Gordon Brown's pre-election budget released last week is, without doubt, historic. Brown promised a family-friendly welfare state for the first time, and a children's centre in every community.
This breaches the Blair version of New Labourism: the retreat of the social state and the expansion of the strong state as the scaffolding around children and families.
Brown does not echo the misogyny and mother-blaming in old New Labourspeak, the moralism that addressed children as objects to be patrolled and policed.
Being Brown, he can't bring himself to honour mothers and admit that the problem with the foundation of the welfare state was that it was patriarchal. It was predicated on men in the public world serviced by dependent wives in an unpaid private world.
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