Miriam Cates under investigation

Cates is a Conservative MP. Conservatives are traditionally laissez faire, lower government spending, lower tax and a tendency to rely on market forces to set costs.
We live in a society where many couples both work, therefore market forces dictate house prices that are often out of reach of single earner families.
If she wants redistribution of wealth into lower paid households to improve their living standards she's in the wrong party

If she wants to affect society so single earner families become the norm again (and thus markets adjust to reflect this) she's going to have to be thinking of some pretty draconian ways to "encourage" one parent to stay at home. Or she just hasn't thought it through, not sure which.

I take it no further info on the investigation.

Children form secure attachments when they're looked after by a primary caregiver for the first 3 years.

Cates seems to be suggesting we need cheaper housing and lower living costs so that parents can choose whether they'd prefer to care for their children or return to work

This does not seem at all outrageous to me. It seems logical, fair, and compassionate.

I particularly like the way that "the end of parental leave" (1 year) has turned into "6 months if you're lucky" in the course of a single tweet.

The tweet:
Labour’s plan for babies…. Six months with mummy or daddy (if you’re lucky) then handed over to the State so mummy and daddy can get back to the Critical National Endeavour of Generating GDP. Has anyone asked if this is best for children?

No she doesn't specify, she says 'mummy or daddy'. So she thinks babies should be cared for by one of their parents, but it doesn't matter which.

The main issue is how this can be achieved if both parents need to be working in order to have enough money to support the family.

So here we go with a Cates specialty:
Labour are proposing to increase childcare provision, reduce childcare costs and provide more continuity between school and nursery.

All necessary to give women a genuine choice about whether or not to return to work.

Cates appears to disagree with the idea of childcare full stop - children should be at home. With a primary caregiver. She doesn't specify the gender but I think we can guess

https://twitter.com/miriam_cates/status/1740647102869348757

Oh my gosh.
Many Christian festivals developed from much older festivals.
I celebrate Christmas as a family time with presents and food. That's also the way the Roman midwinter festival of Saturnalia (25th december) was celebrated, or the Germanic Yule celebrations. I'm sure you know this, you come across as well read.

Christmas is important to Christians as a religious holiday but in the UK its also important to non Christians as a cultural tradition. The existence of Christmas does not mean the UK is a religious country. We are secular.

This is their vision. Every political entity must have a vision for what the sort of society they would like to create. People can vote for that which aligns more with their own vision. Most people, though, have a very poorly formulated or articulated vision- or certainly a vision that has roots in any tradition or workable solution.

If you celebrate, or recognise, Christmas in any way then you are not living in a secular society - you are living in the traditions of a Christian society. It is the same with many other aspects of our culture whether you recognise the origins of these practices or traditions or not.

Is there any actual information yet about what the investigation is about?

Or are we just going to continue find reasons @AdamRyan has to dislike Miriam Cates to fill the void?

"The term "liberalism" is more sharply contrasted with fundamentalism, and signifies a far deeper meaning than modernism. Fundamentalism describes a relatively uncritical attitude. In it custom, traditionalism, and authoritarianism are dominant. ...

There is no doubt that the loss of the traditional faith has left many people confused and rudderless, and they are finding that there is no adequate satisfaction in mere excitement or in flight from their finer ideals. They crave a sense of deeper meaning and direction for their life. Religious liberalism, not as a cult but as an attitude and method, turns to the living realities in the actual tasks of building more significant individual and collective human life"

You are splitting hairs.
If the Nat Cons become a dominant political force they have clearly stated they will build government policy around biblical teachings.

I read "the Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities" as the sort of craziness that has lead to Americans being taught creationism as equally valid to evolution.

If this was a movement promoting "rooting civilisation in Islam" and building government policy around the teachings of the Qu'uran many people would be absolutely horrified.

To me it's no different if it's the Bible, the qu'uran, or any other scripture. I like living in a secular society, I do not want my government policy to be "rooted in religion". To me, religions are one of the oldest tools of the patriarchy and moving to any form of religious influence in public life is not good for women.

I don't care Miriam Cates is Christian, I do care she is part of a political movement who's stated aim is to make society more Christian.

Except that is not what Miriam Cates is attempting to do. She is outlining her own vision for what makes for a stable and functional society. She's not demanding that you become a practicing Christian yourself.

Britain, contrary to what you'd think by reading your posts, is one of the most tolerant and liberal societies on earth. It is also one of the most stable and functional.

That's the beauty of the western liberal tradition. Nobody is forcing you to believe anything. You have a full range of civil liberties protected under law. The leader of the country is not a priest. Marriages can be either civil or religious and both are valid. Nobody has to have a religious funeral, and women are not expected to cover their heads or faces in public. But many of our traditions and customs - the stuff that makes for cohesive community and. 'congregation' are rooted in the western Christian liberal tradition. This tradition is many hundreds of years old and forms the bedrock of our way of life, whether you recognise it, believe it, like it, accept it or not.

I always find it strange that those who profess to follow God often show themselves to be utterly intolerant of those who are different or are very keen to put obstacles in the way of some groups in society. Most odd.

I could not care less about who believes in what.
What bothers me, is writing religious beliefs into government policy and laws. This would bother me regardless of the religion.
The NatCons say:
4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.

No thanks

Looking back a few years, Tim Farron was forced out from leading the LibDems by the media trying to prove that he was anti gay, though I think it is clear that he accepted gay rights and had no wish to remove them. I don’t think his successors as LibDem leader have been better for UK politics. Many Christians are much more politically sophisticated than their enemies give them credit for, and are fully in favour of the law of the land reflecting much wider concerns than just their own religious convictions.

Hey it must be Xmas, i 100% agree with all you ve written there, she was thrown to the wolves in the election campaign, totally wrong.

AND i don't like L. Nandy, glad she was demoted recently, which tells me more about Labour trajectory than anything LN has said.

However, i look at what the Tories have done over the last 13.5 years and none of it is good, aside from BJ's support for Ukraine, they've done nothing i agree with and plenty which has been extremely damaging to women and childrens rights.

Nothing shows the Tories for what they are than how they handled Covid, the stuff that came out in the CV inquiry (so far) is shockingly bad & how on earth can anyone trust a word Sunak says when he had Dementia levels of memory loss when questioned over 2 days? 50 plus time he replied with "i don't remember/recall/recollection" yeah like fuck.

It's odd, because under the SNP schools have become more Christian-focussed and moved away from the non denom approach they are supposed to espouse. They claim Christianity is part of Scotland's culture, which okay. But I still resent any religion being foisted on kids. An hour a week ffs!

During the election for a new leader of the SNP - Katie Forbes was absolutely pilloried for being a Christian, even as she was well respected and apparently very effective within the party. She had no intention of imposing her own faith on others - but that wasn't enough for some.

Muslim, Humza Yousaf is elected leader and immediately holds a prayer session (for the cameras) in Bute House, surrounded by all of his male relatives ( not a woman in sight) and this is lauded as marvellous and progressive.

That many immigrant families are from more traditionally conservative and religious societies with high birth rates and less established women's rights than the U.K is fine - so long as they are not Christians? Christianity has been through many reformations and is now fully conducive with civil rights and liberties - not so other religions. The mainstream Christian position in the U.K is one which is very tolerant and liberal. We do live in a secular society - but we also live in a society with a Christian tradition. This tradition has shaped the values and customs of our society - just like other societies are shaped and founded upon theirs.

Actually looking in to this she points out that when so much time, hope and money is spent on higher education then it can make it difficult to decide when to have children; especially for women.

I do think that is one of the reasons the birth rate is dropping. People are spending more time in a sort of extended adolescence - going to university, partying, travelling the world on gap years etc and then trying to get established in career - that there just never seems to be a 'right' time to have children. My own son and his wife fit this pattern. For men the decision to have a family can be more indefinitely delayed; not so for women for whom both the passage of time and the biological clock; along with the feeling of being overwhelmed by what is imagined to be the burden of children and the inevitable necessity for a degree of personal curtailment.

I thought these posts were down to poor comprehension skills. That could still be true of course, but an alternative explanation is that this poster is using the old method of "repeat a lie often enough and everyone will eventually believe it to be true".

Can you link to the article in which she says she has an issue with women going to university?

I personally think that, as a society, we probably have got to the position where too many people, and a lot of whom are not even very academic, are doing expensive degrees in relatively useless subjects at 'lesser' universities. The value of many degree programmes has been lost and many young people are ending up in jobs that they don't even require A-levels for, as well as being left with a lot of debt.Obviously they'll never get re-pay that debt if they don't earn enough - but even on a modest salary they could be paying up to £300 per month for many years to come.

We are not allowed to discuss what Cates' audience believe when she said that she has problems with women going to university.

https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/

This is a taste of where the Conservative party would be headed with Cates/Kruger/Braverman/Rees Mogg in charge.

A move away from a secular state to a Christian state. A focus on patriarchal family structures and "congregational life", whatever that is. No immigration. Policy recognition that "all men are created in the image of God" so no need to focus on race. (Not sure about women, presumably they are just encompassed in "men" or else its a hard Christian thing that women were created to serve men).

Yuck. Not for me thanks.