PETER HITCHENS: Turning women into wage slaves suits everyone, except women and children, of course.

How bizarre that the cornerstone of a supposedly conservative budget is a plan to help women abandon their children and go to work. Anti-family socialists and hardline dogmatic feminists, often the same people, have long sought to turn women into wage slaves.

The former Communist East Germany managed to get 90 percent of its women into factories and offices in the 1980s, calling it a great triumph. Some modern feminists admire this to this day.

For them, the only good life is the life of paid work. The only ‘working women’ are those who work outside the home. The enormous, responsible, and future-defining task of raising the next generation as good men and women is dismissed as servitude and left in the hands of paid strangers.

Big business has felt the same way, seeing the new untapped female workforce as preferable to the old male working class, most of whom were thrown into the national scrap during the Thatcher years, along with the blast furnaces, the winding equipment at the mine entrance, the rolling mills. and greasy, noisy old-style car production lines where those people used to work hard. However, in those days, most families could get by on one salary, whereas now it takes two, plus lots of tax breaks (and who pays for that in the end?).

So what do we gain? The only form of child care that is not aided or subsidized by the state is that in which a mother raises her own sons and daughters.

In our new age of service industries, call centres, windowless department stores and, of course, the huge empires of the NHS, nursing homes and social work, a female workforce fits all very well. Except the women. And above all, except their children, who in their hundreds of thousands are denied the presence of a full-time father.

To be sure, superwomen like Nicola Horlick and Cherie Blair have always longed to sit on boards or be judges, with gigantic salaries.

Women like these can afford excellent nannies to do the job of a full-time mother. But for most wage slaves, the work is hard and the wages are low, and it takes them away from the children.

As American conservative thinker Helen Andrews has said of the post-1960s generation of feminists: “The boomers promised that jobs were the only way for women to feel fulfilled and independent (but) any socialist could have told them no.” there is no one more dependent than a woman”. salaried worker… The net effect has been to narrow the choices of typical women, taking the choice that made the most of them happy and removing it from the set of choices.’

In the new British Democratic Republic, where most of what normal people used to think has now been declared unacceptable and evil, Ms. Andrews can say this (but only) since she is a woman and lives in the US. , where speech is still in many ways freer than it is here.

I, of course, have no opinions on this, being a man. Soon, now that all the political parties agree, no one will be able to disagree.

If war is hell, why demand it in Ukraine?

Erich Maria Remarque’s book on World War I, All Quiet On The Western Front, was hated by Hitler as no one who read it could ever again be seduced by the supposed glories of war.

Remarque had been a true combat soldier, so he couldn’t be ignored. In fact, the Nazis hated him so much that, unable to get their hands on him, they murdered his sister.

The book is still powerful (I’ve been rereading it this week). But the new movie, despite its Oscars, tries too hard to be smart and stylish.

The gritty story of a group of friends, fooled by braggarts and then exposed to the horrible truth of trench warfare, would have been better.

Those who now demand endless war in the Ukraine must realize what they are asking for.

BBC’s one-sided stalemate is a disaster

If there was a right-wing Gary Lineker, we wouldn’t have all these problems.

Imagine if a figure of similar fame and influence, but in favor of immigration controls, could confront Lineker on Twitter or on a public talk show. Then it wouldn’t matter if either of them used his BBC position to push aside.

But only the BBC could create such a figure. The national broadcaster is the only body that can elevate people to such prominence. Lineker’s large following on Twitter, which makes his views important, is a result of his fame as a broadcaster.

It is true that the BBC occasionally offers modest platforms to a few nominal Tories, or to confused and politically incoherent crowd pleasers like Jeremy Clarkson. But the only opinion from which he violently distances himself is social, moral and political conservatism. Dominated as he is by urban radicals, he simply can’t stand having such opinions, nor the people who do. This is where the impartiality of the BBC has gone awry.

For decades, the BBC has recruited people who actively like mass immigration because it makes the country more multicultural, and who are embarrassed and bewildered by conservative Christianity or people who believe in punishing crime.

How would you correct this balance now? Parliament works, or used to work, because it was balanced between two genuinely opposed parties. Fleet Street was the same, as was our judicial system. A tough public debate is a good way to get to the truth.

The collapse of the BBC into a one-sided stalemate is a national disaster. If it doesn’t reform, close it and start over. Yes, we have a national broadcaster, but not this one. Next time the BBC Charter is presented, make it clear that it will be awarded only to a body ready to allow voices from both sides of our society.

For the past week I’ve been fending off a Twitter mob furious about my point last week that the Nazis were left-wing racists. One jerk even claimed (thinking ‘leftist’ means ‘good’) that I was excusing the Holocaust.

You see, the line between the Nazis and their opponents was not as rigid and impassable as the left likes to think. Large numbers of Social Democrats and Communists joined the Nazi Brownshirts after Hitler seized power. The left-wing German historian Konrad Heiden noted this in his 1938 biography of Hitler.

The Nazis, with their enormous social programs, their strict control over all aspects of society, and their contempt for Christianity and private life, have much in common with the programs of the left. Stalin and Hitler got along surprisingly well. Leftists simply don’t believe that they and their movement can do, think or say anything wrong.

Well, they are wrong. Let’s rejoice that the people who yell at me and demand that I confess to my wrongdoing, recant or just shut up, do not (yet) have any political power.