David Cameron wants to rebrand his party as the party of social justice. Addressing the Conservative Party Conference on Wednesday, he spoke with passion about poverty, discrimination and even equality.
It was a speech many commentators thought could well have been delivered by Tony Blair on behalf of New Labour. But does David Cameron mean what says about how he wants to lead Britain in the last five years of his premiership, or do his actions suggest a very different agenda?
It is not hard to see why the Tory leader should have wanted to pitch his message in this way. His party strategists, and especially the chief one, his chancellor, George Osborne, who wants to follow him into No 10, see the opportunity created by the Labour Party’s election of left-winger Jeremy Corbyn as its leader to move the Conservative Party on to the ground where elections are won. It used to be called the centre ground; now the phrase ‘common ground’ is preferred, implying that all fair-minded people occupy it so big majorities can be won for a party that claims to be there itself.
The Prime Minister said he wanted to devote himself to ‘an all-out assault on poverty’. He condemned the fact that Britain has ‘the lowest social mobility in the developed world’. He said that tackling the problem ‘means entering those no-go zones, where politicians often do not dare to venture. It means taking on our big social problems: entrenched poverty, blocked opportunity, the extremism that blights our society’. And he explicitly tried to seize from Labour the mantle of anti-poverty crusader. ‘If you want a lecture about poverty, ask Labour,’ he said. ‘If you want something done about it, come to us, the Conservatives.’
But his opponents, and not all of them from outside his own party, have been quick to point out that many of his government’s actions appear to be having exactly the opposite effect. Take, for example, housing, they say. The part of the Prime Minister’s speech which his spin-doctors chose to trail before he delivered it, was on changes to the planning laws the government intends to introduce. Instead of developers being required to provide a proportion of affordable homes to rent in any house-building development they are given permission for, they will now be required to provide affordable houses for sale. This, boasted the Prime Minister, would turn ‘Generation Rent’ into ‘Generation Buy’.
But the housing charity, Shelter, pointed out that even with the discounts available to those eligible to buy these so-called ‘affordable’ homes, most families on average wages and all families on the new National Living Wage would still find them unaffordable. What’s more, the change in planning regulations would have the effect of reducing the supply of social housing to rent, as would another flagship Tory policy of extending the right to buy to tenants of housing associations.
Similarly, the Prime Minister spoke of the need to do far more for children in care, yet the funding of care through local authorities has already been cut substantially and seems certain to be cut further as the government seeks to reduce the deficit through more cuts to public spending.
But it is on poverty that the government’s critics claim the biggest contradiction between rhetoric and reality. The Tories’ strategy for making the ‘all-out assault on poverty’ is to get people who are poor into work and with decent wages. The aim is to replace what they call a ‘low-wage, high-welfare, high-tax’ economy with a ‘high-wage, low-welfare, low-tax economy’. They can already claim success in creating record levels of employment in this country and of having presided (under the coalition) over the creation of more jobs than in the whole of the eurozone. In addition to this, George Osborne, in his last Budget, substantially raised the minimum wage, by introducing a new National Living Wage, which will be £7.20 an hour from next April, rising to £9.00 by 2020.
But the flipside of this policy is the cutting of tax credits, paid to those in work on low pay. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, three million families will end up £1,000 a year worse off. When all the government’s welfare changes are taken into account, there will be an addition of 200,000 in the number of working households living in poverty by 2020, according to the Resolution Foundation (chaired by ex-Tory minister, David Willetts), and an increase of 700,000 in the number of all households in poverty by that date. This, his critics say, stands in sharp contrast to Mr Cameron’s claim that the Conservatives are ‘the party of the fair chance, the party of the equal shot’.
Inveterate opponents of the Tories will say that all this is just typical and that for all their emollient, ‘common ground’ spin, they remain the party of the rich against the poor. But some supporters of the Tories, especially on the left of the party, will say that such a charge is simply bad history. They point to what they see as the party’s proud ‘One Nation’ record in dealing with deep social problems. They cite the fact that it was under Tory governments in the 1920s, 1930s and most of all the 1950s that Britain’s house-building booms took place and these didn’t just involve houses for the rich. Under Harold Macmillan in the 1950s an average of 350,000 council houses were built each year. It was under Edward Heath in the 1970s that an early version of tax credits was introduced.
So, they say, it is too early to dismiss Mr Cameron’s ‘assault on poverty’ as simply a cynical piece of rhetoric. After all, the Prime Minister used to have a portrait of Harold Macmillan on his desk. Sceptics, however, don’t like the look of the omens and they recall the candour of Ronald Reagan. He was once buttonholed by a journalist who called out the question: ‘What happened to the war on poverty, Mr President?’ ‘Gee,’ came the reply, ‘I guess poverty won.’
Is that going to be the fate of Mr Cameron’s ‘assault on poverty’, or is the Prime Minister really going to tackle the problems he has so eloquently identified?
What’s your view of Mr Cameron’s speech, the sincerity of his intentions and the likelihood of his achieving what he says he wants to achieve?
Let us know.
