Gordon Brown's pre-election budget released last week is, without doubt, historic. Brown promised a family-friendly welfare state for the first time, and a children's centre in every community.
This breaches the Blair version of New Labourism: the retreat of the social state and the expansion of the strong state as the scaffolding around children and families.
Brown does not echo the misogyny and mother-blaming in old New Labourspeak, the moralism that addressed children as objects to be patrolled and policed.
Being Brown, he can't bring himself to honour mothers and admit that the problem with the foundation of the welfare state was that it was patriarchal. It was predicated on men in the public world serviced by dependent wives in an unpaid private world.
It is the revolution in relations between the genders over the recent decades that has demanded the reform. Politicians, of course, can't acknowledge that rapport with women must make them, belatedly, address this issue.
But there is no doubt that Brown has been taken to this place by his own experience as a parent, and by the discovery of a resource, and by a crisis.
The resource is the world of women, and the growing community of childcare professionals in both the public and private sectors.
The crisis is the gap between Britain's childcare culture and our European equivalents: the exhaustion of the average parent performing as a breadwinner modelled on a man with a servant (a wife); an unceasingly unfair division of labour between men and women and Britain's long working hours; the reality that Britain is an inhospitable, impoverished place for children; and childcare that costs as much as a mortgage.
New Labour has registered that all of this could cost it the 'women's vote'
in the forthcoming election.
But Brown is nothing if not New Labour. He will expand collective childcare, but protect business as private enterprise, as if business was outside society. His programme is both big and yet so slow, so modest and so vague.
He proposes 2,500 children's centres by 2008 - another election year, his appointment with the top job. He promises a children's centre in every community, but at this rate perhaps only a quarter of communities will be beneficiaries. No doubt he expects to be the political beneficiary.
But let's be generous: at last childcare is, as it should be, the big idea.
