Our friends at Bright Blue held their inaugural public meeting yesterday evening with Polly Toynbee and Theresa May discussing whether inequality matters.
Setting aside the significance of the presence of Polly Toynbee as the first speaker at a newly-launched Tory event, these snowballing events are hugely important for the party. They are not ‘Conservative’ events, they are events for people interested in Tony Benn’s famous isshooos. And that’s how you build my favourite theory of the cascade of trust.
One particularly interesting question concerned whether you should aim to support (heavily) the ‘bottom’ (that’s shorthand, before anyone decides to complain that I’m being insulting) few per cent at the expense of the next bottom 25 or so per cent. Her question was whether boosting the life chances of the worst-off, even if only by a small amount, is more effective and desirable than helping people who have fewer long-term problems and just need a bit of extra help at some things.
I doubt there’s an answer to this. I am horrified by the suggestion today from the government’s anti-social behaviour czar of taking entire families into care. And yet there are clearly some people who simply can’t cope. I don’t think morally we can write off the very worst-off as being beyond hope. But equally, governments have a duty to maximise the effect of every penny they spend.
Something that was suggested but not really explored was an experiment discussed in a book called The Spirit Level (also mentioned in David Cameron’s speech on Monday). Bear with me, it sounds a little unlikely but… A number of monkeys who regarded themselves as high-status were removed from their environments and placed in a new one where they became of low status. Nothing else changed, just their social standing. They became depressed, and listless, and more likely to die younger than expected. The conclusion the researchers drew was that it was the lack of control over their lives that caused at least a significant part of the damage.
This has huge implications. I don’t know how applicable it is to humans, or whether this group was a one-off. But it seems obvious to me as a Conservative that people who feel in control of their lives have a better time of it. I’m not saying that money isn’t important, but part of what money can give you IS control – you can choose where you get your public services from, for example.
Perhaps – just perhaps – there is a wider, slightly left-field by-product of social responsibility and devolving power: that by giving people control over their lives, we make them intrinsically healthier as well as socially stronger.
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Surely that is the Conservative ethos? Give people control of their lives and let them prosper