We Must Act Quickly To Remedy Labour’s Failure on Inequality and Poverty

Barely a day goes by without another acknowledgement of this Government’s failure to help those who placed the most faith in it.  Only last week, one report showing that 13% of children in the UK are living in poverty was followed by a devastating critique from a Government body of New Labour’s record on inequality.

According to the National Equality Panel, “comparison with measures based on tax records suggests that this is the highest level of income inequality since soon after the Second World War.”  Read that sentence again and then ask yourself the very simple question – what is a Labour Government for?  After 13 years of Labour Government, inequality has widened and social mobility has gone backwards.  That is most certainly not what people signed up to in 1997.  What would Keir Hardie or Nye Bevan have thought of this?  Come to think of it, I would imagine that the likes of Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins would have been shocked.  Even Ramsay Macdonald would have been horrified.

That such a report comes out and Labour ministers are not utterly shamed by the findings says so much about what the Labour Party has become.  The party that was once, “a moral crusade or it is nothing” has been reduced to a mere political calculating machine.  Nowhere in the Ministerial statements about the report were there any new ideas about how the problem could be resolved and how poverty and inequality could be reduced.

The report makes quite clear that the accident of birth plays far too important a role in determining life chances.  It makes quite clear that too many children are let down by education in deprived areas.  That is why radical new progressive Conservative policies are aimed at establishing new schools in the most deprived areas and introducing a pupil premium where schools are given extra money.

Tackling inequality and poverty will be one of the priorities of an incoming Conservative Government.  Labour have failed the poorest in society.  It is now up to us to ensure that life chances are not decided at birth; the causes of inequality and poverty are tackled; and that Britain becomes a fairer society after 13 years of Labour’s diminished hope and broken promises.

Related posts:

1. Glasgow East must be used to expose Labour’s grotesque failure to eradicate extreme poverty
2. Waging A War On Poverty and The Causes Of Poverty
3. Channel 4 Should Not Be Using The Tragedy Of Poverty As ‘Entertainment’
4. Bright Blue: Does inequality matter?
5. Globalisation and Global Poverty policy group report