IN 2013 Prime Minister David Cameron reinstated a Married Couples Tax Allowance (previously abolished in 2000) but restricted it to a niggardly 10 per cent of the Personal Allowance. Apparently, he was reluctant to create a disincentive for both partners to work and did not want to discriminate against cohabitees. Yet this was not seen as discriminating against families with one partner at home for childcare. Neither were stay-at-home mothers meant to feel discriminated against by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt when, in 2024, he judged them guilty of a ‘shocking waste of talent and potential’. The same preference for working mothers lurks behind Keir Starmer’s reluctance to ‘tell people to have more children’ for the sake of the birth rate. In all cases, genuflecting towards female autonomy gives a moral laundering to the painfully actual anti-family tyranny of an economy which now prevents women having the number of children they want, if any at all. Predictably, given the aim of getting more mothers into work, the panacea is state-funded childcare. Though making it harder to opt out of work, it is not reckoned to discriminate against aspiring stay-at-home mothers.
The thinking which dresses up economic pragmatism as kindness to other people is the same thinking which would accuse the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son of discrimination when, in celebrating the return of the errant younger son, he arouses the jealousy of the older. Returning as if from the dead, the younger son naturally deserves special treatment. In celebrating his homecoming, the father in fact carries out his duty as a loving parent to both sons. Killing the fatted calf demonstrates how love’s powerful generosity is known through its equal accommodation of the needs of individuals in different circumstances. The only ‘equality’ that would have been achieved by ignoring the occasion would have been that which treated both sons equally badly.
When policymakers assume an ‘anti-discriminatory’ stance in relation to mothers and children they declare their loyalty to the economy and so treat everyone equally badly. But promoting the economy at all costs is a choice that presupposes a judgement about the balance between monetary and social interests. Is there a better definition of a healthy economy than one which balances wealth-creation with provision for the basic needs of individuals in their specific circumstances? Or of an unhealthy one than that which produces aberrant social behaviour?
The reports prompting this essay (discussed in detail in Part 1) expose the self-defeating contortions into which working mothers are twisted by the economic imperative: responsibility for early childhood development is willingly transferred to the state even while employers and state are petitioned for therapeutic intervention to alleviate the sufferings associated with this very transfer. This absurd paradox arises because the economy, rather than reflecting the real needs of mothers and children, is managed for the interests of those who profit from them. Whether by the Treasury expecting interest on its childcare spend, private equity companies running nursery chains for profit, or employers extracting labour from mothers as cheaply as possible, or all three, the social benefit of happy mothers able to care for their own children is judged too expensive (also, conveniently, as socially undesirable, at odds with feminist demands for female progress, parity and financial independence).
When George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘the most important and indispensable work of women, that of bearing and rearing children, and keeping house for them, was never paid for directly to the woman but always through the man’, he saw childrearing and housekeeping as essential work for which it is right that women receive monetary recognition. But their ‘wage’ is self-evidently not a price paid for a tangible commodity; nor is it a business loan on which interest is demanded. It was in fact gift money, afforded through a general level of wages sufficient for a man to support his family. The whole economy was adjusted to afford this gift because, although it resulted in no immediate material productivity, it protects and nurtures the seeds that will support and sustain society in the future.
Today the spirit of humane and rational generosity appears to have given way, in childcare as in many other parts of our common life, to an elite ideology as well as to usurious speculation When a mother under financial pressure reluctantly leaves her baby in childcare in order to take a job, the primary care she would have given freely is commodified and sold back to her. Provided to meet an artificial demand, its price is her income tax plus her liberty, her peace of mind and her confidence as a parent. What we might call the cost of loving has become too great for the general economy on terms other than the monetisation of social need; care must pay its own way or be dispensed with as economically unviable.
So now the state takes children into care, not for their well-being but for the sake of the economy while ministers assure us that it is to give the child ‘the best start in life’. Yet experts (and common knowledge) tell us that the family does more in the first five years of life than schools can in the following 13; that parents under stress impair children’s socio-emotional development; that being read to by a parent is the strongest determinant of ‘school readiness’. But against the determination of legislators and money-managers they gain little traction. It is tempting to ask what mothers, actual and potential, really want. But we should not expect those trapped body and mind by received wisdom and the struggle for subsistence to readily slip their chains to give the care many feel they owe their children.
Chains however have been slipped in the past; moral revolutions do occur.
The 2025 Reith lecturer, Rutger Bregman, shows how ‘again and again, small groups of committed citizens have bent the arc of history towards justice’. It was thus that slavery was abolished, thus that women won the vote in the 1920s, thus that apartheid in South Africa was finally vanquished. Always it was a battle for human dignity against interests so deeply entrenched that governments could not, on their own initiative, protect it. To measure motherhood in Gross Domestic Product is mathematically impossible and gets our values upside down.
The work of women in the home needs no excuse. To seek its legitimation in the machinery of economic growth is an inversion of natural morality. It is exactly this mistake that the reports from Kindred Squared and Make Mothers Matter expose. For those in error money-making becomes the excuse, the condition, for having a child. The cause of motherhood is betrayed by those striking a pose in its defence. By contrast, those fighting for a mother’s right to be at home with her children fight with values that grow from love.
