The ideological pressure stoked up by the right wing press and media, together with their own innate social conservatism and religious bigotry, has been sufficient to ensure that New Labour has attempted only the most limited reforms to deal with the oppression of women and the continuation of institutionalised sexual discrimination.
Single parents (mostly women) have been picked out by New Labour and blamed for many of society’s ills. Instead of recognising that poverty leads to ill health, poor parenting and desensitised young people, single parents have been castigated and scapegoated and targeted to lose benefits unless they are prepared to take the worst paid jobs.
The slow progress of limited and belated moves to extend the provision of affordable nursery places, after-school and youth clubs, to enable more women to find work reflects the real priorities of government: to hold down state spending, and force working class women into low-paid work regardless of the impact on them or their dependants.
Families with two parents are not much better off. With the employed in Britain working the longest hours of any European country, most families can only survive with both parents working, and many in this situation work unsocial hours. The Daycare Trust’s recent report revealed nearly 25% of the workforce working at some point between 6pm and 6am, including 15% working all night. In this situation parents are often too tired to provide more than the very basic necessities for their children. Such activities as play, discussion, social contact and helping with homework, are impossible.
Seen in this context, and against a background in which thousands of families of asylum seekers and immigrants to the UK have been forcibly broken up by Labour’s enforcement of racist immigration and asylum laws, the hypocrisy of the government’s cant about the importance of the family is underlined.
All of this takes place in the context that more than 30 years after the passage of the Equal Pay Act women in Britain are still paid on average 20 per cent less than their male counterparts if they work full time. For part-time workers the difference is 45 per cent. Jobs that are seen as traditional women’s work - that is carrying out for pay what women are supposed to do freely for love at home - receive lower pay rates than so-called men’s jobs.
Despite the backlash against feminism which claims that it is men who are discriminated against, and the fact that the government wants as many women at work as possible, women still do not have access to abortion when they need it. Two doctors have to give permission for a woman to decide how she wants to live her life. And in some parts of the country few women can find doctors who will agree - there has been a post code lottery for abortion for decades before the rest of the health service had heard of this. Essentially anti-abortion doctors deny women control of their fertility - or force them to pay for abortions in the private sector.
Nor is access to contraception or sex education adequately available - particularly to young people. Blair’s response to the fact that Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies has been completely inadequate. We say that every young person should have access to non-judgemental sex education, covering all the possibilities of human relationships and to free contraception.
The male-dominated, atomised, nuclear family represents one of the fundamental units of capitalism, where the cheap labour of women services the family by shopping, cooking, cleaning and looking after the young and the old and the sick. It is often an oppressive and violent place both for women and children. It also acts to reproduce ideology and to repress sexuality -including of young gay men and lesbians - and to condition women and girls from their earliest years to expect and accept a subordinate position, both to men and to the power of capital.
However, statistics increasingly show the level of popular rejection of the traditional notion of the nuclear family linked through marriage as a lifelong contract binding the woman to one man, in a subordinate relationship in which she serves as "housewife" and "mother", while he acts as "breadwinner".
The all-time low in marriage and the increasing numbers of couples cohabiting, leading to rising proportions of children born outside marriage; the rise in divorce rates, and the growth of single-parent families all serve to underline the increased confidence and economic independence of women, who now comprise over half the workforce.
But these changes also flow from the reorganisation and restructuring of capitalism. The demise of traditionally "male" jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry, and the rise in the service sector, the disappearance of affordable rented and council housing, have forced ever-larger numbers of women to work full-time in order to pay the mortgage: and this in turn has served to dislocate and break up relationships.
A socialist government would recognise that new conditions have to be created for society to be transformed, and for the old-style nuclear family to wither away, with new relationships between individuals established - or even re-established - on the basis of full equality. In this, the elimination of poverty, and maximising the economic independence of women, including equal pay for work of equal value and the expansion of affordable housing are crucial.
A massive programme to extend provision of free nursery and after-school care needs to be coupled with a fresh injection of real resources into training and education programmes to meet the needs of working class women, and a revamping of school education to enable young women to overturn sexist stereotyping.