"It may be better news for women... to look after their own children and fit jobs into the child's day"

[SleepWhenImDead]

So says Jill Kirby, director of the Conservative think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies in this BBC article.

Seriously, what planet is this lady on? She makes out like it's a NEW idea for women to either not to work or to work hours to limit the amount of childcare that's needed. Well done Jill, we'd never thought of that before you suggested it!

I'm going to be hard hit from these cuts to public sector, I'm currently on maternity leave but due to be made redundant anyway. The public sector is the place I'd need to get a job, and get child-friendly hours. DOes this Jill think we get to CHOOSE these things, like a job is something you do for fun to avoid looking after your own children?! Think I might as well give up even hoping for a job and soon we'll lose our child benefit as well. I'm attacked on all directions!

Are there qualifications in how to be a smug Torie git or can you self certify?

I agree - MN think tank sounds awesome.

Will there be wine and nibbles?

OverflowingMum - they don't want you to bake cakes. They want you to volunteer in your DCs' school, take care of elderly parents, pick up litter from verges, drive neighbours to hospital appointments and make all sorts of other free contributions to the running of society, in between raising your DC.

Ah. We were speculating about what she thinks single mothers are supposed to do. Here's another of her publications:-

link

The title is "Broken Hearts - family decline and its impact on society"

Apparently, would you believe it, women have been having children out of wedlock, and that has caused all the problems society now faces. Lawks a mercy, those hussies have brought shame upon us all.

And she is a Conservative policy advisor. I am getting seriously scared by this government.

People, you can take your fury straight to Jill Kirby if you like here - as you'll see, she's got plenty of other appallingly shonky ideas ("Sure Start has been proved a colossal waste of money"...) so she's clearly been doing some good old thinktanking.

Good god. Can we please ship this woman off to America, I bet the Tea Party and various other mental far right groups would love her.

I think we may have found the government's secret plan to reduce unemployment. Women should just stop working! Then the men could have their jobs, and the women wouldn't be unemployed because, y'know, they're women and they're not really meant to work anyway. And obviously none of them would possibly want to work when they could be at home doing stuff men find boring with their children all day.

From the paper Bec highlighted (referring to Labour at the time):
"The Government?s current programme appears to be based on the assumption that men and women should be homogenous and interchangeable. In this vision of family life, all adults of working age, regardless of gender or parental status, should ideally be in full-time paid employment, equal earners and taking equal shares
in their domestic responsibilities"

Umm, more or less, yes. That's what I aspire to. Certainly, the "equal partners and taking equal shares in their domestic responsibilities" is exactly what I aim for. And I consider earning money part of our domestic responsibilities so between us, domestic responsibilities that have to be met include earning money, doing laundry, paying bills, feeding cats (and children in due course) etc etc etc.

I think the page titled "Dead British Babies" is possibly the worst thing I've ever, ever seen (she's following up a point about cot death and single and/or teenage mothers). No mention of the link between poverty and cot death and whether that has been taken into account. Oh this lady is a piece of work...

(Btw, according to the foreword, she left a career in law to be a full time mother to her three boys. Presumably she also did 'good works' in BS style. Presumably her husband supported her financially.)

If she does come on for a webchat, could MNHQ Pleeeeeeeeeeease have Xenia in the same room at the same time? Pretty please?

Maybe throw in SGB for good measure. And dittany.

Actually, reading her vile post is chilling...she's like a divining rod into the true values of the stony Tory heart.

"think tank"- not doing much thinking! to look after their OWN children- what about the men?

Oh for pity's sake. Her basic assumption is wrong. She's pulling out all these statistics to show that in marriage children are safer and therefore seems to think we should all be married. But that's ridiculous. So if you get pregnant but then get married things will be better? Of course not. IF there is a problem, it doesn't come from couples who make a conscious decision to have children without getting married or couples that get pregnant but for whatever reason cannot stay together.

Sorry, got to ask bonsoir again, what non-jobs? you can do better than nappy lady surely? The essential problem with the cuts argument IMO is the idea that the public sector is full of women people sitting around, scratching their arses and bleeding the tax payer dry. It's lovely to think that, because then we can get rid of them all, they can go back to looking after their kids (surely what they want anyway) and we save ourselves a bit of cash. Problem is, it's just not true.

I'll tell you who will lose their jobs under the Tories, it will be the woman at the school where I used to teach whose job it was to work with the disruptive kids. But she's not a trained teacher, she's not 'front-line' so we don't need her, so the disruptive kids will go back in the classroom with no support. So the teachers will have to manage them in the best way they can, but that's ok because the Tories say it's ok to 'physically intervene' with children in the classroom! Oh and for the ones who don't come to school we'll also be losing the 'back-office' lady who supports and chases up truants, so no-one will notice that they aren't there anyway. What's that? Falling educational achievement? Illiterate teenagers? Development of an 'underclass'? Rising crime? Surely not Mr Cameron, not under the Tories?

OMG. I am rarely speechless.

I really hope her husband is knobbing someone else. Yeah, screw sisterhood!

Perhaps jill kirby would like to try an experiment - try a single income of say £30K a year for her husband and she stays at home raising her 3 boys and doing good deeds in the community.

We can ask her in a year how it is going. Until she has completed the experiment she can keep her opinions to herself.

Well I suppose the Tory party do have a long history of supporting sex workers, one way and another.

On the CB front, remember the Tories are only cutting it for people in the 40 per cent tax bracket.

Most families will not lose CB

Reading her bio (from Bec's link), she has no training in social research (she's a solicitor) and she starts from a clear ideological position. Everyone needs to be married and stay married, regardless of what the marriage may be like. Don't you see, you silly-billies, domestic violence only occurs in situations of cohabitation, not proper Marriage! She cherry-picks the evidence (eg. the Rowntree report) to support her viewpoint. Not a credible commentator at all.

"women going out to do jobs to pay for childcare generates a type of work which then requires subsidy from the state". - what on earth is this lady on???! Many of us page a huge % in tax rather than are subsidised!

It is totally possible in the private sector for working women to have fantastic jobs that pay enough for child care and are flexible enough for child care hours. It just requires effort from the mum and it is a heck of a lot of work. As I'm sure it is for any public sector job too.

It makes me so angry to see that someone like Jill has a very narrow view of working women and what's feasible in this day and age. She's showing her age & lack of understanding of the current work place - just look at the % of working women who earn more than their partners and are grafters.

I wish that, rather than "women", the article in the OP referred to "second earners in couples with children". The issue of paying for childcare and family friendly jobs arises when there is not one SAHP. Doesn't have to be the mother who is the SAHP.

For once I feel compelled to quote Margaret Thatcher,

"There is no such thing as society"

especially not a big one, Dave.

Spooky, of course it would be unfair! It needs to be in the "Everyone come throw old fruit at this woman" section, or, at a pushh, the chat section where EVERYONE van see it. Or maybewe could get a live debate broadcast into the Houses of Parliament, from a stage in Trafalgar Square.

That would generate an adequate sample of women for her to fail to generalise.