Unemployment in the North East now stands at 12 per cent, whereas in the South East, the rate is only 6.4 per cent.  The North East also suffers from the highest rate of economic activity, the lowest rate of employment and the highest claimant count (which is more than double the rate in the South East).

Of course, politicians since the war have talked about minimising the North-South divide, but the rhetoric has seldom been matched by results.  As I argued in The Guardian a few months ago, the creation of public sector jobs in places such as my home town as Consett did help to alleviate the economic devastation of unemployment.

Nevertheless, the growth of the public sector was only a short term solution and left many towns at risk when Government decided that it had to cut spending (and all three parties went into the last election committed to spending cuts).  As pertinently, even after the boom in public sector jobs, the North-South divide in terms of GDP per head, unemployment and worklessness remained as stubborn as ever.

It’s imperative that more is done to create jobs and tackle unemployment in the North.  Although public sector jobs are important and valuable, private sector job creation is crucial for the North to have sustainable growth and sustainable jobs in the future.

Although concepts such as the Regional Growth Fund and Local Enterprise Partnerships represent a step in the right direction, it’s clear that more must be done to create sustainable jobs in the North.  When Government is making major infrastructure decisions, it should consider how these investment decisions can help regenerate the North.  At the same time, the Government should be considering the impact of National Pay Bargaining and an anti development planning system on the North.

Just as the North-South economic divide remains as stubbornly wide as ever, so does the political divide.  A map of England shows that England has become hugely polarised, with Conservatives dominating most of the South and Labour most of the North.  As I have said on Platform 10, the Tories must develop a Northern strategy to help turn around their long term decline in the North.

But the issue goes beyond party politics.  It is an even bigger issue if parts of the country feel that the Government doesn’t understand the North and people in the North feel that they aren’t being adequately represented or listened to.  There’s no Minister for the North East, for example, in the Government and there are no North Eastern MPs or peers in either the Cabinet or the Shadow Cabinet.

All political parties need to be addressing the important question of how to narrow the economic and political North – South divide.

I do think we as a society have an obligation to help those who can’t help themselves. But I do not see why people should have to pay for those who won’t help themselves to live in nicer houses, have holidays and other things that those who work can’t afford, and – crucially – not have the worry that most working people do about the security of their jobs, and what they can give their children.

The changes proposed by the Government will not affect the disabled, war widows/widowers or households with a worker. I don’t think that is unreasonable and in fact I question whether they go far enough.

As, incidentally, do most people.  A YouGov poll this weekend shows that 36 per cent of people think that the cap should be under £20,000 a year.

If we’re agreed that the aim of this cap should be to make work more attractive than not working, has it really been thought through in full? Is there a better way to ensure that those who work and do the right thing gain, and those who won’t… don’t?

As Mary-Ann Sieghart wrote in the Independent this morning, it’s that fabled squeezed middle who feel most strongly about this. It is they whose wages have fallen 4 per cent, and who face rising inflation.  In one of his many attempts to be coherent last year, Ed Miliband said that Labour couldn’t be seen as the “party of those ripping off society any more”. Given that he has decided that his Lords will vote against the Government tonight, this is unlikely. But the thing that might really cut through is something that I don’t think the Coalition has the guts to do…

He should propose a cap at the level of the minimum wage. Which would be raised to make sure it is actually liveable on, as I have argued previously (building on Ed Miliband’s own very Conservative idea of tax breaks for companies that pay living wages) and paid for by reducing the level of tax that companies pay – because it is pointless simply recycling money.

I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t know if any of the above is practical. But the aim must – surely – be to radically reduce complexity, increase the disposable income and incentives for people in work, and properly encourage people into work.

And yet. The scrawny boy scurrying around in the background at your local Indian takeaway; a neighbour’s live-in Kenyan maid who is quiet and slightly nervous-looking but seems happy enough; the prostitute who says she arrived from Malaysia yesterday and who, when you pop by the massage parlour two weeks later is no longer there, the cheerful madam explaining that they get new girls every week.

These are the kinds of things that may give a moment’s unease but are often dismissed a few seconds later, even if you have watched ‘Taken’, the film where Liam Neeson single-handedly rescues his daughter from a bunch of heavily-bearded traffickers, or were horrified by recent front-page headlines describing the conviction of pensioner Saeeda Khan for forcing a Tanzanian woman she met abroad into domestic servitude.

Now, clearly trafficked human beings don’t lurk around every corner (so I wouldn’t go interrogating your neighbours just yet as to how they came by their cleaner) but police,  academic and charity investigations all indicate that victims of trafficking can be found in even the snuggest of neighbourhoods.  Yet it is this need for a community focus that is all but ignored by policymakers and sadly, despite the Coalition’s initial promises to “tackle human trafficking as a priority”, the latest Human Trafficking Strategy falls into all the usual traps.

From a lack of real reform of the National Referral Mechanism to an astoundingly paltry 2 (out of 24) pages dedicated to victim care (though to be fair, they needed to make room for the kind of incomprehensible guff that passes for civil-service-speak nowadays), the strategy was apparently written by people who thought that meaningless bluster makes for effective policymaking.

By far the most important omission, however, was the failure to realise a basic truth about trafficking: that victims are trafficked from one community to another, frequently across international borders but, once in their destination country, regularly spirited from one town to the next.  Once you accept this really quite obvious idea, a range of policy options naturally suggest themselves.

For starters, where are the government’s own exhaustive figures about the scale of human trafficking (for non-sexual forms of exploitation) within communities? You would think this would be a fairly vital starting point for policymaking and yet it is currently in large part left to charities and community groups to design and conduct their own investigations.  While voluntary groups like the ACT London Forum (for which I do some research in my spare time) do some excellent work, they are clearly unable to match the resources that a government department has at its disposal.

Once you have the information, how do you use it to combat trafficking? This blogpost began by describing some of the signs that might mean that someone you encounter is being exploited. The implication is that local people have local knowledge that could be easily tapped. To do so, we need to raise community awareness;  and it would be relatively straightforward to initiate a programme that informed and trained key community actors, like councillors, social workers, teachers and religious leaders, to understand the motivations behind, and symptoms of, trafficking in their neighbourhood.

Once people are able to recognise the signs, it is vital that they know what to do with their suspicions.  Alongside awareness-raising, a national trafficking hotline staffed by trained employees and equipping local police forces with the necessary resources to both take action against trafficking and publicise these efforts, could be effective. The government wouldn’t even need to micromanage these schemes, instead concentrating on enabling civil society organisations to do so.

I’m not denying that trafficking is a global issue – that much is obvious to anyone with even a passing interest in current affairs – but the strategy was woefully misbalanced, almost overdoing its treatment of trafficking’s global aspects (allowing the Conservative Home Office ministers to somewhat cynically attempt to curry political favour with the Conservative Right by treating trafficking as an immigration problem as opposed to a human rights issue) while doing nothing to solve the lack of available community awareness and infrastructure.

I understand that a cross-departmental ministerial team was set up to co-ordinate this Strategy.  In which case, I can only assume that the DCLG representatives were otherwise engaged or on sick leave for the entire period.  It is exasperating that, with Coalition partners who relentlessly trumpet their commitment to human rights, a Conservative leadership that has used international development issues to prove its ‘modernisation’ and a Government that is trying to impose localism on anything that moves, the opportunity to craft an effective response to the growing problem of human trafficking has been missed.  The sickening events of Leighton Buzzard are happening behind closed doors across the country – and it’s time we kicked them in.

David Cameron has strongly stated that the riots highlighted a cultural problem. Peter Oborne’s bombastic article uses the Credit Crunch and MPs expenses scandal to make the strong case that this ‘cultural problem’ has permeated its way down from the top of our society to the bottom. A country’s moral backbone is important because it influences the laws that are passed, how they are enacted and people’s general behaviour. The old assumptions no longer work. Greed is not good anymore; the state can’t be a nanny; rights cannot exist without responsibility. So what should this new moral code be? My first thoughts on this complex question is that it could be summed up in three words: opportunity, reciprocity and responsibility.

Opportunity: Through talent and hard work can anyone be anything? If someone doesn’t believe that they are going to be rewarded for their hard work then are unlikely to try to get the reward. Recent evidence suggests that social mobility in the UK is decreasing. I can’t help but think that the widening gap in wages is a major cause of social rigidness. Parents who are bankers, lawyers and accountants now have even more motivation to do everything they can to ensure that their children have the best opportunity to fill the limited number of ‘professional’ vacancies. Forget citizenship classes; from an early age lets have career classes where people can learn what options are out there and how they can achieve them. One week of work experience and an overstretched career advisor won’t make a difference.

Reciprocity: Are we all connected and do we understand how are actions affect others?  Society is about thousands upon thousands of relationships. Each relationship has a knock on impact on other relationships. It is equally important that we have bankers, bin men, doctors, social workers and so on. All roles in our community should be valued. If you have a job where your actions may have big impact on many others – such as banking and politicians – then you must always put the greater interest first. Benefits should not be viewed as a permanent entitlement and those who receive them should understand they have the responsibility of trying to move off them as quickly as possible.

Responsibility: Do people believe that they will be held responsible for THEIR actions? There is a lot to be said to the old English sporting attitude that it is not the winning that counts, but how you play the game. In the modern macho world the connection between what you achieve and how you achieve it has been broken. I need to get that bonus, it doesn’t matter how. My team needs to win the game, it doesn’t matter how. I want to own some new trainers, it doesn’t matter how. But it does actually matter how we do things. By cutting corners to gain instant gratification people are likely to be creating greater long-term problems for the future.

I would like to live in a society where the answer to all the questions above is a resounding yes.

The words quoted above are those of Herbert Spencer, a prominent Victorian sociologist. If I had read them last week I would have thought them moralising and hyperbolic. This week they seem a terrifyingly prophetic explanation of how the state welfare and social services take half the economy without delivering social peace.

Let us go back 150 years. The Victorian working man, and I do mean males, aspired to be respectable. He would avoid being drunk, fighting and beating his wife. His children would be clean, his home well-maintained, he would be thrifty and not in debt. His clothes would be neat. He might even buy a piano or write his autobiography. He would plan ahead for hard times through a mutual, friendly society, his fellow members of which would also discourage swearing and gambling and drinking. Through the Friendlies and through chapel and moral and political causes he was a member of the Victorian big society.

I describe an ideal, often achieved only by a few, but these were the values of much of the working class. The community self-policed against anti-social behaviour. All this of course was incredibly hard work and restrictive by modern standards. The alternative was worse of course, debt, social ostracism and, if things really went wrong the Poor Law: the Victorians provided for the needy, but they imposed harsh conditions on them.

This changed in 1911, when a Liberal government started to provide modern welfare for the first time: benefits without strings attached. It is forgotten now but the early socialists did not like this: welfare was a stop-gap maintaining the system. It would be unnecessary under socialism which would have full employment all the time. Also the idea that benefits should be conditional – and not given for “loafing” – was accepted in Labour circles. Ramsay Macdonald, Labour leader warned of the risk that, “the whole thing degenerate in to a national charity of the most vicious kind.”

That word again, vicious, and used by a socialist about welfare.

Welfare was reformed after the Second World War. Labour‘s vision in 1945 was of welfare built around a working man and his family, respectability was to be made easier by the state.

Labour changed by the late 50s and early 60s, a new left interested in minority and women’s rights emerged, within the context of an increasingly liberal society. The family was patriarchy, and the demands of respectability looked increasingly out of date in the individualist world. Since then, Britain has, under all governments, built an increasingly liberal social democracy. The state deliberately facilitates freedom in lifestyle choice.

At first this wasn’t a problem because there was full employment. Until the mid 70s almost everyone had a job. Now it is as if the tide has gone out, and we are left with a stranded under-class: neither having to moderate their behaviour for an employer in the market or for the state benefit system. In such circumstances there will always be a few who will not moderate their behaviour at all. Hence the rise of what we call anti-social behaviour. A lenient criminal justice system compounds the problem.

I should make clear at this point: non-conditional welfare will never make anyone vicious. It just gives the vicious freedom to be so until physically sent to prison. The impressionable – which may mean the fatherless – follow in their anti-social wake.

The result is that the circle is complete: the respectable are at the mercy of dissolute neighbours. Victorian respectability was oppressive, but this surely must be worse. Blame will be thrown around in the next few weeks, but ultimately the left will be asking tough philosophical questions about whether Britain’s liberal social democracy is viable.

What is needed is leadership, high-profile national political leadership. Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems should – for a short time – forget their differences and stand shoulder to shoulder with the vast majority of law abiding citizens. David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg should each make the same speech at the same time but in a different impacted location. Cameron in Tottenham, Miliband in Enfield and Clegg in Lewisham – the news stations cutting between all three as they pass on the same message.  A belief that the best change happens through democratic means, that shopkeepers should be able to trade without fear of looting, that those who intimidate and break the law should face responsibility for their actions,  that good people will be listened to and supported.

Now is not the time for partisan prejudices; these can easily be saved for the upcoming verbal battles in the months to come.  Whether you believe that the cuts are happen too fast or not fast enough, that the rise in tuition fees is inevitable or reckless is not important today. Our democratic society has no hope of finding its way through the difficulties it currently faces unless the rule of law is upheld. Questions need to be answered and debate must be had, but first the vandals need to be stopped.  Now is the time for the three leaders to talk about what unites them and show all of us that they can ignore their differences to promote what is right.

Life is of course not as simple as the above. On Tuesday the former Labour Home Secretary, David Blunkett, gave a speech to the right-wing think-tank Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). The CSJ is famous for being the place where Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) gained political gravitas after he had failed to find any status when leader of the Conservative Party. The CSJ is also highly regarded for the research it conducts on the causes of poverty. The title of Blunkett’s speech was: ‘The politics of fear versus the politics of hope in a rapidly changing world.’

According to the former Home Secretary we live in a world that has never had so much rapid change in it as we do now. This leads to greater uncertainty in life. Blunkett acknowledged that the past contained insecurities and uncertainties but the impacts of this were less negative as  people were more likely to live in a stable family and community environment.

Rapid social change means that people find it hard to get to grips with what is happen to their local shops, schools and community environment. People fear change when they don’t understand it. Blunkett admitted that Labour made a mistake when they allowed unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe. The statisticians had only predicted a fraction of the eventual number who would come to Britain.

In David’s experience a lot of people on benefits write themselves off too easily. He wished IDS good luck with his current legislative programme but warned that welfare reform is very difficult. Every step you take will be challenged by those who are directly effected, plus well meaning people who don’t understand the bigger structural issues the country faces.

Blunkett believes that there needs to be a two sided message to welfare. The first is that it is right to help people in need. The second is that the purpose of welfare should be to get people away from being reliant on benefits. In the post-war era welfare provisions were nationalised. This was needed because the country faced huge problems post-World War II.  It was refreshing to hear a Labour politician talk about the downside of this approach. If people don’t feel close to the people they are helping then reciprocity** brakes down.

David Blunkett’s conclusion was that it is now time to decentralise the welfare state. The current model is not relevant to the world we live in. Blunkett would like to see both the Labour and Conservatives, and maybe even the Lib Dems, work together to find the best way to achieve this goal.

I certainly do not agree with everything that David Blunkett believes in but it was good to hear a Labour politician acknowledge that the status quo is unsustainable and offer a decentralising Labour alternative. As Ed Miliband launches Labour’s policy review he would do well to follow Blunkett’s approach of tackling the substance of the problems we face, rather than opportunistic point scoring

*You can’t blame a political partisan for trying…

** Reciprocity: A mutual or cooperative interchange of favours or privileges

I don’t dispute that I am very fortunate in all sorts of ways. Nor do I dispute that people who rely on in-work benefits are having a tough time of it. But what I objected to was his assumption that people in that situation can’t aspire to a better life. And that, I think, is a fundamental difference between Labour and Conservative philosophies.

Taking it back a step – I think it is odd that there isn’t already a cap on the total benefits one household can receive. I think it is pointless that we ask people on very low incomes to pay tax at all (and well done, again, to the Lib Dems for getting the proposal to remove the lowest paid from the tax system into the Coalition agreement – we thought the Tories should have adopted it anyway, and I think we should aspire to go further). I think it is scandalous that we ask people on low incomes to  subsidise people who are better off than them with, for example, child benefit, and housing benefit that gives those who take it better homes than those who subsidise them. I think it’s questionable that we allow – encourage, even – people to stay in council houses at reduced rents even when they earn plenty to allow them to either have their own home or pay a full rent. Of course there needs to be flexibility, and personalisation, and I wouldn’t want any one to be thrown out of their home, but we do have a serious problem of lack of good social housing, and I think we should look at who really needs it.

Setting all of that aside – my underlying assumption is that everyone who can, should work. That everyone who can, should endeavour to make the most of their lives. And that everyone who needs it is entitled to help from the rest of us to live a decent life. But his assumption was that there is no scope and indeed no need for that family relying on tax credits to improve their own situation. Which I think is fundamentally wrong, and is why Labour is perceived to be a party in favour of abandoning people in a dead-end.

If this government is about anything – beyond fixing the dire finances which Labour, as usual, has left us – it is about aspiration. For individuals to improve their own situation, for neighbourhoods to have more control over their own destiny, for communities to come together to achieve what is right for them, and for our society as a whole to grow and improve in a way that we collectively want it to.

Where Ed Miliband was right was when he talked about responsibility. In fact, much of the (not very much) meat of that speech could indeed be a Cameron speech, despite the inconsistencies and the fact that Labour had 13 years to address – or not cause – some of these problems. But given that even Ed Miliband recognised that the Labour party has got itself into a position where it needs to say that it is not the “party of those ripping off our society” (and those are his words, not mine), I’m not holding my breath for Labour to be seen as the party to fix this any time soon. Nor, sadly, for them to walk through the lobbies this week to vote for Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms.

The speech did have one little idea worth a second look, though – the ‘British promise’.

This clumsy phrase is based on ‘the expectation that next generation will do better than the last, whatever their birth or background.’ Miliband observed that this

“is about what happens between generations. That the easy path is to take short-term decisions…. And if we really do care about the next generation, we will have to show it in the decisions we take.”

To fans of conservative thought, this may feel a little familiar.

Last year David Willet’s book The Pinch won attention for its argument that the baby boomers have ‘taken their children’s future’ and the idea they are ‘spending the kids’ inheritance.’

Or, here’s George Osborne speaking in 2008:

“The current generation should not make the next generation pay for its mistakes. There should be fairness between the generations, not just within them. We care for our elders, our children will care for us, and so it goes on from generation to generation.”

Sound a tad similar? Well, here’s Margaret Thatcher on the election trail:

“That’s the way society is improved, by millions of people resolving that they’ll give their children a better life than they’ve had themselves. And there’s just no substitute for this elemental human instinct.”

And moving from 1979 to 1790, here’s Edmund Burke, reflecting on the revolution in France, arguing that society…

“becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

So the ‘British promise’ isn’t new, and even if Miliband’s emphasis was obviously different it’s clear that the talking about fairness between generations harks to a rich vein of undeniably conservative thinking. It’s an important concept, that promotes a pragmatic meaning of fairness - and also allows a conservative to talk coherently about the future, providing intellectual ballast for policies from poverty reduction to debt reduction.

That means this is a serious philosophical battleground. When published, Red Tory was recognised as borrowing heavily from ideas more associated with the left – mutualism, local economies and so on – and Blue Labour, which Miliband’s speech gave a clear nod to, follows the ideological kleptomania-by-colours. This debate will influence thinking for years to come.

There’s also a more immediate political and electoral importance to Miliband’s musings.

Demographic change makes navigating relations between age-groups increasingly vital: those baby-boomers are a hefty voting bloc, and the younger generation a potentially angry one.

What’s more, intergenerational fairness (well, maybe not the actual phrase) resonates with people – it goes to the heart of what most people want from life.

No political party or intellectual tradition can assume it has a monopoly on refining, developing and benefitting from the concept. So this might not have been a great speech.

But precisely because it strayed into traditional Tory territory, if Miliband and Labour develop this theme, then it will surely merit a deeper response.

It has become clear that something must be done to tackle the ‘aspiration gap’ and the problems of poverty.  It has become equally clear, though, that just throwing money at the problem doesn’t come close to being an adequate solution.  What is needed is a coherent, intelligent approach to tackling poverty and raising life chances.

The findings of the survey make starkly clear the poverty of aspiration felt by young people from poorer backgrounds:

• 22 per cent of those from deprived homes believe that “few” or “none” of their life goals are achievable and 26 per cent believe that “few” or “none” of their career goals are achievable
• 26 per cent of young people growing up in poverty feel that “people like them don’t succeed in life”
• 24 per cent of those from deprived homes believe that they will “end up on benefits for at least part of their life” and more than one in five feel they’ll end up in a “dead end job”

The findings make clear the gulf in aspiration between those who are born into the poorest background and the rest of the population.  Bridging this gulf has to be a priority for policy makers.

A coherent approach to tackling the causes of poverty and lack of aspiration is necessary.  It has become clear that complex tax credits and, amongst some, a benefit culture is not the way to helping ensure that people make the most of their potential.

A coherent approach to the problem involves considering the barriers to aspiration and improving life chances at every level of the education process, from early years through to university.  It involves reforming the welfare system, to tackle intergenerational dependency and ingrained lack of aspiration, so that the welfare system helps people to aspire, rather than holding them back.  Such a coherent approach also involves tackling poor standards of housing and the poor quality of life, including high levels of crime and anti social behaviour and poor levels of health, that affect poor areas the worst.

Policy Exchange has developed and will be developing, over the coming months, policies to tackle each of these areas.

A simplistic approach to tackling poverty and the poverty of aspiration, which involves simply throwing money at the problem, has been shown not to have worked.  The problem is a severe and urgent one. Politicians owe it to those in deprived areas to develop a coherent approach to the problem.