To the Point - Who speaks for centres?

Parents in Stoke saved seven centres from closure, while the Daycare Trust and netmums are starting to mobilise more widely. But nothing has yet materialised on the scale of the visceral opposition to the sell-off of England's forests. Nor have the children's centre campaigns found their Philip Pullman. The celebrated author's eloquent, passionate and often scathing denunciation of Oxfordshire County Council's plans to close many of its libraries has become a viral internet hit.

This surprises me. I always thought that children's centres had, in a very short period of time, put deep roots down in popular sensibility and attachment. The fact that middle class parents use Sure Start centres - commonly cited by Conservatives as a distortion of their original purpose - seemed to me a very good guarantee that they would be protected against cuts. Political theory textbooks tell us that those parts of the welfare state used by the middle classes are the hardest for cutters to reach: services for poor people become poor services, as the saying goes, but not those in which a majority of the population has a stake.