Don Paskini has suggested a Labour Against Poverty campaign, and has asked people to spread the word, and to pass on their thoughts. Well, this is me doing my bit: I’ll quote his post in its entirety before making a few points of my own.
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“To the best of my knowledge, there is no group which is specifically campaigning within the Labour Party to end poverty in Britain, along the lines of Labour Against the War or the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights. One of the main reasons that I joined the Labour Party, and I’m sure this is true for many other people, was because I don’t think it is right that 1 in 5 people in Britain live in poverty and I wanted to work with others to do something about that.
What I want to know is whether anyone else would be interested in joining up to a Labour Against Poverty campaign. It would be a campaign open to all Labour members and supporters, and its aim would be very simple, to get the Labour Party to make reducing and ending poverty in Britain a top priority.
This might involve local Labour parties organising and campaigning in deprived communities, putting forward policies through GCs and the affiliated unions to annual conference, and trying to change public perceptions of poverty and get a Labour government re-elected which will end poverty in Britain.
Gordon Brown says that he wants campaigners to put pressure on the government to take more action on poverty, so let’s take him up on that. If you’re interested in joining a Labour Against Poverty campaign, please leave a comment here, or write about it on your own blog and spread the word.”
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I certainly do think this is worth pursuing. It’s not that Labour hasn’t done – and tried – a lot to reduce poverty, but one additional way in which the poor lose out is not having – within the political process, and within the Labour movement – a powerful voice of its very own.
Trade unionists, socialist societies, professional bodies, corporate lobby groups, and think tanks have interests they seek to promote, but the poorest lose out not only in terms of life chances, but in terms of organisation, unity, and the ability to lobby, persuade, raise funds, and mobilise their own supporters and activists. They might forever be in our thoughts, and their problems may motivate MPs and Ministers in the course of their constituency work, but being at the back of one’s mind doesn’t provide the kind of power that the organised campaign of a sectional interest can employ (and, yes, I am referring to the NUS‘ anti-fees campaign).
What is required is a force within the Labour Party that is prepared to defy other interests, and traditional ideological boundaries, in order to lobby for the best mix of policies – across the board – with the sole intention of eliminating poverty.
I hesitate to use the ludicrous (and discredited) term Czar, but it’s not far from what I’d like to see. Just to clarify the definition of “poverty” that we’d be eliminating: clearly we can’t be talking “relative poverty” in the sense of an income below a certain percentage of the national median, which is a statistical detail, and indicative at best. No, the measurement should consider a “basket” of items. Not a “wellbeing” index, but one that measures “life chances”: income, health potential, educational potential, the effects of crime and exploitation, and so on.
Labour’s poverty team must then decide what the threshold is to be, based upon the best available advice, the extent of their ambition, competition from other parties, and the likelihood that they can win over the Ministers affected.
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I’m not going to be drawn on whether such a scheme is remotely likely, but at the very least it might encourage us to think about the political influence of the poor, and the relative moral weight of the claims that existing sectional interests make.
Update: Just a thought: how can an organisation be responsible to a group in society (”the poor”) when the very definition and boundaries of that group is a matter for discussion. If a particular “basket” were to be selected as a measure of poverty, this may have to be one of the organisation’s “founding documents”.
I’d like to see it, and would probably join it.
The issue though, is that even within the Labour Party there is such a spectrum of opinion about how to deal with poverty that it might be hard to find a set of policies that everyone could feel happy supporting. But that isn’t insurmountable, and the formation of such a group could lead to a real discussion about how to fight poverty at a grass roots level.
Surely the Labour Against Poverty Campaign already exists – it is called The Labour Party.
Luke is right, but Labour’s objectives are wider than poverty. Which makes me think there’s room for a campaign on poverty with a distinctly Labour face.
I tried to cover that point, Luke. There are several de facto priorities for Labour: economic growth and stability, working towards some sort of equality, improvements across all departments, etc., but perhaps the impossibility of eliminating (existing definitions of) relative poverty and the inapplicability of existing definitions of absolute poverty to the UK, means there’s no firm goal. My main concern, though, is that the poorest and most disadvantaged do not have the same political power as other “pressure” groups. They may benefit greatly from Labour governments, but not necessarily as a result of a strategy that is focussed upon poverty reduction. Take the minimum wage: it has reduced poverty in aggregate, but an anti-poverty campaign might have pushed for something more radical and more focussed, like a minimum income.
Luke is right. Anyone who claims there’s no difference between a Labour and Tory government should speak to some of the millions of pensioners who, like my in-laws, lived on basis state pension. The ‘means tested’ pension credit has made a huge difference to their lives.
But a campaign group might be helpful to support Gordon Brown’s efforts. He sometimes seems to be a solitary voice in cabinet ‘doing good by stealth’. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of floating votes to be gained from helping the poor and/or inarticulate.
Existing campaign groups, for example those for pensioners and students, tend to be dominated by people who, by comparison with the genuinely poor, are quite well off. And their campaigns, whilst claiming to be aiming to help the poor, are usually really about helping themselves…
Don’t get me wrong, HV, I’m not doing Labour down (though I do expect more – and the best – from them, or rather, us), and if the Tories had anything of any relevance to say then I might have given them a mention. Nobody believes they do.
And I couldn’t agree more with your last two paragraphs – exactly my point.
Thanks to Andrew for highlighting this post and to everyone for comments.
Labour has done a lot to reduce child and pensioner poverty, in the face of opposition from the Tories and the Lib Dems. These achievements are things which, in my experience, party members whether on the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ of the party are proud of. But it clearly and demonstrably isn’t the case that reducing poverty is the top priority for additional government spending or legislation at the moment, suggesting that an internal campaign could make a difference to existing priorities.
According to poverty.org.uk, there were 11.4 million people in Britain living in poverty in 2004/5. For all that the Labour Party has done, only a tiny proportion of those people are members or activists, suggesting that there is a lot more that we as a party could do.
Take care
Dan xxx
(Writing as an ex-party member)
Labour has done a huge amount to reduce poverty since 1997. The Neighbourhood Renewal strategy, programmes like Sure Start and Children’s Centres, Brown’s tax credit type innovations – things like this have acheived great things. But they seem to be almost an embarassment for national Labour Party spokespeople, rather than an achievement.
The perception seems to be that target voters don’t care about poverty, they care about crime and other (perceived) “right-wing” issues. The success of the Make Poverty History campaign in touching the hearts and minds of so many people shows that this might be true.
Maybe it would take a Labour campaign against poverty in the UK to make this case.