What’s the modern answer to every problem? Training. We seek salvation by flipchart. The more affluent and educated we become, the less confidence we have in our abilities. We want someone else to tell us what to do. We want them to do it for us.
Take last Thursday’s childcare debate. Looking after children, once a normal expectation of adulthood, has become the work of professionals. Never mind the scandals in public care over the years: the state knows best because its employs trained people.
There are good reasons for expanding government’s role in childcare. More women are working, which represents a huge gain in personal fulfilment. Even if current house prices give many no choice. Even if the people most in favour of the change work as broadsheet columnists, not on supermarket checkouts.
And there are more young women raising children without a partner or support from a wider family. They may welcome help or advice, and you don’t have to buy Gordon Brown’s full Arbeit macht frei agenda to see that their only way out of poverty is a job.
But on Thursday many went further. When Karen Buck talked of ‘a high-quality early-years experience,’ she took for granted that it would involve children being looked after by someone other than their parents.
Training, paying and monitoring professionals is horribly expensive. Yet Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs who complained about the cost of childcare generally went on to supportmeasures that would make it even more dearer. (The Tories are no more consistent: they like mothers to stay at home but hate paying them benefits.)
Sandra Gidley was one, worrying about au pairs having charge of children. She favoured an American scheme where they must have 200 hours of “documented infant experience” before they can look after a toddler.
You felt some Labour MPs would like to follow this by banning babysitting. Then they would make it compulsory to have a postgraduate qualification and two years’ supervised practice before you became a parent.
Back in the real world, most childcare will always be informal. And our Liberal Democrat belief in ‘community’ should make us feel warm towards such neighbourliness.
It’s not that we need to relax our standards. We just need to relax.
Inside the Commons, David Blunkett was impersonating Eric Cantona: “It is sometimes necessary to wait while the yolk comes out of the egg.”
Outside, it was carnival time. Nearly a million people carrying the cross of St George thronged Oxford Street, Regent Street and The Haymarket to celebrate England’s world cup victory.
And New Labour just didn’t get it. They have never been good at enjoyment. Remember the Millennium Dome? As one visitor said, “the Work Zone reminds you of a Restart interview”.
Interviewed the morning before the parade, Tessa Jowell showed little has changed. She was in full nanny mode – probably the scariest nanny since Bette Davis.
She dismissed the idea of a public holiday to mark the victory. Just think of the effect on productivity! And she followed the Government line that any children out of school to see the fun should be rounded up.
Rugby Union is not a New Labour game – too much testosterone, too many public school boys. And maybe Monday’s events will soon be forgotten.
But it could be that the Government’s inept handling of the celebrations marks something more fundamental. Maybe New Labour, the party that prizes ‘modernisation’ above all, has lost its feel for the Zeitgeist.
Take those flags. One unexpected consequence of devolution to Scotland and Wales has been a revival of English identity. This is something the left mistrusts, even though it indulges Celtic nationalism. The English are too jingoistic, too racist, too Tory for it to be encouraged. There is an element of this fear in our Liberal love of the regions too, but we are all going to have to come to terms with Englishness.
Which brings us to Jowell’s departmental Christmas card –a montage with not a robin or snowflake in sight. It had the press reaching for the block of type marked ‘politicalcorrectnessgonemad’. Certainly, it typifies the New Labour approach to multiculturalism: avoid celebrating anything too enthusiastically in case it offends someone. Where I work in Leicester we take a more liberal view. We have a Diwali meal and a Christmas meal.
Monday’s joyous procession may be a sign that the era which follows New Labour will be one in which government is happy for people to celebrate their Englishness – or anything else.
The debate on the Queen’s Speech goes on for days, and Monday’s themes were local government, environment and transport. So the opening speech for the Government was given by the Deputy Prime Minister.
We British are always told we are bad at foreign languages, so House Points took the opportunity to study Prescottese.
All its elements were there. There was malapropism: he talked about the Fire Brigades Union voting in favour of reform on “a high turnover” of 75 per cent. And there was a howler almost as good as his famous “the greenbelt is a Labour achievement and we plan to build on it”.
This time, still thinking about firefighters, he told the House: “For far too long the service has operated in a vacuum.” Surely that has made their job a lot easier?
But the most characteristic feature of Prescottese is the intrusive article. Superfluous a’s and the’s are dropped into sentences almost at random. So on Monday we had “Many of the most vulnerable in our society live in the private sector accommodation” and “new powers to license selectively private landlords when there is a particular problem such as an antisocial behaviour”.
And listeners quickly pick up Prescottese for themselves. On the Tory front bench David Curry also started talking about the turnover in elections. Then he invented a whole new word: ‘eccentricitly’.
Though there is something patronising in New Labour’s attitude towards him, Prescott is no fool. You sense his brain works much faster than he can speak, and that phrases and even whole sentences are dropped as he races to catch up. When the nice people at Hansard put them back for him, it all makes perfect sense.
The people you felt for on Monday were Joan Ruddock’s constituents in Deptford. Prescott was to visit them that evening as part of the Big Conversation. (Or the National Conversation in his language.) If Prescottese is that contagious, what must they have sounded like?
“What about the fallop of the pound? Oh deep folly! All tax and spendit matey. And how can we trittly-how in the early mordy without the bobby on the beat? All the things of the forry which as you know lurky deep and dowm come into this.”