Quality | 2009.12.12
Revenge for past failings is a luxury the poor can't afford | Polly Toynbee
However disappointing Labour\'s record may be on fairness and services, the noises from Tories show it could get worse
This is the season of reckonings, when end-of-year inspections rain down on the government like tombstones from the sky. One after another the judgments crash in: it was hospitals , primary schools and care homes this week. Next week come new comprehensive area assessments that will give citizens an all-round view of exactly how their area is doing. Ofsted will be reporting on children\'s services – expect tougher post-Baby P investigations. It is to Labour\'s credit that it devised these rods for its own back, all producing lurid headlines listing worst performers.
That\'s what inspections do: inspectors earn their bread by being tough while their press offices write punchy press releases emphasising the worst. The better truth is often buried in the small print. Progress from a decade ago disappears in the noise about today\'s "worst". Weakest hospitals are named and shamed, but headlines ignore overall safety improvements. There was no hospital inspectorate in 1997 and no one denies standards have improved. Some schools may lag – but there are half as many non-readers at 11 than a decade ago. Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics produces difficult " productivity " figures which suggest that a class of 40 pupils would have a more productive output per penny, as would a ward with just one nurse.
What\'s more, standards measuring schools, social care and health keep getting stricter – more honest, perhaps, than politically wise. Unsurprisingly, the Tories will axe much inspection in its bonfire of the bureaucratic quangos. They will "trust the professionals" – wooing doctors and teachers while suffering fewer painful annual brickbats.
But the measurements that no government can avoid are the relentless numbers that tell if Britain has become fairer. This week Labour blenches at its failings on poverty and inequality. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and New Policy Institute\'s annual report, Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion , report makes dismal reading. As the results were presented to a roomful of economists, experts and academics, the air was thick with gloom. Bear in mind that these official figures from 2007-08 still predate the crash: worse will follow. Yet even in that last year of plenty, 13.4 million people were officially poor – the most since 2000. Children did better but adults did worse – no overall change. Labour let that happen in the last golden decade of unrivalled growth.
Persistent unemployment was an underlying problem – with one in eight workless adults. Youth unemployment never fell, and now stands at nearly one in five. But the root cause lies deeper. What\'s striking is how a bigger majority of the poor are now in work – yet are still paid too little to live without subsidy. Labour did not raise the minimum wage when it had the chance. Immigration and vanishing union power have led to endemic low pay and the "flexible" labour market that Blair and Brown tried to inflict on the rest of Europe. Growth happened only to the rich, the middle stagnated and the poor fell back. Labour knew it was drifting: the figures show early improvements fell away after 2005.
However, just before the election, the child poverty figures should improve. Extra child tax credits in 2008 will work through, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) predicts about a million children will have been taken out of poverty since 1997. That misses Labour\'s target, and overall national poverty is unchanged – but they can still boast that nearly a third of children were reached.
This is where to take a deep breath and stand back. Once the red mist of bitter disappointment has lifted, look just as hard at what might have been and look even harder at the choice ahead. How much worse would poverty be now had the Conservatives been in power for the last 12 years? The IFS says that the Tory 1997 tax and benefit regime, with the usual upratings, would by 2008 have propelled 2.1 million more children into poverty. Nothing in Tory policy then or now suggests any policy to avoid this. So what might a future Cameron government do? Their speeches mock tax credits – the one mechanism that redirects money straight into low-paid households. Nothing Cameron says implies he understands the lessons from Labour\'s era: as soon as a government stops swimming hard against the tide of inequality the poverty numbers rise, as they have since 2005. Do all you can with social programmes, but never take your foot off the tax-credit pedal.
Cameron, in his Hugo Young lecture on poverty, said ominously: "We have surely learnt that it is not enough merely to keep funding more and more generous tax credits." Interestingly, he praised groundbreaking research by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level . He seemed to have absorbed its meaning when he said that "more unequal countries do worse according to every quality of life indicator". But in the next breath he contradicted himself: "That doesn\'t mean we should be fixated only by a mechanistic objective like reducing the Gini coefficient " – the measure of inequality itself. Good news that he has deliberately opened himself up to future judgment: he would now be embarrassed if poverty rose as steeply as in Thatcher\'s time. The bad news is that he seems not to grasp how fast it would worsen without "more and more generous tax credits".
Cause for alarm is George Osborne\'s "We\'re all in this together" conference speech that pledged to cut tax credits for families on £50,000 in order to save £400m a year. That sent out shockwaves: to raise that much would mean cutting families far lower down the scale. Sure enough, in answer to a parliamentary question this week, the treasury said cutting out those on £50,000 would only raise £45m. If Osborne means to raise £400m he will have to cut credits for families with joint incomes of £31,000 – which is below the household median, a hard blow. His slip of the calculator accords with the tone of many in his party who suggest tax credits would wither away.
There are many – myself included – who often yearn to wreak revenge on Labour for its crimes, cowardice and craven appeasement of the rich. But in the light of the alternative, revenge is a luxury the low-paid couldn\'t afford. It\'s a miserably weak reason to support Labour, but don\'t imagine things couldn\'t get worse: oh yes, they could.
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