The Politics of Paternity

One year ago, after hectoring bill clinton to send ground troops into Kosovo, Tony Blair won a reputation for steely resolve on foreign affairs. Recent weeks have made apparent that it's on domestic matters that Blair gets all wobbly. Since his wife Cherie announced last month that she would like Blair to take leave of his duties as British Prime Minister to help tend to their fourth child, due in May, he has put on a melodramatic, and very public, Hamlet act. "I honestly don't know what to do," he fretted to one interviewer. The issue has taken on so much global gravity that Clinton interrupted a news conference earlier this month to insist that he didn't "want to get in the middle"--and then he did anyway. "I could spend a lot of time with the baby and still work," he chirped. Yet despite such counsel, Blair dithers.

There's a reason. For Blair, as with Clinton, the personal is always political--and keeping this baby talk going is a political bonanza. Downing Street's fussiness over the coming child has endeared Blair to the young suburbanites who now form the backbone of the Labour Party, as well as to aging baby boomers who, like Clinton, envy the Prime Minister's new lease on family life. More importantly, Blair has used his predicament to hype a new Labour-backed law which gives all parents 13 weeks of unpaid leave from their jobs during a child's first five years. Lately Blair has stumped to expand the measure to make paternal leave paid and allow new mothers to return to the workforce on a part-time basis.

Both ideas have enormous popular support, and their emergence comes at an ideal time: Blair's approval rating stands at its lowest point since his election in 1997. But this welding of paternity with public policy is more than just opportunistic. It is also precisely what Blair's philosophy of governance--the Third Way--is all about.

Take, specifically, the issue of paid paternal leave. There isn't anything particularly radical about the idea: in some E.U. countries, like Sweden, dads can take off, and get paid, for a whole year. But as a political instrument it is wondrously plastic. It appeals to vital women's constituencies on the left, who welcome the idea of husbands shouldering more of the child-rearing load; and yet it is palatable to social conservatives on the right who believe that family values and cohesion are in decline. Given the public sympathy for paternal leave, New Labour pols can pillory the Tory opposition for blocking attempts to enshrine even unpaid time off--knowing that the government's own policies have so far cost it next to nothing. Even the most obvious opponents of parental-leave measures--businesses which have to cope with an employee's sudden absence--are mollified. The government promises to pay for paternal leave by offering tax credits to individuals rather than requiring employers to cough up the cash themselves.

There's one other thing that makes Blair's paternal-leave gambit so seductive: it is utterly inconsequential. Although 75% of the British public supports giving men the right to paid leave, many workers on both ends of the income scale will simply choose not to take the time off. That's because any tax credit the government offers will likely be a lot less generous than a paycheck. (In Germany, whic h offers minimal, means-tested payments, less than 1% of fathers take the full paid leave allowed.) Money aside, in the ever-competitive workplace the fear of getting passed up provides a persuasive argument against disappearing for too long. "Anything the government does won't have much effect," says Francis McGlone of London's Family Policy Studies Centre, "unless we make changes in the culture of work so that family is not seen as secondary."

But don't expect Blair to start meddling with the rules of the New Economy, or to propose a parental-leave program costly enough to make it a viable option for working parents. That's the secret of Third Way politics: in an era of prosperity, voters want their governments to be responsive and empathetic, but not intrusive; they go for bite-sized, family-friendly programs, but not ambitious new entitlements. As a result Labour's parental-leave initiative will have only symbolic value. But symbols matter. Running for re-election in 1996, Clinton boasted about the sweep of his own family-leave program--which few Americans actually used--and even appeared in a tear-jerking TV movie dramatizing the benefits of the law. It was, to be sure, an act of shameless manipulation. But it demonstrated Clinton's mastery of gesture and his awareness that the most electorally potent policies are often small, humane and harmless. That goes a long way toward explaining why Bill Clinton won a second term. Thanks to Labour's own version of parental politics, the same may soon be said about Tony Blair.