Then, the following day, came news of four separate amendments laid on the two-child limit. And not just by opposition parties but by Labour MPs, including Zarah Sultana and Kim Johnson. If Keir Starmer had hoped his announcement of a child poverty task force would quell dissent, it didn’t appear to have worked.
There will be howls, voices raised at the unfairness of this, and calls for patience to give the PM, his new government, a chance. And I’d normally sympathise, if not raise my voice too. I would.
If the state wasn’t harming our children.
If our country wasn’t seeing increasing child mortality rates.
If last year, child death rates weren’t twice as high in our poorest areas as in our richest.
If death rates weren’t the highest among our Black and Asian children.
If I hadn’t spent my early years in poverty.
I know the desperation that these children live in hour-by-hour, the desperation that saw me, as a small child, eat out of the big bin behind the local chippy. Keir Starmer speaks a lot of dignity, but how much dignity do you think I had as a five- or six-year-old, babe? How much do I have now, stuck with the sense in the very deepest part of me that I’m worth less?
Time is a privilege kids today do not have, not when they’re living without heating, food, or electricity. When their mums can’t afford knickers or shoes or to get them to school. Things that I’m sure every member of government would insist their child is entitled to. Well, the children of this country are now yours, too, Keir – why are they entitled to less? Why are their mums?
Because this isn’t just about children. Not when the cap was designed to punish kids as a deterrent for their parents. There is a screaming women’s rights issue sitting at the heart of this, one that many of us seem not to hear.
There is much I could point to, but I’ll mention just two things. That this policy interferes with a woman’s right to choose. Or, more specifically, the rights of our poorest women to choose under the threat of hardship. Would we accept women’s bodily autonomy being compromised in any other situation? Would we accept it happening to any other group of women? Or would we stand up and fight for them, with them?
And secondly, the exception to the cap for “non-consensual conception”. Or, as I prefer to call it, “rape and sexual assault”. One you apply for by completing a form with a third-party professional (that you’ve disclosed to). That requires your signature next to the statement, “I can confirm that I am not living with the other biological parent of this child”. AKA your rapist.
And who is the most likely perpetrator of rape against women in this country? Correct! An intimate partner. The partner a woman may still live with. Who she isn’t free to just up and leave when she lives in poverty with her children. Including the one conceived in sexual violence, who’s punished alongside her. For the violence of men. This is what we mean by misogyny.
So, yeah, I have little patience with being told to “wait”. A wait that the government won’t even give a steer on (beyond saying “growth” must come first). That, last year, Lucy Powell suggested, may not happen until their second term.
