Oliver Letwin, who chairs the Conservative's policy review and Tory research department, on why he believes his party is now the one that represents the least well off
Some years ago, Michael Portillo - then shadow chancellor - shocked the pundits by announcing that the Conservative Party accepted the minimum wage was here to stay. A few days ago it was reported in the press that Mayor Boris Johnson was about to shock the pundits by adopting the £7.40 "living wage" for Greater London Authority staff, something Ken Livingstone never got around to doing.
Between these two announcements, quite a lot of political water has flowed under quite a lot of political bridges. The surprise used to be that the Conservatives had caught up with leading-edge reform on low pay. Now, the surprise is caused by the fact that Conservatives are leading the way on low pay.
This is, of course, just one part of the recent shift in British politics. In the past two years, Conservatives have adopted the aspiration to end child poverty - Iain Duncan Smith's Social Justice Policy Group has come up with the most convincing analysis yet provided of the nature and causes of multiple deprivation - and David Cameron is leading the debate on social responsibility and social mobility.
This shift in emphasis is reflected in crunchy policy. In recent green papers on welfare reform and prisoner rehabilitation, the shadow secretaries for work and justice, Chris Grayling and Nick Herbert, propose policies to engage social and commercial enterprises in lifting people out of unemployment and crime. Their plan is to pay these organisations for each person they get into a sustainable job or back into the social mainstream with money saved on unemployment benefits and prison places.
A green paper on schools proposes policies to deliver root-and-branch improvement in education for the most disadvantaged. The shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, plans to let new providers establish first-rate schools that compete with failing education authorities in areas of deprivation; and he specifically proposes a tilt in funding to provide a premium for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Meanwhile, a green paper from Greg Clark on the voluntary sector proposes changes to the terms of trade between government and charities or social enterprises, to enable not-for-profit and community groups to play their part in mending the broken society.
This focus on lifting people out of multiple deprivation has renewed Conservative concern not just with welfare and education, but also with the family. As a result, we have recently made a commitment to use Sure Start to provide universal access for young mothers to a proper amount of time from health visitors. Hence, too, the commitment from George Osborne to end the couples' penalty by recognising the value of marriage in the tax and benefit system.
So, Boris Johnson's move on low pay in London is an aspect of a wider movement of ideas that is producing an array of policy, aimed at addressing inequality, helping the poor, and using post-bureaucratic means to achieve what Gordon Brown's centralised approaches have so signally failed to accomplish.
It is a good thing that British politics is changing. On the evidence of the past ten years, change is essential if we are to bring the least advantaged into line with the rest of us. Income distribution graphs from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that under Margaret Thatcher there was a huge increase in the number of families on what we would now regard as middle income, and a noticeable rise in those on high income. But they also show that during the past decade, contrary to what you might expect under a Labour government, there has been virtually no change in the proportion of the population on low income. Indeed, the income of the very poorest has fallen.
Other statistics tell the same tale. The number of working-age adults living in poverty rose by 700,000 last year to 7.2 million and has risen overall since 1997. Four million people of working age without dependent children are now in poverty - 800,000 more than in 1998-99. Two million 16- to 24-year-olds are living below the poverty line: nearly one in three young people.
It is one of the ironies of the political scene that the leading advocates of radical change to achieve progressive goals are now to be found in the Conservative Party.
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