From Shaw’s Pygmalion Act 2 Doolittle:
“What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If theres anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: ‘Youre undeserving; so you cant have it.’” (sic)
How is it that both Conservatives and Labour can say their party stands for social justice? Is this a wonderful bipartisan approach to inequality? Is the UK entering blinking into the brand new Obama-rama of cross-party light and harmony? What has happened is that these two little words, social justice, disguise the edge of a philosophical, political and practical chasm of immense proportions between right and left.
The reason is that when a Conservative thinks of social justice he or she is thinking in terms of all members of society getting what they deserve. This is like the justice of the Old Testament. Those whose poverty is undeserved – the ill, the bereft, the unfortunates who have fallen on hard times but will soon be right as rain with a little charitable help – these deserve to be held by the hand and gently led into the new dawn. Those who have made their own foul beds, have brought it on themselves with their worklessness, their feckless coupling, their disgusting family ways, their terrible shopping habits, foul mouths and crappy parenting, they don’t deserve help. Short of shipping these problem people overseas – no longer a viable solution since we lost the colonies – they deserve a strong dose of the stick of the state. This punitive and singularly patronising attitude to other people’s misery is what characterises “Old Testament” social justice, the philosophical basis for compassionate Conservatism.
“New Testament” social justice derives from a different place. It is a justice that doesn’t begin by attempting to separate the “deserving” from the “undeserving” because that is merely looking at the symptoms of the illness. It recognises that we are each born into a place in a social structure which initially determines our life chances: where we are born, who are parents are, what income and occupation they have, our local school, our environment. “New Testament” social justice seeks therefore the removal of these structural barriers by political and economic means, so that each one of us can live fully. In the meantime individuals and families in poverty need support. In the New Testament it is written, love your neighbour as yourself and that everyone is a neighbour to everyone else. The “New Testament” view of social justice invites us to accept collective responsibility for the suffering of others. Their suffering is our suffering. Their inequality is our inequality. It lays on us a moral responsibility to fundamentally change society, not penalise the individual.
My political opponent in Chingford and Woodford Green is Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the Conservative party and founder of the Centre for Social Justice. In the introduction to a recent CSJ Report “Couldn’t Care Less” he writes:
“We believe that the surest way the Government can reverse social breakdown and poverty is to enable such individuals, communities and voluntary groups to help themselves”.
It follows simply that Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice is in fact a think tank for the Old Testament view of Social Justice. Some will be chosen, some will be helped, some will be cast aside. Who is to do the choosing? Who is to be cast aside? And if you are the one cast aside – what then? As the compassionate Conservatives reveal their policies for society in the next general election, let’s see what criteria they choose to sort out the deserving sheep from the undeserving goats, and what they will do with the underclass they will create with the leftovers.
Poverty is structural – a price paid by others for our affluence. Personally, I shall continue to attack with all my strength the unfair structures and systems which hold people under. And I shall attack Old Testament social justice that seeks to blame the poor for their poverty. That’s why I am a Labour candidate standing on a Labour manifesto for a fair society. I just wish I could afford a whole think tank like my opponent!