We always knew a Labour government was going to be dangerous and intrusive, but not until Telegraph leader writers had sat down to their first really good lunch of the new year did we find out how bad things really are:
‘Next time you reach for a tub of raspberry ripple, beware – the government, the BBC, Channel 4, and Boots will all try to slam the fridge door in your face … Fatness is the fault of fat people. And the cure is very easy … MOVE MORE, EAT LESS.‘
The Daily Telegraph, Leader, January 6 2004.
Ministers in fridges! Will the madness never end?
We don’t need here to rehearse the very widespread concerns about the potential consequences of rising childhood obesity. That, in an elegant example of how to have your raspberry ripple and eat it, was done perfectly well in the news section of the very same edition of the Telegraph – under the headline “Healthy eating drive in schools is ‘too limited’.” And again two days later in the Telegraph on January 8: “Obesity blamed for 22pc rise in womb cancer”.
We know the long-term public health costs of obesity. We know the costs of long-term unemployment. We know the costs of trying to address the Tory legacy of seven million adults without the literacy and numeracy skills we expect of an eleven year-old.
And we know the Tory take on all this. Michael Howard helpfully set it out very clearly when he took a stand against an ‘army of interferers’. To be fair, when Mr Howard talks about interferers, he probably doesn’t mean police officers (unless of course they are dealing with the speeding and other traffic offences that help to kill 3,450 people on our roads every year). But he probably does mean, to name a few, health visitors, social workers and child protection officers.
And of course, he means us: that government is none of the Labour Party’s business.
So, what is our business? It’s a question we need to take seriously. This may be the most sophisticated and intellectually engaged government we have had, with an explicit commitment to understand and respond to a changing world, to evidence-based policy making and to not hiding from the complexity of modern society or modern citizens’ expectations.
That sophistication is vital to modern policy making, but there is a danger that the necessary complexity of the modern state and social policy can sometimes serve to obscure our underlying purpose. This is particularly true of those effects of inequality, which we have come to place under the heading of social exclusion.
And it’s a question we need a good answer to, because running through the Telegraph’s leader page is the truth about the right; their challenge to everything a progressive government is for. It says: ‘Poverty is the fault of poor people. And the cure is very easy: EARN MORE, SPEND LESS.’ It’s what the Tories passed off as social policy for twenty years.
It’s the lie that makes them feel better, and it rests on the fantasy that the lives of the poor are the reasonable consequence of the choices they have made. But the effect of eighteen years of Tory government was not simply to increase inequality. Not content with trying to dismantle the post-war consensus in favour of equality and social solidarity, they pushed large numbers of poor people through the rabbit hole into a world where choices and consequences have lost any reasonable connection.
What social exclusion really describes is the demented Wonderland the Tories created for the poor. Leave aside for a moment the question of whether the reward differentials between work at the top and the bottom of the scale are reasonable, and simply ask: what are the reasonable consequences of having less money? And how many of the real consequences of having less money that people actually have to face in our society are reasonable? One, perhaps: being able to buy less stuff (where stuff does not include the basic human needs that prosperous and fair economies guarantee to meet). But it is not a reasonable consequence of having less money always to have less money, or to have children who will have less money. Certainly being less healthy and dying younger are not reasonable consequences.
Too many things in our society that should bear no relation to each other now correlate. It makes no intuitive sense that those who have less should be more likely to be robbed. Or that obesity should correlate with poverty. This web of bizarre connections is the monument to the success of the Tory project to drive reason and justice out of the ordering of our common affairs, to pull our society through the looking glass of unfairness. And it is our answer. What is our business? Whatever is unfair is our business.