The Wardman Wire

Oddity 1: Beggar Off.

who said….

“We must stop the amoral culture that sees speculators betting on banks to fail, knowing the taxpayer will pay out in the end. And the madness of bonuses awarded no matter what. We need a wholly new approach to regulation: limiting, not encouraging, the excesses of the market.
And when reckless bankers come with gold-plated begging bowls to ask for shareholders to be bailed out, our answer should be a resounding No.”

That’s right, Nick Clegg, atheist LibDem leader, giving a dry run to an argument used 1 week later by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Clegg also mentioned God in his speech, which Christian Socialist Gordon Brown didn’t. It was in a joke, so I don’t know if that really counts.

Oddity 2: Family Time, More or Less.

The day before Ruth Kelly left the government to spend more time with her family, Gordon Brown announced plans for nearly 700,000 parents to spend less time with theirs. The plans to extend free nursery places to 2 year olds are, supposedly, aimed at helping mums to get back into the workforce. In case Labour hadn’t noticed, a full-time mother is already in the workforce, something acknowledged in other European countries. And it’s not a great time to be looking for a job at the moment.

There may be an unpublished reason - the stubborn refusal of 20% or so of our kids to reach national literacy and numeracy standards. Pushing more of them into state-monitored care at an earlier age enables yet more development benchmarks to be set, monitored and ticked off. At least for 15 hours a week, the quality of care, education etc. can be controlled by the state, through the Early Years framework.

It’s interesting to see that both Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown see the state as the main, indeed the only, player in child development. Clegg said last week “Our children are some of the most unhappy in the world. We have to change this. The journey starts in our schools. We need to draw out the potential in every child from every background” (my emphasis). The Tories are the only party who have registered the link between family structure and child development.

Their ‘Childhood Review’ notes:

Children in intact, two-parent families do better on a wide range of outcomes. For example, they are less likely to smoke, become a single parent, be in social housing, and receive benefits. In an atmosphere of extreme marital discord, children are more likely to be anxious, depressed and withdrawn.

Children feel unhappy if they think the family is breaking down, that mum and dad are arguing all the time. In a survey of 2,343 pupils aged between eleven and sixteen, 7 out of 10 said parents getting on well is one of the most important factors for a happy childhood.

When the Tories finally get round to spelling out some policies, (and David Cameron doesn’t then change them a week later), it’ll be interesting to see if they follow through their own logic.

Oddity 3: Nobody is Listening.

I remember the good old days of being able to watch party conferences live on BBC2. The tedium of a union rep droning on about Compact 63a, a nervous party activist having to be pulled off the podium mid-stream when the red light came on. Oh the joy. What strikes me most this year - as someone who’s probably digested an average amount of news coverage - is that nobody is really listening to the words anymore. We can dismiss Clegg’s idealism because he’ll never be PM, and see Browns speech as one long coded reference to David Milliband (who has replaced Brown as Labours ditherer-in-chief). Either way, it means we don’t pay attention to what people actually say.

Maybe it’s because I’m part of a church that, 1700 years or so ago, needed a global leadership summit to decide over the presence of a single letter, but words are important. If we didn’t think so, we’d not pay any attention to blogs either.

Next week I’m hoping to compare the texts of Brown, Clegg and Cameron, to dig into the vision and values behind their speeches. Not because I’m a geek (well, ok then, I am), but because it’s important to know.