The new ‘champion of progressive ideals’?
Ruth Lister, Fran Bennett
It is the Conservative Party that is the champion of progressive ideals in Britain today … If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality ... forget about the Labour Party … If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change. (Cameron, 2008b)
In this cheeky piece of political cross-dressing, David Cameron gave notice that he intended to move his troops firmly on to Labour political territory. He underlined the centrality of the issues of poverty and inequality to the new Conservative agenda. In the same piece he wrote that social justice was one of the ‘priorities for the modern Conservative Party’.
In this article we explore this apparent revolution in modern Conservative Party thinking and how Cameron’s Conservatives have identified poverty, in particular, as a major problem to be addressed by ‘true progressives’. We then analyse their diagnosis of the problem and their prescription for change, based on statements and policy documents available at the time of writing (early March 2010).
Recognition of the problem: the rehabilitation of the ‘p’ and ‘i’ words
Considerable credit for the recognition of poverty as a problem, and one with which the modern Conservative Party must engage, lies with its former leader, Iain Duncan Smith. During a visit to Glasgow’s Easterhouse in 2002, Duncan Smith underwent a Damascene awakening when, he explained, he first understood ‘the sheer desperation of the lives of people on society’s margins’ (Brindle, 2006; see also Derbyshire, 2010).
When he was replaced as leader, Duncan Smith established the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), with a number of members of the Conservative front bench on its advisory board. Its Executive Director, Philippa Stroud, describes the CSJ as the ‘heartbeat and conscience’ of the Tory party (Gentleman, 2009). The CSJ has hosted the Social Justice Policy Group (SJPG), chaired by Duncan Smith, which was commissioned by David Cameron ‘to make policy recommendations to the Conservative Party on issues of social justice’ (SJPG, 2006a, 2). This resulted in two reports: Breakdown Britain (2006a) and Breakthrough Britain (2007). In his 2009 party conference speech, Cameron praised Duncan Smith as ‘the man who has dedicated himself to the cause of social justice’ and announced that, if the Conservatives were to win the election, he would be given responsibility ‘for bringing together all our work to help mend the broken society’ (Cameron, 2009a) (1).
The clearest statement of the Tories’ rethinking on poverty can be found in one of the ‘state of the nation’ reports summarised in Breakdown Britain. It was drawn up by the Economic Failure and Welfare Dependency Working Group chaired by Greg Clark MP. Despite its title, Economic Dependency (of which more later), the report explicitly distances Conservative thinking from a number of key tenets of the Thatcher years. Duncan Smith observes in his foreword,
In modern times, poverty has been a difficult issue for the Conservative Party to deal with. However, as this Report makes clear, it is too important an issue to be left to the Labour Party. All forms of poverty – absolute and relative – must be dealt with. (SJPG, 2006b, 3)
The report itself explicitly embraces a relative definition of poverty:
We should now say explicitly: Poverty must be defined in relation to changing social norms. We should reject completely the notion that poverty can be defined in absolute terms alone. Relative poverty matters because it separates the poor from the mainstream of society. (SJPG, 2006b, 6)
And it quotes senior Conservative Oliver Letwin’s acceptance, in 2005, that ‘Of course, inequality matters. Of course, it should be an aim to narrow the gap between rich and poor’ (SJPG, 2006b, 6).
David Cameron himself has referred frequently to poverty and, to a lesser extent, social justice and inequality in his pronouncements. An early example is his Scarman Lecture, in which he called poverty ‘an economic waste and a moral disgrace’. Echoing the SJPG, he explained that
we need to think of poverty in relative terms – the fact that some people lack those things which others in society take for granted. So I want this message to go out loud and clear: the Conservative Party recognises, will measure and will act on relative poverty. (Cameron, 2006)
The following year, in a speech entitled ‘Making British Poverty History’ he declared, ‘let us be clear: fighting poverty is one of the most fundamental of aspirations’. However, in a passage which was more redolent of an absolute than relative understanding of poverty, and which ignored the implications for inequality completely, he went on to say: ‘we must help the haves to have more, yes we must back the aspirations of our over-taxed, over-burdened middle classes … but a modern aspiration agenda means helping the have-nots to have something’ (Cameron, 2007).
More recently, in his Hugo Young lecture, Cameron allied the Conservative Party with ‘the fight against poverty, inequality, social breakdown and injustice’. Citing The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009), he said that ‘we all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it.’ He finished with the claim that ‘the Conservatives, not Labour, are best placed to fight poverty in our country’ (Cameron, 2009b).
This is all a far cry from the Thatcher years when inequality was lauded in the name of economic progress, social justice was deemed philosophically meaningless and illegitimate and, according to Social Security Secretary, John Moore, we had reached ‘the end of the line for poverty’. Moore’s thesis, in his infamous 1989 speech, was that absolute poverty was as good as vanquished and that relative poverty was ‘in reality simply inequality’, espoused as a concept by those on the left in order to condemn capitalism. Interestingly the SJPG and Cameron himself have both explicitly distanced themselves from Moore’s thesis: ‘John Moore was wrong to declare the end of poverty … Poverty is relative – and those who pretend otherwise are wrong. This has consequences for Conservative thinking’ (Cameron, 2006).
Reasons to be sceptical
It is important to acknowledge the significance of the Tories’ new-found commitment to tackling poverty and inequality. It is the more remarkable that Cameron has felt the need to compete with Labour on this territory when attitude surveys suggest that public opinion has grown less sympathetic towards government action to combat poverty and inequality. (This possibly reflects New Labour’s own ambivalence towards redistribution and often punitive discourse with reference to welfare reform.) Campaigners no longer have to convince the Conservatives that poverty and inequality are problems. However, there are at least three reasons to be sceptical as to whether we can now hope for effective action.
The first concerns the refusal to take responsibility for what happened during the Thatcher years. Having dismissed Moore’s stance, the SJPG does not hide the fact that ‘relative poverty rates … grew rapidly during the 1980s’ (SJPG, 2006b, 5). However, it manages to avoid paying any attention to the role played by government social, fiscal and economic policies in the increase in poverty and inequality during that period. The most it is prepared to concede is that ‘it would be wrong to deny that mistakes were made in response to the challenge’ of rising poverty and inequality (SJPG, 2006b, 6).
Worse still, when lambasting Labour, Cameron conveniently ignores what happened in the 1980s. Thus, in his Hugo Young Lecture, he traced the twentieth century trend in poverty up until the late 1960s and then jumped to post-1997 (Cameron, 2009b). At this point, he drew attention to widening inequality and in particular to an increase in the numbers in severe poverty and how this group had got poorer under Labour. In his party conference speech, he asked rhetorically ‘Who made the poorest poorer? ... Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories … you, Labour: you’re the ones that did this to our society’ (Cameron, 2009a). The point is reinforced by the recent Conservative document, Labour’s Two Nations. This sets out evidence, which, it claims ‘proves that Britain is once more divided into two nations’ (Conservative Party, 2010c, 6; emphasis added).
Now we are not apologists for Labour’s disappointing record on poverty – notwithstanding its welcome commitment to the eradication of child poverty – or its dismal performance on inequality. But Cameron’s taunt is breathtaking in its selective and misleading reading of recent history. Actually, Mr Cameron, it is ‘the wicked Tories’ who ‘did this to our society’. To the extent that governments can be held responsible for adverse trends in poverty and inequality – either through policies of commission (such as economic policies, which increase unemployment, and highly regressive changes to the tax-benefit system) or of omission (failure to combat underlying distributional trends) – the Conservatives were responsible for the record levels of poverty and inequality in the ‘two nations’ inherited by New Labour. Even though the subsequent record on inequality shames New Labour, the National Equality Panel explains how ‘reforms since 1997 have tended to reduce income inequality, while those in the earlier period tended to increase it’ (National Equality Panel, 2010, 399). By focusing on the very poorest – even though the Institute for Fiscal Studies has cast doubt on the robustness of these data – the Conservatives offer a distorted picture of Labour’s record. They also draw attention away from how real incomes after housing costs fell for the bottom decile by 13 per cent between 1979 and 1993/4 while they rose by 65 per cent for the top decile.
In reminding readers of the Conservatives’ record when last in power, we are not arguing that Cameron’s Conservatives are necessarily Thatcherite wolves in progressive clothing. But if they do not take responsibility as a political party for what happened then, it is harder to believe in their commitment to the anti-poverty and inequality cause now. This is why, contra Jon Cruddas and Chuka Umunna, we believe that we do have to ‘hark back to yesteryear’ as well as engage with ‘the Tories as they are now’ (Cruddas and Umunna, 2009).
Second, the proposed increase in the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million for single people and £2 million for couples would affect only the largest 2 to 3 per cent of estates at a cost of potentially over £2 billion. According to accountants Grant Thornton, ‘for all practical purposes, inheritance tax would be abolished’ (O’Grady, 2010). Inheritance is a key driver of wealth inequality, which is much wider than income inequality. This ‘handout to the really wealthy’ (Stephens, 2010), even if postponed, does not therefore sit well with all the fine words about inequality – a point that many commentators, not surprisingly, have made.
Third, there have been various signals that, in office, the Conservatives might ‘move the goal posts’ with regard to measuring poverty and inequality. According to the Financial Times (Timmins, 2010), their manifesto will water down Labour’s commitment to eradicating child poverty by abandoning a clear target and by broadening the measure of poverty to include a range of indicators such as under-age pregnancies and school exclusions. This was foreshadowed in the CSJ’s Economic Dependency report, which was critical of the current ‘simplistic poverty threshold’ of 60 per cent of median income in part for failing to capture ‘the non-financial aspects of poverty’ (SJPG, 2006b, 7, 19).
In fact, from the outset the Labour government has also published a range of non-financial indicators and has added material deprivation indicators to one of its child poverty measures. However, it is the income-based measure on which the media and campaigners focus in order to hold the government to account. Moreover, as an internationally recognised measure (deployed in particular across the EU), it enables comparisons with other countries as well as over time. In similar vein, Cameron has qualified his critique of inequality by emphasising that it ‘doesn’t mean we should be fixated only on a mechanistic objective like reducing the Gini co-efficient, the traditional financial measure of inequality or on closing the gap between the top and the bottom’ (Cameron, 2009b).
In other words, the Conservatives are giving notice that measuring income is not a key tool in their strategy for tackling poverty and inequality. This reflects their diagnosis of the nature and causes of the problem and shapes their prescription for dealing with it. It is to these further reasons to be sceptical that we now turn, focusing in particular on poverty since Conservative policy documents say less about inequality as such.
DIAGNOSIS
A key task for any diagnosis is to distinguish between causes and symptoms. The Conservatives play down the significance of low income because they see it as symptomatic of deeper causes, and they accuse Labour of tackling symptoms not root causes (Conservative Party, 2010c). We, in turn, will argue that the Conservatives ignore underlying socio-economic structural causes of poverty in their focus on behaviour and culture. We believe that ‘money matters’ (Strelitz and Lister, 2008).
The Conservatives’ diagnosis of the problem of poverty is framed by the two tropes of ‘broken Britain/society’ and ‘big government vs. big society’. Like New Labour, Cameron’s Conservatives understand the power of language. They deploy it skilfully to represent the problem of poverty and its causes and solutions in ways which place the main responsibility on the individual and on communities rather than on government.
Broken Britain
‘Broken Britain’, in particular, has, according to Jill Kirby, Director of the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies, ‘become a core theme of Cameron’s broader message’ and ‘has acquired the potential to become a peg for almost any social policy reform’ (Kirby, 2009, 246). Duncan Smith locates the source of this breakdown firmly in ‘Britain’s most difficult and fractured communities’ where ‘too many people live in dysfunctional homes, trapped on benefits’ (SJPG, 2007, 2). Cameron himself represents the ‘broken society’ in the kind of verb-less utterances popularised by New Labour: ‘Poverty, crime, addiction. Failing schools. Sink estates. Broken homes’ (Cameron, 2009a). He has made it his ‘central mission to repair our broken society’ (Cameron, 2008a, 1). Kirby argues that Cameron’s broken society message represents ‘an important way of signalling his distance from the Labour government (who reject the suggestion that British society is “broken”), as well as from the free-market emphasis of the Thatcher years’ (Kirby, 2009, 246). In other words it performs a similar political function to Blair’s ‘third way’.
The broken Britain/society discourse carries within it the Conservatives’ diagnosis of the key causes of poverty. The SJPG identifies five ‘pathways to poverty’: family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness and addictions (SJPG, 2006a, 13). These, together with inflated and alarmist accounts of crime, all figure in subsequent representations of the problem of our ‘broken society’; but it is family breakdown and economic dependence that are central to the Conservatives’ diagnostic analysis of poverty. It is on these therefore that we focus.
Family breakdown
When Cameron first referred to the ‘broken society’ he linked it explicitly to the ‘broken’ family, and the two remain closely intertwined in his public statements (Kirby, 2009). His analysis derives primarily from the work of the SJPG and the CSJ. The Breakdown Britain report identifies a range of problems, including poverty and ‘welfare dependency’, which it associates with ‘family breakdown, whether by dissolution, dysfunction or “dad-lessness”’ (SJPG, 2006a, 32). In his foreword to the CSJ’s Green Paper on the Family, Duncan Smith argues that ‘the peculiarly high levels of family breakdown found in Britain are at the heart of the social breakdown which is devastating our most deprived communities and fracturing British society in general’ (CSJ, 2010, 4). The CSJ’s Executive Director told The Guardian that ‘for us, the reversal of social breakdown and poverty comes through promoting family’ (Gentleman, 2009).
The three key and inter-connected themes of the family breakdown thesis concern marriage, family break-up and lone parenthood, and poor parenting. They are often underpinned by a critique of the role of the state, to which we will return below. In his Foreword to the CSJ’s Green Paper on the Family Duncan Smith criticises government for having ‘become indifferent to the institution of marriage’ and argues that ‘you cannot mend Britain’s broken society unless you support and value the institution which is at the heart of a stable society’ (CSJ, 2010, 5). The Green Paper itself expands the argument with reference to: the ‘fundamental importance’ of the ‘difference in stability between marriage and co-habitation’; the positive mental and physical health effects of marriage for adults; and ‘the best outcomes for children’ resulting from ‘committed, in particular married, couple relationships’ (CSJ, 2010, 9).
As a number of commentators have pointed out, it is not possible to conclude from the statistics that marriage itself causes the positive outcomes associated with it and that therefore the stability of a society is a function of the support given to the institution of marriage. In particular, social scientists suggest that the stability associated with marriage can be attributed to the kind of people who choose to get married or to cohabit and to the values that they hold. While it is true that marriage appears to be associated with better mental and physical health, with some evidence of a protective effect – although rather more so for men than women – again, it is not clear to what extent the association is causal. And cumulative evidence points to a decent income and to living in a more equal society as more important determinants of health overall. As a Financial Times leader wryly observed, ‘the Tory leader would be surprised by how few social questions there are to which the answer is “encourage more people to get married”’ (Financial Times, 2009).
The argument that ‘the best outcomes for children’ result from ‘committed, in particular married, couple relationships’ shades into the issue of family break-up and lone parenthood. The underlying assumption that changing family forms signal a loss of commitment within family relationships has been challenged by a major ESRC-funded research programme: ‘the shape of commitments is changing but there is no loss of commitment’, particularly when it comes to the well-being of children (Williams, 2004, 7). Similarly, the assumption that teenage pregnancy is necessarily a problem, resulting in poor outcomes, and that it is a symptom of social breakdown, has been challenged by a number of studies.
The CSJ’s Green Paper on the Family links the relatively poor outcomes for UK children revealed in international league tables to high levels of lone parenthood and family break-up. It acknowledges that poverty itself can lead to family break-up and that ‘it is difficult to isolate causal effect [because] when looking at the relationship between family breakdown and various adverse outcomes for children, factors such as poverty also show strong correlation’ (CSJ, 2010, 11).
Nevertheless family structure remains at the heart of the Green Paper’s overall analysis. This analysis is not supported by the international league tables on children’s well-being, which the Conservatives frequently cite. Two of the social scientists responsible for the UNICEF league table firmly refute the attempt to attribute the poor showing of children in the UK to family break-up (Bradshaw and Richardson, 2009). They point out that international comparisons do not show any clear relationship between ‘broken families’ and level of child well-being. Instead, there is a clear association with inequality. Moreover, they conclude, child well-being tends to be greater where government spending on families and children, especially on in-kind services, is above average.
An evidence review of the impact of family breakdown on children’s well-being found that the long-term effects of family break-up are ‘comparatively small’ and that ‘dimensions of family functioning and some socio-economic factors have a greater influence than family structure on child well-being’ (Mooney et al, 2009, 21). A recent study of the well-being of children and young people, by researchers at the University of York, throws further doubt on the Conservatives’ central thesis. It concludes:
The current survey confirms previous findings that [children and young people’s] well-being is much more strongly associated with the quality of people’s relationships – such as levels of family conflict – than with family structure. A simple measure of how families were getting on together was able to explain over 20 per cent of the variation in overall well-being whereas family structure could only explain less than 2 per cent of this variation. (Rees et al, 2010, 80)
The quality of family relationships brings us to the third element of the Conservative thesis on family breakdown: poor parenting. As well as the CSJ’s work, Cameron has seized on a recent Demos study to emphasise the over-riding importance of the quality of parenting for children’s life chances (Lexmond and Reeves, 2009). In a speech to Demos, he argued that their study shows that good parenting ‘is the single most important determinant of our future success or failure’. It ‘sets us a new challenge: to alleviate poverty of parenting, in the knowledge that it is the best way to help children escape material poverty’ (Cameron, 2010a).
Although Cameron presented a rather distorted and over-simplified account of the Demos findings (which also disputed the impact of family structure on child outcomes), he is, nevertheless, on stronger ground when underlining the importance of parenting. He is also careful to concede ‘that it is easier to achieve good parenting when there is material prosperity’ and that ‘with poverty can come a host of problems that make parenting more difficult’ (Cameron, 2010a). But, in his enthusiasm for attributing the causes of poverty to individual behaviour, this insight is effectively put to one side with the observation that ‘what matters most to a child’s life-chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting’.
We are left with the impression that Cameron does not really appreciate the body of evidence that shows how poverty can undermine parenting capacity, particularly in the case of mothers, whose mental and physical health is often damaged by the strain of managing poverty. ‘Warmth of parenting’ cannot be disassociated that easily from ‘wealth of upbringing’ (see Tim Horton and Ollie Haydon-Mulligan in this issue of Renewal). Furthermore, while analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study does corroborate a link between quality of parenting and early educational achievement, it is considerably weaker than Cameron implies (Kiernan and Mensah, 2010). Positive parenting appears to mediate the impact of child poverty on early educational achievement by only about a half.
‘Welfare dependency’
The SJPG’s analysis links family breakdown to ‘welfare dependency’: ‘the failure to form a durable bond between a mother and a father often leads to welfare dependency’ (SJPG, 2006a, 32). Welfare dependency, and its associated ills, is the other key piece in the ‘broken Britain’ jigsaw. According to Duncan Smith, ‘As the fabric of society crumbles at the margins what has been left behind is an underclass, where life is characterised by dependency, addiction, debt and family breakdown’ (SJPG, 2007, 3).
The notion of ‘welfare dependency’ is never defined but is simply assumed in Conservative policy documents, where it is a recurrent theme. Indeed, it is frequently simply conflated with receipt of benefits among people of working age; but the slippery incision of the term ‘culture’ then further conflates receipt of benefits with a culture of dependency. One Conservative Party policy document, for instance, states that ‘almost five million people were claiming some form of out of work benefit and the bill for this level of welfare dependency totals £346 billion for the last twelve years’ (Conservative Party, 2009, 4). It goes on to decry ‘the culture of welfare dependency that drives intergenerational worklessness’ (Conservative Party, 2009, 11; emphasis added). An earlier policy document declares that ‘it is our moral obligation to end the culture of long-term welfare dependency in Britain’ and ‘the time has come to put an end to the culture of deliberate worklessness’ (Conservative Party, 2008a, 11). In his foreword, Cameron states that ‘mass welfare dependency is a waste of the country’s human resources and a huge drain on the taxpayer’ as well as ‘one of the primary causes of low aspirations and social breakdown’ (Conservative Party, 2008a, 1).
The SJPG has broadened the notion of welfare dependency to embrace ‘in-work dependency’: ‘dependency on out-of-work benefits has been replaced by dependency on tax credits’ (SJPG, 2006b, 12). It identifies ‘a dependency divide’ between the richest three-fifths of the population who are ‘overwhelmingly self-sufficient’ and the poorest fifth, for whom ‘welfare accounts for over half of all household income’, with the intermediary fifth a zone of transition between these ‘two nations’ (SJPG, 2006b, 13). This theme was taken up by Cameron in his Scarman Lecture when he claimed that ‘getting into work means you are more dependent than ever on the state’ (Cameron, 2006).
The ‘welfare dependency’ thesis (together with Duncan Smith’s references to an ‘underclass’) takes us back to the 1980s and the influence of US new right thinkers. It is difficult for New Labour to criticise the Conservatives on this count because it too speaks the language of welfare dependency (even if no longer that of the ‘underclass’). Social scientists, on the other hand, are able to illuminate the ways in which the term is used to frame the problem of poverty as a problem of behaviour and to reconstruct social security as a cause of poverty rather than as part of the policy solution. The damaging discursive power of the language of welfare dependency is underlined in a widely cited American critique:
Few concepts in US social policy discussions do as much ideological work as ‘dependency’. The term leaks a profusion of stigmatising connotations … It alludes implicitly to a normative state of ‘independence’, which will itself not withstand critical scrutiny. Naming the problems of poor solo mothers and their children ‘dependency’, moreover, tends to make them appear to be individual rather than social problems, as much moral or psychological as economic. (Fraser and Gordon, 1994, 4)
One overview of the British data concludes that
not much evidence has been unearthed in support of a welfare class founded on either cultural or psychosocial dependency. It did not feature strongly in the empirical research literature and nor, therefore in the explanations for the growth in claimant numbers. Unemployed and disabled claimants typically retain prior attachments to work, as do many lone parents, and it is other barriers that prevent them from working. (Walker with Howard, 2000, 307)
The authors concede the possibility that ‘dependency manifests itself in welfare communities in particular localities’, which was not the focus of their analysis. However, more recent research, carried out in just such a community, led to the conclusion that ‘conservative theories of a dangerous, welfare-dependent underclass are plainly, simply wrong’. It found that ‘“hyper-conventional” attitudes to getting jobs predominated, despite the fact that casualised “poor work” was what people usually got’ (MacDonald and Marsh, 2005, 198-9). While international analysis does indicate a rather lower level of commitment to work than in twelve other welfare states, it also reveals that ‘employment commitment is stronger in countries with higher levels of welfare state generosity’. Moreover, it does not support the thesis that ‘employment commitment has declined … through serious disincentive effects of generous welfare state benefits’ (Esser, 2009, 93, 98).
Is Britain broken?
Overall the Broken Britain/society narrative represents a behavioural and cultural analysis which attributes the underlying causes of poverty to the failings of individuals rather than to socio-economic structural factors. As Duncan Smith observes, ‘at the heart’ of the policy solutions put forward by his CSJ ‘is recognition that the nature of the life you lead and the choices you make have a significant bearing on whether you live in poverty’ (CSJ, 2009, 4). Likewise Cameron attributes a range of social problems, including inequality, in part to ‘wrong personal choices’ (Cameron, 2010a).
While poverty analysts do increasingly acknowledge the importance of recognising the agency of people living in poverty, they also make clear that this agency is exercised within severe structural constraints (Lister, 2004). Not to do so leads to the confusion of causes with effects and symptoms. The Conservatives, even though they cite The Spirit Level when it suits them, ignores its central message that many of the social ills they associate with Broken Britain can be attributed to inequality. This helps them avoid the question: if Britain is broken, who broke it?
But is Britain broken? The verdict of a recent investigation of needs is that it is not: ‘most people in Britain are living good lives and believe that they live in strong and supportive communities’ (Young Foundation, 2009, 246). Even an analysis of the evidence on crime and uncivil behaviour in The Economist concludes that ‘the evidence supporting the existence of a “broken society” is thin indeed’ and that the thesis represents ‘a dangerous misdiagnosis’ (6.02.2010, 33, 11).
To dispute the Broken Britain tag is not to be complacent; for instance, we acknowledge the damaging social impact of growing individualism and consumerism (of which more below). And, as the Young Foundation continues, ‘Britain is a brittle society, with many fractures and many people left behind’. Whereas the discourse of Broken Britain frames the diagnosis of poverty as a problem of behaviour and culture, the responsibility for which lies with individuals, that of a Britain fractured by inequality focuses attention on underlying structural causes and the responsibility of government (2).
Big government
Government is, however, presented by Cameron as a cause of the problem rather than as the source of the solution. In his speech on ‘Making British Poverty History’, having declared that this requires making ‘welfare dependency history first’, he concluded that: ‘It is increasingly clear that top-down state poverty schemes are no longer the solution to poverty but are in many cases the cause of it’ (Cameron, 2007). In his party conference speech he answered the rhetorical question ‘Why is our society broken?’ with the answer ‘Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility’ (Cameron, 2009a).
Following the negative reaction to the strong anti-state stance of that speech, he developed a rather more nuanced critique in his Hugo Young lecture, in which he acknowledged that simple ‘retrenchment’ is not the answer. Nevertheless, he asserted that ‘the size, scope and role of government in Britain has reached a point where it is now inhibiting, not advancing the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality, and increasing general well-being’ (Cameron, 2009b).
There are three main strands to his case. The first is a pragmatic (albeit ideologically rooted) argument that the state has proved increasingly ineffective at reducing poverty and inequality since 1997. He accuses Labour of relying ‘too heavily on redistributing money, and on the large, clunking mechanisms of the state’ (Cameron, 2006) or ‘top-down mechanical state interventions’ (Cameron, 2007). According to Cameron, state anti-poverty programmes, including redistribution, ‘have now run their course. The returns from big state intervention are not just diminishing, they are disappearing’ (Cameron, 2008b).
Cameron uses the widening of the gap between the richest and poorest under Labour to substantiate his argument (Cameron, 2009b). What he ignores is that the reason the returns from state intervention appear to have diminished during the second half of Labour’s period in office is that the level of additional state intervention was reduced after 2004/5. Nevertheless, it is estimated that:
overall poverty in 2008-09 would have been up to six percentage points higher and child poverty up to 13 percentage points higher under a continuation of the previous government’s tax-benefit policies. Adding in the value of health and education spending strengthens the redistributive impact of fiscal policies and substantially improves the relative position of the poorest. (Sefton et al, 2009, 44)
Cross-national analysis also points to the key role played by state intervention in reducing poverty and inequality: ‘when states spend more financial resources on citizen welfare, poverty is reduced’ (Moller et al, 2003, 45).
At the heart of Cameron’s antipathy towards the state is his belief that ‘big government has all too often helped cause [problems such as poverty] by undermining the personal and social responsibility that should be the lifeblood of a strong society’. It is this ‘steady erosion of responsibility’ that is ‘the worst thing about their big government’ (Cameron, 2009a). As a consequence, ‘the recent growth of the state has promoted not social solidarity, but selfishness and individualism’ (Cameron, 2009b).
The paradox at the heart of big government is that by taking power and responsibility away from the individual, it has only served to individuate them. What is seen in principle as an act of social solidarity, has in practice led to the greatest atomisation of our society. (2009b)
Responsibility is the core value promoted by Cameron. He makes no mention of the extent to which responsibility has also been a defining principle of New Labour social policy. Nor does he provide evidence in support of his contention that ‘big government’ has eroded responsibility. As Lisa Harker, co-director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, points out: ‘You need only look across the Atlantic at the most individualistic country in the world to realise that social solidarity does not spring from small government’. Instead, she argues,
our selfishness has been encouraged by consumerism and our pursuit of who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire lifestyles … Above all it is both encouraged by and reflected in the greater value we give to other things: making money and achieving status through acquisition rather than what we give to others. (Harker, 2009)
It was neo-liberalism and the triumph of the market over the state under Thatcher which gave birth to this ‘turbo-consumerism’ (Lawson, 2009) and the encouragement of individualistic greed at the expense of public service and mutual responsibility. Back in 1994, John Gray, a Thatcherite apostate, argued in a Social Market Foundation pamphlet that ‘the fragmentation of family life which contemporary conservatives bemoan is, in very large part, a product of the culture of choice, and the economy of unfettered mobility, which they themselves celebrate’ (Gray, 1994, 39). And he linked ‘an epidemic of crime’ to ‘the desolation of communities by unchannelled market forces’ (Gray, 1994, 9). From the excesses of the City, to fractured communities deprived of their livelihoods, Cameron should be pointing the finger at the market rather than the state in attributing blame for any atomisation.
Linked to the thesis that the state has undermined responsibility is the third strand in the argument against big government: that it has undermined civil society and the voluntary sector. According to the SJPG, ‘the war on poverty will only be won by liberating the third sector from the incessant pressure to do the government’s work in the government’s way’ (SJPG, 2007, 57). Cameron maintains that it is the third sector that is best placed
to help people through the complex and interconnected problems of poverty … Labour have tied them up with bureaucratic constraints and complex funding processes. And rather than encouraging them to take on new challenges, Labour have actively squeezed them out. (Cameron, 2007)
Yet, according to analysts of the voluntary sector, ‘under New Labour, voluntary welfare gained a new significance’ (Kendall, 2008, 217) and ‘Labour has eschewed the rank instrumentalism that marked the contract culture of the late 1980s and the early 1990s’ (Lewis, 2005, 138). There may be legitimate criticism of the specifics of policy towards the voluntary sector and the constraints still imposed by the contract culture (to the particular detriment of small organisations). Nevertheless, it is difficult to argue that the sector generally has been ‘squeezed out’, even though, like other sectors, it is now suffering in the face of recession.
More generally, cross-national experience does not support the thesis that strong states tend to be associated with weak civil societies. According to Philip Collins and Richard Reeves, ‘even within the US, liberal Minnesota has higher spending, and more civic engagement, than conservative Mississippi’ (Collins and Reeves, 2010, 21). And a recent Society Guardian article illustrates how Sweden combines ‘a strong public sector and a vibrant civil society’ (Fouché, 2010, 1).
Overall, even if the state does at times play an oppressive role in attempting to regulate the behaviour of people living in poverty, particularly when enforcing responsibility, Cameron’s thesis that ‘big government’ is causing poverty does not stand up to scrutiny.
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