The real question is whether New Labour has either the attitude or the ability to reverse these worrying trends. I started to worry when I heard Tony Blair calling the public sector ‘inflexible’. Certainly, there are areas that need reforming, and there is still too much Old Labour sentiment in some small yet influential areas of the union movement. But is it really inflexibility that leaves patients on trolleys in hospital corridors and forces pensioners awaiting cataract operations to fly to India to bypass eighteen-month waiting lists? That compels the NHS, in the grip of a flu crisis (the idea of which was in any case exaggerated to cover up Labour’s health failures), to send patients to France because our hospitals have reached critical mass? Or that leaves children in schools with woefully inadequate books and equipment?
Arguably, in some areas of the public sector, there is a little too much flexibility. In Britain’s universities, there is a profound sense of unease over the working conditions of academics. Increasingly, universities are being forced to hire people on short-term contracts, often for a term or a year, and often on a part-time basis. Academics, particularly young academics seeking to make a mark, are forced to publish at such a rate of knots that their work does not meet the quality that would have been expected only a few years ago. In the university environment, where we need people to think in a considered and long-term manner, that is far from ideal. Yet that is what flexibility breeds, and in the university context, it is self-defeating.
The real problem is not inflexibility. It is a deliberate reluctance on the part of New Labour radically to address poverty and the countless other injustices blighting our society. A reluctance born of the fact that New Labour dare not be honest about the money it needs to spend to put these things right, for fear of losing the support of the wealthiest sections of society, who have benefited from New Labour’s concessionary attitude to tax.
I am not delivering a blanket criticism of the Labour government. A recent University of Cambridge study suggested that the incomes of the poorest tenth of the population have risen over the last three budgets, while the richest tenth have, on average, not become any richer. The study said that the poorest families with children have seen their income rise by 16 per cent. At the same time, Labour’s welfare programme was met with howls of discontent from the start. Witness the furore when Harriet Harman announced in autumn 1997 that she was going ahead with the Conservative plans to phase out additional benefits for single mothers, and the similar uproar when the government cut disability benefits, and introduced tuition fees for students in 1999.
In contrast to the Cambridge study we also have to consider the figures released by the Office of National Statistics in April 2000, which indicated that the gap between the earnings of the richest and the earnings of the poorest has widened to its highest level since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. The government was visibly embarrassed by these findings, which overshadowed John Prescott’s plans for a ten-year drive against poverty in the inner cities, launched only days before. They argued, in response, that the figures were unrepresentative, because measures such as the New Deal and the Working Families Tax Credit had simply not had time to take effect.
We cannot deny that Labour is spending money – but its record of benefit cuts indicate that it is doing so very selectively. There have been no universal increases in cash benefits – though academics have argued that this was what was desperately needed for a country where nearly 14 million received below half the average income.6 They have also not funded these increases from income tax.
In fact, they are still adamant about cutting income tax, because Labour believes this is the right way to win middle-income voters back from the Tories. This in turn means that, whatever Labour does for the most disadvantaged, it cannot do nearly enough to address the problems facing them. In 1997, journalist Nick Davies wrote:
Labour thinking seems to take no account of the damage which has been inflicted on the poor in the past twenty years … that by flicking the switches of the benefits machine … people can be manipulated into families or into work or out of crime, as though they were carefully calculating their rational self-interest, as though their lives and sometimes their personalities had not been scrambled by the experience of the last twenty years.7
His words are just as true now. And the solution is not simply to raise taxes and throw more money at the poorest sections of society. The solution requires as much of a revolution in thought as in deeds.
The Alternative
I have repeatedly stated that Liberal Democrats do not and will not inherit the vacant lot to the left of New Labour. Such a strategy would be tantamount to our party embarking on the search for a political cul-de-sac, but, at the same time, I believe that our party is the only party truly concerned with social justice, and we will fight the next election on that basis.
This is not a new stance for the party. Nor is it something I have chosen because it is fashionable – or unfashionable, for that matter. Far from it: Liberals and Social Democrats have a long tradition of fighting the war against social inequality. Some of the key thinkers of twentieth-century politics, who had a decisive impact on the shape of millions of people’s lives, were Liberals. William Beveridge produced the proposals for social security that became the bedrock of the post-war welfare state, and John Maynard Keynes was the economic guru of much of the post-war economic settlement. Before them, turn-of-the-century New Liberals such as L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson were among the first people in Britain to make a persuasive case for a government role in fighting poverty. We are and must always be the definitive political movement of conscience and reform.
Hobhouse’s view that ‘the struggle for liberty is … a struggle for equality’, is the basis of liberal attitudes to social justice. For all to be free, argued Hobhouse, there had to be equal access to opportunities for education and employment, and only individuals together, acting through government, could ensure that happened. Progressive social reform has deep philosophical roots within the Liberal Democrats.
It also has deep roots in Labour history, but the current leadership seems to have forgotten this. As a result, active public enthusiasm for New Labour (as opposed to national opinion polls) is at an all-time low. The desultory turnout for the 1999 European elections clearly indicated the nation’s deep cynicism towards the political process. At a time when war in Kosovo had been raging for seventy days, less than a quarter of the population found European politics sufficiently relevant to leave their houses and vote.
People only pay attention to politicians when they are dealing with issues that immediately concern them. From my travels across the country, I know that inequality is an issue of great contemporary concern, but the present government has all but stopped trying to redress it. It feels it is doing enough, because it can always churn out figures that prove it is. When one of its own ministers, Peter Kilfoyle, resigned from office because he felt that Labour was not doing enough for the poor in his own Liverpool constituency, the response from the leadership was an embarrassed silence. There was much talk about regretting his departure, not so much about regretting what he said – or whether it was true.8
One practical measure in particular would make a radical and immediate improvement, and put issues of inequality at the centre of political debate. Just as the Budget dominates the national news once a year, so we need an annual Social Justice Audit of similar importance, which would examine the impact of all government policies that have any link with social inequalities. It would be published in full in the newspapers and be publicized to the hilt, and every year the government would be expected to show