Profit-seeking business provides (often unstable) jobs and consumer products and services but it free rides society. It treats labour as just another input. We see the results in the degradation of community and the way that individuals are atomised. This becomes of critical importance when we look at the bed rock of society – the working class family. Presenting work as liberation and appealing to the very reasonable desire of women to have an equal and independent existence, liberal society and business have forced us into a very unequal situation where parents sometimes work not only twice over but with multiple jobs just to keep children housed, fed and clothed.
While the Workers Party of Britain is absolutely committed to equal participation of men and women in the work place, it must not be under exploitative conditions or at the expense of children or family life. Child-rearing is not a side issue. It is one of immense social importance. It is a job in its own right. Stable, happy children contribute to a stable, happy society with less social costs such as crime and poor productivity. Well heeled middle class children often do better at school not because they are ‘brighter’ (we reject that absolutely) but because working class children often never get the chance to ‘shine’ in households constantly struggling to make ends meet. This must change.
Our policy is one of social investment integrated with our cradle-to-the-grave welfare commitment. We will make it much easier for families to be able to afford to have children in safe, supportive and secure conditions and to care for elderly relatives in their own households through our redistributive economics, our housing policies and through material incentives. We will extend the period in which at least one parent in a household can spend free time caring for children under seven without material loss. We reject that anti-human negative stance towards children of radical Greens and many liberals. We will support not only families with children but young people wanting to start a family earlier.
We will undertake a review of the tax system to stop the penalisation of single earner households which drives parents into two low wage jobs simply to keep the labour force cheap for business. The tax system as it is currently constructed deliberately discourages working class commitment to taking on social burdens and build a healthy society and it deters working class aspiration. At the same time, the Workers Party of Britain will invest in the continued education and training of mothers or fathers or other carers during the vital early years of family life and while caring for elderly relatives. We will bring back workers into the economy without them being disadvantaged in their careers by their absence from the work force.
We remain committed to private choice of lifestyle and religion but with the proviso that social services be properly funded to be able to deal with those cases where families are truly dysfunctional. We see the state educational system as vital in encouraging the personal and individual development of children and adolescents. We will therefore prioritise state education, with particular emphasis on early stage educational childcare provision which has to be more than ‘child minding’. We will also remove the charitable status of all private educational establishments.
Julie Lowe 