'Yes, but...' This is the prefix to any discussion about what the present Government does about children. Childhood is one of New Labour's metaphors for other stuff: moralising about marriage, law and order, and the collapse of civilisation as we know it.
Sure Start is the classic example. Was it a family services prototype allocated to the most desperate, and therefore the most deserving; a template that with more time and money might be universalised? Or was it really a law and order thing, designed to interrupt the criminal career of the feral infants born to those deemed to be crap parents in the neighbourhoods from hell?
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