Obsolete

Friday, May 08, 2009

More unequal than ever.

It's been completely overshadowed by other events, but what really should be the final nail in Labour's coffin was quietly slipped out yesterday: the income gap is now the widest it has been since records began. This should be the very knife in the heart of New Labour: the entire political deal which shaped the party was that even if the rich would be allowed to become filthily so, through subtle and stealthy redistribution the poorest would be lifted out of poverty, with child poverty to be abolished altogether.

Arguably, for a while it worked: the poor were not getting poorer, it was just the rich getting richer more quickly which prevented Labour's record from being noteworthy and successful. The latest figures however show that even before the banking meltdown, the poorest were having to make do on less, while the richest continued to benefit. As alluded to above, this should be the final straw: the whole reason that Labour supporters were meant to put up with the triangulation, the constant appeasing of the tabloids, the wars, the constant reactionary rhetoric on everything that the Home Office deals with and dealt with was because that below the surface, things were slowly but surely getting better for the most vulnerable in society. Now even Polly Toynbee at her most desperate cannot pretend that her nosepegs can keep out the smell that emanates from New Labour's corpse.

Labels: child poverty, death of Labour, inequality, New Labour, Polly Toynbee

Share |

5/08/2009 11:05:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Labour isn't working.

When your default world-view is cynicism, not much tends to shock you. Even by the modern standards of the Labour party, this is little short of astonishing:

Ed Balls, the children's secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the chief secretary to the Treasury, have launched an attack on the so-called London living wage – the £7.45 an hour recommended minimum for all workers in the capital. They claim it would be "artificial, inflationary" and not "necessary or appropriate."

...

But the children's ministry, which is a signatory to the Child Poverty Pledge, said: "An artificial 'living wage for London' could distort labour markets and prove poor value for money. Moreover, in seeking to reflect perceptions of the cost of living, this proposal could also raise inflation expectations at a time when increased vigilance is needed on inflationary risks. We do not believe it is necessary or appropriate."

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter crap. The real danger at the moment as has been argued by David Blancheflower and others is not inflationary pressures but unemployment and if anything, deflation (not stagflation, obviously. durrr).

Who on earth is New Labour attempting to appease with this in effect two fingers to the working poor? Why, that would be the CBI, the same organisation which opposed the minimum wage from the very beginning and complains every time the government dares to raise it.

To try and get your head around just how foolish this is, even the Tories support the living wage, or at the moment at least pay lip service towards it, as do the Liberal Democrats. Why then would any person in London or other major city on the minimum wage vote Labour when they don't even pretend to be on their side, and make such utterly dismal arguments to defend the indefensible?

The irony is that this comes just as Labour has attempted to mount a defence of its record on social mobility - which the Cabinet Office's report suggests has improved, at least very slightly, since 2000. Pollyanna Toynbee naturally noted this and swiftly determined that the Tories would it wreck this slight improvement should they come to power. This is on top of a recent report from the OECD which found that also, since 2000, inequality had declined. The criticism isn't that the government hasn't tried, it has, although it has often tried to do so without soliciting attention, but that it hasn't done anywhere near enough. For all the spending on tax credits, notoriously complicated, open to fraud and only available to those over 25, the benefits have been slight. This is why increasing attention is being paid to the citizen's basic income, along with the proposal to lift the lowest paid out of tax altogether. To do so though would mean taxing the higher paid a higher rate, and to judge by the complete lack of backbone being displayed towards the bankers that we now own a share of, there simply isn't the political will for any such drastic changes to be made. When a Labour government seems to be abandoning the very basic foundations of what the party was built around, you have to wonder whether there ought to be a prosecution attempted against it under the Trades Descriptions Act.

Labels: child poverty, death of Labour, Ed Balls, inequality, minimum wage, New Labour, politics, social mobility