| Summary: | In November 2015, protests erupted in Oxford in response to the decision of the Oxfordshire County Council to cut, among other things, 44 Children's Centres and seven Early Intervention Hubs. The debate about whether these centres could be considered as disposable or not did not get to an agreement. I argue that the main cause of this outcome is that the opposing arguments were based on moral positions that were incompatible, but not simply incompatible. They were and are fundamentally incommensurable. The argument in favour of deficit spending reductions is that cuts to social services (in this case family and children services) are unavoidable. In contrast, parents refuse to accept austerity measures that will undermine the rights of their children to access services that will improve their chances in life. Neither argument is based on incontrovertible evidence. On the one hand, the decision to cut a given service always involves the arbitrary evaluation of that service against a set of other services that will not be cut. On the other, the protest against those cuts is based on the hope that early intervention initiatives will benefit the children, even if that evidence lacks consensus. On the basis of the thematic analysis of 27 stories written by Oxfordshire, parents I interpret this divergence from the perspective of the moral economy, and argue that this allows an appreciation of the link between health economics, the morality of parenting, and the evidence base of early intervention.
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