When children's minister Margaret Hodge announced a year ago that the Government was thinking about parenting classes, she was greeted with predictable bile by free-market ideologues.
Their obsessive anti-statism had them roaring 'nanny state'. Harrumph, they fizzed, when Ms Hodge, with unusual candour, backed up the proposed parenting classes with her own experience: 'I remember going home with my first child. It's so exciting. Then you get home and you haven't a clue.'
The free marketeers' website, Unpersons, protested that she had no idea how to bring up her own kids, so we shouldn't be surprised that she regarded 'every other British parent as equally clueless'.
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