Brown’s inadequate parenting advice
Posted in Uncategorized on October 5th, 2009 by Sue – 2 Comments(Republished from Spiked, Wednesday 30 September 2009)
Under Brown, New Labour’s obsession with acting in loco parentis for teens has expanded to older parents, too.
Hearing Gordon Brown’s pronouncements on teenage parents from the podium at the Labour Party conference yesterday reminded me of the much ridiculed Peter Lilley, Tory minister for social security in 1992. Readers may remember that Lilley delivered, via an excruciating Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche, a party conference speech promising to ‘root out… young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list’. The subtle differences between Brown’s and Lilley’s approaches tell us much about where the New Labour project has ended up.