UK’s opposition Labour thinks standing up for families can shape next election

BLOOMBERG

Rishi Sunak’s political opponents think they’ve found his weak spot — the family. With an election edging closer, Keir Starmer’s Labour is making a move onto traditional Tory territory, accusing the prime minister of abandoning working parents.
Sensing victory after 13 years in the wilderness, Labour wants to make an overhaul of Britain’s hugely expensive child care system a key part of its pitch to voters. The party is talking up its aspirations despite currently being unable to give detail, costings and timescales.
It’s a bold move from a party often cautious about the concept. “People talk about their lives in terms of family and yet somehow from the left we don’t do that,” Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said in an interview. “But that’s how people will view their lives and that’s the prism through which they view the world.”
In 2008, then-Conservative leader David Cameron made family a cornerstone of his agenda shortly before wrestling back power from Labour. Now Labour hopes to do the same. With an election expected in autumn 2024, and by January 2025 at the latest, Starmer is eager to win over disillusioned Conservative voters.
Most polls put his party more than 20 points ahead and on course for victory. But he faces a balancing act to retain Labour’s core vote. He has already branded Labour the “party of business” — taking on the traditional Conservative mantle. Now Phillipson is declaring Labour the “party of the family.”
Phillipson’s own background makes her an authentic voice on the issue. Raised in the 1980s and 90s by a single mother in the town of Washington, in northeast England, Phillipson said she felt a “lot of judgment” about her own family. “I think it demonstrated to me it was important for governments to recognize that families come in different shapes and sizes.”
Phillipson’s mother founded a domestic abuse charity but had to give up paid work when her daughter was born because of a lack of affordable child care. She only returned to the workplace when Phillipson started school.
“She told me that she would have gone back into paid work much sooner but it just wasn’t possible, particularly when you’re a single parent — how on Earth can you do that with no child care?” Phillipson said at a mother and baby group in Feltham, West London.