Osborne doesn't speak today until 12.30.
But he trailed a 20% subsidy for childcare costs as his great middle class give away in the budget and guess what? It looks like the first U turn will be coming soon.
The Tories hate it. It's unfair to mums who don't work, they say.
The Mail is ranting.
I have reservations about it: paying increased child benefit and keeping it as a universal benefit would have been so much more effective especially as this is so obviously a sop to those he's taking it from and has nothing to do with the lowest paid. But he'd already dug his own grave on that one.
It looks like we're in for another budget of cock ups and u-turns already. This mobs ability to see a bear trap when it's looming large in front of them is non-existent.
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probably missing something, but why does a Mum who dosent work need help with childcare costs, if they arent working then arent they looking after their children?
You have the feeling that the broader issues (austerity) are decided by whoever it is pulls Osborne’s strings but he himself’s allowed to play with relatively minor issues. It’s austerity itself which is damaging the country, to which the majority of people are beginning to awake now, but it’s from Osborne’s own efforts, one feels, that this endless stream of PR disasters are born. There’s the measure of the man. Difficult for the backroom players who control him because to be controlled in the first place he’s got to be an idiot, and when you’re trying to control an idiot you can’t expect him to be able to act in a sensible manner when the occasion demands it. One feels there’s an unspoken gritting of teeth coming from Conservative Central Office at times. With Cameron it’s when he’s speaking in the HOC and, up against it, tries to distract by telling obvious lies. With Osborne it’s whenever he speaks at all.
When are we going to fit the economic and social relations of the country around child-rearing?
I defy anyone to find a more vital or important ‘job’.. and yet there is this perpetual assumption that both parents should be doing a ‘real’ job and that very small children can be ‘farmed out’ without psychological costs. It should be a priority to invest in the future generation by paying any family, with a child under 7, a wage so that there could be real choices about stay-at-home parenting or working… with good-enough ratios of nursery staff being paid good wages.
It won’t be happening under George Osborne.
That’s because Osborne doesn’t see any need for future generations to be capable of anything other than servitude.
And his 2nd because he leaked the contents of the Budget to the Evening Standard – something for which Hugh Dalton resigned in 1947 – although I doubt Osborne will see the precedent. Would anyon trust journalists not to do a little insider dealing?