PETER HITCHENS: Making women wage slaves suits everyone well – except women and children, of course

How bizarre that the cornerstone of a supposedly conservative budget is a plan to help women abandon their children and go to work. Anti-family socialists and dogmatic hardline feminists—often the same people—have long sought to turn women into wage slaves.

The old communist East Germany managed to cram 90 percent of its women into factories and offices in the 1980s and considered that a great triumph. Some modern feminists admire this to this day.

For them, the only good life is the life of paid work. The only ‘working women’ are those who work outside the home. The huge, responsible, future-defining task of raising the next generation as good women and men is dismissed as servitude and outsourced to paid strangers.

Big business has felt the same way, seeing the new untapped female workforce as much preferable to the old male working class, the bulk of which was thrown into the national scrap heap during the Thatcher years, along with the blast furnaces, mine winders, rolling mills and greasy, noisy production lines for old cars where such people used to toil. But back then, most families could get by on one paycheck, while now two are needed, plus a bunch of tax breaks (and who pays for them in the end?).

So what have we gained? The only form of childcare that the state does not assist or subsidize is where a mother raises her own sons and daughters.

In our new era of service companies, call centres, huge windowless warehouses and of course the vast empires of the NHS, care homes and social work, a female workforce is a great fit for everyone. Except the women. And above all, except for their children, who are denied the presence of a full-time parent for hundreds of thousands.

No doubt, superwomen like Nicola Horlick and Cherie Blair have always longed to sit on boards of directors or be judges, with huge salaries.

Such women can afford excellent nannies to do the work of a full-time mother. But for most wage slave women, the work is monotonous, the pay is poor, and it deprives them of children.

As American conservative thinker Helen Andrews said of the post-1960s feminist generation, “Boomers promised that work was the only way women could become fulfilled and independent. [but] any socialist could have told them that there is no one more dependent than a wage labourer… The net effect is to limit the choices of typical women, taking the choice that made most of them happy and choosing it from the array of options. to delete. ‘

In the new British Democratic Republic, where most of what normal people used to think is now considered unacceptable and evil, Ms. Andrews can say this (but only on her own) since she is a woman and lives in the US, where speech is still freer in many ways than here.

Of course I have no opinion on this, since I am a man. Soon, with all political parties in agreement, no one will be able to disagree.

If war is hell, why demand it in Ukraine?

TRENCH WARFARE: All Quiet On The Western Front tries too hard to be smart

Erich Maria Remarque’s book about World War I, All Quiet On The Western Front, was hated by Hitler because no one who read it could ever again be seduced by the supposed glory of war.

Remarque had been a true warrior and so could not be ignored. In fact, the Nazis disliked him so much that, unable to get hold of him, they killed his sister instead.

The book is still powerful (I reread it this week). But the new movie of it, despite the Oscars, tries too hard to be smart and classy.

The raw story of a group of friends, tricked by blowhards and then exposed to the horrible truth of trench warfare would have been better.

Those who are now demanding an endless war in Ukraine should realize what they are asking for.

The one-sided stagnation of the BBC is a disaster

Gary Lineker returned to Match of the Day on Saturday, a week after the show aired without presenters following an argument over impartiality

If there was a right-wing Gary Lineker, we wouldn’t have all these problems.

Imagine if a figure of similar fame and influence, but proponent of migration controls, could confront Mr. Lineker on Twitter or on a public debate show. Then it wouldn’t matter if any of them used their BBC positions to move one way.

But only the BBC could create such a figure. The national broadcaster is the only body that can elevate people to such fame. Mr. Lineker’s huge following on Twitter – which makes his opinion important – is a result of his fame on television.

It is true that the BBC occasionally gives modest platforms to a few nominal Tories, or to confused, politically incoherent crowd pleasers like Jeremy Clarkson. But the only opinion it violently deviates from is social, moral, and political conservatism. Although it is dominated by urban radicals, it simply cannot bear to have such views around, nor the people who hold them. This is where the BBC’s impartiality has gone wrong.

For decades, the BBC has recruited people who welcome mass immigration because it makes the country more multicultural, and who are ashamed and bewildered by conservative Christianity or by people who believe in the punishment of crime.

How would she restore this balance now? Parliament works, or has worked, because it was balanced between two truly opposing sides. Fleet Street was the same, as was our justice system. Solid public debate is a good way to get to the truth.

The collapse of the BBC into unilateral stagnation is a national disaster. If it doesn’t reform, shut it down and start over. Yes, let’s have a national broadcaster, only not this one. When the BBC charter next appears, make it clear that it will only be awarded to a body that is willing to allow votes from both sides of our society.

For the past week, I’ve been fighting off a Twitter mob that raged last week at my point that the Nazis were left-wing racists. An idiot even claimed (thinking “left” means “good”) that I excused the holocaust.

See, the line between the Nazis and their opponents was not as rigid and impassable as the left likes to think. Large numbers of Social Democrats and Communists joined the Nazi Brown Shirts after Hitler came to power. German leftist historian Konrad Heiden noted it in his 1938 biography of Hitler.

The main entrance of Dachau concentration camp on July 29, 1945, the day prisoners were liberated. The motto on the fence reads ‘Arbeit macht frei’ – ‘Work brings freedom’

The Nazis, with their massive social programs, tight control over every aspect of society, and aversion to Christianity and private life, have much in common with the programs of the left. Stalin and Hitler got along surprisingly well. Leftists simply don’t believe that they and their movement can do, think or say anything bad.

Well, they’re wrong. Let’s rejoice that the people who yell at me and demand that I confess, recant or just keep my mouth shut do not have political power (yet).