The acute problems in politics, said Isaiah Berlin, are never a conflict between good and bad, where the choice is obvious. The real dilemmas pit good against good. At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday Jeremy Corbyn demanded to know what had happened to a government pledge on childcare. Though Mr Corbyn, as usual, lacked the wit to follow up his pertinent question with a punchline, he had stumbled on an issue which illustrates two great weaknesses of British politicians: the tendency to promise too much and the refusal to confront hard choices.
All over Whitehall, things are no longer happening: the EU referendum is consuming all the government’s energy. That’s not surprising because David Cameron’s promises on childcare are nugatory if Britain votes Leave on June 23. Mr Cameron will be gone before you can say “ever closer union”. In the meantime, as the leader of the opposition noted, no progress is being made towards redeeming the prime minister’s pledge to provide 30 hours of free childcare a week.
This promise was the price of the auction that occurred in the last election campaign. The fallacy that political campaigns lead to political outcomes tempts politicians into reckless pledges. Hark at the way Gordon Brown invented a British federal structure simply because one opinion poll suggested that the Scottish referendum was close, which it never really was. Look at the way that the Conservatives were frightened by their poll numbers last year and were spooked into outbidding Labour’s promises on childcare, though not before mocking them as unaffordable. Now, in government, with growth fragile and a tenacious deficit, the government is finding that their first response was the right one.
The Conservative childcare pledge exhibits the classic unintended consequences of state intervention in a market. Childcare is a mixed economy in which the paying customers subsidise those who receive free care, which is only partly funded by the state. The problem in poor areas, with fewer paying customers, is now spreading everywhere. Even though the governm
“A warehouse will keep a child safe but not help them do better
ent has committed £350 million a year, there is more money going out than coming in and the result is misery. The delicate balance between underfunded “free” places and slightly overfunded places paid for by wealthier parents has been disturbed. Entitlements have run ahead of funding which is why more than half of childcare providers say they will not offer the extra hours, even if the government presses them.
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The obvious move for a government that is not scared of the opposition, chiefly because it doesn’t face any, is to cancel the promise. To turn it into an aspiration, a hope, a “perhaps one day”. However, the issue of childcare may not disappear so readily, because it is the critical policy at the junction of a hard political choice. Labour came to power in 1997 with the insight that the welfare state was barren in the early years of a child’s life, which are pivotal for their future prospects. A set of reforms, notably the Sure Start programme, was established to fill the gap and a rolling academic evaluation began.
From the beginning, though, there was a confusion between the two goods built into the policy. Was it, essentially, a method for enabling more women to work? Britain has a poor record of female employment, especially among single mothers. The lack of reliable childcare is one reason for that. Therefore, as long as a safe environment can be provided for children, mothers can work. Quite apart from the extra money that comes into the household, which is invariably spent on the child, this is usually good for the mother herself.
But there is another good which this policy does not serve. The objective of maximising the life chances of the child is not only different from that of increasing female employment, it demands a different policy. If your primary concern is the child rather than the mother then the required childcare will be more expensive. A supervised warehouse will keep a child safe and warm. But their development requires highly-qualified staff. As labour is 80 per cent of the costs in any case, better personnel will be very expensive.
The reason this choice matters is that the prime minister is letting it be known that, once he has got a successful EU referendum out of the way, he intends his legacy to be an assault on the inequality of life chances in Britain. It’s a noble mission but has no chance of fulfilment, not least because he has so little money and it cannot be done without spending a great deal. The error-in-waiting of British politics is to suppose that austerity will run all the way through to 2020.
The defining moment of this parliament will be when George Osborne stands at the dispatch box and declares: “I am happy to tell you that today is the day we call time on austerity.” This is a political, rather than an economic imperative, which is why it will happen before the next election, no matter what the numbers say.
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That does not mean, though, that the government will find the £20 billion a year required for a childcare system that would make a substantive difference to the lives of poorer children. Mr Cameron’s task will be to set that as a goal for his successor and then lay out the path.
British public spending, all £750 billion of it, is organised as if deliberately to frustrate the ambitions of the least well-off. If spending were planned with the good of equal life chances in mind, then it would be heavy at the start of life, gradually decline through schooling, fall away precipitately during university and all but disappear thereafter. In fact, we do the opposite. Public spending takes off just at the moment it ceases to make much difference.
The second act of a life is a romantic idea but our destinies tend to shut tight early on, after which they harden into all we’ve got. You have to catch kids before they fall. If Mr Cameron is serious about life chances he needs to be serious about childcare and braver about the welfare state’s excessive generosity to pensioners. Cradle, not grave. It is not that one is good and the other is bad, just that some goods are better than others.