Quality | 2009.11.22
Airbrushing the Tory past | Ed Miliband
Cameron\'s rhetoric on poverty may sound new, but his prescriptions go straight back to Thatcher
According to the great Guardian journalist Hugo Young, before admitting people to her circle Margaret Thatcher would ask, "Is he one of us?" It is clear from the speech on poverty David Cameron gave in Young\'s name earlier this week that he would have passed Thatcher\'s test.
Cameron\'s argument was that the state is the cause of poverty. "The size, scope and role of government in Britain has reached a point where it is now inhibiting, not advancing, the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality …" And indeed, ever since the late 1960s, the state has been "ineffective". There is no evidence, historical or otherwise, for this claim, only pernicious political motive.
Analysis supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation makes clear that poverty has fallen. The gap between the most deprived parts of the country and the rest has narrowed. While women remain more likely to be in poverty than men, the gap has halved. The authors describe the progress on child poverty as impressive, with a halving in the proportion of lone parents who say they cannot afford important items for their children. Pensioner poverty has fallen by a third. Modelling of the policies left by the Tories suggests it would have kept on rising without our action.
Not every indicator has improved, but in the words of Professor John Hills, Britain\'s foremost expert on these issues, "where significant policy initiatives were taken, the outcomes generally moved in the right direction." The lesson from this decade is that we need to do more, not less.
In contrast, the effect the last time anyone tried to do as Cameron advocates and roll back the state is quite the opposite. The rise in inequality in the 1980s was exceptional in the context not just of British history, but also of any other country in the world at the time. Child poverty more than doubled between 1979 and 1997, leaving more than a quarter of children in poverty. Cameron is right to say that the state can be "ineffective" at reducing poverty, but the reason that was the case in the Thatcher era was not because it was too big, but because those running the state decided to massively redistribute from the poor to the better off.
The record is so inconvenient that Cameron just airbrushed that era out of his lecture – we move seamlessly from the late 1960s to 1997, as if the 1980s hadn\'t happened. That isn\'t just a glaring historical omission, it is also a travesty when it comes to explaining the condition of Britain today.
In Doncaster, the town I represent, people are still living with the effects of the unmanaged de-industrialisation of the Thatcher era. No doubt, family breakdown can contribute to poverty, but it is disingenuous to fail to make the link between the economic breakdown of the 1980s and the social breakdown that followed. And these are effects that take decades to turn round. That is the starting point for tackling poverty and inequality: sticking at it, recognising it takes a long time to tackle entrenched disadvantage. The first toddlers to benefit from Sure Start will be 18 in 2017.
We should also understand that a market economy which makes inequality significantly worse makes it much harder to tackle the problem. There are limits to what can be done but policy which helps us grow together, not apart, is an absolute priority for the future.
We should continue to reform the state and make it far more responsive. That is about liberating the best in the public sector to do more and being willing to make more use of the voluntary sector where it can deliver better services. But we should never use charities as an excuse for abdicating the responsibility of the state to provide funding, as Cameron\'s lecture suggests he would. And we will have to make tougher choices in an era of tougher times on public spending, just not to the benefit of the rich and powerful, such as the inheritance tax cuts for the very richest.
The big prize on offer for Cameron is to convince people, including people on the left, to lose heart. He wants to create a coalition of the enthusiastic Tory right who never believed in government in the first place and the acquiescent, disillusioned left who think all politicians are the same or have legitimate worries about the unresponsive state.
The difference between Thatcherism and Cameronism may be that rhetorically, one says poverty doesn\'t matter, and the other says it does. But let\'s not be taken in: there is no difference when it comes to prescriptions.
This is his project: to build a reactionary consensus. By convincing people government is the problem, he builds support for retrenchment and cuts. A return to the 1980s by the back door. It is insidious, it is clever and it might work. We have been warned. It really is up to people of progressive persuasion to decide where they stand.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]v/13/airbrushing-the-tory-past
