The day I became a carer, I was unloading some shopping from our car, distracted, phone tucked under my chin, on hold to our GP. She had seen my son the day before because he’d been a bit tired lately. And she’d ordered a full blood work panel, telling me there was (probably, most likely) nothing to worry about. But now, suddenly, here was her voice, anguished and wrenched from all professionalism, asking me if there was anyone with me right now. I stumbled indoors and put her on loudspeaker, as though spilling her words into the room might somehow dilute the horror of what she had to say: we needed to go to straight to the hospital because there was something very wrong with his bone marrow.

I don’t have the words to describe the six months that followed: the medications he received, the time he spent in the ICU; the seizure from the chemotherapy they injected into his spine; the words he lost, or the days when he did not know my face. So let’s skip forward to remission, to carer’s leave.

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Leukaemia treatment in the UK and Ireland is roughly three-and-a-half years for boys. It is — to use one of the phrases the consultants tossed around a lot — “a marathon; not a sprint”. After six months of aggressive front-line therapy which, thankfully, rid his body of leukaemia cells, our son entered what’s known as “maintenance”, a period of nearly three years designed to reduce the risk of relapse. He still receives daily doses of oral chemotherapy, monthly doses of intravenous chemotherapy, monthly steroid pulses. Every 12 weeks he receives a general anaesthetic and an intrathecal injection into his spine. And every week there is a blood draw to determine the dose of his chemotherapy for the coming week.

I take carer’s leave. Along with the day-to-day business of caring for him and taking him to hospital appointments, I have to learn a whole new set of skills: changing dressings, drawing blood, administering chemotherapy drugs and emergency seizure medications. I practise on a child-sized doll. The doll has matted blonde hair and a central line like the one my son had inserted into his subclavian vein on the day he was admitted to the children’s hospital. Acts of care — things that feel alien at first — do come, gradually, to seem almost normal.

One afternoon in September 2022, I receive a phone call from somebody called Brian*. He tells me that he is our social worker and that this call is just a formality, really, because he would like to formally discharge us from his care. This feels strange, as I wasn’t aware that we were “in his care” in the first place. But I remember him now, a man with a rainbow-coloured lanyard who drew me aside and asked me how I was feeling shortly after my son’s diagnosis. He talked to me about self-care and told me I needed to fill my own cup before I could fill my son’s. “But that’s what being a parent is?” I remember saying, “it’s caring even when your cup is empty”.

That same month, he starts school. After six months of aggressive chemotherapy, he has almost no white blood cells. He also has no hair. Like most children returning to school after Covid, he is frequently ill. Unlike other children, though, when he gets sick or has a temperature he is admitted to hospital. We drive to the children’s hospital in the dead of night. There are times when my husband and I are united, a team, and other times when the stress and anxiety of these late-night hospital dashes make us fracture and we turn on each other. I have one memory I’m particularly ashamed of: running to the cancer ward in the middle of the night with my son in my arms, a staph infection in his central line, screaming at my husband for forgetting to pack the overnight bag that I had slung over my arm at that very moment, while a group of parents queueing for A&E looked on. My son has been through so much. The very least I can give him is parents who care for each other.

I join a private Facebook group for parents of children with cancer. I need to ask questions about carer’s leave and the financial logistics involved. For the most part it seems that mothers are staying home during maintenance treatment, while fathers are returning to work. The mothers who answer my query put forward various solutions to their financial circumstances, from life insurance policies that cover childhood illnesses, to temporary mortgage freezes, to stress leave, carer’s benefit and relying on grandparents for unpaid childcare. A close friend also gives me the number of a mother she knows whose daughter had leukaemia. This mother suggests I do not try to work while my son is in treatment. “He’ll never need you like he needs you now,” she writes.

With time, my son’s hair begins to grow back, first as a downy peach fuzz and then as ashy blonde curls. People marvel at how fast he can run now and how beautiful his hair is. My friends and even my family frequently ask when my son “finished treatment” and I have to tell them that he is, in fact, still in treatment, and that he will remain in treatment until — best case scenario — April 2025. And in some ways, he will always be in treatment.

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My husband and I are both academics, employed by the State. He works throughout our son’s treatment. In September 2023, I return to work full time. My husband now takes carer’s leave and receives carer’s benefit, which in theory allows him to work a maximum number of hours a week — in his case, about a fifth of his usual workload. This is what is supposed to happen. But in reality, he ends up keeping up closer to half of his normal teaching and administrative load on an informal basis, while earning a fifth of his normal salary. He ends up working for free. His department does not hire anybody to replace his classes. Colleagues send emails out of hours and at weekends that begin, “I know you are on carer’s leave but…” — then ask him to take on additional work.

The irony is that these colleagues serve on the board of Athena Swan, a charter put in place to uphold gender equality in the university. And the thing is, I’m sure they imagine that they are upholding gender equality in the workplace. My husband isn’t a woman after all. Surely he has a wife to do this caring for him? Surely there is a mother doing her duties at home, ensuring that the common good can be achieved? I’m not sure if the emails are the result of a misunderstanding about my son’s cancer or part of some bigger problem with the norms of who cares in our society. But the result is that my husband and I both need to work harder, snatching hours when our son is asleep. We both have to care less.

Sometimes I’m angry at him for not pushing back more against his employer. Why didn’t he speak to his head of department about the extra hours before term began? Why didn’t he go to his union? And sometimes I feel he’s angry at me for returning to work in the first place. I can’t argue that there are more obstacles in place now that he is the one doing the caring. Sometimes I feel guilty too. I think of the mother who said of my son “he’ll never need you more than he does now”. I think that maybe she’s right.

I fear that part of the problem is that, in Ireland, fathers who take paternity leave or even, it seems, carer’s leave to look after their very sick children, are still viewed as bad workers, as bad colleagues. This is partly the fault of the State. In the Nineties, the Swedish government introduced a “use it or lose it” paternity leave policy. In 1995, 30 days of leave were reserved specifically for each parent, increased to 90 days by 2016. In this way, Sweden didn’t just change the laws about who cares — it altered the social norms. As a result, Swedish fathers who don’t take paternity leave are bad fathers in the eyes of society. And Swedish fathers now take more carer’s leave than other European fathers. But in Ireland, by choosing to care for his son, my husband was treated as though he was letting the side down.

Can we hope to change such harmful attitudes? Today, to mark International Women’s Day, Irish citizens will vote on what’s been called the Care Amendment. The proposed amendment would delete from the Irish constitution Articles 41.2.1: “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” And 41.2.2: “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

These two clauses recognise a woman’s role in the home. More dubiously, they may even recognise that a woman’s role is in the home. Wiping them from the constitution feels like simple progress, a blot of extant sexism, scrubbed clean. Yet though this referendum is a women’s issue, it is also — as the name suggests — a carer’s issue.

The Irish government want to replace the older, gendered language with a new Constitutional Article (42B) on “Care”: “The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.” Care remains in the home. Care is a family matter, not for the State, or for the wider community.

Voting on the Care Amendment seems straightforward. Of course, we will strike a line through the extant role of women in the home. We will pat ourselves on the back for taking yet another progressive stance. But in doing so we align ourselves with an empty identity politics that changes nothing. If we say that a woman’s place is no longer in the home, the words will change, but will that change anything? In theory, women will be liberated from their caring responsibilities — but in reality, they will remain at their loved one’s bedsides with little support from the state. Part of what nearly broke my family in the past two years was that we cared alone in a progressive, neoliberal Ireland. We cared alone. We broke alone. And no one cared.

To read the accusations levelled at Silber, you could be forgiven for thinking that he was a blood-curdling white supremacist who turned up to class in white robes and a pointed hood. His sins, however, were somewhat different: his course focused on Islamist terrorism, he had previously worked for the New York Police Department (NYPD) as Director of Intelligence Analysis (2005-2012), and he had co-authored a NYPD-sponsored report of jihadist radicalisation. “It is extremely and violently Islamophobic, racist, unconstitutional, and imperialist,” wrote the organisers, referring to the course, without bothering to substantiate how or why it was all of those things. “Hence, another key demand,” they went on, “is that Silber be fired, his course cancelled forever.”

I drag up this pitiful episode from the US-Derangement File because it sharply parallels a recent case that has been doing the rounds here in the UK: the demonisation of King’s College London (KCL) as a citadel of progressive infantilism that endangers the British security state. It all started on 9 January, when a journal that nobody had heard of (Fathom) published an article by a former civil servant that nobody had heard of (Anna Stanley). Within days of its publication, Douglas Murray (who everybody has heard of) was calling for the suspension of a senior KCL academic; and now the Security Minister Tom Tugendhat has ordered a review into “biased” civil service training.

There are differences between the two cases: most notably, the cancellation effort aimed at KCL is coming from the Right, whereas Silber’s antagonists were coming from the Left. But in their ideological zeal and hyperbole, KCL’s most vocal critics sound every bit as puritanical as the progressive types they loathe.

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In her article, Stanley recounts a three-day course she attended last year at KCL while she was working at the Foreign Office as an open-source intelligence analyst. The course, “Issues in Countering Terrorism”, was organised by the Centre for Defence Studies and was attended by around 40 civil servants from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence and Home Office.

It was “a deeply, existentially depressing experience”, she wrote. This was not because of the dark subject matter of the course, but rather because so much of its content was informed by “typical post-modern identity politics”. Indeed, she charged, the course was not so much an educational training programme as a form of anti-government “indoctrination” that downplayed the threat of Islamist extremism, which, she rightly pointed out, remains the most serious security threat in the UK.

According to Stanley, the course went downhill as soon as it started. It began with definitions: “What is Terrorism? Without anyone providing an opposing standpoint, we were taught the adage, ‘One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist’.” This was rank “cultural relativism”, she argued. One lecturer told the class that “labelling a group terrorist can increase the state’s power”, while another used slides that showed Left-wing inanities about how condemning terrorism is siding with the oppressor and how the real problem isn’t terrorism but state power. Yet another lecturer, Stanley alleged, smeared William Shawcross, the government’s independent Prevent reviewer, as an anti-woke zealot and spoke scathingly about Douglas Murray and podcaster Joe Rogan: they were far-Right demagogues and needed to be suppressed, the lecturer said.

It is hard to know what to make of these accusations. On the one hand, they are extremely damning, suggesting that instead of cultivating an atmosphere of open inquiry about a subject as fiercely contested as terrorism and national security, KCL was imposing a radical pedagogy fundamentally at odds with official government policy on terrorism. But on the other hand, as Stanley herself partly concedes, many of the progressive platitudes she mentions were obviously used to facilitate discussion and were not intended to express the views of the lecturers.

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If the KCL lecturers had indeed sought to impose their “post-modern identity politics” onto students then this would be an unforgivable breach of their calling as educators, and the government should never work with them again. But the problem with Stanley’s polemic is that it’s short on supplying the contextual evidence to prove this, whereas the problem for KCL is that it will need to prove otherwise if it is to keep the public’s and government’s trust. “What I want to know,” a senior KCL academic who had no part in delivering the course told me, “is were they [the course’s attendees] exposed to a range of views, or was it all completely one-sided?”

The lecturer who made the disobliging remarks about Shawcross, Murray and Rogan, and who Stanley chose not to name in her article, has since been outed by Murray as Peter Neumann, who is Professor of Security Studies at KCL and the former founding director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Neumann, for his part, rejects Stanley’s portrayal of the course and the academics who taught on it. He told The Times that, far from being a woke ideologue, he was in fact a “centre-right liberal and, as such, am highly critical of ‘cancel culture’, whether from the Right or Left”. However, he did acknowledge that he had “criticised the Shawcross review for prioritising the threat from jihadism at times when security agencies said that Right-wing extremism was more dangerous”. What he neglected to say is whether he’d described Murray or Rogan as Right-wing.

For what it’s worth, I think Neumann is wrong about Shawcross and the severity of the jihadist threat, but as academics we’re allowed to disagree over these sorts of things. And quite what Neumann was doing in bringing up Douglas Murray and Joe Rogan in a counter-terrorism class isn’t clear. Perhaps he was discussing the opinion, common among progressives, that they have provided rhetorical cover for dangerous far-Right extremists. But whether or not Neumann actually believes this, he is nonetheless entitled to express it in his classes. What he isn’t entitled to do is foist off his views onto his students, and Stanley supplies no evidence to show that he had tried to do so.

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Stanley is no doubt right to worry about the civil service being captured by progressive ideologues and the most damning observations in her article concern the robotic Left-wing platitudes of the participants she attended the course with. One, apparently, gave a biased talk on Prevent — accusing it of being racist — and had a brother who went to Syria to join Isis, both of which are hardly the fault of the course’s organisers. But it’s a bit of a stretch to think that KCL’s security department is a bastion of progressive radicalism or that Neumann, a centrist who himself has been subject to accusations of Islamophobia, is its dastardly avatar.

There are certainly far more deserving targets, such as the dismal apologia of a recent hire at KCL, a certain Doerthe Rosenow, who reposted an appalling tweet celebrating the October 7 attacks on the very day they took place. The tweet, posted by another academic called Kai Bosworth, showed a photo of Hamas militants breaching into Israeli territory with a bulldozer. It was captioned: “Seeing these border infrastructure come down just so fucking beautiful. this could become the dominant image of our future, if we make it so.”

Rosenow, who is a lecturer in international relations, was not on the staff delivering KCL’s counter-terrorism course, according to an anonymous source at KCL. But in her unreadable prose and radical politics — she aspires to “move understandings of (global) colonialism(s) beyond unitary and homogenous notions grounded in predominantly Anglo-American experiences” — she is indicative of a broader rot in UK academia. And had Stanley been minded to find further evidence of it she wouldn’t have needed to venture far.

She would, for instance, have found no shortage of low-hanging fruit to pulp from my own field of criminology, where abolitionist sentiment and liberal sentimentality towards terrorists, such as Usman Khan, is common and of a piece with the kind of ideological puritanism that came for Mitchell Silber in 2020. But instead she chose to identify a problem where there probably isn’t one. And unsurprisingly, it seems to have backfired, alienating potential allies while soothing sworn foes.