This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.
The view seems to be that it?s just about all right for women to give birth, but after that can we please separate them from their young as soon as possible, for the sake of the economy?
New Labour was frank about it, with that terrifying commissar Patricia Hewitt describing the dwindling numbers of full-time mothers as a ?problem?.
The Lib Dems? chief feminist, Lynne Featherstone, says with her usual simple-minded bluntness that having a baby is a ?bit of a setback?, adding that: ?One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact women still have babies.?
The Coalition wants 40 per cent of two-year-olds in day care by next year. The shiny Modern Tory Liz Truss (I can?t call her a conservative) hires a costly nanny for her own children but wants the less wealthy to stuff their progeny into baby farms with industrial staff-to-toddler ratios.
Even the Leftist Polly Toynbee, who has nothing in principle against nationalising childcare, describes the Truss plan as ?warehousing?.
Nobody ever questions the claim that it is automatically good for mothers to go out and be wage-slaves. Once, this idea was widely hated, and every self-respecting man worked as hard as he could to free his wife from the workbench.
Then the feminist revolutionaries began to argue that the home was a prison and marriage was penal servitude, chained to a sink. Most people thought that was nuts ? until big business realised that women were cheaper than men, more reliable than men and much less likely to go on strike or be hungover than men.
What?s more, all the really beefy men-only jobs ? mining coal, rolling steel, stoking furnaces ? had been abolished.
So suddenly the wildest anti-male ravings of the ultras became the standard view of the CBI, the political parties and the agony aunts. And off the women trooped, to their call centres, their offices and their assembly plants, choking back tears as they crammed their toddlers into subsidised nurseries.
They got tax-breaks. Fatherless households got welfare subsidies. So as far as the State was concerned, the one arrangement that was discriminated against ? and hard ? was the one where one parent went out to work and the other stayed at home.
A selfish upper crust of female lawyers, professional politicians, bankers and journalists imagined that all women enjoyed work as much as they did ? when the truth is that most do it to pay the bills.
But this self-satisfied clique was and is very influential. Who, in Parliament, law, business or the media, speaks for full-time mothers? Certainly not the steely, suited superwomen who have done very well out of the sex war.
Does all this matter? Well, I suspect it does. Children need parents, and small children badly need the devoted, unstinting personal attention that only a mother can give. Without it, they will grow physically but they will not flourish as fully developed humans.
If you wonder where those feral teenagers came from, or why so many primary school children can barely talk and are not potty-trained, ask yourself if it might not be connected with the abolition of motherhood.
But surely Scandinavia, the home of mass day care, is a? paradise? Well, not if you believe Swedish sociologist Jonas? Himmelstrand, who last week warned psychological disorders have tripled among children in Sweden since the child-rearing revolution there in the Eighties.
Culture can?t be transferred from one generation to the next when children are left to bring each other up. He says of mass day care: ?It is at the root of bullying, teenage gangs, promiscuity and the flat-lining of culture.?
As usual, we have been warned. As usual, we will not take any notice until it is far? too late. For no political party stands up for private life or the independent family.
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Every few years a sort of blue mist blurs the vision of the dwindling battalions of Tory loyalists. They persuade themselves that some more or less fraudulent person is the new hope of the future.
Facts are ignored. Blind faith is deployed. From this came the wild and comically wrong belief that David Cameron was a secret patriot, who would rip off his green, liberal garments when he assumed office.
Well, we know how that worked out. But, learning nothing from the experience, the poor old Tory Tribe are now looking for a new delusion to cling to.
Some are beguiled by Alexander (alias ?Boris?) Johnson. They don?t even know his real name, and have also failed to notice that he is politically correct, pro-EU and, while he is cleverer than his schoolmate and fellow Bullingdon hearty, Mr Slippery, he is the same sort of thing.
But dafter even than that is the cult of Theresa May, now being hawked about as the New Iron Lady.
Oh, come on. Theresa May is the Marshmallow Lady. She U-turned over militant feminism, switching without explanation from opposing all-women shortlists for parliamentary candidates to supporting them.
She worked happily with Harriet Harman over the passage of the horrible Equality Act.
And as for her non-pledge to put withdrawal from the Human Rights Convention ?on the table? if the Tories win the next Election, what?s that worth?
?On the table? doesn?t mean she will do it. And the Tories will lose the next Election anyway. As a statement of intent, it is like that fine old music-hall chorus: ?If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.?
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The awful Huhne case shows how driving cars brings out the worst in all of us.
Perfectly pleasant people, once in control of a ton of steel and glass, become irrational, arrogant, impatient speed-maniacs muttering ?get out of my way? and buying personalised number plates.
How much time did Chris Huhne save by his speeding? What did he do with it? He has plenty now.
As I ride my bicycle, I notice the steady worsening of manners on the roads, more hooting, more violent swerving, more red lights jumped, more mad texting while driving.
The people involved are probably saints at home or at work, but become fiends and morons once at the wheel.
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It's started. The Coalition is breaking up, as I predicted here in September 2011.
Get ready for a noisy Tory minority government, all mouth and no trousers, designed to fool you into thinking they?ve rediscovered their principles.
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I gather that the wrongly imprisoned police officer April Casburn, convicted on some of the flimsiest evidence I?ve ever seen, will not be appealing.
What a pity. I should have thought the Police Federation would be anxious to? protect its members from the danger of such prosecutions, and would want to press the? matter even if Mrs Casburn is reluctant.
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