What bores the Conservative party can stir Labour once more

‘All we hear from [Labour] is poverty, poverty, poverty – la, la, la … It is just boring for Conservative members.’

So once said Liam Fox, outlining the fundamental difference between the two mainstream parties and reminding us of Labour’s historic mission to ensure that wealth, power and opportunity are in the hands of the many and not just the privileged few.

In government Labour set to work on delivering that mission, with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s announcement that Labour would end child poverty by 2020.

This task was set to with a focus on raising child benefit, introducing tax credits and programmes such as Sure Start.

This is why many Labour folk, and wider commentators, were left scratching their heads that Ed Balls chose a freeze on child benefit as the policy to announce at party conference this year.

Not only did it fail the policy test by raising a frankly insignificant amount towards tackling the deficit, it failed the values test of demonstrating what a Labour government is about.

If Labour wants to show a commitment to reducing the welfare bill, as it most certainly should, then this needs to be about reducing the amount we spend subsidising bad employers through tax credits.

Sadly, because of the Treasury belief in tax credits themselves, the amount we are spending on them was occasionally seen as a good thing in and of itself, occasionally distracting from their main purpose, which was to reduce poverty.

But we should not accept that it is the role of the state to be relaxed about filling the gap in falling wages that predates the financial crisis.

Promising that the minimum wage will be £8 in six years’ time is necessary but insufficient. We need to be much more aggressive in focusing on wages and ensuring business meets its responsibilities.

It is right that Labour campaigns for Sure Start but we should also recognise that there is a core of families that will never walk through the door of a Sure Start centre in the first place and we need to be much more vigorous in our approach to helping them.

What became clear over time was that tackling child poverty is both a matter of income and of other social factors, with belonging to a dysfunctional family being a real problem for kids. In office, as time went on, the focus evolved.

Through a combination of the ‘Respect’ programme and the social exclusion unit Labour pioneered radical ideas which are now being promoted by Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty commission.

‘There’s a disjunction, if you like, between the end we are wishing for – the eradication of child poverty – and the means that we’re prepared to deploy,’ Milburn told Progress’ Adam Harrison and Richard Angell last month in an interview with Progress.

The next Labour government will continue the drive for a good school in every area. In addition, and in an era of precious few resources, we must go back to the original aim of Sure Start: that no child entered school so far behind that they were just never going to catch up.

That is why Labour should find the resources to support the targeted interventions of the Troubled Families programme. This is not only socially just but economically competent. Spending now means increased life chances and serious savings to come.

Communities must have the means locally to challenge problems and ensure that families are supported in their communities.

The work that some local authorities are doing will change children’s life chances.

It is absolutely right to say that a more effective way to develop strong, confident, able children than through the family has not been found. That means we need to ensure that in this fast-moving and challenging global world, we need to make sure that families are able to do just that.

But it also means we need to talk about parenting and family breakdown, despite our own nervousness about being seen to be judgemental or favouring a ‘nanny state’.

As Tristram Hunt said recently to the Local Government Association, this does not mean slipping into old Tory rhetoric or making policy based on the number, gender or sexuality of parents.

Rather, it means ensuring that we are preventing breakdown of the family unit in whatever form it takes.

Labour has a lot to say about the short-term poverty that many have been plunged into by this government – namely its hated ‘bedroom tax’ and historically high levels of unemployment. But what about the long-term measure? Milburn says Britain is ‘on the brink of becoming a permanently divided country [of] haves and have-nots.’ Ultimately this is a problem made worse, but not started, by this government.

Good policy in this area is good politics. The public see intergenerational poverty leading to social failure and are prepared to invest in it for the good of the country where they can see that the difference that will be made is as much for the community as for the family, and as much for the long term as for the short.

What is clear is that, whatever Fox’s levels of boredom with the subject, Labour needs to have solutions that meet the challenge of its historic mission to end child poverty.

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