Caroline Flint Has An Idea

Everyone's favourite inflatable Blairette, Caroline Flint, whose prior claim to fame was her suggestion, as Minister for Second Homes, that the long-term unemployed should be booted out of their council houses, has evidently been cudgelling whatever squalid mewling thing passes for her brain in search of a visionary new idea with which to give the all-important impression that there is some sort of policy difference between Labour and the Conservatives. Having discovered, presumably from the experience of her own two marriages, that married couples make more deserving parents than mere cohabitees, Flint "tackles head-on the argument made by many of her colleagues that cohabiting parents provide as secure a unit as married parents"; or, in Oldspeak, denies it. She precedes her denial with the words "I think we have to be honest", but the political correspondent of Britain's leading liberal newspaper appears immune even to this blatant signal of mendacity. Flint calls upon New New Labour to fight the Conservatives on their own ground in the best Blairite tradition, by emulating the Conservatives at their most thick-headed and reactionary. Unlike Daveybloke's Cuddlies, who simply intend to reward people for being married, Flint proposes reducing VAT just for "the biggest family occasions" such as weddings, civil partnerships and funerals, provided that the families in question are the legitimate sort whose loves and deaths are worthy of tax relief. It seems a little tactless, to say the least, for Flint to have published her great idea during the very week when the Glorious Successor and his two main adversaries are busily denying that the Government condones or encourages torture.