What does it take for a small child not to recognise their own name? I’ve been thinking about that for days, since reading the Local Government Association’s recent report on a growing crisis in early childhood. We’ve known for a while about children starting school still in nappies, or speaking in Americanisms absorbed from hours stuck in front of YouTube, or even struggling to sit upright because they’ve spent too long slumped over an iPad to develop core muscles. So sadly, it’s not surprising to read of early-years workers telling the LGA they see more and more pre-schoolers who can barely speak, play with others or contain their rage when things don’t go their way. But it was the practitioner who noted that some children “don’t seem to respond to their name” who got to me. You have to wonder how often that child hears a loving adult trying to get their attention. Too often, another practitioner said, “children are not spoken to at home, but offered screens all day” – at mealtimes, out shopping, or in the car – with parents seemingly scared of provoking tantrums if they take the phone away.
The report describes a complex puzzle with multiple causes: poverty, and the parental exhaustion that comes of a hardscrabble life; growing up in a pandemic; changes in early-years provision; and way too much screen time. It can’t be solved by money alone, but certainly won’t be solved without it. So a two-pronged strategy of lifting the two-child limit on children’s welfare payments – as Rachel Reeves did last week – and intervening early where toddlers aren’t meeting their milestones makes sense. The Best Start family hubs rolling out gradually nationwide will, we learned this week, get Send (special educational needs and disabilities) co-ordinators, focusing particularly on speech and language. They’ll promote the upcoming National Year of Reading to wean kids off screens and on to books, and more generally attempt, on a shoestring, to mimic the support that their predecessor programme Sure Start once offered parents. There’s not enough funding – there never is – but there are the beginnings of joined-up thinking, accepting that tackling problems in nursery rather than in primary school is easier, cheaper and kinder on everyone involved.
Let’s not tempt fate, given this government’s unparalleled ability to take one step forward and three back. But for the record: taxing the better-off in the budget to invest in tackling child poverty, telling some home truths about the economic damage done by Brexit (as Keir Starmer also did this week), and striking a zero-tariff deal on pharmaceuticals with Donald Trump to save a lot of jobs isn’t a terrible week at the office. More surprisingly, for the first time in ages Labour is talking about things its supporters actually like. Jobs! Europe! Children not going hungry! Evidently there has been a disturbance in the force.
Westminster rumour has it that the Morgan McSweeney tendency inside government – focused on wining voters back from Reform – is currently being out-argued by those more worried about losing them to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. Who knows whether this will last, or what this will do to their electoral fortunes, so for once let’s stay focused on those at the sharp end.
The biggest budget winners in terms of net income, the Resolution Foundation thinktank notes, were the poorest 10%; the biggest losers were the richest 10%. Strip away all the fuss about who leaked what to whom, and there’s the gist: Reeves raised money mostly from the better off and spent it mostly on poorer families. She got there inelegantly but she got there, and now there will be children waking up tomorrow who won’t suffer the lifelong harms of early deprivation. At the time of writing, the government’s imminent child poverty strategy is still under wraps, but children’s charities were unanimous that it would be pointless without scrapping the two-child limit. That’s done. What remains is to tell a compelling human story about how children’s lives will change as a result of all that public money, to make people feel it’s worth it.
Of course Nigel Farage will say Labour is whacking up taxes for no good reason. But he backed the lifting of the cap this summer, and Reform has problems of its own. For all its meteoric rise in the polls, it has struggled to break the 30% ceiling – a nice problem to have, admittedly, when you’re still miles ahead of the two supposedly big parties, but 30% isn’t enough to win an election. Hence renewed speculation that Reform will merge with the Tories, which would indeed make sense electorally – if only so many of those involved didn’t hate each other.
Meanwhile both Labour and Tory strategists have noticed that Reform’s vote share seemingly falls a bit when the economy is uppermost in people’s thoughts, and rises when immigration is. When the battle is over tax and how to spend it, or where new jobs are coming from, Reform isn’t clear what it wants to say and so loses ground to the Tories. The striking thing about watching Kemi Badenoch pummel Rachel Reeves in parliament last week was how it left Farage oddly out in the cold.
Let’s not get carried away here. The chancellor’s path remains strewn with landmines – including a revolt brewing among rural Labour MPs over the increasingly toxic farm inheritance tax – and this administration’s capacity for self-destruction is prodigious. But when a Labour government actually delivers some of what its supporters were screaming for, it’s churlish not to acknowledge it. Sometimes, you just have to take yes for an answer.
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