You would not want to go into a general election promising to match pound for pound the prospectus of your enemy. And you would not want to announce a new agenda to the absolute indifference of the nation's media. But that is what has happened to the Conservatives.
On 28 March Michael Howard presented the Tories' childcare policy, announcing that the party would give an extra 250,000 families 50 a week towards childcare (see news, p4). Questions? pleaded Howard. He was answered by the mass media's total silence.
However, the Conservatives' childcare proposals are interesting. They are an index of how far we've come - how far mothers and childcare professionals and providers have persuaded the world of Westminster that this is one of the great issues of our time.
The Tories' problem is that they can't transcend their own history as a privatising, patriarchal party. Under their proposals, the 50 a week will go to families regardless of the type of childcare they use, formal or informal. And grandparents will be eligible for 'grants, credits and other benefits' if they look after two other children who are not their family members.
The Tories' notion of state support for such 'informal' networks merely reveals the lack of institutional childcare networks. Their cliche of community disguises the dangers to children of unregulated and unsupervised childcare. Their mantra, choice, is merely an alibi for the lack of it.
What appears to affirm family webs merely relies on relatives as a private resource, often in the absence of public provision. Tories hail the informal and the ad hoc to hide the lack of strategic and structural investment.
What appears to underwrite community-based childminding is now past its sell-by date, as childminders themselves are resisting the ad hoc and informal and insisting on minimum standards of training, registration and remuneration. Did the Tories bother to consult childminders before proposing a programme that sounds more like cost cutting than investing in quality care? Their offer of a 10,000 nursery start-up grant to companies is risible: what are they thinking of, a DIY conservatory in the car park?
When Howard announced all this on that disastrous Monday, he invoked his own experience. Bringing up children is one of the most rewarding things you can do in life, he said. Except he didn't do it because he spent 'long hours at the office... not getting home until very late'. Worse, he noted, his children's generation were struggling with the same dilemmas. And whose fault is that?
