IT must be something in the autumnal political water. No sooner has the ink dried on the States’ endorsement of free nursery places for three- to four-year-olds than up pops Gordon Brown offering publicly funded nursery care for UK toddlers scarcely able to talk. Is somebody trying to curry voter favour?

Needless to say, there’s a cost, and the devil is in the detail. But in politics, economics and morality are strange bedfellows.

I suppose it must rate as the strongest instinct of every species on the planet – the protection of one’s young. It is even greater than self-preservation, because the great Darwinian clock tells us all that the future of creation depends on succession. So it’s a very strange take on 21st-century living to witness the virtual battleground between the needs of the youngest, most impressionable members of society and the state provider. And when you see tots lined up in the Royal Square with protest banners, you’ve got to take note.

I don’t have children, so what follows is not a personal issue. I admit to having been surprised to learn that my brother put his children’s names down for a nursery school place three months after they were born. I guess it’s a matter of supply and demand, space and facilities – which in the end comes down to resources. So names placed on waiting lists at, say, four establishments on a ‘just in case’ basis, three years in advance, seemed prudent. Imagine doing that for a booking at a restaurant!

It is an expensive business funding education all the way from nappies to mortarboards, and there are undoubted priorities for the public – and private – purse. Inevitably there is an argument loudly expressed that anyone producing children should accept it as a personal commitment and bear all the costs of a consequence of their own making. The more extreme even resent paying for anything which smacks of a subsidy towards the child-rearing costs of others.

Oddballs apart, there is, of course, a case that bringing children into the world, while supported – indeed, promoted – by religious dogma, does require accepting responsibilities which might incur adapting to an altered lifestyle and foregoing luxuries to accommodate it.

There’s no question that sociability is the bedrock of education. The more children mix and share, the better prepared they are to cope with the increasingly pressured society we’ve been happily creating for them. So the earlier it starts, the better, and the more toddlers hanging up their rompers together, the better they are prepared for the general rough and tumble of normal education.

Now that’s not the same as advocating the speediest opportunity for mum and dad to dump them off with dedicated but hard-pressed parental substitutes while they pursue precisely the detached ‘good life’ they enjoyed beforehand. There is a child/life balance to be struck where the payback for a formal educational quick-start is matched by responsible parenting from cradle to majority.

So should nursery education be universally free? Well, it does depend, I’m afraid, on the means available to support it. In a family with a two-parent income, the cost of child-rearing might not represent such a large financial burden as for a single parent, who might see the cost of nursery education and general child-minding run a very close second to income.

Therefore, should state funding be a priority for those on income support? Well, that takes us into the realms of what sort of society we most wish to espouse.

No one would dissent from the objective of giving the next generation the best start in life. And the arbitrary position in which 50% of nursery places were funded and 50% weren’t did appear iniquitous. But there are those members of the population who, for whatever reason, will still choose to pay for their children’s education. It is their right and privilege so to choose. The new, much-vaunted public-private partnership may indeed be able to ride to the rescue of the remainder.

So with Scrutiny feeling the ministerial collar to get a structure for managing pre-school education for our 4,000 toddlers in place, in the best tradition of ‘when you’ve got a problem, spread it around’, the public was called in to consider some pretty tame options. And guess what – they declared that nursery education should be free for all.

Not everyone will be convinced. Triumph for the babes raises questions about the other beneficiaries: from the increased opportunities for maternal relatives to indulge in daytime pleasures to the conspiracy theorists who cite the provision of state-assisted nursery places as merely a cynical government ploy to get impoverished young mums back into the labour market on the grounds that it’s cheaper to fund nursery places for toddlers than issue Social Security pay-outs for frustrated carers confined to barracks.

The surprise is that it took so long. Despite the Education Minister’s plaint that it was a priority, funding didn’t appear as a ‘must have’ in the recent Business Plan, which is odd, since it is education, isn’t it?

But, in the nick of time, despite all the protestations of there not being enough cash in the collective pot, the magicians in the Council of Ministers added an amendment and, hey presto, the prospect of free nursery places for all three- to four-year-olds from next September became a reality.

Problem solved – at a cost to the exchequer of … well, we’re not quite sure about that. Anything from £500,000 to £1.9m in four years’ time. But don’t worry about that. Budgeting is such a game these days. Just take it as a pre-election ‘thank-you’ from your ever-faithful friends in the Royal Square.