Last week, Kier Starmer promised voters “a politics that trends a little lighter on all our lives”. Yesterday, he recommitted Labour to having teachers supervise a national programme of daily toothbrushing for three to five-year-olds. The Labour leader has more experience of flip-flops than a shop assistant in Clarks. Yet even he might be able to twig that this shift prompts a little raising of the eyebrows.
If he does, he isn’t showing it. “We need to take on this question of being a nanny state,” Starmer argued. He wants to “fight” the case for more intervention, unafraid of the contradiction between quietening politics down and throwing the clunking fist central government behind the tooth-fairy. He aims to address what he labels 14 years of Tory “neglect” of our children. In Rishi Sunak’s Britain, the kids aren’t alright.
Starmer has the stats. Two in every five children are leaving primary school overweight. 200,000 children are waiting for mental health treatment. Rotten teeth has become the number one reason for young children being admitted to hospital. “Sticking plaster politics” has left our children smaller than Haitians, fatter than the French, and sadder than the Turkish. This. Is. A. Disgrace.
Having nursery assistants standing by with the Colgate and Listerine is only the start of his children’s crusade. Free breakfast clubs in every primary school. A 9PM watershed for junk food advertising and an online ban. Bans on marketing vapes and e-cigarettes to children. 8,500 more NHS mental health staff. 700,000 more dental appointments, paid for by taxing non-doms, even if I’m sure that money has been spent half-a-dozen time already.
Dentists back the toothbrushing scheme because it means less work for them. Teachers have opposed it, for the opposite reason. Libertarian-types on the Tory beaches might grumble. But bans on vape and junk food advertising have previously been floated by the Conservatives, so we can’t complain. Plus, this is hardly the hill to die on. Who wouldn’t want fewer kids going hungry at breakfast? Shouting about “muh freedom” doesn’t get much traction when you’re asking against helping children with rotten teeth and mental health issues.
But what happened to parental responsibility? Surely it’s the job of parents to tell their kids to put down the chocolate bars and pick up a toothbrush, not the state? Starmer claims that, as a Dad, he worries about his kids. Yet he couldn’t remember their sexes last week. Are these policies similarly confused? It’s easy to ban things. Getting 30 toddlers to line up and brush for the requisite number of minutes is more difficult.
Yet Labour is responding to a real crisis with Britain’s children. That British kids have worse health outcomes than many of their international equivalents is a national tragedy, another depressing sign that we are poorer than we think we are. But Labour shares some share of the blame, since it was a tragedy exacerbated by the same lockdowns that they unflinchingly supported.
Starmer may now be hoping voters forget his pandemic-era zeal for school closures. But doing so will not undo the immeasurable harm that confining a generation of children to their homes has done for the education and well-being of a generation.
Missed months of education have led to a regression in basic skills. There is an ever-growing attainment gap between those children who did receive proper schooling during lockdowns and those who did not. Rates of anxiety, depression, and eating disorders have spiraled. Kids kept away from their peers to protect against a disease that didn’t threaten them are turning up at school overwhelmed and uncommunicative.
Just as pertinently, it suggested to a generation of parents that school attendance was non-essential. Polling for the Centre for Social Justice shows that almost one in three mothers and fathers now believe their children do not have to go to school daily. Rates of persistent absence from schools have doubled from pre-lockdown levels to one in five of all school-aged children. If a parent does not see the value in their offspring getting a full-time education, what priority will they give to teeth brushing, exercise, and eating properly?
Nobody wants to see any child neglected. But there is no exact science to determine at which point the state should step in to take on the parental role. Even the most zealous conservative or libertarian would want social services to take away a child from their parents if they weren’t being looked after properly. Starmer is applying that principle to a national level, refashioning successive Conservative administrations as the backstory of a Jaqueline Wilson novel.
Of course, even five years ago, many on the right would have seen state-mandated toothbrushing as an absurdity. One can imagine Boris Johnson’s column writing itself. But lockdowns have made all of us used to government intervention in our lives. The pandemic proved that the freedom-loving Englishman is a myth. We have swapped personal responsibility for the comforting assumption that the state will look after our health for us. Even Johnson swapped stuffing cakes through school bars to lecture us all on the need to lose weight.
If Sunak aims to stop anyone born after 2009 from ever buying a cigarette, he can hardly grumble when Starmer one-ups him. These proposals might be impractical, unaffordable, and illiberal. But they are a sign of the direction of travel. Politics is not going to tread more lightly on our lives any time soon. Won’t anyone think of the children?