Monday, October 30, 2006
Labour targets the insidious family (Again)
The Daily Mail reports here on the latest initiative against "child poverty" quite what is meant by this in the UK is a mystery to me and the proposal isn't to send children to work so they might earn some money.
My reading of the "initiative" is that apparently two-parent families have been getting along "under the radar" as it were and haven't come in for too much attention from the benevolent state. Shock horror, it appears as if some parents have been not working in order to look after the children when as everyone knows, the state is best entrusted with this task.
"...mothers will be encouraged to hand over their children to state-run nurseries and go out to work under Labour's latest drive combat child poverty." Yes, well most of these mothers will be working in low paid jobs, which may then lose them entitlement to other benefits so quite how this is an attack on child poverty I don't know. Of course if you define poverty as lack of interaction with the state then I suppose it fits, and if that is the definition I wish I was far poorer.
Unsurprisingly, there's no assumption in the report that mothers might actually want to look after their children, possibly regarding it as far too an important task to entrust the state with whilst they go an work on Tesco checkouts.
The socialist infatuation with work once again surfaces in this report produced for Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton. I can't be bothered to go through the article, but even the Daily Mail seems to have adopted some of the presumptions as the reporter allows a lot of what is said to go unchallenged.
The whole thing is very wrong. The state has no real role in childcare at all. Nil, nothing, not even in education, the state should not be involved. It is up to parents to make necessary choices. There are strong moral arguments that the community should provide say in the case of orphans or other hardship cases and I don't disagree with that, but that doesn't make it the task of the state.
This is a thinly disguised agenda to reduce the influence of the family in bringing up children. Statists like Hutton want everyone to be free from any influences they cannot control, the Orwellian nightmare approaches.
My reading of the "initiative" is that apparently two-parent families have been getting along "under the radar" as it were and haven't come in for too much attention from the benevolent state. Shock horror, it appears as if some parents have been not working in order to look after the children when as everyone knows, the state is best entrusted with this task.
"...mothers will be encouraged to hand over their children to state-run nurseries and go out to work under Labour's latest drive combat child poverty." Yes, well most of these mothers will be working in low paid jobs, which may then lose them entitlement to other benefits so quite how this is an attack on child poverty I don't know. Of course if you define poverty as lack of interaction with the state then I suppose it fits, and if that is the definition I wish I was far poorer.
Unsurprisingly, there's no assumption in the report that mothers might actually want to look after their children, possibly regarding it as far too an important task to entrust the state with whilst they go an work on Tesco checkouts.
The socialist infatuation with work once again surfaces in this report produced for Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton. I can't be bothered to go through the article, but even the Daily Mail seems to have adopted some of the presumptions as the reporter allows a lot of what is said to go unchallenged.
The whole thing is very wrong. The state has no real role in childcare at all. Nil, nothing, not even in education, the state should not be involved. It is up to parents to make necessary choices. There are strong moral arguments that the community should provide say in the case of orphans or other hardship cases and I don't disagree with that, but that doesn't make it the task of the state.
This is a thinly disguised agenda to reduce the influence of the family in bringing up children. Statists like Hutton want everyone to be free from any influences they cannot control, the Orwellian nightmare approaches.
Tags: family, liberty, freedom
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
