Lindsey German | ukwatch.net

The war in Afghanistan is not a noble cause

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:42:55 +0000

The most noble cause of the 21st century was how Des Browne, the defence minister, described the war in Afghanistan.

This isn’t just a grotesque and insulting way to describe a war in defence of corrupt government, warlords and opium poppy production. It is part of a concerted attempt to rebrand Afghanistan as the good war, the war worth fighting and dying for, the war worth spending billions of pounds to maintain.

No less than Princes William and Harry have been enlisted for this cause, with church parades, memorial services, and pictures of the coffins of dead soldiers returning home. Special reports from the troops in Afghanistan pop up on the news, all stressing the valuable and important role of the troops in helping the Afghans to fight terrorism.

Ministry of Defence spin doctors are working overtime to present this war in all its patriotic glory just as the figure for British soldiers dead has shot over the 100 mark and looks set to continue going up.

George Bush’s visit in June provided the opportunity for Gordon Brown to announce more troop deployment in Afghanistan, as well as increasing sanctions on Iran.

This war has now been going on for nearly seven years. It was the first war George Bush launched in his “war on terror” following the 9/11 attacks. Its aim was to root out Osama Bin Laden from his mountain hideaway, overthrow the Taliban government and destroy Al Qaida. Even Bush has publicly distanced himself from his cry of “Wanted dead or alive” about Bin Laden. The reason is simple: the aim of the Afghan war was not achieved.

The Taliban was defeated easily by the world’s greatest military power and its allies, but Al Qaida was not rooted out, Bin Laden was not captured and none of the promises made to the Afghan people were kept.

Tony Blair announced that “we will not walk away” in the aftermath of the war. He was right. The troops remained, but little was done to help to improve the lives of the Afghan people. Ten times as much is spent on the military as on reconstruction in the country, which remains one of the poorest in the world. Much of that reconstruction is in any case military related.

The Economist magazine published recently a scathing report about the US-backed Afghan government, highlighting its corruption, dependence on warlords and inability to control large parts of the country. There is a quota for the number of women in the Afghan parliament but the society remains as difficult for women as ever. Despite claims by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair in 2001 that women would be liberated by the war and the overthrow of the Taliban, most women still wear the burqa.

Most of the British casualties have occurred in the past two years in Helmand province, despite claims by then defence secretary John Reid that he hoped British troops could go to Helmand and operate “without a shot being fired”.

Britain and the US are intending to pour more troops into Afghanistan. In Iraq, British troops play a political, not military, role as they sit it out at Basra airport. Even the US is engaged in “secret” talks with the Iraqi government about the conditions of withdrawal, although this would involve maintaining US bases, giving US troops immunity from prosecution, controlling much of the airspace and much else.

There is no such talk in Afghanistan, where a serious war is continuing and threatens to escalate, drawing in Pakistan. The Taliban is stronger than it has been since 2001 and there is widespread Afghan opposition to the foreign troops, as many civilians are caught in airstrikes or are forced to become refugees to avoid the war.

We should not allow Bush and Brown to escalate the war. Its human and financial costs will only grow. We are also seeing the effects here. The vote in parliament to extend detention for terrorist suspects without charge to 42 days was one of the most shameful of recent times. The most right wing party in parliament, the DUP, were promised up to £1 billion (plus no extension of abortion rights to Northern Ireland) in order to give their nine votes to the government. Many Labour MPs who voted for the change clearly did not believe in it but thought it a good way to wrongfoot the Tories.

The demonstration opposing Bush was met by restrictions, police violence and arrests. So when we said if they wage war there they will also wage it on us here, we were right.

A bankrupt and unpopular government is attacking the civil liberties which have been fought for over hundreds of years. They are doing so because protest and dissent give the lie to their propaganda about the war and make it harder for them to keep enlisting teenagers to die in the killing fields of Afghanistan. That’s why we have to keep protesting.

Is Britain moving to the right?

JamieSW — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:07:20 +0000

It’s hard to remember that only nine months ago 1 May was projected as a likely general election day. Then, the theory went, Gordon Brown would be able to take Labour to a fourth election victory, strengthen his position as elected prime minister and continue for another four or five years. Brown was at that time – again hard to remember – enjoying a honeymoon following the unlamented departure of Tony Blair.

Instead the local elections in parts of England, Wales and London on 1 May, alongside the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, were terrible defeats for Labour. On the basis of these results, the Tories would have a 116 majority in parliament if there were a general election now. We can therefore be pretty certain that there will be no election, if Labour has anything to do with it, until late in this parliament.

These elections mark a watershed in a number of ways. Most importantly, they presage the return of a Tory government for the first time in more than a decade. May also saw the election of a Tory mayor, after eight years in office for Ken Livingstone, who won first as an independent against Labour in 2000, and then as the Labour candidate four years later. Alongside the election of Boris Johnson, the fascist BNP won a seat on the London Assembly.

None of this is good news for the left. While some right wing candidates made advances in the London elections (the notable exceptions being UKIP and the English Democrats) candidates from the Lib Dems leftwards either lost votes or only just maintained their previous ground (as in the case of the Greens).

It would, however, be a mistake to see the result as simply a shift to the right. Much more it represented a collapse of support for Labour with the Tories being the main beneficiaries. Why did that happen? Firstly, the election as a whole was fought on the basis of right wing politics. Crime and immigration dominated the issues being discussed, and this was a deliberate decision on the part of the main parties. When that happens it is much harder for a space to the left to open up, especially when Labour goes along with the consensus of more police on the streets and being tougher on crime.

More fundamentally, traditional Labour voters were punishing Labour for the 10p tax, the rise of food and utility prices, the housing crisis and much more besides. In the circumstances of a right wing and unpopular Labour government, staggering on after 11 wasted years, it is unsurprising that some voters saw little difference between Labour and the Tories.

It is instructive to consider two feature articles which both appeared on the same day a week after the election results. One, by Ken Livingstone in the Guardian, heralded his support for and in the City of London. The second, by David Cameron in the Independent, appealed to all those who were progressive on green or equality issues to join the Tories. No wonder voters were confused.

At the same time as these electoral gains for the right, there was another story during the election period. Teachers, lecturers and civil servants struck and demonstrated on 24 April. The demonstrations on that day were some of the youngest and most militant workers’ demonstrations for at least a generation.

The carnival held in London’s Victoria Park the weekend before the elections attracted 100,000 in opposition to the BNP.

Immigration

In addition, there is no evidence that attitudes on a range of issues – from privatisation to war – have changed in the course of the election or that the results are likely to lead to such a change of views. In many instances the general public remains to the left of politicians on these questions and on many more. There is one major exception to this – immigration.

The consensus here is much more right wing, with even those who claim to be anti-racist and pro-diversity (which even Tories like Johnson now boast) saying that there have to be limits on immigration. Or, as it’s sometimes put, “the country’s full up”. This, plus the growing wave of Islamophobia, has given a base for the BNP to grow. Even liberal opinion has played its part in this. The BBC’s White Season showed a concern for the “white working class” not evident when reporting strikes, or the class bias in education, or the housing crisis.

Even in the case of the BNP vote, however, it is clear that for many it represented a protest against the Labour government by people who felt they had been ignored or left behind by Labour. That does not mean we should dismiss the vote. While the proportion of the vote was not much higher than four years ago, the absolute number of votes was higher, and the election of an assembly member for the BNP gives them a profile and a level of confidence which they have not had in London for many years.

The BNP vote also highlights the contradictory nature of the politics in the recent elections. There is a sense of frustration and disgust with the policies of the mainstream parties and politicians, who are widely seen as corrupt and only in it for themselves, and this sentiment can be channelled in different directions. In these last elections the main beneficiaries were right wing parties, particularly over the question of immigration. But this was at least partly because the main parties have taken up and promoted anti-immigrant policies.

Most shamefully, New Labour continued to do so in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, held just weeks after the local elections. Literature for the Labour candidate highlighted “concerns” over immigration and invited voters to consider, “What do you think is the biggest problem facing the area?” offering “immigration” as a tick box reply.

The left failed to meet the challenge presented by this election. In London it became a Boris and Ken show, with little substantive differences on most policies, and some of those not to Labour’s advantage (for example on ID cards or conductors on buses). The other parties were squeezed, especially UKIP whose vote fell most dramatically from over 100,000 to just over 20,000 and who lost two seats previously held on the assembly; and the vote I received in 2004 for Respect at around 61,000 first preferences fell to under 17,000 this time. It’s clear that many voters did not want to risk voting for a smaller party for mayor in case it led to the defeat of their favoured candidate.

While this squeeze affected the votes for mayor, the split in Respect and the divisions on the left did no one any favours in the list elections when they were in direct competition. The left vote was therefore split in London, with neither the Left List nor George Galloway’s Respect getting close to winning. There was clearly great confusion over the name. In addition, any division leads to political confusion with some people taking the view that they will vote for neither. The Left List vote was disappointing. It is clear that the weeks which we had to publicise a new name were not sufficient and that some people voted for Respect thinking they were voting for us.

It was, however, right to stand in the elections. When we took part in hustings we made a real impact, helped to pull the campaign to the left and put distinctive policies on housing, crime and immigration onto the agenda. We were also able to intervene around the teachers’ strikes and against the BNP putting a political alternative. It would have been wrong to take part in an election campaign where no one challenged the dominant consensus.

At the same time, it was also right not to put all our emphasis on elections. Elections are a very useful snapshot of consciousness among working class people at any one time, but they don’t tell the whole story. Of necessity, they reflect the past more than the present in the sense that people still vote mostly on past loyalties or on issues which particular parties have or have not taken up in the past. The different groups of workers going on strike over pay, or the 100,000 who attended the carnival, or those becoming radicalised over the banking and economic crisis and the high cost of food and commodities, or the students who have campaigned for fighting unions, have a specific weight regardless of if or how they vote.

Any socialist or left organisation has to relate to them, as well as to ethnic minorities suffering immigration raids, or the Muslim community suffering racism and attacks on civil liberties. Opposition to the war continues, as does defence of women’s rights, especially over abortion and the reactionary attempt to reduce the time limit. The outcome of the various struggles that take place in the coming months can have a greater impact on the balance of class forces, on people’s lives and their willingness to engage in further struggle than where they put their cross on a ballot paper.

Where does the left go from here? Firstly, this is a time when many on the left want to discuss why Livingstone lost, whether a Tory government is inevitable and how the left can organise to defend ourselves. We have had nearly a decade when the movement has seemed on the rise, since Seattle in 1999, and this is a reverse which requires explanation and serious analysis if it is not to lead some to despair.

Secondly, we have to engage in activity which can counter despair and point a way forward for the left: whether against fascism, for higher pay or over housing needs. But that activity on its own is not enough. We also need political solutions to the major ideological and political questions that face us. Socialists are well placed to do this: we have a set of ideas which attempt to understand the world in order to change it, also because we take a wider view of the working class movement.

The crucial questions facing the movement today are how do we develop successful struggles and how do we build an alternative to Labour which has so badly failed generations of working people? The election results were bad for the left overall in London – although even here there were some very good votes in north and east London which show the left can present an alternative – but in parts of the country the results were extremely good, for example in Sheffield and Preston. Other results, for example the anti-academies councillors in Barrow, who won four seats, show there is space to the left of Labour that needs to be filled.

That is why it would be a mistake to abandon the electoral field, and why the Left List should continue to organise locally, through meetings, networks and activities which can allow us to build a base in the localities. In London we began to establish very good networks among different ethnic minorities and trade unionists, but in this election they did not translate into votes. We have to build on our areas of success to find a way of winning more votes in future.

The left also needs to build links and organisation on every issue which confronts us – war, fascism, a growing housing crisis, attacks on living standards – which at present will fall short of total electoral or programmatic unity, but which should aim to go beyond single-issue campaigns. Labour MP John McDonnell has put forward a list of demands that Labour should adopt to win the next election and these sorts of issues are ones which can unite the left.

Finally, socialists are too few in number to bring about the changes and policies we need. That has to change, both by winning more people directly to socialist ideas, and by deepening our influence where we can make a difference and where we have already shown the importance of socialist organisation. That also means spreading our influence geographically, especially to areas such as outer London where the fascists have gained support in recent years.

The world is changing very fast. We do not know the full extent of the economic crisis – only that it is already affecting jobs, wages and housing. We can see the terrible impact of neoliberal policies as people riot in different parts of the world to gain enough to eat. We know that there is great disillusion with existing politics and a sometimes inchoate desire for change. Socialists can give a lead and make a real difference by fighting on the economic, political and ideological fronts.

Gordon Brown beats drums of war

Ellie Keen — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:42:40 +0000

New sanctions threat against Iran

Gordon Brown turned up the heat on Iran this week by threatening serious consequences if the country did not comply with US demands to ditch its nuclear programme.

“Iran should be in no doubt about our seriousness of purpose,” he warned in a speech on Monday evening. Britain would champion tougher sanctions against Iran, he added, aimed at blocking Western investment in the country’s oil and gas industries.

By calling for intensified sanctions against Iran, Brown is joining a growing chorus of voices threatening the country. And these sanction threats can easily spill over into military action – just as they did when Iraq was harried over its supposed weapons of mass destruction.

George Bush’s administration backs sanctions against Iran, but has always insisted that military action remains a live option. The US has sent a nuclear powered aircraft carrier carrying 2,500 Marines to the Persian Gulf, accompanied by nuclear submarines.

Brown has also persistently refused to rule out backing airstrikes or worse against Iran. “I don’t think we would ever rule out a military option,” the prime minister’s official spokesperson said earlier this week.

US officials and intelligence services have repeatedly spread claims that Iran is behind the resistance in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. With staggering hypocrisy, they denounce Iran for intervening in these countries – something they believe they alone have the right to do!

Brown is not alone among European leaders in rushing to Bush’s aid. The French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel have both visited Bush in recent weeks and committed themselves to stronger sanctions against Iran.

Not to be outdone by Sarkozy or Merkel, Brown this week restated his belief that the US remains Britain’s “most important” ally. “It is no secret that I have been a lifelong admirer of the US,” he said.

All of this gives added importance to the two days of action next week called by the Stop the War Coalition to campaign against any strike on Iran. We must not let Brown follow his predecessor down the road of another disastrous war in the Middle East.

Still Looking for Liberation

Tim Holmes — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:07:32 +0000

Lindsey German has written about and been active in struggles for women’s rights for many years. She looks at the changing lives of women and explains what stimulated her to write her new book, Material Girls – women, men and work.

What took you so long? That’s a fair enough question about a book which has been seven years in the writing. I first made time to sit in libraries back in the beginning of the new millennium. It seemed that a great deal had happened to women in the decade since I finished Sex, Class and Socialism, and I wanted to write a new book which took into account those changes. It seems incredible now that in the seven years from starting to finishing the book so much has changed again in women’s lives.

That’s not the main reason it took so long, of course. That was down to the “war on terror”, which George Bush and Tony Blair launched after the events of 11 September 2001, when around 3,000 people died in the US as a result of terrorist attacks. I helped to found the Stop the War Coalition and found myself at the head of the biggest mass movement ever seen in Britain, organising two million people who marched in London on 15 February 2003.

The successive wars and the movement against them, which counted women as an important and significant part, have in themselves changed attitudes to women. The war against Afghanistan was waged in part in the name of women’s liberation, with Laura Bush and Cherie Blair employing feminist language to support the warmongers. The Islamophobia exacerbated by the wars plays strongly on an image of Islam as a repressive, anti-women religion, and of Muslim women as passive and oppressed.

Some socialists and feminists have failed to defend Muslim women in these circumstances, preferring to reinforce these false stereotypes. The chapter on war in Material Girls attempts to redress the balance and to show the important role that women are playing in the movement, including Muslim women. It is a bizarre kind of feminism or socialism that is threatened by a group of people who suffer racism as well as sexism, and who struggle to be treated as equals in our society.

However, the changes have not just been caused by the war. The system of neoliberalism which now dominates the globe has wrought extreme alterations in the ways in which people live and work throughout the world. It is now expected in many parts of the world that women have to leave home and family to enter paid work. It is expected that children will be cared for by people who are not their natural parents. It is expected that marriages will break up and that women will have lives outside the home.

A race to the bottom

Such changes in lives also change attitudes, and here we have seen a spectacular reversal of many accepted truths over the past half century. Whole debates have opened up. Today these tend not to be about whether women should have sex before marriage or whether they should dress in a certain way, because many of those arguments have become less important, at least in the West.

Now the assumption is that women have gone too far in their quest for liberation. Today the debates are around whether women can have everything and whether it has all gone too far. More than two decades on from Margaret Thatcher’s notorious statement that, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families,” it is perhaps hardly surprising that social solutions to women’s oppression are spurned in favour of the views that stress the importance of personal change. These suggest that women need to be more assertive to win equality, or simply just assert that it is men who are the problem.

The right to work for women has become the right to be exploited on the same basis as men. Free sexuality is reduced to sexual images dominating most areas of life – and making a big profit for a few. Neoliberalism has heralded a race to the bottom as workers’ rights come under attack and inequality grows. Recent figures published by the Economist show the gap between men’s and women’s earnings at its highest among the poorest 10 percent.

The cumulative effect of the different changes on women’s lives means that this is a completely new book. Even issues covered in Sex, Class and Socialism are looked at from a different angle. It is strange the way that issues which are essentially the same, and which you haven’t changed your mind about, tend to look quite different from the distance of ten or 15 years. Some widespread assumptions no longer hold, and sometimes events have rendered the original assessment or discussion less relevant.

The book deals with the present situation of women but constantly dips back into history. Sometimes that means the 18th or 19th centuries where previous upheaval in women’s lives had such an impact and needs to be integrated into an analysis; sometimes it means much more modern history. We live in a society where history is all too often ignored and where only the immediate is deemed to matter. But we can’t understand any of the changes in the world without looking at history and at how in the past women and men have grappled with many problems similar to those we face today.

The feminists and the socialists of the late 19th and early 20th century had to deal with issues of equality and class, just as we had to in the 1960s and 1970s. The battles over suffrage which took place 100 years ago saw repeated divisions on grounds of class and politics. Successive generations have tried to deal with wrongs and inequalities. We can learn from their stories and struggles about how to organise today. The history of women has long been a hidden one, only rediscovered as part of the development of ideas around the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The history of working class women, along with that of the working class as a whole, has been particularly hidden.

Many of the changes I write about I have lived through. I came from the baby boom generation born after the Second World War. So while I didn’t live through the war I grew up in a family and a city profoundly affected by the war. When my mother talked about her experiences as a wages clerk in the AEC munitions factory in Southall that experience was as close to her in time as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the first Gulf War or even Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997 are to us now. I knew that women were conscripted into work or the armed services long before I read about it. Her experience of the war was double edged, with hardship, loss and danger an everyday fact. It was also an exciting time for a young woman, dancing with GIs at the Hammersmith Palais and queuing for shoes in Oxford Street. In many ways I think it was the best time of her life.

I experienced women going out to work, first part time, then full time. The changing marriage patterns were those of my friends and family, as was the growing divorce rate. The 1967 Abortion Act had a real impact for my generation. Changes in work and the widening of women’s horizons were real events. The movements of the 1960s politicised me and women’s liberation expressed the aspirations of a generation of women who demanded equal treatment. The sense of hope that came out of the 1960s came from a generation brought up by those who lived through the war and who hoped for a better world. Equality and liberation, whether national, racial or sexual, were the guiding principles of millions of young people around the world, and their ideas and actions had a powerful impact on politics, which has not been destroyed today after decades of attacks.

That view of history is, of course, subjective and partial, but I try to interweave it with an analysis of how changes occur in class society, and of how those changes – women working, the decline of marriage structures, much more open sexuality – interact on the dominant ideas and thus change them as well. It’s also important to recognise the limits of change. All the advances have left women still very far from equal, still the primary childcarers, still subject to sexist attitudes and assumptions. The answer to the question why this still happens in the 21st century is the key to understanding the way to liberation.

Capitalism breeds and encourages inequality, dividing and ruling along lines of gender, race and nation. The longest oppression has been that of women. Despite the advances for women, advances in work, family, education or sexual freedom all come up against the limits of class society. Women are able to change their lives, but only up to a point. When their rights threaten the ability to make profits – for example by granting equal pay or by creating full time free nursery provision – then they come under attack or are denied altogether.

Socialists argue that we have to change the world for the better on a number of grounds: poverty, war, hunger, the destruction of the planet, are all pressing reasons to fight for a world based on cooperation, not competition, which can end the profit system. The ending of oppression, the systematic discrimination against particular groups, must also be a major reason. Women’s oppression not only makes the lives of women much harder, but also denies women, men and children the possibility of genuine free relationships based on equality. The ending of the class system of exploitation, and with it the various forms of oppression, has to be the end goal for anyone who wants to achieve liberation. Socialism and women’s liberation are therefore intertwined.

Every movement of women has come out of the radicalisation of society as a whole. This was true of the English and French revolutions, of the women’s movement around suffrage, of the period following the Russian Revolution and the First World War, and of the 1960s and 1970s. The renewed interest today presages women’s movements and struggles ahead.

Blaming The Victims

jo — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:41:49 +0000

George Bush tells us he’s disappointed with progress in Iraq. How does he think the rest of us feel? The occupiers have now admitted they cannot control Baghdad or Basra. No wonder generals, former warmongers and even the politicians are now discussing withdrawal from Iraq. This is about much more than the US midterm elections, where Bush looks like he’ll get a pasting. It is about a complete failure of strategy in the region, and the sudden realisation that things can only get worse.

What do you do when you have made such a mess and want to cover up for it? Take a leaf out of Jack Straw’s book. Straw, last seen swanning round the north west with fellow war criminal and architect of this disastrous war Condoleezza Rice, has been thinking hard about integration and related questions. So he might. After 27 years as Blackburn’s MP, perhaps he might take some responsibility for the situation there.

But no. Jack Straw is uncomfortable, not with substandard housing, high unemployment and racially segregated schools, but with Muslim women who wear the face veil, or niqab. His deliberate public statement that he asked women to remove their veils when they visited his surgery has opened up a flood of attacks on Muslims.

Where respectable politicians lead, much worse follows. Racist attacks have grown, the BNP has witnessed a surge of support and it appears to be open season on Muslims. In the nasty, bullying atmosphere we are now experiencing, the quietest and most unassuming Muslim is under the spotlight. You object to attacks on Muslims and you’re denying free speech. You get angry and you’re denounced for extremism. You keep yourself to yourself and you’re allowing extremists to speak for you.

Perhaps a reality check would be in order. British Muslims have not traditionally been known for militancy or separatism. They came to this country in large numbers in the decades following the Second World War to do the jobs that many British born people no longer wanted to do. They settled in some of the poorest parts of Britain, living in housing which was often second rate, subject to racist barriers where they lived and worked.

Their children and grandchildren struggled to get educated and sometimes to enter professions that would have been undreamt of by the first generation. Even so, young Muslims today suffer high unemployment and under-employment, and tend to be educated in less prestigious universities and schools.

Most importantly, they could not escape the racism embedded into our society which means that Bangladeshi and Pakistani boys do worst at school (along with African Caribbean and Turkish boys), and that ethnic minorities, especially those with large working class components, do worst for jobs and housing.

Political statement

This structural racism is now being blamed on its victims. So lack of integration is not blamed on whites who move out of areas or send their children to Christian schools to avoid Asians, but on Asians. When they turn to their religion as a spiritual and cultural support in a hostile world (as Irish Catholics and Jews have done in Britain before them, joined later by Sikhs and Hindus) they are painted as backward fanatics.

The wave of Islamophobia now sweeping Europe, which wants to force uniformity and integration by denying open religious symbols, is not about modernising. Muslims are already part of modern society but want the right to be treated equally while following their religion.

Many young Muslim women have taken the decision to wear the hijab or even the niqab as a political statement. That is their right. Those who deny them this right should reflect that they are pushing such women towards wearing scarves and veils.

When “modern” society brings racism and discrimination, and when people in politicians’ suits lecture them about how they dress, no wonder they feel like asserting their right to be different.

Recipes For Disaster

jo — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 13:26:55 +0000

Talk about not having it all. Women are expected to work longer, but then get the blame when anything goes wrong with their kids.

According to the Economist, “The increase in female employment in the rich world has been the main driving force of growth in the past couple of decades. Those women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants, China and India.”

But this great contribution to the world economy has been achieved on the cheap. Childcare remains privatised, Britain has some of the worst state nursery and pre-school provision in Europe, and those women wanting to work have to rely on partners and family members to help them. Or else they have to be rich. Despite the casual way in which media columnists refer to their nannies – as if we all had one – the bottom line cost of employing a nanny is £35,000 a year.

In addition, this big increase in women’s work has gone alongside a much worse work culture. Working hours are the longest in Europe for men. But many women also work long hours, and shift working is much more common. A quarter of all families with children contain at least one breadwinner working shifts.

Suddenly were hearing this isnt good for children – and women are blamed for it. They buy processed food and poor quality takeaways, and children are in danger of obesity because they eat junk food. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the fact that only 12 percent of people cook from scratch.

That isn’t so surprising really, when you consider how much more women have to do outside the home than our mothers and grandmothers had to do. Women today are engaged in the biggest juggling act ever of trying to balance pressurised work, shopping, cleaning and childcare.

Good cooking using healthy ingredients can of course be done quickly and pleasurably, but there are all sorts of reasons why it is not. Ready meals don’t need much thinking about, and they are palatable to a generation brought up on processed food. There needs to be a cultural revolution in attitudes towards allowing people the time for shopping and time for cooking properly. If you shop at 10pm on a Monday evening you tend to think frozen and ready meals, not rocket salad and goat’s cheese.

Child obesity is a class question too. Fish, fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean meat are all expensive, while much that is bad for you is cheap and filling. The rich can eat out every night in good, healthy restaurants while eating out for the working class means Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, kebabs and chips.

Public restaurants

So let’s start blaming those who have helped ruin a generation’s health. Jamie Oliver’s campaign for healthy school meals is only necessary because of government policy. School meals were the first Tory privatisation back in 1979. School meals services were sold off, and canteen style cheap fast food was introduced.

A century ago it was recognised that children needed nutritional school dinners. But for the past two decades these have been destroyed in the name of the market. We now complain children won’t eat healthy food when we’ve miseducated them.

What can we do about the problem now? Not send women back into the home. Here are a few suggestions that would make life better: a 35-hour working week for men and women would enable parents and families to spend more time with children. A national childcare service, free at the point of use along the lines of the NHS, would free up parents time.

Not for profit public restaurants, based on healthy eating, would mean families could eat out at low cost. There should be healthy subsidised school meals providing breakfast, lunch and tea.

Who would be against that? The big companies who make such profit from unhealthy foods or from private childcare, and the employers who would have to pay the same for a shorter working week. Who would be for it? Just about everyone else apart from the government. No contest really.