Thanks to Guido (we now outsource all our document circulation in the Tory party!), below is the actual bit of Greg Clark’s paper that manages to get Polly Toynbee and Winston Churchill into the same argument. As with everything Greg does, it is highly thoughtful, provocative, and extremely relevant. If it takes a juxtaposition of Toynbee and Churchill to get the media interested in a new approach to poverty, then I am all for it. Incidentally, Boris has a hilarious mickey take of la Toynbee in today’s Telegraph.
First principles: Poverty is relative and social exclusion matters
Sir Winston Churchill was able to sum up the mission of the Conservative Party, at least in the field of social policy, through two images: a ladder – “we are for the ladder, let all try their best to climb”[1] – and a net – “below which none shall fall”.[2] However, while rescuing people from the abyss of hunger and homeless may have been an adequate – even stretching – ambition for social policy in the twentieth century, it is wholly inadequate for Conservatives in the twenty-first century.
The trouble with nets
The trouble with nets – even safety nets – is that people get tangled up in them. According to Government statistics, someone who has spent five years in low income has no more than a 10% chance of escape the next year.[3] Furthermore, low income persists over the generations – especially in a Britain where social mobility has actually diminished over the last five decades.[4] People can too easily become enmeshed in the very structures that were put in place to stop them falling into destitution. As a result, they can languish for years – even generations – below even the bottom rung of the ladder.
In the twenty-first century it is not sufficient for Conservatives to want to catch people who fall. We have a positive duty to help stop them from falling from the ladder of opportunity in the first place, to help people climb upwards on that ladder, and, if they do fall into poverty not to palliate it but to help them escape from it.
In the twenty-first century we need not so much a safety net as a tow-rope out of poverty.
The traditional Conservative vision of welfare as a safety net also encompasses another outdated Tory nostrum – that poverty is absolute, not relative. Churchill’s safety net is at the bottom: holding people at subsistence level, just above the abyss of hunger and homelessness. According to this approach, the ladder and the net are separate images. If those left behind –caught up in the net – lose sight of those scaling dizzier heights, then this isn’t seen as an obvious concern for policy makers.
In an age when absolute poverty a real danger for millions of people, the safety net represented an enormous advance. But in our own age, our ambitions should be higher. As individuals we should all have the chance to move forward and as a nation we should move forward with a sense of cohesion. Thus it is the social commentator Polly Toynbee, rather than Sir Winston Churchill, who supplies imagery that is more appropriate for Conservative social policy in the twenty first century. She pictures our society as a caravan crossing the desert, one that needs to keep together for the common good:
“When the front and back are stretched so far apart, at what point can they no longer be said to be travelling together at all, breaking the community between them?”[5]
Thus while dynamic, entrepreneurial individuals will always take the lead, we need to take care that no one falls so far behind that they cease to be part of the whole.
[1]
BBC radio broadcast, 8 October 1951[2]
This is the road, Conservative Party manifesto, 1950[3]
Department of Work and Pensions, Households below average income 2003/04, 30 March 2005, table 7.15.1[4]
Jo Blanden et al., Intergenerational mobility in Europe and North America, 25 April 2005[5]
Polly Toynbee, Hard work: Life in Low pay Britain, Bloomsbury, 2003, pages 2-3
