Quality | 2009.09.05
These Tory poverty claims will return to haunt them | Polly Toynbee
I predict with confidence that they can\'t fix broken Britain. Whoever\'s in charge, things get worse if unemployment is high
Opposition is so damned easy, Labour protests. The Tories get away with murder, running down Britain with rotten statistics. This was the Tories\' scheduled "Broken Britain" week – and they were indeed murdering the figures. When Chris Grayling , the shadow home secretary, compared gang crime in Manchester and Liverpool with The Wire , set in Baltimore, it didn\'t take more than a click to uncover the true figures: murders in Manchester 34, in Liverpool 23 – and in Baltimore 282. UK murders are the lowest for 20 years. But ex-TV man Grayling knows political showbiz: he has talked of a "Jeremy Kyle" generation of young men and "Frank Gallagher-style parenting". There is nothing progressive about his reheated Charles Murray "underclass" brand of conservatism.
Theresa May echoed him with her shocking fact: 5 million people haven\'t worked since Labour came to power. Just about everything was wrong with this figure. First, it\'s based on the 2001 census. In 2001, 3 million had left the workforce before 1996 – hardly Labour\'s fault – and no one knows if they went to work thereafter. Of the other 2 million, half were under 19 then, mostly studying. Professor Paul Gregg of the Centre for Economic Performance brought them up to date with current Labour Force Survey figures: 2.1 million of those who have never worked are under 24, over three-quarters of them students.
There are indeed 1.25 million people who have never worked since 1996, almost all in the 50-64 age group, mostly sick, disabled, retired or women who never went to work when their children grew up. But more people in that age group now work than used to. In all, Gregg finds 2.5 million people of working age who have never worked under Labour – though that includes a lot of college-leavers not yet employed.
Theresa May is right that there remains a longstanding problem: too many people don\'t work who could and too many children live in households where no one works. But no one can accuse the Purnell reforms of going soft: he had lone parents preparing for work when their youngest child is aged three, and incapacity benefit claimants given much tougher medical tests. Numbers on incapacity benefit have fallen steadily in the last six years – despite a great slab of people deliberately parked on it by the Tories in the 1990s recession.
May embraces the broken Britain theme with gusto: solving poverty is "about aspiration and skills rather than giving people extra financial help". Herriff on tax credits – which "do not solve poverty, but mask it" – led to the Times and Sun warning "Tax credits to be cut". This was the only proposal in her speech and yet tax credits have proved the great life saver in the crash. When someone loses a job or goes on to short-time working, tax credits rise to fill some of the gap as an automatic stabiliser.
These facts matter because making even small improvements has proved so hard – and the Tories need to know it. To be sure, this is the usual statistical warfare of a pre-election year. What Labour did to the figures when attacking the Major government doesn\'t bear much scrutiny either. Gloves are off when an opposition is 16 points ahead in the polls, as money, influence and think-tanks switch sides to row towards the Tory flagship sailing up the Thames.
But they who now attack would do well to watch their language. Broken Britain week laid out profound social problems still unsolved; but without policies to improve deep poverty and dysfunction, the Tories raise expectations that will return to haunt them. These speeches will be quoted back time and again as unemployment, child poverty, crime and educational failure are likely to rise on their watch, not fall.
I predict this with confidence because everything worsens when unemployment stays high, as it now will whoever is in power. In the good years, despite high spending and strong belief in the power of new programmes to solve social problems, Labour has done less that it hoped. The task was tougher, people\'s habits more intractable, and the cost higher than this low-tax country was dared ask to pay. Many of Labour\'s unrealistic targets were missed. Yet crime fell by 39%, violent crime by 40%, more children passed more exams than ever, more single mothers took jobs, and 600,000 fewer children were poor.
A Conservative government faced with hard times, committed to cuts, has no hope of preventing most of this sliding backwards. In this economic climate, it won\'t all be their fault. But in the last decade Labour has run hard up a down escalator to stop a natural pull towards inequality growing greater. If a Tory government stops trying as hard, then that chasm will yawn wider. If they do mean to cut tax credits, they plainly don\'t realise how instant the impact would be on all these social indicators.
Cameron in his "general wellbeing index" mood may be sincere in wanting to improve life for the poorest. He may shift programmes that don\'t work and can axe things that waste money.No doubt he would like to boast that poverty decreased on his watch, while worklessness, educational failure and bad parenting improved. But it won\'t happen without giving it far more importance than seems possible when cutting national debt is his top priority.
There is no sign that Cameron or his team understand what it takes to make social progress. They should look harder at just how heavy the lifting has been for Labour. He sets himself a dangerously high benchmark if he wants to be judged on how much faster he can improve the lives of the poor. With this week\'s rhetoric, the Conservatives suggest they will do more – but that\'s a tall order, since Labour has still made better social progress than they can hope to match.
The Guardian ICM poll this week showed that although people expect to pay higher taxes and see their incomes suffer under the Tories, they still prioritise paying off national debt and sorting the economy. That\'s what they say now. But when faced with spending cuts and tax rises, they will change their minds. A debt-repaying Tory government making cuts into the head winds of rising unemployment would face nothing but rocks and hard places. In that storm, where will repairing Broken Britain feature then? Progressive conservatism would vanish from the lexicon before Osborne stood to deliver his first budget.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]8/polly-toynbee-broken-britain
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