A Place to Stand

The BBC reports

Many parents in Britain are paying in excess of £8,000 a year for a full-time nursery place, a survey suggests.

The Daycare Trust found the yearly cost of a typical nursery place for a child under two was £8,684 in England, £8,216 in Scotland and £7,592 in Wales.

...It comes as the government has published a review of childcare in England, in an attempt to make the system more flexible and affordable and to ensure standards remained high.

.....Daycare Trust joint chief executive Emma Knights said: "Yet again the cost of nursery places has increased above inflation, making pre-school education a big drain on family budgets at a time of financial uncertainty.

"It is crucial that parents claim all the help they are entitled to, and that the government increase the free childcare entitlement to include all two-years-olds.

"The current review of tax credits should increase the maximum proportion of childcare costs the poorest parents can claim from 80% to 100%."

I will leave the reason why this faster than inflation rise is happening for a day or two to give various papers a chance to publish my letter on the subject.

The other side of this story is the incestuous media manipulation going on.

The BBC describe the Daycare Trust as a charity, which is legally the truth but not the whole truth. Via Mark Wadsworth we find that of the £1.1 million they get in they get £57,000 from 2 Nuffield Trusts & the rest is £612,000 donations from government agencies; £186,000 from consultancy which I am willing to bet is virtually all government money; £9,000 for training, presumably training government employees; £67,000 for giving advice, to government employees, which apparently is not the same as consultancy; £37,000 for running conferences attended by - well I'd have to guess but could it be government employees; & £53,000 from sponsorship. part of which looks like Bovis sponsoring them rather than cut conference fees, that is a tax break & the rest from the usual suspects.

All in their accounts mainly page 13

QUANGO - Quasi-autonomous non-governmental agency. The Daycare trust is about as autonomous as a left sock. Nor does it appear any of its actions involve anybody actually meeting a child. One of their functions listed is a Childcare Week Party in the Park but I am cynical enough to suspect this was a party involving the great & genocidal rather than a party for kids.

What we see is a report from a government controlled advertising organisation masquerading as a charity getting advertising airtime from the BBC, a government controlled propaganda organisation masquerading as a "news" broadcaster, though their press release went out from the press association & was reported in the Guardian, the Telegraph & Nursery World (the Guardian is also effectively a quango since, like all newspapers, it survives more on adverts than purchases & unlike the rest it can easily be seen that its advertising is not by ASDA but government job adverts).

This morning the radio phone in was on this "story" which most of the real MSM have ignored. Surprisingly the BBC commentator actually asked why these costs were going up but nobody phoned in to answer. Actually I did but nobody was in - or at least answering their phone. The BBC identify callers numbers & thus names & know what we have said previously! The general consensus, as BBC consensii are, was that more government money should be spent on subsidising childcare, with a bit more regulation to stop nurseries profit gouging.

I even have a little Yes Ministerish sympathy for Ministers who often benefit from government advertising but in this case look like they are being bounced by the bureaucracy.

Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said the survey was based on parents requiring 50 hours of childcare all year round for under-fives, which was "more than most parents take up or want".

which is a point which quite obviously negates the entire "research" & suggests that in this case the Minister (or at least this Minister) was not in on it.

We have seen the same phenomenon in the eco-fascist movement (Friends of the Earth, Europe being almost wholly funded by the EU & members & being appointed as preferred advisor on whether the EU bureaucracy should get bigger) & in the government financing of ASH & the "consultation" on the smoking ban. This is known in advertising circles as astroturfing since it simulates grassroots action. It may be there are some real people in the various fascist (eco-, health, bombing foreigner-, socialist-, movements (though even the Labour party, once a genuine mass party seems to have few party workers who aren't councillors or paid in some way by them). However the default position should be that any body calling for bigger government & more regulation should be assumed to be paid by the government until they prove otherwise - they usually are.