Are you unemployed? No decent jobs where you live? Rents too high? Can't afford the basics for your children? Don't worry — the government will send you on a free parenting skills course to find out how to bring up your children. If it doesn't work too well, and your kids end up hanging around on street corners in the evening — all the local cafés and youth clubs have closed down and they can't afford the fare or entry money to go to the cinema — the police now have powers to send them away.
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The state machine developing under Tony Blair and Co. is broadening and deepening its campaign and powers to intervene into the lives of workers in Britain, telling us what is good for us, and making us do it if we are unwilling. Meanwhile, they use the army to take "democracy" to other countries too ignorant or wicked to do it for themselves.
Childcare strategy
If you and your children are categorised as "disadvantaged" (i.e. poor) you are doubly likely to be pushed around and told what is good for you. Take the new 10-year strategy for childcare and early education announced in early December. Margaret Hodge, the children's minister, had just announced that there was no question about whether the state should intervene in people's lives: "For me it's not a question of whether we should intrude in family life, but how and when. . . The state can be a powerful force for good in families and communities and we should celebrate, not denigrate, its role."
So just what kind of intervention does Hodge have in mind? She announced further plans to extend the Sure Start children's centre programme, providing day care, education and health services for under-fives.
An authoritative government-funded long-term research project on which early years provision best enables children to achieve at school at age 7, known as EPPE (Effective Provision of Pre-school Education) is consistently showing that such integrated centres are good for children and families. EPPE also shows that the centres are best when well-trained staff run them, and employ qualified specialist teachers.
No surprises there then — and generally children's centres seem a good thing for workers and their children. But government has picked the bits it prefers from the research.
Local authorities have had some funding to help create children's centres, but so far only in Sure Start areas ("of high deprivation"). They have to be "self sustaining" so parents have to pay for the childcare element of the day (two-and-a-half hours' education per day is free).
There are no plans to improve wages and conditions for the staff — and childcare workers are so notoriously badly paid that, as they point out, they can't afford day care for their own children in order to stay in work. There is a significant turnover of staff in day care centres, because they can generally earn more at the Tesco's checkout.
Parent training
The central theme of the childcare strategy is "lifting children out of poverty". Government plans to do this by attaching training and education opportunities for parents to children's centres, and Jobcentre Plus offices. So while your child is being cared for, you are learning basic literacy and numeracy skills (which you should have learned at school), taking NVQs, and learning how to be a good parent. There is any number of parenting courses on offer: Happy Parenting, Healthy Living, Community Parenting, Childhood Illnesses, Managing Behaviour. Then you will pop into the Job Centre, and get a job.
Notice the fallacy in this scenario? Parents in the Sure Start areas are generally poor because there are no jobs. The utterly hollow heart of the government's so-called poverty strategy is that there is no mention whatsoever of decent, real, skilled work for people to do. And children born into families where nobody works do far less well at school, not because they are stupid or because their parents don't know how to bring them up, but because they live in families and communities where there is no assumption that the next generation will be able to work, that the future will be better than the present.
So instead of real training for real skilled work, parents attend classes on parenting and "life skills". The Sure Start centres running them are in the poorest parts of Britain, largely the ex-industrial regions, towns and villages originally laid to waste by Margaret Thatcher. There were jobs at one time — in mining, steel making, shipbuilding, the motor industry, engineering, and all the local jobs which depended on those manufacturing centres. Now they are getting the boot from this government. It bears repeating that more industrial jobs have been destroyed under Blair's government than by Thatcher's. Britain's true unemployment figures are hidden behind statistics about long-term sickness and disability, and the "economically inactive".
| Every baby a capitalist baby? |
| Does Gordon Brown think that being dipped in capitalism at birth will make us all capitalists? Every child born after 1 September 2002 is being entered into his baby bond scheme.
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| Two million parents are receiving notice that an initial £500 will be allocated to their child under the Child Trust Funds in 2005. This will be followed with an undisclosed sum in seven years' time. The baby bond can be allowed to be topped up to £1200 tax free.
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| The sum will remain in proscriptive savings accounts with complicated tax or tax-free riders until the child reaches 18 years old. The idea of putting hundreds of millions of pounds of workers' money into banks, building societies, savings schemes for up to 18 years must have the financiers drooling like babies.
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| Brown claims he will eradicate child poverty in this way. Fat chance. Better the money was spent on poor housing, health, road safety and heating — the biggest killers of children in Britain.
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Intervention
The true test of a government anti-poverty strategy would be the extent to which it prevents jobs being destroyed or being shipped abroad. Yet on this front this highly interventionist and interfering government shrugs its shoulders. Economic intervention to protect or promote British jobs, regulate rents and property prices, reduce transport fares, is not on the cards — remember Margaret Thatcher's "you can't buck the market"? Blair and Co. support the untrammelled working of the market — capitalism unconstrained — and capitalism means poverty like night follows day.
When it comes to capitalism, government likes to drone on about globalisation and forces beyond its control. Yet the state will tell you how to deal with your children's behaviour, what to feed them, how to play with them, which nursery rhymes to sing, how to deal with stroppy teenagers, and if you don't volunteer for the course it might even force you, with a parenting order.
Do we accept this? Remember John Major and his family values? He was laughed out of court — you only had to look at the way Tory MPs behaved towards their partners and kids. Yet now we have a government, which includes David Blunkett, determined to lecture a section of the populace about how to manage their families. Forget the right to a job with decent pay and conditions, with working hours that permit you to get home to collect your child from school and spend time with your family. Instead you are offered "extended schools" and "wraparound care" which enable parents with jobs to work long hours (the longest in Europe), with somebody else looking after their children.
Parent-friendly?
Why is it considered progressive and "parent-friendly" to have nurseries and childminders offering overnight care for young children (one of the new initiatives being funded)? And day care all through the school holidays? Are we giving up on the idea that mothers and fathers should have working hours that suit family life and enable them to spend time with their children? In future, grandparents will not be able to help out — they will not have enough pension to retire. This tells us something about the kind of future the state is planning for parents.
Or forget the right to a job at all. Even if you are unemployed, the state apparently prefers your young child to be out of the home. When Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke talks about "equality of opportunity", what opportunity is he talking about? Are young children best kept away from their feckless working class parents in the extended day care of a worthy children's centre? One prominent Labour backbencher was quoted in the press as saying: "The more you can get these toddlers out of their home into more stimulating environments, the better."
The government's apparent concern about the well-being of children in its childcare strategy is combined with a callous and brutal attitude to them when they grow up. Children are criminalised and locked up more under this Labour government than under any previous post-war administration, and more than almost any other industrialised country.
Overall, the number of under-18s in prison has more than doubled since 1993, in spite of a decline in the number of children convicted or cautioned for offenain has one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility in the world. The Prisons Minister informed Parliament in March 2004 that "inmates" in young offender institutions (under 21s) received an average of 7.1 hours of education a week. The official target is 20 hours.
Blunkett wants to put away even more of them. His Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003) purports to deal with "troublesome gangs". Yet it gives police the power to require any group of two or more young people hanging around a town centre (where are they supposed to go?) to leave. If they refuse or return within 24 hours, they can be arrested. If they are under 16, they can be taken home or to a "place of safety". These dispersal orders can be extended to six months. And children subject to Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (asbos), as young as 10, can be named and vilified in the press.
Our agenda
Our children deserve much better, but it is up to us to demand it and make sure they have a decent future. The children's centre programme could be excellent. It is already excellent, where the workers concerned have taken control and insisted on the best quality in qualified professionals, resources and buildings.
But they need to be built and run according to our agenda and not the government's — this is within our power. Part of the agenda needs to be unions insisting on a real future for Britain — the best possible "childcare strategy".
On a number of fronts workers have shown they are unwilling to be told what's best for them by Blair. We know what is best for our families — decent jobs in real British industry and manufacture.