We move in to a new year clearer than ever about that faded flower, New Labour, once vaunted as light on ideology and heavy on pragmatism and joined-up governance.
Its promise for a third Labour term in Government is to put childcare high on its list of priorities. But ask yourself if that election pledge makes this a pro-child Government.
Somehow that feels like an unsettling question without an obvious answer.
Although the ten-year strategy for childcare is unprecedented, it does not come as part of a programme for childhood and childcare, it does not touch the Government's approach to the protection of children's health and well-being, and it does not inform its approach to childcarers, to their working time, to women's wages, to childcare as a career, to law and order, housing or traffic.
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