You can tell a lot about a governdren. In Britain, a third live in poverty and only one in seven has a childcare place. The government rarely talks about children and young people unless it's to brand them as delinquents, as a threat.
It sanctions physical punishment calling it reasonable chastisement, almost the exact term used not very long ago to legally sanction the physical abuse of women.
The government is putting more money into childcare but only for those children whose parents go back to paid employment. Childcare workers are paid at minimum wage levels and are under-trained.
The government looked to private provision but that hasn't delivered and especially not in less wealthy areas where people can't afford the fees. The government often looks to the USA for its policy ideas.
What does the childcare of the US say about its government? Only one in ten lowincome children have a childcare place. What little there is, is targeted on the poorest so they can work and is means tested. ..
Salary levels for childcare workers are around $15,000, well below the poverty line. There's a 50% turn over rate, which affects the quality and consistency of care for the children.
A lot of childcare is informal and has been compared with kenneling dogs. In some parts of wealthy America of course, the dogs will get a better deal.
Poor women and lone parents have no choice but to give up their children to worse care than they would give them thanks to the 5-year lifetime limit on welfare.
The huge inequality and low wages in the US for working class and ethnic minority women means that the average working week of a lone parent in New York is 74 hours. To all intents and purposes, the parent and child hardly ever see one another.
Women who manage to get a career will find that there is no childcare. 40% of women in professional jobs are childless at 40 and not by choice. Certainly, they are financially better off than low paid women.
But if they give up work for seven years to look after children, they'll never catch up with men with the same qualifications. Lack of childcare increases class and gender inequality.
What about Europe? Denmark has some of the best provision, the product of a wellorganised labour movement, reformist governments and a view of children as citizens. Childcare workers have three years training. The job has high status and high levels of unionisation.
There's early help for children with special needs and families in crisis. It's a publicly funded, universal service. For the majority there is childcare from 12 months to 10 years. 10 years ago, there were 3,5000 on the waiting list, but now that's been reduced to almost none.
There's a range of childcare, for example childminders are the main form of childcare in rural areas. There's a lot of local decision making. Relatively speaking a good service.
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But it's under threat. The current government, following neo-liberal policies pioneered so enthusiastically by Blair in Europe, is reducing public expenditure on childcare so as to avoid raising taxes on the rich. Striking childcare workers are being supported by parents to save their children's services and to keep their own jobs or place in education.
• don't want to follow the callous US road of state sponsored child neglect. In Britain we want a publicly funded, universal service for all children, irrespective of whether their parents need the childcare to go to work or not.
There should be a range of flexible good .... Geeeee d quality childcare. Childcare workers reflecting the value of children's development and well-being, should be well paid and highly trained.
But we should also learn from the experi ence of Denmark. that what capitalism concedes at one time is never secure but can be taken away later.
The future for children in most developed countries is deprivation on the level of working class and ethnic minority children in the world's richest country, the USA, unless we fight not just against neo-liberal policies but against the whole capitalist sys tem which demands that working class children should be sacrificed for the benefit of the wealthy.