The poverty of New Labour

In fact, the programme, which the Government now implements, is certainly coherent and is, in its way, a philosophy. Charles Leadbeater set out the abiding theme at the seminar. ''We believe passionately in self-help, self-reliance and self-improvement. We want a society which promotes industry, initiative and endeavour. The Third Way is the politics of aspiration.''

Three questions immediately arise. Who is opposed to those objectives? Is there the slightest philosophic value - as distinct from public relations advantages - in promoting such vacuous generalities? And why, with so many vacuities to choose from, was ''the politics of aspiration'' chosen as the cliche of the year?

The answer to all three questions is that Mr Leadbeater's definition has a subtext. For the first time since the war - indeed, perhaps for the first time this century - the Government of the day makes a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

Samuel Smiles has become the patron saint of New Labour. Social and economic policy is based on helping those who help themselves. Mobility has replaced equality as the basic object of Labour policy. The explicit goal is to create a meritocracy in which - as Samuel Smiles would have put it - there is ''the chance to rise''.

Like all socialists, I am in favour of increasing overall levels of prosperity and of encouraging what I believe to be the natural desire for improvement. Like all sensible people, I realise that the achievement of that goal depends on dozens of different factors. The encouragement of personal initiative is certainly one. The organisation of a vibrant market economy is another. So is Government intervention in the economy to ensure a proper balance between private profit and public needs.

But when we create the conditions for individual improvement and corporate expansion, there will still be a proportion of the population who are left behind. That is not a risk, it is a logical certainty.

Providing ladders up which the determined and industrious can struggle out of poverty, providing escape routes away from deprivation and all the other cliches of increased opportunity have one inescapable implication. Whilst a percentage - perhaps even a majority - climb out or escape from disadvantage, very many of their fellow citizens are left behind.

Intelligent tadpoles reconcile themselves to the inconvenience of their position by reflecting that though most of them will live to be tadpoles and nothing more, the more fortunate of the species will one day shed their tails, distend their mouths and stomachs, hop nimbly onto dry land and croak addresses to their former friends on the virtues by means of which tadpoles of character and capacity can rise to be frogs.

The Government is doing its best to convince tadpoles that only sloth prevents them from becoming frogs. The Chancellor of the Exchequer explicitly promises help to ''those who are willing to work''. The whole tax and social security system is geared to the same principle. According to press reports, Gordon Brown is now considering replacing housing benefit with a tax concession for working, low-income families.

Once again the benefit will be concentrated on men and women with jobs. But we know that, in the global economy, full employment is impossible. Ten or fifteen per cent of the working population will be out of work. It seems that they are increasingly to be denied help. It is as if the Government has 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.

When the White Paper on English education was published, David Blunkett, after accurately analysing the causes of truancy, set out a scheme for driving children back to school which was encapsulated in the phrase, ''How to help truants help themselves''. In fact, we all know that getting children off the streets and back into the classrooms does not involve ''a cultural change'' which reawakens the spirit of enterprise within them.

It requires us to end their alienation from a society of which school is, to them, a part - a society of the well-to-do, the prosperous and the successful. Since I know this Government is hugely susceptible to the way in which President Clinton won the presidency of the United States, perhaps I can adopt his election slogan as the true indication of what lies at the heart of all our social problems, ''It's poverty, stupid!''

I am absolutely in favour of what the Government calls ''welfare to work''. Work ennobles as well as enriches.

But in a modern global economy, a percentage of the population will not be capable of facing the daunting challenge of the sophisticated modern world. Some of the reasons will be economic - inadequate demand for their particular skills. Others will be social - the failure of society to prepare them for new challenges. A large number will be psychological - the by-product of the environment in which they are brought up. But, into the foreseeable future, there will be a high proportion of failures.

We may argue about whether they have failed the system or the system has failed them, but failures they will certainly be. The Government is making absolutely no provision for their protection and their welfare. Indeed, it seems to blame them for their poverty. For 30 years we were told that unemployment was the result of job shortages. Now we are asked to believe that it is the result of wilful indolence.

That is, in part, because the Government in general and the Prime Minister in particular labour under a heroic illusion - namely that every tadpole who tries can turn him or herself into a frog. New Labour thinking rejects what it calls determinism - the classic socialist contention that, if we change the nature of society, we change the character of the citizens which it produces.

It seems to me self-evident that children from families which live below the poverty line, who speak no English at home and have no tradition of domestic conversation, even less of reading, are likely to do worse at school than their contemporaries who come from the prosperous middle classes.

And it is equally obvious that they will be the casualties of a global economy which is increasingly built on information technology. Yet Government policy persists in the belief that ''deprivation is no excuse for failure''. It is not an excuse, but it is a reason. Children who go hungry to school are disinclined to learn.

It is easy to say that the Government will not accept the economic causes of our social problems for venal political reasons. Certainly, to say that poverty must immediately be alleviated is to accept that public expenditure increases are only possible for a Government which raises income tax rates.

However, 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 own bootstraps. The Government is genuinely convinced that all it has to do is provide the opportunity. It does not realise that, because of the nature of society, some individuals are incapable of taking advantage of the opportunities that New Labour honestly wants to create.

Increasingly as I watch Government performance I think that its errors are intellectual rather than ideological. It totally misunderstands what can be achieved by ''equality of opportunity'' - an essentially competitive concept. There cannot be equality of opportunity in a society which is hideously divided by class and rank. Nor can there be equality of opportunity in an unregulated market. The basic rule of economics - Marshall not Marx - is that those who go into the market with most, come out of the market with even more. If the Government really wants to achieve any of its generalised objectives - ''fairness'' being the obvious example - it has to engage in a positive policy of redistribution which generates practical equality.

The moral question that faces us all is whether we should agree with those proponents of New Labour who argue that the best we can achieve is 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. Kenneth Galbraith would argue that to adopt such a policy is to risk the whole disintegration of society, for the deprived 15% will one day rise up and destroy communities which have neglected them. The Culture of Contentment's apotheosis is The Bonfire of the Vanities. I wish that Kenneth Galbraith - who I admire beyond all other philosophers - was right. But the truth is that the disadvantaged minority has been hugely unsuccessful in pressing its claims on the rest of society.

When, in the House of Commons, I was accused of breeding the politics of envy, I used to wish - sometimes out loud - that the British poor were as envious as they are entitled to be. In fact, they have always accepted their lot with infuriating resignation. My old constituents in central Birmingham tolerated conditions which, were Kenneth Galbraith right, would have incited them to burn down Joseph Chamberlain's town hall 30 years ago. What is more, the prosperous classes have a sophisticated way of cooling poverty's passions. It is partly the frog and tadpole argument - put crudely, you have only yourself to blame. Every grocer's daughter from Grantham could become Prime Minister were she as determined and intelligent as Margaret Thatcher.