Mail, 16 October 2003

Excuse me, there must be some mistake – I can’t have heard the name correctly.

Patricia Hewitt, the Trade and Industry Secretary, has said the government has undervalued women who stay at home to bring up their children instead of going out to work. Labour ministers had given the impression, she said, that stay-at-home mothers were worthless and that all women should get jobs. This had been a mistake.

Come again? This is Patricia Hewitt talking, the most ferociously feminist member of a government which, since its inception, has discriminated against mothers at home and spent billions in bribes to get them all out to work.

It must surely count as the most spectacular recantation since Archbishop Cranmer denied his belief in Protestantism.

This is the government, after all, whose Gender and Equality Unit said only four months ago that even mothers of young children should go out to work. They should take paid jobs, it declared, to help the economy and pay back the cost of their education. And it claimed there were 'real problems' over women who stayed at home to bring up their children.

Who is the minister responsible for this unit? Why, none other than Ms Hewitt. In her own foreword to this Orwellian diktat, she said women needed to increase their ‘economic participation’ in society. Now she would have us believe she regrets such sentiments.

What hooey. Ms Hewitt has form in this matter as long as your arm. In 1990, she was one of the authors – along with the Solicitor General Harriet Harman and the former Women’s Unit official Anna Coote – of a pamphlet entitled The Family Way.

This mounted a concerted attack on the stay-at-home mother and the breadwinner father, an arrangement it dismissed with contempt as entirely outdated. Women, it ordained, must not be economically dependent upon men since that meant men had power over them at home, were more likely to be violent and would stop women from leaving them.

It said mothers wanted and needed both to work and to care for their children. Fathers should accordingly do half the housework and should not contribute more than half the family’s income. What was essential to bring about this happy state of affairs was a huge progamme of state-sponsored child-care.

The Family Way was not only a manifesto for the destruction of the traditional family. It was also a blueprint for Labour government policy, which has followed its prescriptions almost to the letter.

Just as it suggested, the government has introduced a huge programme of child-care support. In addition to massive subsidies for child-care provision, the new tax credits give thousands of pounds to working mothers to spend on child care.

In addition, single-earner families are discriminated against by the tax system which, because partners are treated independently with each entitled to a tax allowance, leaves dual-earner families significantly better off.

Ms Hewitt claimed that the tax credit system had been changed to give more money to stay-at-home mothers. But this is highly disingenuous. Yes, such mothers get a few hundred pounds, but this pales into insignificance beside the thousands of pounds available for working mothers to spend on child- care. The signals could not be clearer.

It was not her job, said the Trade Secretary, to preach. But this is nothing less than an agenda to redefine motherhood and fatherhood, financially penalising traditional women of whom the government disapproves and rewarding instead mothers who have paid jobs.

Hatred of traditional family life dripped from every page of The Family Way. Now Ms Hewitt- who herself is twice-married – has said that ‘what makes people happiest is a good marriage, a good family life’. Yet in 1996, she informed us that marriage ‘no longer fitted’ in Britain.

Economic pressure was therefore employed to eliminate what Ms Hewitt saw as an outdated way of life that made women financially dependent on men. This tied in with Gordon Brown’s belief that the only route to salvation was through paid work. The Treasury thus became the instrument of ultra-feminist ideology.

The government has repeatedly claimed that all mothers want to work. But this is very far from the truth. A survey this week showed that only one per cent of mothers would choose to work full-time after having children, and only one third would be happy to work part-time. Most said that being away from their children so much in their early years would make them so anxious and guilty they would rather be a full-time mother.

This is hardly a new finding. Survey after survey has shown that the majority of working mothers take jobs not from choice but out of financial necessity. Even ministers discovered this in a consultation exercise in 1999, when women told them in no uncertain terms that the government did not value stay-at-home mothers. Yet it has resolutely overriden what women actually want, intent instead on forcing a shift in work patterns and the shape of family life.

Ms Hewitt’s decision to don her hair-shirt and ritually abase the government’s record is hardly a genuine conversion. It is much more likely to be part of the Prime Minister’s attempt to repair the damage done to his government’s image among dangerously disillusioned voters.

Tony Blair knows he was brought to power by the decent, responsible, orderly classes, who believed he had given them a commitment to protect their security, well-being and way of life. It is these people whose trust and patience he has squandered, and whose anger he must assuage.

Hence this week’s loudly-trumpeted initiative on anti-social behaviour; and hence, undoubtedly, the ever-pliant Ms Hewitt’s nostra culpa.

But this is just yet more spin. These words are not matched by equivalent deeds. There are no new policies, nor any change in policy.

Indeed, the announcement on anti-social behaviour was mainly notable for the complaint by both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary that all their myriad policies to tackle this scourge were being ignored. There was no recognition that without a much more radical approach – getting rid of the Human Rights Act and the Children Act, for example, or tackling family disintegration – their impact on anti-social behaviour would remain minimal.

As for mothers and work, nothing is changing. The incentives to work and the disincentives to staying at home remain in place. If Ms Hewitt’s remarks were sincere, they would usher in a policy to give women real choice about working. That would mean a tax and benefits system that created a level playing field between women who stayed at home and those in paid jobs.

The fact is that her emollient words were an object lesson in cynicism -- in character with someone who has ruthlessly re-invented herself from being Neil Kinnock’s loyal aide to becoming the impeccably Blairite Cabinet minister.

Ms Hewitt says she wishes now she had spent more time with her children when they were small. She thus poses as on the same side as stay-at-home mothers. It is about as believable as Lucrezia Borgia expressing regret for the people she had poisoned, and announcing she wished she’d taken up knitting instead.

Posted by melanie at October 16, 2003