By John Pilger
Today, 40% of all British children live in poverty. It is a breathtaking claim, yet the evidence was produced on World in Action two weeks ago by York University. Although this figure is probably the highest since modern research into poverty began, it ought not to come as a surprise.
Last July, official figures disclosed that one in three children lived below the poverty line and that, since 1979, the number had quadrupled. The trend was clear: while high unemployment persisted, more families would be dragged into penury. At least 14 million children and adults, a quarter of the population, are now impoverished, compared with 5 million (9%) when Margaret Thatcher was elected. A fifth of all of Europe's poor in the 1990s are Britons.
Moreover, the damage is not confined to a so-called "underclass", but runs wide and deep. As Richard Wilkinson's landmark research at Sussex University has shown, the decline in life expectancy among British men and women represents a social impoverishment affecting at least half the population.
"The more unemployment, the more homelessness, the more houses repossessed, the more poverty", he wrote, "the greater will be the sense of anxiety and insecurity among the population at large". If job opportunities, pension rights and health services are crumbling, people feel "there is further to fall and the risks of daily life are more worrying". Wilkinson traced this malaise to 1985, when the gap between rich and poor began to widen as the tax and benefit systems were manipulated to favour the well-off.
In considering these facts, delegates to Labour's conference might ask themselves why they are in Blackpool. If the answer is that they want, above all, to get rid of a culpable Conservative regime, then this is an understandable, if tenuous, reason. If, however, they wish to restore the modest, civilising premises upon which social democracy was built in Britain, then this is more difficult to justify â for stopping the destruction of British community life, of society itself, is no longer a Labour Party aim. There is no evidence to support the converse; and hot air will never do it.
Alex Salmond may have had his Scottish Nationalist axe to grind when he described the "Toryism of Tony Blair's Labour Party as being no different from that of John Major's", yet in doing so he was to become the first senior opposition figure to speak this truth out loud, although leading Tories have acknowledged it since John Smith's time.
To the right of the Tories
Indeed, Labour is now to the right of the Tories on a number of issues. The current Labour Briefing is probably correct when it predicts that, on public spending cuts, "Blair will succeed where Thatcher and Major failed. Under the guise of 'modernising' welfare, the social wage will be slashed."
Labour's anti-tax campaign had all the portents. Labour now says that it will not tax more than the Tories. This is the sum and limit of its vision. But what if the need is desperate, in schools and public services? Moving old money around can be a two card trick that leads invariably to cutting benefits. There is no suggestion that a Labour government would claw back the 23,000 million owed in corporation tax, or the 1600 million owed in VAT.
A level of poverty is sound monetarist policy, which is now shared by both Tory and Labour parties. The recent Guardian disclosure that Blair has secretly agreed with trade union leaders to scrap current target levels for a national minimum wage was not unexpected. That the "modernising" Labour leader should be caught doing traditional deals in back rooms says much about Labour's new "democracy".
On the signal workers' strike, Blair is to the right of the Daily Express, which has urged the government to pay up. On the health service, Labour is unlikely to repeal the NHS and Community Care Act, whose "reforms" are privatisation by another name. In education, the Tories' national curriculum will stay.
On law and order, Labour is vocally to the right of the Tories. (When Kenneth Clarke was home secretary, he complained that he "couldn't keep up with Blair".) "There is no bigger problem in Britain than crime and lawlessness", said the Labour leader in a disgraceful distortion of the root problem. Home Office figures show that burglaries rise and fall with unemployment; and probation figures show that 70% of young offenders are jobless.
Blair has given significant, if indirect, support to the Criminal justice Bill, the most repressive legislation ever put forward in modern Britain: by tabling amendments to it, he has conceded the bill's principle. On the issue of corruption in the judicial system and the police, which has kept innocent people in prison, he has made the kind of token noises that have no real value.
On Ireland, Labour is not so much to the right of the Tories, as behind them, always an echo. The same is true of most of Labour's pronouncements on the rest of the world. Indeed, who knows what Labour's foreign policy is? In a world in which the disparities of wealth grow wider and the majority of people are confronted by an imperialism known as the "global economy", Labour has nothing memorable or different to say.
Labour's "modernisers" argue that this is what people want, that without these "reforms" the party would not be electable. This has become Labour's mantra, to be intoned at those diminishing number of grassroots members who are brave enough to question Labour "reforms" and the myths that underpin them.
Myths
I recommend an authoritative new study, Labour's Last Chance? The 1992 Election and Beyond, based on the British Election Study and published by Dartmouth. Edited by Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice, the report demolishes some of the more potent Labour myths. It concludes that Labour's policies matter more to voters than the leader's image; that electoral pacts with the Liberal Democrats and tactical voting will not benefit Labour â had there been a pact in 1992, the Tories would have won 332 seats; that the Tory press did not make a difference to Labour's fortunes (and the majority of Sun voters did not vote Tory); and that John Smith's plans to raise taxes did not lose them the election.
What is clear is that the electorate simply did not trust Labour's ability to carry out its own policies. When the researchers questioned those who said they would vote Labour and failed to do so, they found no evidence that they were against higher taxes. "Rather they seemed to be people who had relatively little faith in Labour's ability to improve services like health and education."
Received wisdom among the "modernisers" is that the electorate has moved irretrievably to the right as a result of Thatcherism. The researchers found the opposite to be true. Although there was a shift to the right in the late 1970s, within a few years the pendulum had swung back so far that, by 1992, the electorate was more to the left on key issues than at any time since the 1974 election, when Labour won with one of its most radical platforms. This volatility of voters, which is the opposite of the media's view of unchanging conservatism, has been constantly misread by Labour.
While most polls were dramatically wrong in 1992, one survey that has been consistently right is Social Trends, which every year demonstrates a capacity to touch what Graham Greene called the "subterranean truth" of the nation. Over and over again it has demonstrated the distrust of the majority for the "market" ideology embraced by Labour. More than three-quarters of the population believes that profit is something that should be invested to the benefit of working people. Barely 3% believe that shareholders and managers should benefit.
A similar Guardian survey last year found that most of the British were now to the left of the mainstream parties. Clear majorities believe there is "one law for the rich and one for the poor"; that privatisation should be stopped; that there should be higher taxes and that it is more important to reduce unemployment than inflation.
Military
I spent almost a week at the House of Commons just before the summer recess, interviewing Labour MPs, including a former minister, past and present members of the shadow cabinet, and backbenchers. I am making a documentary about the arms trade, and the subject for discussion was a bloated defence budget and an attendant arms industry that is now the leading high-tech manufacturer in Britain, consuming almost half of all research and development funds.
As it was a Labour government that set up the Defence Sales Organisation, a sort of international arms brokerage, in 1966, it seemed reasonable to ask a clutch of prominent Labour MPs why their party actually supported the government in spending billions of pounds on Cold War "defence". The Eurofighter, for example, designed to match Soviet aircraft, will cost Britain at least 13 billion and probably double that. The National Audit Office has just discovered that 800 million has been "lost" in putting up huge sheds for Trident, which is more than the sum of the entire conventional forces cuts announced by Malcolm Rifkind in July.
If the Labour leadership was serious about reallocating all resources, it need look no further than the 20 billion-plus spent annually on defence, which could be cut to at least the average in Europe, releasing billions of pounds. Only the political will and imagination to explain this to the electorate are lacking.
I asked the Labour MPs what they thought Labour should do about giving Britain a genuine "peace dividend". Most were unwilling or afraid to challenge the assumptions that have kept the defence and arms industries protected from public scrutiny. Only one of them was prepared, on a point of principle, to analyse critically the distortions of the military economy and to regret his own party's role in setting up government arms sales. This was Michael Meacher.
When I asked Labour's defence spokesperson, David Clarke, to name the new "threat" that justified keeping Trident, he struggled at first, then came up with an unnamed country in Africa. Shortly afterwards, I spoke to the former Tory armed services minister, Archie Hamilton, who questioned whether new fighter aircraft were needed and if there had ever been a Russian threat. This Tory grandee, in effect, was to the left of Labour's man.
Abandoned
I filmed at the Larches council estate in Preston, Lancashire, which used to be a relatively prosperous place of skilled defence and related industry workers and their families.
Today, more than half the young people are unemployed or have never had a job. A group of the youngest played on strips of asbestos outside a bricked-up youth club, and they begged. "There are still flowers in the gardens", said a woman who shooed the young children from the asbestos. In the Larches Labour Club, two dozen pensioners sat in the warmth, able to afford only a few glasses of beer between them. It was a picture of middle England that Labour has all but abandoned.
For Labour to win the next election, it will need to record one of the biggest swings since 1945. The essential stupidity of the party's image-makers has been to embrace a stereotypical middle class, while ignoring the fact that the working class now includes both blue- and white-collar workers, making them a majority.
So what is Labour for? On the World in Action program, a little girl described how her mother, a single parent, went without food in order to feed her. On the Walden program in July, Tony Blair dutifully attacked single mothers while dutifully squirming as Walden signalled his approval. A party with nothing to say about an epidemic of poverty that affects up to half the nation's children is not even the social democratic party proposed by Labour's traditional right.
This truth may be painful for many, but they will know â by the time of the next election â that Labour has become a fraud. For Labour is no longer a great mass movement, not "modern" in any real sense, but a force of old-fashioned reaction that has declared society static and seeks to muffle the most tentative suggestion of democratic resistance, such as the signal workers' stand, the nurses', the firefighters' and the teachers'. They are Britain at its best and they deserve a political party to match.
[This article was first published in New Statesman & Society in the week before the Labour Party conference.]