Keir Starmer’s war on mothers

As their swift suspensions indicated, Keir Starmer can probably cope with a rebellion of “pissed-off” Labour MPs over his failure to commit to scrapping the two-child benefit cap. But when even Suella Braverman, the Right-winger that right-thinkers love to hate, gets in on the act, he must sense trouble brewing.

The benefit cap, which prevents parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit for more than two children, has become a totemic image of evil Tory policy, symbolising a simultaneous attack on poor people and women’s bodies. For Labour MP Rosie Duffield, it has a Handmaid’s Tale cruelty, as “women are subjugated according to their social class”. Others may be less feminist in their objections, but they still think the policy is too harsh. “It’s pushing more children and families into relative poverty,” said Braverman, adding that “it is time for it to go”.

During a punishing cost-of-living crisis, and following the brutal pandemic years in which the government spent an estimated £96.9 billion on paying people not to work, it seems perverse that the Labour administration should cling onto such an unpopular, mean-spirited policy as the two-child cap: scrapping it, by contrast, would cost £3.4 billion a year. This is even stranger in the context of anxieties about the UK’s falling birth rate and the realisation that the days in which migration could provide extra workers are numbered. We seem to swing from one anguished policy debate about how to encourage people to have more children back to the defensive position of cajoling them to have fewer. Where’s the logic?

After all these years of headless policymaking, it would be tempting to argue that there is, in fact, no logic; that policies are rushed in and reversed with little thought about their contradictions or unintended consequences. Unfortunately, policies relating to fertility decisions generally follow one, neoliberal line of thought: that questions of who should have children and how many should be framed by the state and the market.

Duffield is right to argue that, while the obvious target of the two-child benefit cap is “the caricature of the ‘feckless’, ‘irresponsible’ people who drop children every few minutes without being able to pay for them”, the subtext is “an attack on women’s right to choose how many children they have”. Throughout the 20th century, family-planning policies sought to limit how many children were born to poor or unmarried women, while boosting the more “desirable” fertility of the middle classes. On the global stage, international organisations and NGOs have spent years trying to reduce the number of children born in poorer parts of the world, couching population-control policies in progressive-sounding language about the environment and women’s reproductive rights.

In the late Nineties, Tony Blair’s New Labour government continued this approach with gusto. One flagship initiative was the 10-year Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, launched in 1999 with the aim of halving the under-18 conception rate. This involved providing young people with better access to effective contraception and abortion; strenuous efforts to warn them not to get pregnant, via sex education and a communications campaign; and interventions with young parents to “support” them not to get pregnant again. The strategy achieved its target, and was described by social commentators as “the success story of our time”.

Other initiatives took a less explicit tack. Those such as the New Deal for Lone Parents, the National Childcare Strategy and Sure Start sought a solution to the problem of mothers on benefits by cajoling them into work and their children into nurseries. The New Deal for Lone Parents, as social policy professor Jane Millar has noted, was particularly significant — throughout the post-war period, policy was largely based on the assumption that single mothers would stay at home to care for their children, and thus ”lone parenthood was a marker that indicated legitimate withdrawal from the labour market”. But under New Labour, being a single mum was no longer an excuse for not having a job: in fact, it made employment even more important, to reduce “social exclusion”.

As the BBC reported in 1998, all of New Labour’s “welfare to work” strategies hinged on one “single idea”, that: “Work is good for you. Those who can, should work. More people in work means fewer on benefit which means reduced social security costs, which in turn means more for health and education. It is apparently the ultimate win-win policy.”

There were certainly some good things that came out of New Labour’s obsession with work. For those people who can work, it is better to have a job than it is to languish on benefits. Women need access to contraception, abortion and childcare if they are to have careers and, above all, freedom and equality. But, as the ensuing years have shown, work is not the solution to all welfare problems. In tying the compulsion to work so closely to new motherhood, something important did get lost: the idea of children as a personal and social good.

When the key priority for everybody, including mothers of young children, became to earn their way through paid work, the social value of having and raising children diminished. Aspirational young people were to go to university, and others into work: those who chose parenthood were othered as “socially excluded”, outside of the norm. The emphasis on getting children particularly from poorer families into childcare compounded the idea that parents were ill-equipped to care for and socialise children in their all-important “early years”. The decision to have children was framed as an individualised act of careful self-actualisation, to be done only when one’s career and finances allowed it; and when the reality of “juggling” work and home could plausibly act as its own contraceptive. Childbearing became more of a choice than ever before, but one that was heavily hedged by the weight of that decision.

The policy mentality that prevailed through the New Labour years is summed up by David Blunkett, the former home secretary who is one of the few voices still defending the spirit of the two-child benefit cap. Referring to an article he wrote in 2001, in which he cautioned people not to “see the Government as an ATM machine”, Lord Blunkett recently told The Telegraph:

“It’s a combination of government support and personal responsibility. So if things go wrong, and you have more than two children, then we need to help. But we also need people to think seriously — can I, at this moment, afford a third, fourth or fifth child? We need to help, but we need people to also accept some level of responsibility themselves.”

When New Labour finally left the building, the coalition and Conservative governments picked up the reins of the individualised family policy logic: only with less cash to go round. Mothers on benefits weren’t just “supported” into work: they were explicitly “unsupported” if they had more than two children. Middle-class parents had their own version of the cap, with the (equally misguided) introduction of means-testing to Child Benefit. If one parent earned more than £50,000 per year, the once-universal child benefit payment would be reduced: so while a dual-earning couple could bring home just under £100,000 and have the full benefit, a breadwinner earning £51,000 would receive less. Any pretensions the Conservatives might have had to be the party of the traditional family quickly withered.

What we are left with now is a policy framework that, whether explicitly or implicitly, penalises people of all social classes for having children. This is deeply ironic given the economic anxieties about the affordability of welfare provision in a time of sustained low birthrates, where it has been suggested that Britons may need to work until their early seventies in order for anybody to be able to retire. But a bigger problem is what this says about the value society places on its own reproduction and renewal.

As pronatalists have learned over history, policy cannot directly encourage people to have more children than they want — and nor should it try. But policy can help families with some of the practical, material pressures that come with procreation, and transmit a positive message about why kids are good for us all. If we don’t support people to have the children they want, we can scarcely blame them for not having the children we need.

This article was first published on UnHerd.