Is it possible that the British left, so accustomed to (and, it sometimes seems, so comfortable with) betrayal, has failed to see that it now has a government truly dedicated to eradicating the worst aspects of poverty and inequality? In Ben Pimlott's words (see page 34), could Tony Blair yet surprise us all? Could he, while continuing to upset the well-heeled bien pensants of the left establishment, actually bring about dramatic improvements for those at the bottom of the social pile?
As David Marquand shows in his essay on page 43, this government has been a profound disappointment to liberal progressives. Professor Marquand mentions the feebleness of the freedom of information proposals and the apparent preference for a nominated House of Lords. But that is less than half of it. On crime and punishment, new Labour looks every bit as illiberal as the Tories, and the same goes for its policies on refugees. It shows no signs of greater tolerance towards drugs. For all the talk of an ethical foreign policy, our arms sales overseas continue to rise. Education policies rest on traditional beliefs about the primacy of the three Rs, the efficacy of whole-class teaching and the wickedness of mixed-ability classes. Schoolteachers, academics and doctors are promised no relief from the centralised target-setting introduced by the Tories.
Perhaps even Professor Marquand can forgive all this if new Labour launches a frontal assault on inequality and if the Prime Minister is serious about his 20-year mission to end child poverty. It is easy to be sceptical about the Department of Social Security's first annual report on tackling poverty and social exclusion because it gives no specific targets, merely a series of generalised intentions to "reduce" rough sleeping, poor housing and so on. But people who think that Mr Blair is a closet Tory should try to imagine a Conservative government publishing anything similar. In particular, they should note new Labour's definition of poverty - anybody living on less than half the average income - and welcome this rejection of the Thatcherite view that inequality doesn't matter and that you are only poor if you are actually starving. Further, though he never allows the word "redistribution" to pass his lips, the Chancellor is putting money where ministers' mouths are, devoting an annual £2 billion to the working families tax credit, while removing £5 billion from the holders of occupational pensions.
Mr Blair's remarkable achievement has been to remove from the public mind all the accumulated anti-Labour bogies of a century: reckless economic management, loony leftiness, cosiness with strike-happy unions, punitive taxation, softness on crime and drugs, encouragement of "trendy" teaching methods and so on. Having secured public trust in this way - having in a fashion convinced everybody that he isn't really Labour - the Prime Minister can afford to be quite dramatically radical in tackling inequality. If he can fully reverse the shift from poor to rich created by two decades of Tory rule, almost any price would be worth paying.
Where Labour's strategy must be questioned, however, is in its heavy reliance on work as a route out of poverty. The DSS report has almost nothing to say on levels of out-of-work benefit. Though it keeps repeating "work for those who can, security for those who cannot", it turns out that the latter means only those who are more or less physically incapacitated, either by age or severe handicap - and, in the case of the old, their future security seems to depend on their enjoying many years in work. Yet about one in three children lives in a household where nobody is in full-time employment. If this is the case after several years of economic growth, can Labour really expect that all its various projects for education, training, advice and guidance will get sufficient numbers back to work to make a significant impact on child poverty? Experience from America suggests that, no matter how harsh the sticks or succulent the carrots, at best four-fifths (and probably considerably fewer) of those on welfare can find jobs, even occasionally.
Labour is right to insist that there should be no disincentives to work and that a job is the best route out of poverty. But what happens to those who can't take that route? Here, Labour simply hasn't thought things through. For all the talk of social inclusion, the present approach leaves the long-term unemployed (who may also be lone parents or disabled people) more excluded than ever, struggling on diminishing benefits and told, moreover, that it's all their own fault. Mr Blair may succeed in reducing the numbers of poor, but poverty and alienation seem likely to bear still more heavily on those left behind.
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