Jenny McCartney’s column in the Sunday Telegraph today pinpoints the key flaw to the Labour project: in its drive for equality, it produces inequality. This apparent paradox is the regular consequence of left-wing politics world over: the best of intentions produce the worst of results. There is now enough data on the 11 years of the Labour Project to show its failure on every important yardstick. Employment figures: a mirage created by immigration. Economic boom: a mirage created by debt. NHS performance: dismal, for the money injected. Education: Britain hurtling down the international league tables in absolute and relative terms. Defence: let’s not go there. But it is in social justice that Labour’s failure has been the most profound and unforgivable because if Labour is not for the poor, then who is it for? Labour’s supervisory approach to poverty has failed, and the Tories will have to approach this problem with fresh thinking and vigour. An extract from McCartney’s piece:-
I have never understood why hard-working people on low incomes, for example, can’t simply be taxed less. Instead, they are compelled to scrabble to get their own money back from the state, by means of Gordon Brown’s laborious and expensive working tax credits scheme…Labour is spending money, all right: John Bird, the outspoken founder of The Big Issue magazine, has observed that we have “the most expensive poor in the world”. But he argues that the money creates and maintains a costly and unproductive structure of dependency, and I think he is right.
The Guardian now likes to ask if Cameron can be trusted as progressive and my answer is: emphatically. The original definition of “neoconservative” is a left-winger who has been mugged by reality. I suspect the millions of new Tory voters at the next election will come under this category – they’d be attracted to what Cameron describes as “progressive ends by conservative means”. If Cameron manages to get the message – McCartney’s message – out clearly and loudly enough.
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