Monday, 5 August 2013



Family values suffer from the Not-the-Conservative-Party


With truly eye-watering illiberalism, the Government is once again trying to hammer family life into a shape that millions of us would reject.

It is expected to announce today that it will introduce an on-line voucher system that will subsidise up to one-fifth of childcare costs.

By one of those remarkable coincidences that brings a smile to a minister’s face, the day this happy news was judiciously leaked also brought a report that more than two million women are their family’s main bread-winner, equivalent to one in three of those who work.

With the cost of childcare going up and up, some might therefore hail the announcement of the voucher as an inspiring example of how ministerial hearts beat as one with the interests of the nation.

Unfortunately, however, there are one or two reasons why such hosannas would be wildly inappropriate.

First, this subsidy will be available to those on incomes of up to £150,000 a year. That means that even households with two working parents bringing in a joint income of £300,000 could end up receiving this support.

This is odd indeed for a Government that, at a time of supposed austerity, never stops telling us the better-off must bear a disproportionate share of the national pain.

The real downside of this childcare voucher, however, is that it is a subsidy for working mothers alone.
More than one million households in which mothers choose to remain at home to care for their children will get nothing. Far worse, this is part of a pattern in which such households are being punished financially.

A few months ago, the Government cut child benefit for single-earner families whose income was £60,000 a year, while allowing dual-income families on £100,000 to keep it.

It would seem, therefore, that ministers’ desire to push mothers into the workplace is so overwhelming that this effaces their other aim to soak the better off.

Yet beyond the metropolitan commentariat, this obsession is not widely shared.

Much, if not most, of the rise in the number of mothers working is not because they all want to do so. On the contrary, if they have young children, they often do not want to go out to work – but find there is no alternative if the household bills are to be paid.

That’s partly because of the financial discrimination against single-earner families of which the childcare voucher is but the latest example.

Surely, policy should be even-handed towards those who want to work and those who want to care for children at home.

The fairest way to rectify the state’s punitive treatment of marriage and one-earner families is through transferable tax allowances.

Yet the Government has broken its 2010 manifesto commitment to introduce just such an allowance. It has thus betrayed single-earner families several times over.

Indeed, it is grotesque that, with this new childcare voucher, families in which both parents work will get child benefit and childcare subsidy, while families where one parent stays at home to look after the children will receive neither.

Such a double whammy, resulting in widening inequality, suggests an active campaign being waged against mothers (for it is overwhelmingly women who make this choice) who choose to look after their children full-time.

And the even more crazy thing is that it is actually good for children and society if mothers care for their offspring while they are very young.

So one has to ask: what on earth can explain this obsession with getting mothers out to work? Or to put it another way, why don’t ministers value mothers who choose to look after their own children?

One is forced to conclude this obsession is purely ideological – and entirely un-conservative.

For the Cameron government is doing nothing less than continuing the campaign to undermine the traditional family that was such a hallmark of the Blair/Brown years.

Those Labour administrations did everything they could to undermine marriage by promoting lifestyle choice.

They did so not just by refusing to support married couples while maintaining financial incentives for unmarried mothers. They also remorselessly dismantled the irreplaceable framework of legal and social constraints that shored up marriage against the pressures working against it.

Closely allied to this campaign to undermine marriage was the corresponding push to get more mothers into the workplace.

As was stated explicitly by the cheerleaders of this militant tendency, Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, who had wormed their way into the Cabinet to implement this agenda, the aim was to deprive men of their traditional bread-winner role by turning women into the main earners instead.

And behind this particular piece of sexual engineering lay the belief, espoused by prominent feminists, that men were by and large so hopeless that women were better off going it alone and raising their children without them.

To achieve this, of course, women had to become financially independent of men. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that so many mothers are now their family’s main breadwinner.

Whether such women relish this status is another matter. But then, no one in government ever thought about what most women actually wanted.

What such ideologues believed was what women ought to want – and which the state should therefore provide.
The consequences of all this have been calamitous, for individuals and society. The anti-man animus on which it was based was as unpleasant and idiotic as it was destructive.

With men being told they were an optional extra to the family, they became increasingly unwilling or unable to settle down with the mothers of their children.

The result was countless women plunged into poverty, isolation and depression, and with more mothers and children exposed to physical and sexual abuse.

And though many lone parents do a heroic job, the cost to society –with fatherless children doing worse in virtually every aspect of their lives, demotivated men sinking into unemployability and the rising general toll of mental and physical ill-health within fractured households – has been incalculable.

If ever there was a conservative cause, a campaign against this willed destruction of the traditional family, the oppressively illiberal imposition of lifestyle choice and the outright malice displayed towards the single-earner married couple was surely it.

Yet, despite David Cameron’s pious declarations of support for marriage, no such initiatives have been forthcoming.

Every few months there’s another vague promise that he will introduce tax allowances for married couples. Not only does this never materialise, but his Government is actively penalising traditional families.

Indeed, when it comes to family life, the only difference between this Conservative Government and its Labour predecessors is that it has gone much further in undermining the traditional family – even dismantling the meaning of marriage itself.

Meanwhile, Mr Cameron is busily hiring various practitioners of the black arts of electoral manipulation in order to see off the threat from UKIP and spin his way to a second term.

But no such political sorcery can conceal the fact that, on this fundamental issue of the family (not to mention many others), David Cameron is the demonstrable leader of the Not-The-Conservative Party.

For if conservatism is not about upholding, promoting and defending the traditional family, then what on earth is the point of it?

Exactly. You may well say so. And we are all the losers as a result.

"Help has arrived in the form of a slim volume written by Helen Wright, a mother of three and respected headmistress of all-girls’ schools. Her book will come as a welcome relief, a bit like picking up a Delia Smith cookbook after years of flirting with Nigella Lawson or Heston Blumenthal."
The Times
Price $5.99


Posted by Britannia Radio at 21:48