How Labour failed working people (the short version)

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For years I’ve argued that our approach to regeneration and social change amounts to little more than sending middle class folk into poor communities to say: “there, there” and to give them a big hug. Nothing about the underlying dysfunction, the depression, the dreary inevitability of poverty.

To me this was the promise of the Labour Party and their acolytes in the social work industry. They would promote governments founded on high levels of taxation and these taxes would be used to “alleviate poverty”. But sadly the only poverty alleviated by this process was that of middle-class lefty graduates too right-on to get a real job earning money that might really alleviate poverty.

So when Tracey Cheetham (that rare thing, a nice socialist) talks about poverty my ears prick, my eyes glisten and I see the true advocate of the left-wing myth. Poverty isn’t eliminated by taxing rich folk. It really isn’t. And it’s worse when those tax pounds are, in reality, merely transferred from the moderately well-off to the averagely well-off. Two thirds of that “investment” in defeating poverty goes in wages. Wages mostly paid to people who don’t live in the deprived communities that those folk are employed to hug.

I am (as merits a good conservative) sceptical about the magic bullet of family policy. But I can read the evidence. I can see that when we give perverse incentives that encourage single parenthood we are doing something wrong. And I can see that working class communities don’t want collegiate guff about engagement and participation. They want the government to pay up on its side of the bargain – that the working class do all the shit jobs, the one’s you lot are all too precious to do. And you – the government – will make sure our kids don’t have to go through all that by providing a half way decent education, some good health care and a chance at reaching those Elysian uplands.

Dear Labour Party, this was your deal, your offer, your Faustian pact with the ordinary worker. And you reneged on that deal. You bottled it. You failed. Instead of hard work leading to opportunity it led to the benefit trap, to the dole queue, to sink schools, to a depressed and depressing world of drugs, booze and fast food. And your response was to feed the articulate middle class social workers who claimed a solution. And that solution wasn’t jobs. Or education. Or opportunity. It was a lecture about drinking, smoking, fatty foods and slapping kids. At best it was a hug.

Were I one of these victims of Labour’s arrogance, I would be hoping – with every sinew – that things will change and the nanny state is replaced with real opportunity, choice and the fulfilment of that promise of a better future. And they won’t get that from a Labour Government.