Quote of the day
“We want to transform the most intimate and private relations between women and men. We want to change not just who holds power in international conglomerations, but who controls the household budget. We want to change not just what childcare the state provides, but who changes the nappies at home. …It is only when men are ready to share caring and work responsibilities with women that we will be able to fulfil our true potential to form equal partnerships in which we have respect, autonomy and dignity.”
- a quote from Dr Katharine Wake, writing for the Guardian three years ago, who – despite being a hardline feminist – has been chosen as the Government’s new chief spokesman on families. She will head the Family and Parenting Institute, a heavily state-financed organisation set up by Labour to speak for parents and children. The Institute boasts that it ‘brings alive the real issues for families’ and ‘listens to parents and carers across the country’ but critics said her appointment, currently director of the Fawcett Society, showed the Institute was out of touch with the concerns of ordinary families. Despite overwhelming evidence that a majority would prefer to stay home to bring up young children, ministers have piled pressure on women to take jobs and warned that those who fail to do so, and who rely on the income of a husband or partner, are likely to face poverty. Dr Rake, who will take over from the Institute’s founding chief executive Mary MacLeod, has long declared her intention is not to support parents as they are, but to ‘revolutionise their lives’.
Witanagemot Blogs
Hmm. I ‘let’ (well, plead that) my wife does the houeshold finances. Why? Well I chip in 50% of the bills to the joint account and don’t really care for signing cheques. Worst bit of being a company director in my experience. So long as you trust your partner, be they or you male or female, spouse or live in lover, then its one of the greatest things to be able to let go of that nonsense and have someone else look after if because they want to! I consider that my wife wants to do it an absolute frickin bonus.
Which is an obliqueish way of saying that people who view that as a gender thing rather than a trust thing are f*cking morons.
My wife now relies entirely on my income. We are better off now than we have ever been. How we manage our finances and how we divvy up the household chores is a personal matter and nothing to do with government.
LR, I couldn’t have put it better myself. It’s none of the state’s business.
Shaun, this point is sadly lost of feminists. They see women staying at home as a failure, as a loss, as a disgrace – I see it as a huge bloody compliment that I would want someone to bring up a future child of mine, in the same way that if I stayed at home to look after a future child I would take that as a huge compliment from my spouse. F***ing morons indeed.
Well its odd as my wife’s first husband was not victim to a neuro-degenerative disease but always found excuses NOT to work while wanting to control her every move (including, naturally, finances). So to say that my determination to earn as much as I can while I can is somewhat opposite to her ex is transparent; I want to provide for both of us but where she feels a desire to monitor the minutiae, I really, really don’t. I’ve always been of the view that when you need to know where the last £10 is, you’re already fucked and are better off looking at the bigger picture.
That view is probably down to my fairly middle class end-point as a law graduate and my wife’s less stellar academic background. But still – neither of us ever remotely considered the other less than equal…
who is she to say how any of us should live in private? If any one tries to tell me what to do in my own house and private life they will be told exactly what to do!!!
TBH as long as its a free choice and your role isn’t dictated by, for example, an ancient ‘god’ or tradition, they you should be free to live any way you please. I though that was what it meant to be British…
A fake charity, surely? I’ve reported it anyway.
Reading between the lines: “having completely and utterly stuffed the lives of women without husbands and dependent on benefits, we’re now moving on to stuff the lives of women with husbands and not on benefits.”
Stuff you, and give me my money back.
It’s always worth remembering that socialism is a logroll of cranks. Always has been, always will be. Different cranks will predominate at different times, and there is constant infighting between the various crank groups for domination of the agenda. But the only unifying factor is their crankiness, and desire for power, and willingness to work with other cranks to get it. Twentieth century western socialism was dominated by the economic cranks, but from the sixties onwards the other cranks- lifestyle cranks, food cranks, sexual cranks, and so on, who had been dominant in the “progressive” era but temporarily reduced by the predonominance of economic marxism, reasserted themselves and, with the fall of communism (the extreme of economic crankery), became dominant.
These people are nutters. They have created an enormous mutual support system extending through academia, education, the bureaucracy, quangocracy, “third sector” and so on which extracts wealth from the rest of us to sustain their crankishness- thousands if not millions of people in western society are now full time, state supported cranks who work 24/7 to impose their crankish beliefs on society.
They cannot be reasoned with, any more than the crank who believes he has disproved Einstein or the crank who studies crop circles as messages from space aliens. They have succeeded in pushing many of their crankeries into the mainstream. It will take an enormous concerted effort to rid ourselves of them, an effort so great that it may be impossible at this late stage. Cranks with billions of pounds of guaranteed funding, imbedded in such institutional bastions as education, medicine and so on will be tremendously hard to dislodge. But try we must. They are now beyond the stage of being merely a burden upon us. It may not be an exaggeration to say that they seriously threaten the very existence and continuation of our civilisation.
Those who romanticise women (or for that matter men) in the workplace, as some magical life-changing thing, should in my opinion be forced to do the low-paid jobs that many of us are in.
After a couple of years of dragging themselves out of bed to be ordered around all day for a pittance, they’d soom discover there was nothing “liberating” about it!
Aye- bit of class resentment there
Bloody hell – that’s appalling! I never knew that had been said.
I and my wife changed roles 20 years ago, and I can honestly say it made no difference – whichever role , she still runs the show.
Excellent thought provoking post as always, Ian B. Here is my perspective, but I suspect it comes to exactly the same conclusion.
International politics 101, how do you take over someone’s country? You support the runner up. The theory being that the number two will not be able to gain and hold power without your help, and thus be beholden to you. Now, how do you do that in a stable country like the UK that has no obvious number two? You have to make one. You take all the little grudge groups and bind them together into an opposition. Any minority group that believes itself to be oppressed, has an organisation to speak for it and is willing to take your shilling can join the project. Behold the beast that is New Labour.
The problem I see is that, even if the Conservatives take a chainsaw to these parasites, (which I don’t believe they will) they will still exist, and still be prepared to vote Labour in subsequent elections. It has taken decades to get where we are now, and will take decades to get out of it. Decades we do not have.
As a boy in the fifties, I saw the future through the eyes of Dan Dare. As I got older, I realised I probably wasn’t going to Mars for my hols. Later still, I realised civilisations decline and fall, and so, probably, would mine, in time. Now I’m pushing sixty, I can not only see how my civilisation is going to fall, but I could theoretically live to see it. Which is why I live in Thailand and why it took me so long to respond to your comment. I was asleep. Have a good day, Ian.