The Wrong Rats

Abstract

And the dying welfare state brought its own newspeak as well: governments’ failure to link child benefit, unemployment pay and so on to the cost of living was the fight against inflation; putting children on half-time schooling was referred to as giving parents a free hand; closing hospitals and dumping dying patients on the doorsteps of unwarned and distant relatives was community care; and a new political movement that saw remedies to the whole predicament, if only the nation’s women would buckle down to traditional role and biological destiny, was known quite simply as FAMILY.