You see things differently when you get up at 4.30am to go to work. A hard-working mother I know gets up at that hour for a long commute to be at her desk for 6am. She works an 11-hour day, squeezing a full-time job into four days, to spend a day with her three-year-old son. Now she feels like a mug for wanting to make her way in the world and do the best for her family.

Labour claims to stand up for hard-working families. It has chivvied mothers back into work, saying that it is good for them, their children and the economy. Many parents have done as they were told, despite the crippling costs of childcare. In inner London, nursery care for a child under 2 costs on average £226 a week, outside London it is £167 a week.

Since 2005 a childcare voucher scheme has eased the cost. It gives working parents up to £243 a month paid direct from their wages to a nursery or childminder before tax and national insurance is deducted. If both parents work, the scheme can save a family up to £1,808 a year for standard-rate taxpayers and £2,392 for those on the top rate.

Without the vouchers there would be no point in some parents working at all. Yet in September Gordon Brown made a crowd-pleasing pledge to provide more childcare for two-year-olds. He did not say that he would pay for it by taking the vouchers away from other families.

It was a sly trick. Mr Brown doesn’t have the guts to means-test child benefit — which many better-off families simply stash away — because it would horrify Labour’s core vote. Instead he is chipping away at one of the genuinely good things Labour has done for working families, dismissing it as a middle-class perk. But two thirds of people using vouchers are basic-rate taxpayers. The teachers, nurses and council workers I know who use them certainly aren’t wealthy.

There are good economic reasons to motivate middle-income mums to work. With the country facing a huge budget deficit, it’s important to help them to stay at work.

And vouchers don’t just help to pay for childcare. They can also be used for holiday schemes and afterschool clubs — something for which many employers, particularly small businesses, have been very grateful.

And what of Mr Brown’s promise to provide 250,000 more nursery places for two-year-olds? They would be for low-income families for 12½ hours a week. If a parent could find a job with these hours, and I sincerely doubt it, it will hardly pull them out of poverty. Parents who chose to work and shun the benefit culture have just been kicked in the teeth by the very party that claims to stand up for them.

Angela Jameson is industrial correspondent

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