WELCOME as improved childcare undoubtedly is, it doesn’t justify the attack on single parent benefit.
While a package of £300m for after-school care is important, there remains the need for much greater investment in affordable child care provision, available when parents need it — and that isn’t just after school.
The package of training for 50,000 young people to become carers also merits close scrutiny— if the Louise Woodward case has taught us anything it is that care of children is a skilled job and needs to be treated as such.
Warming though the increase in cold weather payments for pensioners is, they won’t compensate for the real decrease in the value of pensions since the link with earnings was broken.
Gordon Brown’s fine words that he is "simply not prepared to allow another winter to go by when pensioners are fearful of turning up their heating because they do not know whether they will have the help they need with their fuel bills" will cut little ice with pensioners’ groups campaigning hard to restore that link.
Tony Benn was correct to criticise the Chancellor’s mini-budget for having "no element of redistribution". We all know that it won’t be company directors that are hit by Brown’s pleas against high wage increases, but working people — and even more so those on benefits.
Plans were unveiled for the most substantial overhaul of the welfare state since its introduction, with the well fare to work proposals as the centrepiece.
The abolition of family credit and its replacement with tax credits has already been met with fierce attacks by those who argue that it will lead not only to the overturning of recently-found tax independence for married women, but to money being spent by men rather than on the children for whom it is intended.
Justified as these criticisms are, they focus on the effects of the proposals rather than their intentions.
In order to mount a serious response to these attacks and others before them on the whole idea of the welfare state it is necessary to understand those who are its enemies.
Blair’s New Labour Government is mounting such a vicious attack on the so-called "dependency culture" it even makes Maggie seem a bit of a liberal.
Fees for students is one side of this assault — you have to pay for what you get. The other is the idea that any one without a job is worthless and should be bloody grateful to be dragooned into a job, no matter how low the pay and insulting the conditions.
With the wave of a magic wand the problem of mass unemployment is "solved" — as is illness, disability, caring for small children or any other part of working class people’s lives.
While all this is being announced by Brown we also hear that Labour’s determination to stick to Tory spending limits will lead to a likely rise in Council tax bills of 10 per cent next year.
Ministers have agreed to a limited lifting of the spending cap on local authorities for next year in the hope that an extra £800m can be pumped into education to prevent the deep —and unpopular cuts that would otherwise be necessary. Other than that spending limits will only increase by 2 per cent.
The Local Government Association calculates that a further £1 billion would be necessary to prevent cuts. While schools desperately need funds, so to do other local services.
The threatened squeeze on social services in particular could have disastrous consequences as councils are forced to pay for expensive residential care in the private sector where many in-house places have been sold off. Frail elderly people are increasingly likely to fall through the net, missing out on NHS and social service care.
Plans need to be laid now for a mammoth lobby of the Parliament at the time of the Budget next spring, and to debate up and down the country how best to fight to retain the public services that so many thought they were voting for on May 1.