IDS at the DWP: the good, the bad and the ugly

The Spectator this week has an interview with Iain Duncan Smith, secretary of state for Work and Pensions (print edition only, so far). Well worth reading if you have an interest in where the Conservatives plan to take the welfare system.

The interview is a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly. Taking them out of order: the ugly is IDS’s ungracious and faintly misogynistic reference to his Labour predecessor at the DWP, Yvette Cooper: “what was her name? Ed Balls’s wife…”.

The good is his sincere commitment to tackling poverty. He complains that Labour focused too much on a single measure of poverty: people whose income was less than 60 per cent of the median. As the interviewers put it:

Money was spent moving people from just below the line to just above it, and those people were then declared to have been “lifted out of poverty” even if their income had increased by only £10 a week.

A fair criticism – provided we remember that £10 a week isn’t a trivial amount of money for many people. Duncan Smith told civil servants on his first day at the DWP that he wanted it to become “the poverty-fighting department in government, not the place that simply pays money out”. Some of his proposals – such as continuing paying benefits to those in low-paid work in order to help reduce the “poverty trap” – are positive (though IDS admitted the other day that he hadn’t managed to get that particular idea past the Treasury as yet). I think he is also right about the socially-destructive effects of cheap alcohol.

The bad, however, is the distinct whiff of past attitudes towards poverty in some of IDS’s proposals and those of his think tank, the Centre for Social Justice (CFJ). I’d made a sarcastic comment on Twitter when IDS was appointed suggesting his brief was to “reintroduce the Poor Law”. Well, here is his “most radical” idea, for a “universal benefit”:

At the CFJ, he proposed abolishing all 52 current benefits – from incapacity to housing – and replacing them with a universal benefit designed entirely to make sure that no one is better off out of work.

Compare this with the principle of “less eligibility” that lay behind the nineteenth and early-twentieth century Poor Law, as described in this article on the 1909 Minority Report on the Poor Law:

Its central principle of “less eligibility” demanded that the condition of the able-bodied pauper must be kept inferior to that of the poorest independent labourer. This was seen as the “just deserts” of those entering the workhouse, and was designed to force the pauper from the workhouse in search of whatever employment he could find on the open market.

I’m not for one minute suggesting that IDS wants to take us back to the cruelties of the old Poor Law – let alone the days of the workhouse. (Days more recent than you might think: the workhouse was abolished only in 1930, and the Poor Law in 1948.)

But there does seem to be a lingering assumption that the poor are to blame for their own poverty (“poverty was generally seen as a voluntary condition, with the pauper not so much the victim as the perpetrator of his own distress”) and that the poverty trap is mainly due to too-generous benefits rather than excessively low pay for those jobs that are available (“anxiety that the existence of poor relief would tempt many that were otherwise self-sufficient to claim”) – so that only the stick of minimal state support (rather than the carrot of decent, well-paid work) can encourage people to work.

Above all, it is dispiriting to see the problem of “economic inactivity” laid yet again at the feet of the indolent, feckless poor and their welfare state enablers. Unemployment for the last quarter was 2.5 million; the Tories’ preferred measure of “economic inactivity” (which includes those on incapacity benefit/ESA) covers 5.9 million people; but the number of vacancies was 475,000 (src). To talk as if we lived in a country of plentiful jobs ignored by indolent benefit-claimants is a fantasy – and will become all the more so as public spending cuts begin to take effect.

So I’m not going to paint IDS as a heartless Victorian throwback – however tempting it may be to compare Philippa Stroud (defeated for parliament but still able to end up in government as a special adviser – welcome to the New Politics, same as the old politics) with Helen Bosanquet of the Charity Organisation Society, guiding spirit of the Majority Report. He clearly has a genuine desire to reduce poverty, and an engaging lack of ambition (“I didn’t come to do anything else … I am not interested in climbing rungs of ladders any more”).

The question is whether spending constraints prevent his best ideas finding fruition while leaving his more paternalistic and moralistic tendencies intact.

In defence of David Laws

Well, there’s a title I never thought I’d find myself writing. I’d barely heard of Laws until he emerged first as a significant figure in the coalition negotiations and then as chief secretary to the Treasury, but what I had seen I hadn’t liked: someone who gave every appearance of being a dessicated calculating machine, outflanking even George Osborne in his eagerness to implement public spending cuts with what David Aaronovitch memorably described as “an avidity bordering on the erotic”.

And now his world has fallen apart. And to my considerable surprise I feel sorry for him, and for the first time find myself actually rather liking the guy. Suddenly it becomes apparent that the reason he appeared less than human was because he felt it necessary (tragically, unnecessarily) to hide a central part of his humanness from the world.

First off, even if one doesn’t find it particularly admirable for him to claim reimbursement for rent charged by his partner – and let’s face it, it’s not like Laws needed the money – it was clearly within the rules for him to do so when he started doing so.

When the rules changed to prevent MPs claiming for rent charged by their spouses, partners or close family members, I can imagine Laws finding himself in a terrible bind: should he stop claiming the rent – and thus reveal the true nature of his relationship to his colleagues and the outside world – or find some way to interpret the rules so that he could continue claiming? Well, he went for the latter option: and now he is facing the consequences of that decision.

But it’s still far from clear that his interpretation of the rules was invalid, let alone that he deliberately, even criminally, flouted them. If the rules have loopholes or are ambiguous, blame the people who wrote the rules.

In short, this isn’t a story of “snouts in the trough” or financial greed. This is a story of human complexity, of an intelligent but clearly very private man making what turn out to have been spectacularly counterproductive decisions to preserve a secret that surely didn’t need to be kept secret any more (as Tony Grew points out in his utterly superb, must-read post on the subject).

I don’t care for David Laws’s policies or his enthusiasm for cuts with barely any apparent recognition of the human consequences. But I certainly don’t want to see him become the victim of yet another self-righteous, media-driven, Twitter-fuelled, Girardian public lynching.

So I hope he survives this; I hope he can (as Tony Grew puts it) “step out into that new sunshine” created by the pro-gay policies of Tony Blair and New Labour and “escape his former life of concealment” – and I hope that it makes him a better, more human, politician. Because in the end that will benefit all of us, given the influence that will be wielded by him (or whoever holds his office) over the next year or two.

Update: regrettably (but perhaps inevitably), David Laws has now resigned. Here is his resignation letter. It seems to me to show real integrity – as well as real pain and anguish.

The cost of “free schools”

The government’s flagship education policy is the creation of so-called “free schools”, and the first steps to implementing this have been taken by the announcement that all schools are to be invited to become “academies”, removed from local education authority (LEA) control.

It’s claimed that “freeing” schools will raise standards and give parents more choice. My view is that anyone who thinks that has clearly not experienced the secondary school admissions process: a process which is not about parents choosing schools, but about schools choosing children, with some parents spending literally years in anxiety and fear about what might happen if their children end up on the losing side in our divisive and unequal educational system.

So that’s one reason why I’m sceptical about “free schools”. But another reason is that “freeing” schools from LEA control is really about centralising control in the hands of the Department for Education – as both Simon Jenkins and Matthew Taylor pointed out in two excellent articles yesterday.

Simon Jenkins points out that education secretaries and prime ministers have been singing this song for over two decades now, to little effect. The only way in which Gove’s scheme can succeed is for him to “push the nuclear button and give [schools] control over their admissions”. Jenkins continues:

[T]he one really creditable effort of British education since the war has been the battle for some equality of opportunity within the state education sector, even if in big cities it has not always worked. If Cameron and Gove really mean to reverse this, to revert to 11-plus selection and educational segregation, they had better say so, and face the political music.

In the absence of this (almost inevitably coalition-destroying) course of action, it is likely that few schools will be keen to “free” themselves from the “support in staffing and admissions” provided by LEAs. The undermining of LEAs is just another example of the “dreary abuse of local democracy” that has driven the centralisation of the British state since 1979.

Matthew Taylor, coming from a somewhat different political perspective from Simon Jenkins, describes his own (at times reluctant) involvement in the formation of Labour’s academy schools policy in the last decade. The original idea of the academies was to increase capital expenditure in deprived areas. By contrast:

The redistribution element has gone, indeed it must be most likely that it will be more privileged schools and sets of parents who take up the new freedoms and funding streams.

Second, rather than putting grit in the oyster of the local schools system the policy is now to smash the oyster entirely.

Schools already have more freedom than is often recognised, Taylor argues. Conversely, “local authorities can play a vital role in addressing problems in schools that are not succeeding or in danger of getting into trouble”, where volunteer governors may struggle (for example, in getting rid of an incompetent headteacher).

The question of failing schools is critical to this. As Taylor observes:

Michael Gove wants an open market in schooling, but markets only succeed if businesses are regularly allowed to fail. Children only have one education so we can’t be as relaxed about failure in schools as we might be about failure in the high street.

There is absolutely no question that the combination of encouraging all manner of new entrants into school governance along with residualising the local authority role will lead to many more school failures (this is not scaremongering, it is the logical consequence of the policy).

How will the coalition deal with this? In the absence of an LEA, who will step in where governors and headteachers are unable to address problems effectively? Taylor’s “hunch” is that:

any solution will see central government effectively taking over the oversight currently vested in councils.

So the likely result of these reforms will not be “freedom”, but a growing divide between “good” and “failing” schools, and an increase in central government control of education to fill the vacuum left by yet another erosion of local democracy.

The two liberalisms

Interesting post by Stuart White at Next Left on the coming battle for liberalism.

Clark argues that the Conservative/Liberal coalition gives “Orange Book” Liberals like David Laws and Nick Clegg an opportunity to reposition the Liberal Democrats as a party of the centre-right rather than of the centre-left. The Orange Bookers’ aim:

…has always been to reassert the credentials of ‘economic liberalism’ against ‘social liberalism’ – without, they would say, wishing to deny the truths of social liberalism. In essence, this means: a greater willingness to use markets and to tolerate their outcomes.

Clark goes on to suggest that what this highlights is a distinction between two types of liberalism: the “economic” liberalism of the Orange Bookers vs the “egalitarian” liberalism of those who follow in the footsteps of liberal political philosophers such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Clark writes:

Reading someone like David Laws, for example, there is at times a clear sense that the free market produces a distribution of income and wealth which is a kind of natural or moral baseline. It is departures from the baseline that have to be justified.

Laws and other Orange Bookers are of course not libertarians, so they are prepared to allow that some departures – some tax-transfers/tax-service arrangements – can be justified. [...] But the presumption, for Laws, is clearly for “leaving money in people’s pockets”.

In contrast, for egalitarian liberals:

the ‘free market’ is simply one possible “basic structure” for society along with an indefinite range of other possibilities. It has no morally privileged position. So how do we choose which “basic structure” to have? Their answer is that we try to identify principles of social justice and then design a basic structure – including, if necessary, appropriate tax-transfer arrangements – to achieve justice so understood.

On this view, taxation and “redistribution” are not invasions into people’s pockets, a taking of what is presumptively already, primevally “theirs”. Tax-transfers are a way of ensuring that people do not pocket, through the market, more (or less) than they are genuinely entitled to. Tax-transfer schemes define entitlement; they do not invade it.

To put it another way:

one might say that for these liberal thinkers, it is not the free market that is the appropriate, morally relevant baseline, but equality: it is movement away from equality that has to be justified, not movement away from a free market distribution.

That, incidentally, is the big difficulty I have with classical liberalism (and with its more rough-spoken offspring, libertarianism): the refusal to acknowledge that existing economic structures reflect historical and embedded injustices which only worsen to the extent that they are not actively redressed.

Clark cites the Child Trust Fund as an example of how the two liberalisms differ: for an egalitarian liberal, the CTF is a means of redressing the perceived injustice of some children starting life with inherited capital and some without; for a classical liberal it is “just another government spending program that has been arbitrarily tacked on to the market economy”.

Clark concludes that liberalism of “the egalitarian, Rawlsian kind” has been “driven to the margins of British politics”. With the Liberal Democrats now firmly under the control of the Orange Bookers, and Labour’s liberal credentials badly damaged by its record on civil liberties and state encroachment over the past decade, “no mainstream party now speaks for liberalism in this sense”.

I hope that, in opposition, Labour’s egalitarian liberals – of which I’d tentatively identify myself as one, despite not really getting on with Rawls – will indeed “take on their party’s authoritarians and anti-pluralists”. The omens for the short term are not good, with leadership front-runner David Miliband keen to justify the Labour government’s policies on many civil liberty issues. (See this recent tweet from Miliband, and my exasperated response.)

However, as I’ve observed before, opposition does tend to make parties more liberal, just as government tends to make them more authoritarian. So there are reasons to hope that Labour may once again become a comfortable place for “egalitarian liberals” to stand, and to work with others of similar instincts but differing (or no) political affiliation.

The five questions

I’d forgotten these until I saw them quoted in his Wiki entry: Tony Benn’s five questions we should ask any powerful person:

• What power have you got?
• Where did you get it from?
• In whose interests do you use it?
• To whom are you accountable?
• How do we get rid of you?

(src)

Permissions, powers and “non-threatening” liberties

The current talk of civil liberties called to mind the following remark from Jean-Claude Milner, quoted by Slavoj Žižek in his book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.

Žižek observes how the establishment co-opted and neutralised “all threatening consequences” of the 1968 uprisings, granting new rights to people but “without actually giving them any power”, and then quotes Milner as follows:

Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission … A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power, at the expense of another power. A permission doesn’t diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn’t augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes his life easier, which is not nothing.

Hence “the right to divorce, abortion, gay marriage and so on” are “permissions masked as rights” that “do not change in any way the distribution of powers”.

Milner continues by observing that “the spirit of ’68″ has ended up in a depoliticised, individualist, consumer-capitalist lifestyle on the one hand, and in nihilist violence among the dispossessed of the Paris slums on the other. He concludes:

Do not talk to me anymore about permissions, control, equality; I only know force. Here is my question: in the face of the reconciliation of the notables and the solidarity of the strongest, how to make it that the weak will have powers?

Well, now we have our own “reconciliation of the notables and solidarity of the strongest”, in the shape of the Conservative/Liberal coalition. And the difficulty I have is not with the coalition’s civil liberties proposals themselves, but with some of the more adulatory coverage of them (such as this item on BoingBoing yesterday).

What is being missed is that these proposals, while welcome, do not cover any areas of civil liberty that might seriously threaten the interests and power of the state. The vast array of anti-terrorism legislation from the past few years remains in place, with nothing more than a promise to “introduce safeguards against [its] misuse”. The right to silence will not be restored.

The Human Rights Act – probably the most important piece of civil liberties legislation passed in the last half-century or more, and one of the most important checks on state power – remains under threat from a Tory party that seems intensely resentful of the idea that people might enjoy human rights by virtue of being human, rather than being “British”, “responsible”, “law-abiding” and so on.

Above all, for “the weak” of which Milner speaks any gains in civil liberties will be more than offset by the loss of practical liberty that comes from losing one’s job, losing access to essential services, lacking decent and affordable housing, and having to bear a disproportionate share of tax rises.

Let’s celebrate the abolition of ID cards and other measures, yes. But let’s not get carried away. It is the most “non-threatening” liberties that are being restored to us, and I’m deeply sceptical that we will see any significant shift in real power away from a centralising state.

Big themes in the small print

So I had a flick through the coalition agreement (PDF), and my immediate tweeted reactions as I read it are set out at the end of this post, after the fold.

As I’ve said before, it’s not all bad (see my tweets for some examples). However, a couple of thoughts come to mind.

First, an awful lot of the language is still very general. Implementation will be everything. Example: under “Transport” we are told that “We are committed to fair pricing for rail travel”. Sounds good, you think. Except Philip Hammond has already indicated the “RPI + 1%” formula for permanent year-on-year fare increases remains in place (and as someone who has used the same daily train journey for nine years, I can tell you: it all adds up). Now multiply that by every reassuring-sounding-but-vague statement in the coalition agreement.

Second, it’s not about adding up “good things” and “bad things” and seeing if there’s more of one than the other. What will shape this government and form the political reality of the next five years are not this or that better or worse proposal, but a small number of themes which occupy relatively little space in the agreement while having a major impact on people’s lives and on the future direction of politics.

Here are three themes which I think will come to play a major part in the story of this government.

1. Cuts

This is the obvious one, of course. Quite apart from the central government cuts which we know are coming (deeper, faster and harder than those proposed by Labour), local government faces a council tax freeze of up to two years. This will have a devastating effect on “non-essential” council services such as libraries.

In addition, the “general power of competence” for councils will enable Tory councils to cut back their spending even further in the name of “EasyJet-style” services (though perhaps more “Ryanair” in the execution…?)

Another area to watch for is who ends up paying for deficit reduction. The poor and low earners will suffer more than others from cuts to services and cuts to benefits. But they will also suffer proportionately more than better-off people from increases to VAT. Already low earners pay a higher proportion of their income in tax than high earners: I suspect that differential will increase rather than decrease over this parliament.

2. Privatisation

The coalition’s plans for the NHS will “give every patient the power to choose any healthcare provider that meets NHS standards, within NHS prices”. This is a step towards what many Tory rightwingers have been advocating for some time: that the NHS becomes a standards-setting and service-procurement body, with the actual healthcare services carried out increasingly by commercial (sorry, “independent”) concerns.

On the same theme of backdoor privatisation, plans to allow encourage public sector workers to form “employee-owned co-operatives” could be music to this Co-operative party member’s heart. However, the agreement does not indicate how those co-operatives will be protected from commercial competition under public sector procurement rules: they will simply be allowed to “bid to take over” services.

Even if employee cooperatives are given the initial outsourcing contracts without competition, on renewal (as I’ve pointed out before) they would face competition from private providers. You may think this is a good thing: but in that case be open about it rather than spinning it as “empowering public sector workers to become their own boss”. The effect – intentional or otherwise – is more likely to be to break the power of public sector unions before delivering the “empowered” employee-owners back into the hands of private providers.

3. Tyranny of the majority, redux

I suspect that what may end up discrediting proportional representation and coalition government will not be the negotiations that followed the election (remember those? bet you won’t in a year’s time), but the spectacle of how a government behaves when it believes it represents a substantial majority of voters, as well as having a majority of seats.

This can be seen in particular with proposals to pack the Lords with Tory and Lib Dem peers so as be “reflective of the share of the vote” at the last election. Among the many other reasons to object to this, creating 100 to 200 new peers makes a mockery of the claim that reducing the number of MPs by 150 is a bid to “reduce the cost of politics” – rather than a power-grab by the executive at the expense of the Commons.

The same casual arrogance towards the constitution can also be seen in the proposal for five-year fixed parliamentary terms (why not four years? why 55% for a dissolution? and above all, why no consultation on such a significant constitutional change?). Cameron’s dismissive treatment of his backbenchers (as seen in the effective dissolution of the 1922 committee) is surely encouraged by his awareness that the coalition’s 80-seat majority can weather significant rebellions from both left and right – and that a compliant Lords will then rubber-stamp Commons decisions.

Conclusion

So, there are three areas which I predict will come to have a far greater prominence in political discourse than may appear to be the case now. At the very least, these are three areas in which we need to be fully on the alert.

The Spirit Level: why inequality matters

As I mentioned in a previous post (and also here), I hope that, whoever becomes leader, Labour will start to take more seriously the issue of inequality.

Even New Labour never claimed that inequality was a good thing. However, Labour in government preferred to focus on issues of poverty and social exclusion rather than inequality as such, and the assumption seemed to be that inequality didn’t really matter provided that those further down the income ladder received proper help.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level challenges this assumption, by arguing (on the basis of vast amounts of international data) that it is inequality, not poverty or average income levels, that lies behind most social problems in “developed” nations. Their data and arguments can be found on the website of the Equality Trust, including slides showing key charts from The Spirit Level.

The essence of their argument can be captured in just two of those slides, the first showing how health and social problems are associated with inequality in developed countries:

However, those same social problems are not related to average levels of income in those countries:

As set out in their book, and as summarised in the other slides, a relationship with inequality is found (to a greater or lesser degree) in relation to each of the social problems contained within the overall measure used in the above charts. (And yes, before anyone says it: they do address issues such as correlation and causation.)

To give just one example: the relationship between inequality and health, as shown by life expectancy between and within societies:

What the second graph in the above slide shows, the authors argue, is that inequality affects everyone in society, not just those at the bottom. At almost every point in the income scale, statistically you will tend to be healthier than those below you and less healthy than those above you.

This is only a very brief summary of The Spirit Level‘s argument – and those of you still muttering about “correlation” and “causation” are referred to the book, or at least the Equality Trust’s evidence section and FAQs – but it helps demonstrate the essence of Wilkinson and Pickett’s central claim: that inequality matters, matters perhaps more than any other factor, and that it matters to everyone, not just the poorest.

In the posts that follow I propose to look at a couple of questions which flow out of this: first, what is the UK’s current record on inequality, and second, how is that inequality has these negative effects across such a range of social issues?

Seal clubbing and civil liberties

I am indebted to Darrell Goodliff for introducing me to the delightful expression “seal clubbing”, which he defines in this tweet:

Pledge not to stuff the House of Lords means nothing. It’s ‘seal clubbing’, i.e., something a politician would never say they were doing but may still do.

The coalition’s proposals for political reform (as outlined in Nick Clegg’s speech today) contain a number of examples of this – innocuous-sounding qualifications that provide ample scope for ministers later to claim that what they are doing in no way goes against the pledges made earlier in the government’s life:

• “We won’t hold your internet and email records when there is just no reason to do so“
• “CCTV will be properly regulated, as will the DNA database…”
• “This will be a government that is proud when British citizens stand up against illegitimate advances of the state”
• “So, we’ll get rid of the unnecessary laws, and once they’re gone, they won’t come back”
• “We will introduce a mechanism to block pointless new criminal offences”

Don’t get me wrong. My aim here is not to take cynical potshots (well, not entirely…). All politicians engage in “seal clubbing” to some extent, and I’m not saying the coalition is any worse than any other government in doing so. (In any event, I solemnly pledge never to take cynical potshots at the other side without good reason. See how easy this is? )

It should also be acknowledged that the coalition’s proposals include a number of concrete, unqualified measures that I thoroughly applaud: no ID card scheme, no national identity register, no second generation biometric passports, removing limits on peaceful protest, reviewing the libel laws and so on. In many cases reversing measures that no Labour government should ever have countenanced introducing.

(Though as an aside: no taking of children’s fingerprints without parental consent? It’s not clear to me why schools should be taking students’ fingerprints even with parental consent. Why should children’s civil liberties be at the mercy of their parents?)

My point is just that what is being proposed already includes some potentially crucial qualifications, so civil libertarians shouldn’t drop their guard just yet – especially while the future of the Human Rights Act remains unclear, opponents of increasing police powers (by restoring the power for police to charge suspects) are already being labelled as “the lawyer lobby” (Blair, Blunkett and Straw were always fond of dismissing concerns over civil liberties as “lawyerly”), and all the coalition has promised in relation to the reams of anti-terrorism legislation passed in recent years is “safeguards against misuse”.

“Rebuilding and energising” Labour

I obviously have this effect on people. No sooner do I start praising Jon Cruddas than he rules himself out of contention for the Labour leadership.

This is a great pity in many ways, especially if it encourages Labour to make the serious error of rushing into electing a new leader rather than taking time to assess the candidates properly (and it’ll help to have some who aren’t called Miliband!) and think about the direction Labour now has to take.

But I do respect Cruddas’s stated reasons for standing aside. The media have been misquoting him as describing the leadership as a “bauble”, when in fact what he says is he doesn’t want to treat it as a bauble, which would be the case if he went for it for its own sake. Instead, he writes:

I would like to be involved in the debate about the future direction of the party and how we reconnect with our lost voters. But I cannot enter a leadership election just to contribute to a debate; to go into this must be on the basis of running to win and hand on heart I do not want to be leader of the Labour party or subsequently prime minister. These require certain qualities I do not possess.

So, it’s disappointing that Cruddas isn’t standing, but he does seem uniquely placed to contribute to the renewal of Labour, both in terms of its policies and values, and in rebuilding it as a practical political organisation. As Cruddas writes:

Refocusing the party machine, turning the party outwards to the communities we seek to represent, rebuilding our internal democracy and ending the stranglehold of unelected officials are urgent and immediate tasks.

And on the policy side, he is surely right that the priorities will be:

• finding an approach to immigration that neither treats it as a neo-liberal “21st-century incomes policy” nor indulges in “ratcheted-up rhetoric” (certainly it would be good if the leadership candidates could avoid competing to sound “toughest” on immigration);
• introducing a living wage and improved employment conditions, especially for agency workers;
• tackling the housing crisis: not “the crisis of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, where one’s biggest problem is achieving a dream sale price”, but the crisis of “cramped living conditions where family life is undermined” and of “waiting lists that suck the hope from a young couple looking for stability” (and, it might be added, fuel resentment against immigrants perceived as competitors for scarce housing).

To that I think needs to be added an explicit commitment to increasing equality within our society. I hope to blog more on The Spirit Level, but so far it is absolutely convincing in its argument that a wide range of social problems – physical and mental health, crime, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and so on – have their roots specifically in inequality rather than just poverty. So it’s not enough just to deal with poverty – or the other issues outlined by Cruddas – while remaining “intensely relaxed about the filthy rich”.