What labours free childcare policy really means

Wage suppression for the majority in affect. Labours plans to roll out free childcare to more people than ever is on the face of it a good bit of social justice but is it? If you look closely it’s very clever bit of wage repression. So now a mum or a dad can return to work with the benefit f free childcare estimated to be up to 25 hours a week we can only guess at what jobs this would cover. It would most likely be short term, part time and low paid often with poor working conditions. This is a way of driving down wages for employers and is not the social justice idea that it seems from the outside. It’s a cleverly wrapped up policy which is pro capitalist as you would come to expect these days from labour. Last week we heard Ed Milibands conference speech which excited many it seems who seem to want a labour government however bad they are and the example above is beyond them. Labour is clearly trying the popularist approach now after their slide in the polls of late. Promising big things seems the order of the day with the big headline coming out of last week was the promise to freeze energy prices until 2017. How they would do these remains unclear but clearly is something that would be popular with many given the sky high energy prices today. Whether token gestures like this whilst maintaining austerity and the public sector pay freeze will be enough to see a labour win in 2015 still remains up in the air. With other popularist policies no doubt still to come you can see labour walking into government fairly easily given how the electoral system is stacked in their favour heavily. They will not need much to get back in it would seem. But tax cuts for small business are again small tokens which will do nothing to help ordinary people on the ground suffering from austerity, tax hikes in other areas like VAT which labour said they wouldn’t reverse either last week interestingly. With labours pledges for things like their universal job guarantee which is in affect their own version of workfare which has in all honesty been very successful for capitalists to drive down wages and get cheap labour from the workers. This for me comes as no surprise but too many that still hold illusions in the labour party or parliament in general this will not make good reading. With the terminal decline of establishment political parties including those on centre left and right with less than 1% of the population in Britain being a member of a political party the crisis of representation will only continue if labour does get elected in 2015 in my opinion. Labour may tell you it is bringing socialism back and that Ed is still red Ed while he never was of course if people continue sucking up this nonsense then there will be no real change. As Einstein so famously said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I think that phrase is quite apt today in so many ways.