Daily Mail, 11 December 2003

Next to kissing babies on the stump, announcing a raft of measures targeted at improving the lot of children is the stock-in-trade of politicians with an eye to populist appeal.

It also wrong-foots the opposition. For who but the heartless, it might be thought, could possibly object to funnelling public money into child welfare, especially at Christmas-time?

Doubtless, this kind of calculation was not a million miles from the Chancellor’s mind when Santa Gordon pulled out of his pre-Budget sack a list of apparent goodies for children: a doubling of childcare places and the creation of 1000 new children’s centres; an increase in child tax credits; tax breaks for employees whose employers contribute to childcare; and help with child care costs in parents’ own homes.

This programme, however, is not about the interests of children at all. It is rather a radical agenda to reshape the family, to make parents increasingly dependent upon the state, and to undermine them by giving the government more and more control over the care of children.

The whole thrust is to increase ‘childcare’. By this, the government does not mean care by parents -- the one thing that’s really important and yet is not provided for. Instead, it’s all about getting mothers out to work and paying other people to care for their children. As the director of the Daycare Trust said yesterday, Gordon Brown is the ‘childcare champion’.

He meant it as compliment. But ‘childcare champion’ is not the same as ‘children’s champion’. For many years now, the most extravagant claims have been made that it is actually better for children to be looked after in day nurseries or by childminders than by their own mothers at home. But in fact, daycare does not have overall a clean bill of health.

True, some children from multiply deprived homes do benefit from extremely well resourced daycare. But research also indicates that children who spend long periods in daycare from an early age are more likely to have behavioural problems than infants cared for by their mothers. Young children benefit from an intensive relationship with a single constant carer. But in many daycare centres there is an alarming lack of personal contact between staff and children.

With no consensus on whether daycare is good for children or not, it is essential that a level playing field should give parents the choice of whether to work or not.

But the reason daycare is being pushed so hard is nothing to do with the needs of children, but an ideological obsession with getting all women out to work. So there is no choice. Instead, the whole system of benefits and incentives – including child tax credits – is loaded against mothers staying at home.

Widespread protests by women at such an oppressive policy led the Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to deliver an apparent recantation, saying ministers had been wrong to give the impression that stay-at-home mothers were worthless and that all women should get jobs.

Yet at the first opportunity to correct this mistake, Gordon Brown has merely delivered more of the same. Not only does it discriminate against women’s desire to do the best for their children, but under the camouflage of ‘help for children’ it actively undermines their parents.

It is simply staggering that Sure Start, the programme which will deliver the new children’s centres, is almost entirely devoted to replacing parental independence by state-approved child care. The children’s centres will provide not only daycare but ‘parental outreach’, family support, a base for childminders, and a ‘service hub’ for parents and providers of childcare.

The message this gives is that the care of children is a collective activity to be supervised and run by the state, which knows how to bring up children better than their own mothers who should be sent out to work instead.

In Delivering for Children and Families, a report published by the government a year ago, such intended state interference in family life was made crystal clear when it announced: ‘The government is developing an overarching strategy for all children and young people from conception to age 19’.

How have we got into a situation where the government is now boasting of such wholesale intrusion into personal freedom and independence? The answer lies in an unholy alliance between a number of separate agendas.

First and most important is the feminist agenda to reshape family life to give women independence from men by making them all self-supporting, thus undermining the idea of ‘pooled’ resources which is the economic basis of marriage.

The government was aware, however, that family disintegration was an immense and growing problem. Prevented by the feminists from supporting marriage, it had to be seen to do something else to give the impression it was supporting family life.

This is where the Chancellor’s own preoccupations entered the equation. Gordon Brown has an unshakeable belief that paid work is the panacea for all ills. He also wants to redistribute money from the better off to the poor. But redistribution sounds too Old Labour. Far cleverer and safer to talk instead about ‘ending child poverty’. The outcome was that the issue of family life was redefined as the issue of children. This had the advantage of appealing to everyone.

So the solution to poverty and family breakdown –uniting the feminists and the Treasury -- was to get lone mothers out to work and provide mass child care. But by targeting lone parents for such help, and removing financial support for married couples, the government has provided a financial incentive for lone parenthood, making child poverty and disadvantage all the more likely.

For even with these huge subsidies, lone parents will still be poor and children will still be hugely disadvantaged from not being brought up by both parents. The real solution to poverty and the emotional disadvantage of children is for mothers to marry men who are paid a family wage. Instead, the government has created a single-parent family wage. The result is that in the lower reaches of the income scale, the family has been redefined as a mother and children, with a man as an optional extra who is actually discouraged from being a responsible father.

The grotesque apotheosis of this approach is the proposal to give teenage single mothers £5,000 of free nursery care to encourage them to go back to school and ‘get better jobs’. It is, in fact, a £5,000 incentive to teenage motherhood – resulting, no doubt, in such girls being sucked into the Sure Start childcare and parenting ‘support’ system.

The childcare strategy is not some benign aberration. It is a throwback to the Marxist idea that social life should not be rooted in the family – the bulwark of independence from the tyranny of the state – but in the state itself.

Taken with other initiatives such as parenting orders or the National Family and Parenting Institute, it represents a vast intrusion by the state into private lives, while at the same time destroying the only family structure in which the state has any legitimate interest.

It is, in short, nothing less than the progressive nationalisation of childhood and of family life itself.

Posted by melanie at December 11, 2003