Hattersley savages Labour on poverty

Lord Hattersley, a Labour peer, said there would always be people who could not face the challenges of the increasingly sophisticated modern world and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

New Labour seemed prepared to blame them for their poverty, and was making absolutely no provision for their protection and their welfare, he said.

He declared that, for the first time since the war, and perhaps for the first time this century, the Government of the day made a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. For thirty years we had been told unemployment was the result of job shortages. Now we were asked to believe it was the result of wilful indolence.

Lord Hattersley said he wished it were true, as US economist JK Galbraith had argued, that such a policy risked the deprived 15% rising up and destroying the communities which had neglected them. But, in fact, the disadvantaged minority had been hugely unsuccessful in pressing its claims on the rest of society.

In a speech delivered for him at a Welfare Reform conference in Stirling - due to his mother's serious illness - the former Labour right winger referred to himself as a socialist and read Tony Blair and his New Labour Ministers a withering lecture on the need to engage in a positive policy of redistribution of wealth if they wanted to achieve a fairer society.

He accused them of being obsessed about not raising tax, and claimed mobility had replaced equality as the basic object of Labour policy.

His speech cannot have been music to the Prime Minister's ears, but a party spokeswoman in London was careful not to make a personal attack on the rebellious peer. Instead, Millbank Tower issued a long list of New Labour's claimed achievements in tackling poverty and social exclusion.

The statement said: ''The Labour Government is starting to tackle the underlying causes of poverty. Our Green Paper on Welfare Reform spelt out very clearly the principles underlining our approach: work for those who can, security for those who can't.''

For example, the last Budget had put making work pay at the centre of Labour's attempts to tackle poverty borne out of unemployment and low pay. It had also placed families with children at the heart of the Government's strategy to tackle wider social inequalities, said the spokeswoman. She also cited the largest ever increase in Child Benefit, and new child care and tax credits.

Lord Hattersley's highly critical comments handed welcome am-munition to SNP leaders, who described his speech as ''a devastating attack'' on New Labour policies.

The irony was that Mr Blair had dragged New Labour so far to the right the former right winger was now regarded by the London leadership as a left winger, they claimed.

The SNP said the former deputy leader had spoken for the majority of Labour activists and voters in Scotland who were sickened by such policies as imposing tuition fees and cutting public services.

In his speech, Lord Hattersley referred to an analogy of tadpoles and frogs used by 1930's philosopher RH Tawney to describe a society where some were abandoned at the bottom. The Government, and in particular the Prime Minister, laboured under the heroic illusion that every tadpole which tried could turn itself into a frog, he claimed.

He said the Chancellor promised to help those ''who are willing to work'' and the whole tax and social security system was geared to the same principle. The Government was now apparently

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considering replacing housing benefit with a tax concession for working low income families.

Once again, benefit was being concentrated on men and women with jobs, said Lord Hattersley in his speech to the conference organised by the National Local Government Forum Against Poverty.

He added: ''But we know that in the global economy full employment is impossible. Ten or 15% of the working population will be out of work.

''It seems they are increasingly to be denied help. It is as if the Government had decided to create a better life for three quarters of the population, but believes that to achieve that aim, it must write off most of the rest.''

He said: ''It is not simply the Government's tax obsession which prevents the Government from following the necessary strategy. The crucial Ministers really believe that there is a spirit within us all which, given the opportunity, will enable even the most disadvantaged child to pull itself up by its bootstraps. The Government is genuinely convinced that all it has to do is provide the opportunity.''

Ministers did not realise that, because of the nature of society, some individuals were incapable of taking advantage of the opportunities that New Labour honestly wanted to create.

It seemed self evident that children from families which lived below the poverty line, who spoke no English at home and had no tradition of domestic conversation - even less of reading - were likely to do worse at school than their contemporaries who came from the prosperous middle classes.

The moral question was whether we could agree with those in New Labour who urged that the best we could achieve was improved prospects for a majority of our citizens and the consignment of the rest to a life of permanent poverty - the grinding circle of deprivation for 15% of the population and ever increasing prospects for the rest.

Lord Hattersley said he had reached the ''sentimental conclusion'' that some of us had to go on arguing for a more equal society simply because it was right. He promised to do so.