The crucial reason for the difference is that full-time, free nursery education begins in France when a child is three. In addition, the benefit and tax system has a more generous over-lap, reducing the dependency trap which catches many potential British workers.The Conservatives are trying to tackle the problem from the other end. They believe that by making lone parents poorer, they will discourage others from following suit. This determination to punish lone parents is built on the myth that women bring up their children alone by choice, rather than being forced into it by high rates of divorce and relationship breakdown.The one country which has tested the notion that if you cut benefits, women will have fewer children, is the United States. New Jersey introduced a law whereby any unmarried mother on welfare who had another child would receive no extra money. A preliminary study in June 1995 by Rutgers University researchers, comparing a control group with the affected women, concluded that the cap on benefits had had no impact on birth-rates among women on welfare during its first year.But this is as much a moral as an economic crusade.

The Tories want to be seen as the party of the two-parent family. More to the point, they want to be the party that disapproves of poor, unmarried mothers, in the way it did 100 years ago. The fact that two-thirds of lone parents were once married and may well be on lone-parent premium because their husbands abandoned them is irrelevant. The divorcees, the separated, they all have to suffer pour encourager les autres.The Government will argue that its own research has shown that 18 per cent of lone parents are claiming benefit fraudulently.

The figure of confirmed cases is actually 9.5 per cent - which no-one would condone. But the suspicion of fraud centres on the complex issue of whether or not a couple are living together. It is about transient relationships rather than downright deceit.The Government's own figures show that 90 per cent of unemployed lone parents would like to go out to work. A report earlier this year by the Institute of Fiscal Studies showed that a means-tested subsidy of child- care would result in 60,000 people entering the workforce, with a further 45,000 increasing their hours of work and that most of those affected would be lone parents.