Childcare: an inconvenient truth

Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that, of course, is not how they are seen by liberals today. They are regarded immutable, inviolable, permanent and not up for argument. This is especially the case when they are demonstrably counter-factual, such as in the claims that a rapist is a woman, or when they are truly stupid – such as it being OK for a black actor to play a white role but not for a white actor to play a black role. These are not simply the ‘clothes of a season’, we are told, but the inevitable consequence of Progress, and there will be no going back from them. 

State-provisioned childcare is one such consequence of liberal ‘progress’. You will never hear anyone argue against it. They may say that we can’t afford to pay for it, but they never question the aspiration – the desirability of everybody to enjoy free or cheap childcare. In 40 years of hearing this subject being debated I have never, ever heard anybody making the case against a greater availability of childcare, nor question the aforementioned aspiration. It has become one of those inviolable shibboleths associated with liberal progress and thus must not be questioned.

So let me question it for a while. The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has just announced a ‘childcare revolution’, giving parents 30 hours of free childcare for brats from nine months and over. The only arguments against this benevolence on the part of the taxpayer have been structural, or complaints about whether it goes far enough. Hunt wishes to cloak himself in an agreeable array of liberal garments, but also to hasten the return of women who have had children back into the workplace, because we have an acute labour shortage.