F. F. F. F. F. F. F. In March 2024,

2024, soon to be Chancellor Rachel Reeves told the Telegraph that it was her mother who taught her fiscal management at the kitchen table.

At the end of a long week of primary school

teaching, Sally Reeves would sit down at the family home in Bromley taking off

each item on her bank statement against paper receipts. In positioning herself as the thrifty,

per-string holding mother of the nation, Reeves is the direct descendant of Margaret Thatcher,

who similarly professed to derive her financial wisdom from her maternity.

Of course, this comparison of the state coffers to a family budget is entirely dishonest.

For one thing, households can't raise revenue through taxation.

But both Britain's first woman Prime Minister and its first woman Chancellor have savally deployed this fiction to justify massive cuts to state spending.

Just a few weeks into her tenure, Reeves has already announced she's mixing road, rail and hospital

investment, scrapping most pensioners' winter fuel payments and keeping the

two-child benefit cap. There's not a huge amount of money there, Reeves informed the BBC the day after Labor's

general election landslide, as if the money the state has is not entirely within her power. With her slick black bob and

slash of red lipstick Reeves is the 21st century Thatcher, a stern matron helming a

mother state that disciplines and punishes its way with children.

Yet if the mother is the ultimate metaphor, its vehicle isn't only conservatism.

In her new book, Mother State, Helen Charman, a literature scholar, poet, and now political

historian, explores both the repressive uses of motherhood and its liberatory potential.

While Mummy Thatcher led the charge into the Falklands,

women were setting up a nuclear disarmament camp that would run for almost two decades.

While the state was cutting benefits to profligate young single mothers,

...