Gordon Brown, the great feminist

The Chancellor champions a fiscal-led feminism that is unsentimental about marriage and hails work as women's refuge from patriarchy

One of the right's favoured narratives about this government is that it is cementing into British public life a radical agenda of the sixties - the formative years for this baby-boomer generation government. In some aspects this is mere propaganda; no government that presides over a steadily rising prison population and that, ignoring counter evidence, continues to ban soft drugs can be convincingly labelled "alternative".

But in one area, the right has a point. The government is feminist and moreover ascribes to feminism of a certain kind. It is Treasury-led feminism, a new political movement that takes its energy and direction from the Chancellor, Gordon Brown. Brown is as much in public support of the family as every other new Labour minister. But he no longer wishes to give it special privileges: he is ending the long tradition under which married couples with children can expect fiscal encouragement and is intent on making women independent financial actors.

On 22 August the Sunday Express splashed a story that a forthcoming Treasury report would discourage women from opening joint bank accounts with their husbands or partners - for fear of the consequences if they separated. The Treasury rubbished the story in a qualified way; the report on financial services, one of several now being published by the Social Exclusion Unit, draws attention only to the risks of joint bank accounts in the event of break-up. But within the hype was the recognition of a trend: the deference of wife to husband in financial matters and the treatment of a married couple as a single financial unit were to be discouraged.

This takes its place with other, more explicit measures. Pension provisions for a couple are now to be split on divorce - thus removing what has in the past been a disincentive to part. This recognises that divorce happens in middle age or among elderly people and that the law must provide a way for both partners to have a share of what they have jointly put aside.

Still more explicit was the abolition, in the April Budget this year, of the marriage allowance - a move that was described by Patricia Morgan, who campaigns for pro-family policies, as "of great symbolic significance . . . it was the only remaining recognition in the tax system of the institution of marriage". Brown's view of the institution of marriage itself was wholly unsentimental: he abolished it because he regarded it as economically wasteful - it was not targeted on those he most wanted to help: namely, the poor.

Morgan's work, which has been influential (though not, so far, on government), has shown that married fathers would be worse off - at a given income level - than a lone mother with the same number of children. She argues that "the system is firmly structured for lone parenthood . . . what has been created is a new 'family wage' tailored for lone parents in place of the old systems of tax exemptions and allowances which helped to maintain and rear children in the two-parent family".

This is part of Morgan's broader view that new Labour is in the grip of a feminist agenda. This is far-fetched; new Labour is obsessed by issues of responsibility in childcare. But Morgan is - like the Sunday Express story - right about an underlying trend. The atmosphere of the sixties removed any automatic predisposition in favour of the nuclear family (which radical theory saw as damaging and inhibiting).

Much more important, however, has been the view that men and women are equal before the world of work. Brown regards work as the salvation of the modern diseases of want, idleness and squalor. He is himself famously consumed by work, and his determination not to waste a second extends to his fellow citizens, men and women. His feminism is not bent on destroying the family but on slaying the beast of idleness.

It is this which animated his creation of the working families tax credit. The credit is designed to support low incomes through the tax system and tackle the fiscal traps that had made work only marginally more rewarding - in some instances, even less rewarding - than life on the dole. It will be paid to people with children - whether or not they are married or cohabiting or two parents or a single parent. His plans to give extra childcare help are again aimed at getting the woman into work, even when she has dependent children; the implicit assumption is that motherhood does not dignify but that work - any work - does.

Brown was active, in opposition, in pushing the feminist agenda: the Women's Unit emerged from his brainstorming. It was initially under the aegis of Harriet Harman, who was in turn under his aegis when she served as social security secretary in the first year and a half of government. When she became fatally bogged down in internecine warfare with Frank Field, her deputy, on welfare reform, Brown took her side.

In doing so, he took the responsibility for much of the policy-making on reform into the Treasury. The unit is now in the Cabinet Office and reports to Baroness Jay, Leader of the Lords - but it is still working closely with the Treasury, presently on the vexed issue of women's income, lagging even now behind men's in most equivalent areas by around 20 per cent.

It is an irony that this most feminist of political leaders should have committed such an appalling public relations gaffe as to be photographed with his companion, Sarah Macaulay, in a Soho restaurant, accompanied by the briefing that they would marry soon (they have not). It represented a low point by his then press secretary, Charlie Whelan, in seeking to convince the public that here was a heterosexual Chancellor who would soon be a family man - and both Brown and Macaulay, a successful businesswoman, have paid the price in embarrassment ever since.

His own instinct, evident before and after, was that his private life was private. Had he stuck to that, he could have provided a much-needed example to other politicians, who seek to capitalise on their marriages - and, more important, would have issued a rebuke to the vulture press that its prurient interest would not be fed.

No one is all of a piece, nor should we expect it. In buttressing women's financial independence, Brown has done much to encourage a proper consideration of male and female responsibility for childcare - one which was being inadequately served by an insistence on marriage alone. The world the Chancellor is assisting to construct mirrors his own hard-driving life - his satisfaction is found in the virtue of work.

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