Читать книгу The Future of Politics - Charles Kennedy - Страница 8

I have repeatedly stated that Liberal Democrats do not and will not inherit the vacant lot to the left of New Labour. Such a strategy would be tantamount to our party embarking on the search for a political cul-de-sac, but, at the same time, I believe that our party is the only party truly concerned with social justice, and we will fight the next election on that basis.

This is not a new stance for the party. Nor is it something I have chosen because it is fashionable – or unfashionable, for that matter. Far from it: Liberals and Social Democrats have a long tradition of fighting the war against social inequality. Some of the key thinkers of twentieth-century politics, who had a decisive impact on the shape of millions of people’s lives, were Liberals. William Beveridge produced the proposals for social security that became the bedrock of the post-war welfare state, and John Maynard Keynes was the economic guru of much of the post-war economic settlement. Before them, turn-of-the-century New Liberals such as L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson were among the first people in Britain to make a persuasive case for a government role in fighting poverty. We are and must always be the definitive political movement of conscience and reform.

Hobhouse’s view that ‘the struggle for liberty is … a struggle for equality’, is the basis of liberal attitudes to social justice. For all to be free, argued Hobhouse, there had to be equal access to opportunities for education and employment, and only individuals together, acting through government, could ensure that happened. Progressive social reform has deep philosophical roots within the Liberal Democrats.

It also has deep roots in Labour history, but the current leadership seems to have forgotten this. As a result, active public enthusiasm for New Labour (as opposed to national opinion polls) is at an all-time low. The desultory turnout for the 1999 European elections clearly indicated the nation’s deep cynicism towards the political process. At a time when war in Kosovo had been raging for seventy days, less than a quarter of the population found European politics sufficiently relevant to leave their houses and vote.

People only pay attention to politicians when they are dealing with issues that immediately concern them. From my travels across the country, I know that inequality is an issue of great contemporary concern, but the present government has all but stopped trying to redress it. It feels it is doing enough, because it can always churn out figures that prove it is. When one of its own ministers, Peter Kilfoyle, resigned from office because he felt that Labour was not doing enough for the poor in his own Liverpool constituency, the response from the leadership was an embarrassed silence. There was much talk about regretting his departure, not so much about regretting what he said – or whether it was true.⁸

One practical measure in particular would make a radical and immediate improvement, and put issues of inequality at the centre of political debate. Just as the Budget dominates the national news once a year, so we need an annual Social Justice Audit of similar importance, which would examine the impact of all government policies that have any link with social inequalities. It would be published in full in the newspapers and be publicized to the hilt, and every year the government would be expected to show whether they had met the targets of the previous year. This would, combined with an audit of their environmental performance, and the traditional Budget, establish a ‘triple bottom line’. The government is already encouraging ethical companies to report upon these aspects of their yearly performance; maybe it should learn the lesson itself.

Such an audit would have to be genuinely independent of government, and carry significant weight behind its conclusions. A variety of bodies would be consulted in its creation, and a panel of respected independent figures would be established. It would include representatives of, for example, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Bank of England, the CBI, the BMA, the National Audit Office and the Audit Commission. Not all of these bodies are primarily associated with the cause of social justice, and so they would not be seen as having axes to grind, but they could all provide significant expertise at evaluating evidence produced by government departments. In addition, they would be supported by a permanent team of researchers, independent of any government department, whose job would be to examine the figures produced by government. With such support, finding any inaccuracies in government figures would not be difficult – as Liberal Democrat researchers regularly prove even without such support. This would be an enormous improvement upon the government’s present self-congratulatory Annual Report, an exercise which ranges from the anodyne to a brazen attempt at political propaganda at the taxpayers’ expense. Mercifully, nobody appears to pay much attention to it.

What would this audit look like in practice? It would begin with the announcement of Bills in Parliament. Take some of those put forward by the government in the final Queen’s Speech of the last century, November 1999. The audit would apply two key questions to them. First, how would different parts of the country, and the inequalities between them, be affected? Second, how would the inequalities between social groups be affected?

Measures such as the Care Standards Bill, intended to promote better care for the elderly, would have to include information on how those measures would affect people with different incomes and savings. If the Bill increased the access of people on low incomes to high quality care, then it would pass the Social Justice Audit. As the Bill presently stands, it would not pass, and nor would the Electronic Communications Bill, which does not consider how disadvantaged groups can take advantage of new technologies, nor how government can encourage them to participate.

The Social Justice Audit would be similarly scathing of government transport policy, which has not met its targets for traffic reduction, and has decreased spending on public transport. This is a social justice issue just as much as it is one of the environment, for car ownership is only possible for people above a certain level of income, and those below it have to rely on public transport. We need to subject every government policy to intense scrutiny if we are to have a more informed debate on the inequalities in Britain, which goes beyond mere questions of tax and benefits.

I do not pretend for one moment that a Social Justice Audit would solve all of Britain’s social problems, but, given sufficient priority by government, it could change the nature of our political discourse, so that politicians would be forced to be clear about how they will tackle definite inequalities, and be held accountable when they don’t deliver. If a Bill is judged to have failed, it might be automatically rescheduled for reworking in Parliament. The Audit would also highlight the extent to which social justice is affected by a wide range of policies – a fact often overlooked. For example, in terms of the environment, poorer areas suffer most from pollution.

Refocusing politics and reshaping our political language, so that politicians reconnect with the real concerns of millions of ordinary people, will have a tremendously positive impact on the quality of our democracy. It will give genuine meaning to politics, for people who at present feel that it has little to offer them. Otherwise we face a future in which 25 per cent election turnouts are seen as the norm, rather than a cause for concern. And we will continue to live in a Britain in which privilege, rather than ability, determines the achievements and the resultant quality of life.