By SUE REID

Last updated at 18:19 26 November 2007

A part of a new frontier for the British welfare state, the Government wants to encourage more women to go to work while their children are looked after in council nurseries.

There will be nine months' maternity leave, more flexible working hours for parents and pressure put on businesses to allow mothers to take time off if they have a child under 17 who is taking exams or is ill.

These family-friendly policies were announced in the Queen's Speech this month and won approval of female MPs, many who whom cut their teeth in politics during the feminist heyday of the Seventies.

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Harriet Harman, the Minister for Women and Equalities, has led the call for change.

She says: "Mothers often tear out their hair trying to balance earning a living with bringing up children and need more flexibility at work."

But the plans have met with disapproving noises from the Tory Party and businesses.

They warn that they will lead to a nanny state where children of working women will be herded into nurseries and that the family-friendly agenda will be so expensive many employers will be put off hiring women.

So where have Gordon Brown and his female entourage got their ideas for the shake-up in social policy that will change the way we live and bring up our families?

You only have to look at Sweden, where for 30 years successive Left-wing governments have enforced sexual equality by sending women to work while the state brings up their children.

Yet just as Britain moves towards this system, a backlash is under way in Sweden.

Women are beginning to question why they can't look after their own young children rather than being forced to let government nurseries do it for them.

No one sees the downside more clearly than Therese Murphy and her husband, Paul.

They are bringing up their four children in the picturesque Swedish city of Gothenberg.

The couple are due to have another baby before Christmas, a welcome addition for 39-year-old Therese to care for at their five-bedroom house near the waterfront.

The couple should have a perfect family life, but when the Murphys go out their neighbours look at them with curiosity.

If Therese takes her two youngest, Elise, nine, and William, five, to play in the park, it is nearly always empty.

For she and Paul, a medical salesman who was born in the U.S., are bucking the system.

Therese is a stay-at-home mother - one of a tiny number of women in Sweden who do not have a paid job.

She refuses to put her children in one of the state nurseries, where thousands of babies - many as young as 13 months - are left by their mothers each morning.

Europe's most generous welfare system (where subsidised childcare means parents pay £90 a month for childcare and get up to 80 per cent of their salary during 13 months maternity leave per child), is designed to get women into work and once there enforce their total equality with men.

But the truth is that this policy is beginning to fail. Many families have woken up to the fact that their feather-bedded system is putting traditional family life in peril.

The issue has become so controversial that the Swedish government is being forced to change its equality policies - following protests from women.

In a triumph for housewives, from next year in some areas, mothers will be offered a choice: continue using the state-run childcare facilities or take a cash equivalent to look after your children at home.

Dr Catherine Hakim, a researcher at the London School of Economics specialising in women's issues, says she is not surprised about the change of heart.

"No person, man or woman, can have it all.

"It is a fact of life. If you offer mothers special deals at work, the others don't like it. They feel they are left to carry the burden. This rebounds on women and they don't get the top jobs."

Indeed, you have only to study what is happening in Sweden to understand what the future may hold for Britain.

Despite years of pushing women into work, just 1.5 per cent are in top management posts.

Yet in the U.S., where there are fewer family-friendly policies than almost anywhere else in the world, more than 11 per cent of women hold down the best-paid jobs.

But that is not the only problem.

On average, Swedish women earn 20 per cent less than men, the same proportion as Britain.

Most have jobs in the public sector - often, ironically, working in the huge childcare system - while threequarters of men are hired by private firms where salaries are higher and careers more rewarding.

Equality of the sexes it is not.

As Patricia Morgan, an expert on family issues at the British independent think tank, Civitas, explains: "Sweden has made the most concerted attempt in history to bring about the demise of the traditional family and free women from their child-rearing role.

"The system was created, and is kept going, by powerful feminists in the government.

"But it is failing women. The fact is the majority of women want to manage their own children's care, while men go out and earn the money."

Sweden's Ombudsman for Equality has received thousands of complaints from women who say they have not been offered jobs or who lose them because they are pregnant.

A typical example is Maria Catoni, 30, an economics graduate who lives in southern Sweden with her husband, Daniel, and 14-month-old son, Hugo.

Earlier this year, she applied for a job as the financial controller of a firm, but was turned down. She believes she was discriminated against because she is the mother of a young child.

"The same thing has happened to my friends. They go for jobs they would be good at. But then they mention they have children. That is the end. Of course, it is illegal to discriminate, but it still goes on," she says.

But can you really blame employers? Absenteeism among women workers in Sweden is rife - especially among mothers of young children.

On a typical day, 20 per cent of women workers don't turn up. In the public sector, the figure is 33 per cent.

The backlash in Sweden against Government interference in family and work life is based on women's realisation that they are missing out on something very precious: the chance to raise their own sons and daughters.

For the past 30 years, generations of children have been parted from their mothers and brought up in state nurseries - with serious consequences.

Suicides are a rising problem among teenagers. Depression is widespread among girls.

The results in secondary schools, once the envy of the world, have dropped dismally low.

Official statistics show that the psychological well-being of young Swedes has deteriorated faster than in 11 other Western countries during the past two decades.

In 1970, the reading levels of tenyearold Swedes were the best in the world.

But today, they have slipped to 15th in global rankings.

Jonas Himmelstrand, an expert on special needs education, blames a social policy that separates babies from their mothers.

He says children who are brought up at home are calmer and easier to teach. Even as adults, those raised in nurseries have a more difficult time concentrating.

No wonder that Therese Murphy wants to return to the pre-Seventies days when women stayed at home to look after their children if they wished.

In other words, she is demanding the right to be mothers again.

"Polls show that 67 per cent of women want to stay at home - yet only a fraction of that number do so. How can a Government enforce so many to live their lives in a way they don't want?" she says.

Sweden's high taxes - ironically imposed to pay for the nurseries, maternity benefits and entire nanny state - mean that families struggle to survive on a single income.

On average, each person pays half their earnings to the state.

Of this vicious circle, Therese says: "The taxes increase the pressure on mothers to go out to work. Their extra wage is often the only way to pay the bills, run a home or buy their children extra clothes."

Therese's experience of state-run childcare makes her feel that the children themselves also suffer.

A trained nurse, she has helped out occasionally at nurseries. She says she has seen babies handed over by their weeping mothers at the doors at 7am before work.

Worse, she has seen toddlers screaming as their parents walk away.

"We were told to tell the mothers that their children stopped crying when they left.

"But the reality is that some didn't stop crying for nearly three weeks, when they gave up hope.

"For the child, a state nursery is nothing like home. The routine is fixed. These are not relaxed and fun places to spend your childhood.

"The nurseries have so many rules to keep the children safe.

They are often kept awake deliberately so they will sleep at night when their exhausted mother comes to collect them after work. It is like being in an institution."

Madeleine Lidman, 43, is another mother who is challenging the Swedish system.

She lives with her husband, Mikael, a sales manager, and her two daughters, Johanna, 11, and Josefina, nine, in Stockholm.

She gave up her job in computer marketing when she first gave birth and now works part-time from home. "My children are proud that I look after them. They are happy, confident and contented.

"They want to run to me after school and tell me what has happened during the day. We don't have as much money as if I worked, we have not bought our own home. But there are other things that are more important for children than money.

"The parents in Sweden know that something is wrong with this system. But it has been in place for 30 years and most of them have been brought up in state nurseries themselves.

"They console themselves that if everyone else is sending their children it must be all right."

What an irony that in Sweden, the crucible of sexual equality, generations of women deprived of the pleasure of sharing their children's early years at home are starting to rebel.

And if questions are at last being asked in this creator of the nanny state, surely it is time to ask them in Britain - before it is too late.