Not-So Conservative Party: Tories Tell People to Prioritise Full-Time Work, Not Family

Multi-generation family walking in park
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Oliver JJ Lane

The British government has noticed some people are taking time off work to look after elderly relatives or their children and they aren’t happy these people aren’t out earning, paying taxes, and  — presumably — paying for carers instead.

The Conservative Party, which has governed the United Kingdom in a succession of administrations of varying stability and effectiveness since 2010, is presently gathered for its annual conference at Birmingham, England’s second city in the heart of the nation’s former industrial heartland.

While attention has predominantly focused on the government being defeated by the media and markets less than a month into its tenure, much else has been going on, including the government minister for jobs hitting some familiar notes on the importance of making sure people are being productive GDP units rather than spending time with their families.

The Daily Telegraph, a Tory insider broadsheet newspaper, reported the remarks of a minister of state at the Department for Work and Pensions, Victoria Prentis, who said of the government’s concern:

Mid-lifers who have taken early retirement during the pandemic are now “desperately” needed back in employment, according to Victoria Prentis, a minister of state at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

She went on to say that just because people have family responsibilities such as looking after children or elderly parents it “doesn’t mean we can’t work” and it “doesn’t mean we can’t work full time”.

Her remarks come as the Government prepares to launch a fresh push to get the over-50s back into employment.

The remarks raise a number of points, not least among them that despite the insanely high levels of immigration the government has presided over in recent years — last year was the highest ever at well over a million visas granted — the jobs market is still “very, very tight”.

Don’t forget that keeping borders open in defiance of all public opinion and all election-time promises is sold, essentially, on the basis of the jobs market and economic growth needing people. Lots of people. Yet despite 1,114,065 new people coming in twelve months, the government still feels like it needs to crowbar people away from their elderly grandparents or young children to boost the workforce, which perhaps goes to show how well that open borders policy isn’t working.

Not that this is even a remotely new angle from the Conservatives, who really make no bones about viewing the public as economic units, and the raising of children and caring for family as an inconvenient roadblock to boosting those GDP figures. Recently deposed Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel embodied these values and was criticised as having an “almost communist” perspective on labour when she told an “economically inactive” group — stay-at-home mothers — to get out of the house and into work.

As one commentator noted at the time, as reported: “it was an irony of the way government values citizens that humans are judged to have worth if they look after other people’s children or clean other people’s homes — in return for wages — but are looked down upon if they perform the exact same tasks for their own family”.

The British tax system penalises traditional families with one stay-at-home parent and the other parent working harder and earning more to compensate in earnings.

There are other paths available, of course. But as the misjudged and latterly abandoned tax cut for the highest earners while giving nothing to ‘squeezed middle’ middle-class families confirms, the Conservatives remain disinterested in serving the interests of the voters who keep it in power.

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