Has adequate childcare become an unaffordable luxury in Britain?

More than 100 parents queued outside the Ysgol Y Berllan Deg primary school in Cardiff from 3am last week to secure a free breakfast club place for their children. Places were limited, and allocated on a first come, first served basis. So the parents queued outside, sitting on camping chairs from the early hours. It was reminiscent of when people used to queue outside department stores for big sales items – the massive telly or the leatherette three-piece suite.

Now it seems that some parents resort to queueing for the “luxury” of childcare. When I saw the Cardiff queue, I flashed back to being a single parent and the relentless grind of piecing together strangely shaped, differently sized jigsaws of childcare. Clearly, this queue wasn’t about parents wishing to enjoy their eggs benedict in peace of a morning. As some of those queuing made clear, the breakfast club was the difference between getting into work on time, between the family managing to function or not.

Parents queue from 3am for Cardiff school breakfast club place Read more

Well, a certain sort of family – the kind that couldn’t dream of affording nannies or au pairs and wouldn’t have the extra bedroom to put them in. Families that would maybe struggle to afford a paid breakfast club or to find a childminder who’d want the scrappy job of dropping off/picking up from school, when they could make more money looking after smaller children for the full day.

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This is one of the childcare potholes that too rarely gets addressed. Sometimes, it’s not just about the quality and price of full-time childcare, it’s also about the smaller pockets of time – the hour here, the 90 minutes there – that can be so difficult to cover and have the potential to wreck your working day, every day. A child who isn’t covered before and after school means you risk getting to work late, having to leave early or both. Instantly, you get a childcare class divide – those who have nannies or au pairs to meet every random eventuality and those who don’t. The latter group relies heavily on school clubs – if the school has them, that is, and there are enough places.

Otherwise, it’s an unholy scramble of parents doing one another favours, relatives or older siblings stepping in or the parent constantly running late, screwing up at both ends.

Maybe I’m wrong and that queue was all about feckless parents wanting the school to give their kids a bowl of Cheerios, but I doubt it. To me, that queue was about stressed people trying to keep all the balls in the air, a scenario that is doubtless played out, in different ways, all over the country. In this way, the breakfast club queue was tragic – a symptom of the immense strain that too many families are under. It comes to something when the “luxury” that someone is prepared to queue overnight for is the chance to get to work on time.

Of course Obama doesn’t enjoy seeing his successor foul up big time

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Trump could not have done a better job of making Obama look good.’ Photograph: Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

Barack Obama has been denouncing lying, shameless politicians. (Who on earth could he be talking about?) It makes you crumble inside because you miss him so much. And Michelle. And the girls. I found myself thinking: aw, I miss the Obamas. And I’m not even American.

A devilish thought occurs. Is there a part of Obama (a naughty little sliver) that’s loving the President Trump debacle? Not in a deep way and not to suggest that Obama enjoys watching America being trashed.

However, think about it: you’re a former president, but, instead of making you look bad or irrelevant, your successor careers around, demonically possessed, making even non-Americans miss you. Obama would have to be a saint not to get a little kick out of that. Trump could not have done a better job of making Obama look good.

Anyone in any job could be forgiven for feeling secretly thrilled to see a hostile, belligerent successor completely balls everything up. Of course, such thoughts may never have occurred to Obama. Even if they did, doubtless they’d be suppressed in an instant. Still, if Obama did fleetingly think that way, it would only be human.

• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist