Taxman Eyes Up Two Million Stay-at-Home-Mothers: ‘Conservatives’ Signal Yet Another Attack on Traditional Family

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND - JANUARY 18: UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt speaks during
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Oliver JJ Lane

The United Kingdom’s tax system is already hostile towards single-income families but that still hasn’t driven enough mothers away from their children and into work, the government signals as it prepares to announce the budget this week.

The British government is looking to increase “female participation” in the workforce to generate “more taxes being paid”, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) Jeremy Hunt says. While the continued push, launched last year, was initially framed as being a matter of increasing choice for those who want to go back to work and find the cost of childcare prohibitive, the politician then fell back on now well-worn Tory Party hostile rhetoric on mothers which has branded staying at home to raise one’s offspring as being economically “inactive” or “wasted”.

Often the language surrounding parents taking time out of careers to raise children is non-gendered, but Hunt’s remarks threw aside even this pretence, as he made clear he was talking of his perceived problem of women selfishly not earning money and paying taxes.

Hunt said on Sunday in a discussion on taxation and the forthcoming budget this week that “if we had the same female participation rate as… let me put it in better language… the same number of women working as they do in Holland, we would have more than two million extra people in the workforce. That would mean a much bigger GDP, much less talent wasted, a much more prosperous country.”

Reviewing the brusque comments from the Chancellor, the campaign group Mothers At Home Matter (MAHM), which calls for fair taxation for families, noted the claim that women spending time with their own young children is a “waste” of human potential demonstrated that there is “not much hope for supportive taxes for families in [the] forthcoming budget”.

A spokesman for MAHM, Anne Fennell told Breitbart News that the government should reconsider emulating other countries where the mental well-being of parents and children is disregarded and parents are disincentivised to spend time with their children during their crucial and formative early years. She said the Chancellor obsesses over the money by “failing to value that which can not be counted.”

“In what way is talent wasted? Do those who work in care waste their talent, or is it only a talent if it involves a paid transaction?

“Forcing mothers into the workforce will not lead to a prosperous and happy nation.”

Indeed, the fiscal benefit to the taxman of leading mothers away from their families and into work is, of course, considerable. Not only is the new income of the parent taxed, but the real work of raising children is brought into the economy and commercialised, so the income of the extra care workers needed to service rising demand can be taxed too.

While the government can’t strictly force anyone to work, dual-income families are defacto privileged by a tax and benefit system which punishes single-earner families. Families have also been under a concerted assault of stealth taxes forced by the government for many years, eroding their real-term wealth and making surviving on a single income less viable.

The Chancellor’s remarks were made on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg political discussion show and the host challenged Hunt on the enormous extra cost of rolling out radically more childcare for younger and younger children into infancy, suggesting this was bloating the state and forcing higher taxes. The Chancellor rejected the assertion, insisting he foresaw leading women away from home and into the workplace with these subsidies would turn a profit for the government through higher tax take.

Hunt’s remarks echo those of other Conservative leaders in recent years, including former Home Secretary Priti Patel — who self-presented in shallow terms as a real right-wing conservative — who spoke against a group of Britons including mothers as “economically inactive”. The comments were decried as insulting and authoritarian at the time.

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