The second involves employer and employee contributing to a “personal parental plan” (comparable to a personal pension plan) and the third has the employer picking up the bill. The most realistic is the fourth in which employer, employee and the taxpayer share the cost.This will have companies across Britain reaching for the bottom line, but before they worry too much they should look at the facts. Demos, whose two-year examination of parental leave will be finished next month, has done an extensive cost-benefit analysis of parental leave involving four schemes. In 1981 only one in 15 woman earned more than her male partner, a decade later that figure was one in five.Helen Wilkinson believes that business has consistently over-estimated the cost of parental leave and under-estimated its value. Eighty per cent say family life is suffering because working hours are too long and that parental leave could improve our quality of life The younger generation is different. Roles are less traditional and more women are working in better-paying jobs. Only 3 per cent of workplaces have parental-leave schemes with the other 97 per cent saying there is little demand from staff, it is too expensive and the benefits do not justify the costs.

Some 60 per cent of companies told Demos before the election they did not think parental leave would be on the board agenda in the next three years.What a difference a change of government makes – boards should take a peek at Demos’s new survey in which 64 per cent of the public think there should be full parental leave for men and women. And there was one, rather sad, card that may have been for New Man. In it dad says: “OK son, I’m going to tell you everything I know about football.” Son replies: “That shouldn’t take long.” The boob cards were much more popular.”You’ve got to understand that this is an industry of evolution rather than revolution,” said Mr Cousins. Father’s Day – an American tradition that was invented by a woman in 1910 – is now worth pounds 20m in Britain. Mother’s Day, on the other hand, rakes in pounds 38m.In many ways the card industry seems to be stuck at just about the same place as business in general. Workplace culture allows little room for men to be fathers after their baby’s first week of life.

As one executive exclaimed when the subject of paternity leave loomed: “I draw the line there. Paternity leave will never exist as long as I’m here.” Needless to say, he was a father and he had never taken time off.Most companies would agree, off the record of course, but action speaks louder than words anyway and there has been very little of that. However, there were a minority of cards for New Lad Dad with prominent cleavage and boob jokes. Those who had political beliefs, especially, came to think that they alone had the moral power – even the moral right – to lead their fellow human beings after Hitler had been overthrown.All over the Continent, after victory, the survivors emerged from the camps and sought to enter this inheritance. They were the “concentrationnaires” – those who had been behind the wire, and who had imagined a just, clean, disciplined freedom which would be worthy of their dead comrades But they did not inherit. They were respected and given medals and pensions, but everyone was a little frightened of their austere intensity and a little repelled by their messianic claim to have earned authority through suffering.A few, as individuals, became great. Kurt Schumacher, terribly disabled by his torments, became the leader of the Social Democrat Party in Germany but was defeated by Konrad Adenauer who had never spent a night in prison.