The UK Wants to Raise Your Children for You

A radical reform to Britain’s child-care system was the main feature of the United Kingdom’s 2023 budget announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt yesterday. The budget proposes:

• 30 hours of free child care for children between 9 months and 4 years old for parents who work at least 16 hours a week. The rollout will take a couple of years, starting in 2024 with only 15 hours of free child care a week. It will increase to the full 30 hours by 2025.
• A £600 (us$724) handout to new childminders, and £1,200 for those who join through an agency
• Raising funding to £288 million ($347.5 million) to nurseries providing free child care
• Child-care costs paid upfront (rather than in installments) for parents moving into work or increasing their hours on Universal Credit
• Increasing above-mentioned child-care costs by around 50 percent
• Changing the minimum staff-to-child ratios from 1:4 to 1:5 for 2-year-olds

Hunt said of the plan:

This is the biggest transformation in child care in my lifetime. It’s a huge change and we are going to need thousands more nurseries, thousands more schools offering provision they don’t currently offer, thousands more childminders.

Dangerous agenda: Why is the government willing to pay incentives to get more people into the child-care industry? Why offer to watch your infant for you? If the focus was on helping the children, wouldn’t it be better to introduce measures that free up the parents’ time to raise them themselves?

Hunt went on to say (emphasis added):

We know it is something that is a huge worry, for women in particular, that they have this cliff-edge when maternity leave ends after nine months, no help until the child turns 3 and that can often be career ending. So I think it is the right thing to do for many women, to introduce these reforms and we are introducing them as quickly as we can because we want to remove those barriers to work.

The government prefers for women to work rather than stay at home. The reason is twofold. For one, it provides the state more time to indoctrinate the next generation. Second, it fits in with the feminist movement and their message to women: Your career is more important than your child.

Learn more: Children have to be taught. If you don’t teach your child, someone else will. To understand the importance of family, read Child Rearing With Vision.