Shell-shocked and ideologically battered by a fourth successive general election defeat, John Smith set up the Commission on Social Justice in December 1992. Its mission was to renew centre-left thinking, offering big arguments to deploy in the battle of ideas against the right, while setting out credible, modern policies for building a progressive Britain.
Patricia Hewitt and her fellow commissioners rose to that task. Their 1994 report showed that inequality is not a price that needs to be paid for economic dynamism; that individuals flourish best in strong communities, rather than at the expense of their neighbours; and that governments promote prosperity and security not by shrinking the state but by investing in education, active welfare and civic service.
Today, the public sector is winning a new legitimacy. By 2007/8, public spending will be 42 percent of national income, up from 37.4 percent in 1999/2000. Poverty is decreasing and investment in public services is up. Increases in national insurance, sold as the means to pay for an expanded NHS, caused few political difficulties.
Yet despite chalking up significant advances, Labour will only bequeath a radical legacy if it is prepared to lead debate on social justice and shift the climate of ideas, just as it has done on public services. Achieving ‘social justice by stealth’ is not sustainable in the long term.
In an era of growing prosperity, Britain is a long way from achieving fairness. Although income inequality is not widening as it did in the 1980s, the gap between rich and poor hasn’t narrowed. Wealth is more unequally distributed now than it was ten years ago, and there is evidence that social mobility in Britain has declined.
We should be concerned with such inequality, and not just poverty. Not only are the extremes of income and wealth in Britain today indefensible on moral grounds, they undermine economic efficiency, locking out talent and resources from wider productive use. They strain the social fabric and denigrate the worth and self-respect of millions of people. So, while reducing poverty should be a priority, we should not be frightened to say that reducing inequality matters, too.
New challenges also face us. In the last decade, migration into advanced economies has grown substantially and migrant flows have become more complex. The map of ethnic diversity in Britain has changed profoundly, with significant new minorities from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East joining established communities.
We tend to think of fairness as a matter of dividing up the cake between members of a settled community. So what happens when you have citizens, temporary economic migrants, people seeking asylum as well as those granted refugee status, and others who would prefer illegal residence to deportation? It makes thinking about welfare state and civic entitlements much harder, and yet all the more urgent. Migration is an inescapable fact of modern economies and it requires management, not denial. We need new international agreements to regulate economic migration and modernise refugee protection.
Rapid advances in science, particularly genetics, are also opening up new fields of knowledge and public policy intervention. Stories of designer babies get headlines but wider social implications are often underplayed. Although there is little prospect of a new ‘genetic underclass’ emerging, will the better off exploit genetic knowledge to protect their social inheritance? Will employers and insurance firms discriminate more ruthlessly? Or will policy makers better tailor preventative programmes to those at risk of social exclusion as we understand more about the interplay of genes and environments? We are probably a decade away from having even tentative answers to these questions, but we need to prepare for them now.
Likewise, as material wealth has increased since the 1990s, there has been a growing focus on quality of life and environmental issues. Awareness of the evidence of finite natural resources and environmental degradation has gradually permeated public consciousness. Yet economic growth is still the main yardstick of progress while environmental sustainability and quality of life issues are treated as secondary. This is no longer tenable: any third-term Labour government has to place sustainability at the heart of its policy programme.
Since 1994, many of the Commission on Social Justice’s recommendations have fed through into tangible progressive change. Investment in education has increased substantially, while the New Deal has put thousands of people back to work. Britain is in the middle of the European child poverty league table, not languishing at the bottom.
Yet despite radical intent in pledging to abolish child and pensioner poverty, Labour is still too often uncomfortable articulating a vision of fairness to the public. It knows from bitter experience that public attitudes to the distribution of prosperity are complex and often contradictory, and so its progress has often been crab-like. Now it must learn a new confidence in talking about its social justice objectives – its desire to fashion a fairer Britain.