Government sleepwalked into sleep-in crisis
Yesterday MENCAP announced that they may have to withdraw from providing support for more than 2000 adults with learning disabilities unless the row over back pay is settled. The debate around funding the future of social care often focuses on older adults and their associated medical needs, especially when we face ...Segregation isn’t the answer to sexual assault
Chris Williamson MP has re-ignited the debate around women-only train carriages after he suggested they could be a possible solution to the rising number of sexual assaults being reported on trains in the UK.The idea of women-only carriages was previously put forward by Jeremy Corbyn shortly before he became Labour ...
Tough love for a better future
The 2015 Spending Review: cultural consequences
1. Shock and awe: essential
The 2015 Spending Review requests that government departments set out plans for reductions to their Resource budgets.[1] More specifically, they have been asked to model two scenarios, of 25% and 40% real term savings by 2019-20.At first sight the ...
Illness as a career choice
The author is a physician with a practice in the North-West.It is vital that those suffering from disabling health conditions are well supported by the welfare system. However it is my belief that in some cases well-meaning welfare provisions can end up having severe unintended consequences.As a physician I have ...
Who will save us from the well-intentioned do-gooders?
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who ...
Early Childhood Development proponents want the state to become carer as well as provider
Laura Perrins is a former barrister and part-time Teaching Fellow in criminal law at University College London. You can follow her on Twitter @LPerrins. Yesterday I attended an ‘All Party Parliamentary Group for conception to age two’ with Andrea Leadsom MP, Frank Field MP, and the Rt Hon Dame Tessa Jowell MP ...
Ministers have to value stay-at-home mothers now their worth has been established
Stay-at-home mothering might just be a lifestyle choice for George Osborne but ‘informal’ childcare turns out to have an economic tag of £323 billion – equivalent to 23 per cent of GDP. So why hasn’t he or any of his Ministers mentioned it? Why the reluctance to reconsider what counts ...Childcare: what childcare? Dr Spock must be turning in his grave
CPS Research Fellow Kathy Gyngell writes on the move away from parenting to 'childcare' carried out by unfamiliar professionals. Today’s political imperative to ‘meet the childcare challenge’ is not about childcare at all. What the politicians are really talking about is child management on a mass scale to ‘free’ (another euphemism) ...
An incomplete revolution or the start of counter-revolution?
The BSA 30th report manages, despite its evidence of new trends, to put a feminist spin on changing gender attitudes among women:“In the mid-1980s, close to half the public agreed, “a man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family”. Just 13% ...Where are all the feminists now?
On ‘gender selection abortion’ feminists cannot have their cake and eat it. To retain any vestige of credibility or morality they have to condemn it outright and now, writes Research Fellow Kathy Gyngell. After a summer of anti-misogynist tirades, outrage over the wage gap and evermore demands for gender parity - ...Is Dave just too modern for marriage?
David Cameron has proved a reluctant groom on the question of married family tax breaks. It is hardly surprising that yesterday’s most recent ‘promise’ has been condemned as too little and too late, writes Research Fellow Kathy Gyngell. Mr Cameron wants to be seen as very modern while Mr Clegg, whatever ...
Men need families
On Thursday, Diane Abbott delivered a lecture at the think tank Demos on “Britain’s Crisis of Masculinity”. She put an important subject on the agenda. By telling us that “loving families are a benefit to men” she made a good point. But by focusing on masculinities, rather than men, she lost some important facts in ...Budget 2013: One earner families are now under siege
George Osborne’s reformed ‘modern’ state finds the family on the brink of extinction and one earner couple families under siege argues Kathy Gyngell. Liz Truss’s nanny subsidy policy announcement yesterday (£1200 pound per child for couples earning up to £300,000) put paid to any hope that the Coalition would honour their promise ...High quality affordable universal child care is a myth and Elizabeth Truss has, unwittingly, exploded it. That’s why her deregulation proposals have offended our sensibilities.
The hard headed Elizabeth Truss must be wondering what has hit her. Ever since the Resolution Foundation Report, published last October, the word is that the cost of childcare is forcing mothers, unwillingly, out of the work force; that childcare here is more expensive here than in Europe; that maternal ...
As a small ‘c’ conservative, I couldn’t support Alec Shelbrooke’s welfare cash card idea
Several people have asked what I make of Alec Shelbrooke’s idea for a Welfare Cash Card. The Tory MP introduced a 10 minute rule bill to the House of Commons on Tuesday, which suggested that a cash card could be designed such that welfare recipients could not spend their state ...