PETER HITCHENS: Making women wage slaves suits everyone well – except women and children, of course

How strange 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 old communist East Germany managed to put 90 percent of its women in factories and offices in the 1980s, and considered it a great triumph. Some modern feminists admire this to this day.

For them, the only good life is a life with paid work. The only “working women” are those who work outside the home. The enormous, responsible and determining task of raising the next generation as good women and men is dismissed as serfdom and entrusted to paid strangers.

Big business has felt the same, viewing the new, untapped female workforce as far preferable to the old male working class, most of whom were dumped on the national scrapheap during the Thatcher years, along with the blast furnaces, mine mouth winding equipment and rolling mills. and greasy, noisy, old-style automobile production lines where those people used to work. However, in those days most families could get by on one salary, whereas now you need 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 the state does not help or subsidize is that in which a mother raises her own sons and daughters.

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

No doubt superwomen like Nicola Horlick and Cherie Blair have always longed to sit on boards or be judges, with huge salaries.

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

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

In the new British Democratic Republic, where most of what normal people used to think is now considered unacceptable and evil, Mrs. Andrews can say this (but only just) because she is a woman and lives in America, where the discourse It is still in vogue. many more free ways than here.

I, of course, have no opinion on the matter, being a man. Soon, now that all political parties are in agreement, no one will be able to disagree.

If war is hell, why demand it in Ukraine?

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

Remarque had been a true fighting soldier, so he could not 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 re-reading it this week). But his new movie, despite its Oscar wins, 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 an endless war in Ukraine must realize what they are asking for.

BBC’s unilateral 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 debate show. Then it wouldn’t matter if one of them used his positions at the BBC to push him 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 huge following on Twitter – which makes his opinions important – is a result of his fame in broadcasting.

It is true that the BBC occasionally offers modest platforms to a few nominal conservatives, or to confused and politically incoherent crowd-pleasers such as 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 cannot bear to hold similar views, nor can the people who hold them. This is where the BBC’s impartiality has failed.

For decades, the BBC has recruited from 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 restore 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 unilateral stagnation is a national disaster. If it doesn’t reform, close it and start again. Yes, let’s have a national station, but not this one. Next time the BBC Charter comes up, please make it clear that it will be awarded only to a body willing to allow voices from both sides of our society.

For the past week I’ve been defending myself from a Twitter mob protesting my argument last week that Nazis were left-wing racists. One idiot 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 uncrossable as the left likes to think. Large numbers of social democrats and communists joined the Nazi brownshirts after Hitler took 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 hatred of Christianity and private life, have much in common with the programs of the left. Stalin and Hitler got along surprisingly well. Leftists simply do not believe that they and their movement can do, think or say anything bad.

Well, they are wrong. Let’s be glad that the people who yell at me and demand that I confess my wrongdoings, recant, or simply shut up don’t (yet) have any political power.