| John Denham on public attitudes to inequality |
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Rt. Hon John Denham MP Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government 1 July 2009 CHECKED AGAINST DELIVERY Speech to Fabian Society Seminar There’s quite a common attitude historically of part of the left towards the people who elect the left into power - that we want them to elect us into power so we can tackle poverty, but we don’t much like what they tell us about their attitudes towards poverty. Part of what I want to argue this afternoon is that there has always been a tension, in a sense, between the desire of the left to tackle inequality and poverty, and popular attitudes to poverty and inequality. And that what to some extent this research highlights – in a very systematic way – is the nature of that tension. But also I think suggests that if we want to be effective (and no part of my argument today is that we shouldn’t be tackling poverty or inequality at all) – if we want to tackle it, we need to have a politics which can take into account the sort of attitudes that come across in that research. And that we won’t get too far by saying either ‘the people are wrong’ or that they would change their mind if only we explained things to them more patiently. Because I think that’s what reflected in the research here is a pretty deeply and pretty long-held set of attitudes about fairness. And about the view of fairness that is popularly held in the population as a whole. So although the research concentrated particularly on income inequality, it feeds into that wider discussion we need to have about what makes a society fair – what is it that makes people feel they get a fair reward for what they put in. And I think the way that we respond to the research and these issues is critical for the Labour Party now. We have been in power for twelve years, we can point to an enormous amount that we have achieved, whether it’s in investment in new opportunities through Sure Start, to the expansion of the NHS, to the improvement of tax credits, child tax credits, and efforts we have taken that have had a tangible difference, yet we are obviously still in a position where inequality is highly marked in our society, and where (as the research shows) we don’t necessarily have a public consensus for doing some of the things that could be proposed to do more about poverty and inequality. Getting this right seems to me to be crucial. What I think this and other similar research shows is that there is a popular sentiment that supports a tough, hard headed, but at the end of the day, compassionate version of fairness. It is not a society that wants to turn its back on those in great need, but one that also insists that effort should be rewarded, and that society should be fair to those who play by the rules. I personally think, from my own constituency experience as well as from this research, that this is a pretty ingrained set of fundamental attitudes in our society. When people usually say ‘it’s not fair’ it is usually because they believe that the proper balance of duties and rewards, of right and responsibilities, has been upset. What I think this also tells us though is that if we adopt a robust approach to fairness, it actually creates greater political and popular space to tackle disadvantage, as well as providing a sound guide to the types of policy which are likely to work. If you wanted to sum up some of this stuff, it’s that people do not make judgements about how fair things are by only looking at outcomes. They also care about how we actually get there. Now, people seem to be capable of generosity and altruism where they feel that those who benefit have played by the rules. And also – not so much from this research, but from others – there’s a case for helping those who, for whatever reason, cannot help themselves. In other words, where the system is distributing benefits demonstrably takes account of these rules of fairness that people hold in their heads. I think that we come to it politically by showing that the policies we put forward as a government are grounded in the concept of fairness that is widely held in the wider population – and that if we do that, we earn the right to do more for those who have the most problems, and we do that without jeopardising the principles that bind communities and society together. But I think there’s a few things now we need to say about this debate that come from research. I think we have got to accept that we perhaps have come to the end of that period of time where the purely needs based approach to fairness and inequality, which has dominated much left-liberal thinking since the 1960s, is the best way, and the best framework, to which we tackle these inequality issues. I think that the type of egalitarianism that defines fairness solely in terms of society’s response to those in greatest need, is simply out of step with the majority of popular sentiment. The group of people who sign up to a traditional egalitarian view of society (only 22% according to this research) tends to be older and more traditionally working class. In other words, a demographic that is actually shrinking in our society. And it doesn’t look as though it is big enough to build the sort of electoral coalition on which those traditional responses to poverty are going to be successful. So the first thing we’ve got to take from this is that we’ve got to stop believing that where we really want to be is in that traditional 1960s version of egalitarianism. And in our own heads understand where popular sentiment is taking us. It is not that I reject the idea of tackling poverty and inequality – far from it. The challenge to inequality and poverty is absolutely core to being the people who we are on the left. But I’m interested in what is going to be successful. Successful electorally, to enable us to do stuff. And successful in actually challenging those problems. And we’re going to be more successful, in my view, if we adopt a more nuanced view of fairness and equality. A couple of things then follow from that. If I think back to when my father was growing up in South Yorkshire in the 1920s and 1930s, they knew what was wrong with society. Basically, the railways on which his father worked were owned by private owners, and the mines in which everybody else round his street worked were owned by private owners, and the problem was the bosses. What you would have had very widely and for a long period of time was a common description which would have been shared not just across the left, but a large chunk of society, why our society is the way it is. What came across really strongly in this research is that there is no common story about why our society is unequal. People have varying levels of knowledge about how unequal it is, or the consequences of inequality. But no story about why it is the way that it is. What we see from this research is when people are forced to begin to think about why our society is the way it is, then attitudes begin to shift. When people were challenged in this research about rewards for carers, attitudes began to shift. If I’m honest and I look at us in power over twelve years, we have talked a lot about inequality – and we are quite rightly doing so at the moment with the Equalities Bill. We’ve talked a lot about our desire to do something about it. We probably haven’t, as a left, tried to construct a story that explains why our society is the way that it is. And that seems to me to lead to a political problem – that you are forever dealing with a symptom, and it is hard to relate the policies you put forward to the things that are causing the problem. And I think that is something we are going to need to deal with in the future, and it means not just looking at the outcome of inequality, but all of those issues including discrimination, including unfairness in the workplace, including issues of rights at work that may contribute, and the inequalities of power that may contribute to our society being the way it is. I can’t see, looking at this or other research, that without a coherent description of what is going on, we will ever get popular support for some of the measures that may enable us to tackle poverty and inequality. Two things stand out from the research. Firstly, most people think they are in the middle ground, economically and socially. They do not see themselves either as one of the poor or deprived, or as belonging in the ranks of the very well off. This raises real practical issues. If you think you are in this middle group, policies and language aimed at 'the poor' by definition exclude you. They intensify the sense that someone else is getting a better deal than you and your family. And if you in the middle, you are more likely to be concerned about whether 'the top' is doing better than you, than you are about the situation of those at 'the bottom' So our language needs to be inclusive; and to avoid defining - even inadvertently - the bottom against the middle. People in the middle - wherever they actually are - have an acute sense of others getting a fairer deal. So making the deal clear to them is essential. Secondly, people are reaching for a coherent story about the wealthy, why they are wealthy, and the extent to which it is justified that people are wealthy. We saw that attitudes changed as a result of the banking crisis, I think the research would have changed even more dramatically if it had taken place after the MPs expenses row. So we have to have that coherent story about the wealthy. But I think there’s a lot here to indicate that if we get this right there is potential for what we would all recognise as progressive policy. I thought it was interesting that the taper on the tax-benefit system constructed by focus groups in the research was almost identical to the new system of student financial support I introduced: a balance of most assistance going to those with lower incomes, but a strong element of providing something for those not in greatest need, but rewarding those who do the right thing by supporting their children to go to university. So there’s some evidence in this research that left to themselves, people come up with broadly progressive arguments. I think the final thing we need to say, because of that, is that to some extent in the past, when the left have heard the sort of views that come out in this research, we’ve often preferred to disengage rather than engage in those discussions. We’ve often preferred to say, ‘can we not introduce a policy that doesn’t involve engaging with the attitudes that people actually hold’. That I think is a mistake. And there’s some evidence in this report that if you actually engage people in the issues, you get results that many of us would find acceptable. I mention that in the context of the widely discussed (if somewhat misreported) initiative of the government this week to back the very big investment in social housing, with the ability to have more local discussion about allocation policy. Now my view is that we will get good and fair allocation policy, if we engage people in discussions about housing need. But ones that will also be popularly accepted and understood. We don’t get an acceptable outcome if we say ‘we’re not going to trust you with these types of decisions’. There are risks in this – but I think they are less than the risks in a government of the left saying ‘we won’t engage with people around these topics, and we won’t trust them to see what results they come up with.’ |
