Labour needs to cast its mind back to what ‘core values’ really mean

By Peter Barnard

During the Second World War, Lord Beveridge produced his famous report which, I hope, will be recorded for all time in the history of this green and pleasant land of ours.

Lord Beveridge identified ‘five giants’ that needed to be conquered:

* Want (= an adequate income, for all who want to work)

* Ignorance (= an educated nation)

* Disease (= access to health care)

* Squalor (= adequate housing)

* Idleness (= gainful employment)

In other words, Lord Beveridge addressed the ‘condition of the people’ and his ‘five giants’ equate to what we call our ‘core values.’

The ‘condition of the people’ is ever with us and the Labour Party should always have this in mind whenever a policy is proposed. Indeed, the ‘condition of the people’ should form the heart and soul of any Labour policy proposals. It also presents a test (‘before and after’) for the success of any Labour government, whether 1945/51, 1964/70, 1974/79 or 1997 to the present.

It appears to me that what exercises the minds of many contributors to this website is the performance of Labour since 1997. I cannot address all ‘five giants’ in one posting, and I’ll take them one by one over the next few weeks. Having said which, I find it difficult to separate ‘Want’ (an adequate income) from ‘Idleness’ (gainful employment), and my comments follow.

I’m afraid that I find Labour deficient on ‘an adequate income, for all who want to work.’ The ‘Gini coefficient’ – a measure of inequality in incomes – actually increased by three percentage points between 1996/97 and 2007/08 (an increase in the coefficient indicates an increase in inequality). Now, if Labour stands for an increasing inequality of incomes, then present-day Labour (to quote Ian Hislop) is a banana. An equitable distribution of income is essential to a society ‘at ease with itself’, to quote John Major.

Secondly, Labour since 1997 has not developed an economy in which ‘all those who want to work are able to work.’ At best, in 2004/05, the unemployment rate stood at 4.7 per cent. This is not a sign of a healthy economy. A healthy economy provides work for all.

Labour policy needs to address, first and foremost (i) how to achieve full employment and (ii) how to achieve an equitable distribution of income such that ‘the man on the top deck of the Clapham omnibus’ can pay his way fairly in life.

Following this discovery (and the application thereof), I won’t guarantee that all problems will evaporate, but, I guarantee, there’ll be a lot less of them.