Last night Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson made the trip to London to deliver a lecture on poverty and life chances. The fact this happened at all should give the Labour party across Great Britain pause to think.

It was not so much what she said in her address to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Prospect magazine audience. In fact, it really, really, most definitely, was not so much she said. Despite her opening dismissal of the old Tory maxim that anyone can ‘make it’, there was not much that moved the modern Conservative understanding on poverty beyond the Cameroon approach which is the inheritor of Iain Duncan Smith’s epiphany at Easterhouse, in Davidson’s own constituency of Glasgow.

Government can help, she was at pains to say. And background matters too. This apparent acknowledgement of a role for government and of other factors long ago helped neutralise Conservative weaknesses in this area. Being seen to have something positive to say is at least better than being seen to have little, even if what you say has holes in it. The Scottish Tory leader spoke of a visit to Dundee where she met a man with a history of substance misuse and his partner who had had a baby in her mid-teens. In the post-Easterhouse world, such factors are too often, and too blithely, yoked together with a discussion of poverty. The implication is left hanging that these are the reasons we have poverty in the UK, rather than any other, structural issues, which went largely unaddressed.

Substance misuse and teen pregnancy are things that should just be sorted out anyway, whatever party you belong too. What they should not be is drafted in to ‘explain’ poverty in general. Families suffering from entrenched and harmful problems like this are more likely to be in poverty. But we are well past the point now of understanding that poverty in general cannot be attributed to things like this. Too many families are working, holding down jobs and still failing to bring home enough to think that this is sufficient.

Davidson was careful to say that there is, ‘Ever-increasing resentment at the perceived inequalities around us. We ignore the resentment at our peril’ – rather than we ignore the inequalities (which are merely ‘perceived’) at our peril. Little was said about income inequality and the gap between rich and poor. Conservatives hold inequality to be a virtue. Still, she was unafraid to be seen to be presenting a vision of how to tackle poverty ‘as a centre-right politician’ and from that standpoint sang the praises of trade unions in promoting learning and qualifications – part of a deliberate effort to park Tory tanks on Labour lawns – her approach remained essentially a Tory one. The fact that leading Conservatives can speak on poverty and be heard with interest and respect is a warning that they have done enough to be seen to be responsible politicians on this front.

An opening does exist for Labour to remake the case for supporting working household incomes; few politicians have done this in a positive way, rather than simply opposing tax credit cuts, besides Alison McGovern who began to here. In 2015 Labour officially restated its support for meeting the target to abolish of child poverty by 2020, but remained quiet about how it would actually get there.

However, politically all this may matter little. Besides the fact that a Tory can be asked to give a lecture on poverty without it seeming ludicrous, the second important point about Davidson’s appearance in London is that a Scottish politician can be asked to give such an address in the capital without it seeming odd. There is currently a real risk that Scottish politics drifts so far from the UK-wide debate that two conversations progress in parallel with prominent voices from Scotland becoming a rarity on national platforms.

This matters to Labour. Ask yourself what the mirror-image scenario of Davidson’s appearance last night might be. A Labour figure invited to give a thoughtful address on business and generating prosperity? Perhaps even a UK Labour figure being asked to do so in Scotland, and given a hearing in an atmosphere of respect, as Davidson was last night.

The Labour party’s business and economy muscles have for so long lain unflexed that the party remains far from this. Its unionist muscle has barely twitched in decades. Both ‘predators and producers’ and the party’s battering in the general election in Scotland are symptoms of this. An ambition to abolish poverty wrapped inside an understanding of how to build prosperity union-wide such that no part of the country is left behind might in time form the core of this renewed nationwide politics. But when a Scottish Tory comes to London to lecture you on poverty, we might reflect that we are further than ever from fulfilling the founding ideals of the party.

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Adam Harrison is deputy editor of Progress. He tweets @AdamDKHarrison

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Photo: Prospect