The Conservatives have managed to annoy and frustrate me quite often throughout my life. The list now includes having a Brexit election in the middle of the Brexit process that barely mentions Brexit, while I have set up a blog to talk about Brexit as it happens. But today it isn’t the Conservatives but Labour that have annoyed me. This morning Jeremy Corbyn managed to fluff his lines when talking about his party’s Childcare proposals.
I am annoyed because I think they have missed a great chance to promote a great policy idea. I don’t have the time to read the manifesto but what I picked up from the media coverage sounded very exciting. The scheme would offer up to 30 hours of state funded childcare without any means testing - it would simply be applied to anyone who was a child.
If I had put that forward I would be really interested in it. And in fact I am really interested in it. The first and biggest question is how much it will cost. It’s a big question and one that really matters. I don’t blame the interviewer for asking about it. I do blame the rest of the media for not reporting the number when Jeremy finally got his hands on it. It turns out it is £5.3billion.
That’s a lot of money. What I wondered could you do with that sort of money? I dug around and it turns out that it is just about the same cost as the projected cost of the Trident missile system. I am quite keen on having Trident. I am not a military expert, but I just like the idea of Britain having a lot of firepower. I don’t know if it is actually the best way of defending the country in a real crisis, but it makes us look pretty gansta at UN and NATO meetings.
But if it were a choice between free universal childcare and Trident, I think I’d go for the childcare. (I think that we can afford both - that is just a rhetorical point.) The improvement in people’s lives that being able to have your kids looked after while you took a job seems to me one of those things that would make life a lot better.
But the question after how much it costs is what would its overall economic impact be. In the short term it would no doubt mean more taxable income from people who can now go out and get jobs. In the longer run I don’t see how it couldn’t help our children grow up to be more productive. I am sure some of the parents whose lives are now less stressful would be able to go out and create new businesses, new products and new works of art that wouldn’t otherwise have been created. I don’t know how many J.K.Rowlings we have missed on over the years for lack of support, but it seems a safe bet that we’ll get some kind of return from this new scheme. There must be some way of estimating this. I’d have expected Jeremy Corbyn to have that figure as well. Come on Jez! You’ve got some gold in this manifesto. We want more details!
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