Monthly Archives: June 2010

Thinking the unthinkable

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Frank Field’s feckless fathers, by Melissa Benn Posted in: PF blog

11:09 am, 30 June 2010 | Melissa Benn

For as long as I can remember, Frank Field has been thinking the unthinkable. Now part of David Cameron’s cost-cutting team, some old ideas are being re-cycled in a new supposedly culturally and politically sensitive form. His proposals, however, will face some very familiar problems.

Single mothers have long been in the firing line. Remember Peter Lilley and his 1992 conference speech about having a ‘little list…of benefit offenders I’ll soon be rooting out’? Thatcherite Britain was defined by its class-based distaste for ‘babies on benefit’.

This time, however, the argument is more subtle. Field clearly thinks it is a woman’s job to raise children and the man’s to provide for her. He blames a generation of ‘upwardly mobile very successful women’ for trying to drive young mothers into work.

But Field doesn’t quite grasp the fundamental shift in women’s lives. Yes, many mothers prefer to spend the early years closer to home; some due to lack of educational and work opportunities. But many don’t, including the wives of most of our senior politicians. You can’t design a 21st century benefit system around a 1950s model of motherhood.

Either way, you certainly won’t help poor mothers who want to bring up their own children with proposed reductions in housing benefit or the slicing away of the baby tax credit, the toddler tax credit and the Pregnancy Grant.

As the unexpected star of the recent budget debate, Yvette Cooper, presumably one of the upwardly mobile women Field is referring to, taunted her opposite number Iain Duncan Smith, ‘At least Margaret Thatcher had the grace to wait till the children (were) weaned before she snatched their support‘.

But fathers too are being scrutinised in a new way. Thatcher set up the once ill-starred Child Support Agency to chase feckless fathers for payment. The new plan is far harsher: cut the benefits of those dads who won’t get back into work.

Once again, the coalition will run into trouble. A fresh and surely expensive (not to mention ignominious) layer of government will be needed to prove DNA and the outcome of one-night stands.

The other huge but as yet unspoken part of the jigsaw is unemployment; not just the chronic worklessness in areas decimated by structural and political changes of the Thatcherite 1980s but the hundreds of thousands of job losses coming our way.…

Labour contenders give it a twirl…..

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Read Melissa Benn’s latest piece on the Labour leadership contest, here, in this week’s Public Finance.…

Five ways Labour might change

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Read my latest Comment is Free post on the Guardian website about ways Labour might change following its electon defeat.

The idea for the piece first came to me after I went to a local Labour Party meeting, following the election; like many people, the election itself and Labour’s relatively narrow defeat reminded me of where my political values and ultimate loyalty lay ( not that there had ever been any real doubt, as those who know me well often complain!)

I had not been to a local Labour Party meeting for decades, and although I was impressed, as ever, by the stoic commitment of activists and councillors and the fact that the party was holding the meeting on the local estate, I soon felt defeated by the proceduralism and nit picky aspects of the meeting. I wandered home, thinking about the many ways that the local Labour party might connect up with other groups and campaigns, and draw on the enthusiasm and willingness of many who have limited time. Most people just can’t or won’t make the space for endless meetings when they have work/kids etc. Although I have always been politically involved, one way or another, I know I am one of them.

I talked to a few people I know who are far more involved in local party campaigning than I am and it became clear that these ideas are taking off post election around the country; also that many local parties are already implementing similar proposals. They know it’s a case of change or die. But it was a close friend with a sharp political brain, and limited patience, who read my last draft and rang me to say, ‘you can’t really talk about local democracy without mentioning the way the leadership have marginalised and ignored views they don’t like, despite the National Policy Forum’, a body often derided as toothless.

I knew my friend was right. If I didn’t mention this more brutal political reality, the ideas in my piece risked appearing anoydyne. Put another way, activism is pointless if it a) doesn’t put pressure on those with power and b) there are mechanisms to make those in power take note aka political accountability.

So that’s a bit of the background, for those who are interested………..…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

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The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

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Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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