This tweet quotes Kemi Badenoch MP, our trade secretary and a person even more desperate to lead the Tories than Suella Braverman. The video, made at the Covid inquiry last week, is illuminating, but the tweet says all you need to know about what she said:
Kemi Badenoch, "We don't have a cure for poverty. If we did, we would have done it already" #CovidInquiry pic.twitter.com/0dX9NsJ8tC
— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) November 24, 2023
This is a perfect example of the nonsense that the far-right say to support their cause, knowing that what they are saying is completely untrue.
Of course, we know how to tackle poverty. As a matter of fact, there is less poverty in the UK than once there was. As a result, unless you are wilfully blind, it is apparent that we do know how to tackle this issue.
The answers are relatively straightforward. Apart from paying decent benefits and appropriate pensions (neither of which happens in the UK at present) we also need to:
- Build affordable social housing in sufficient quantity that everybody might enjoy it.
- Ensure that essential public services, such as water, gas, electricity, telecoms and transport are affordably accessible to everyone.
- Guarantee free healthcare and social care from cradle to grave.
- Deliver high-quality education so that people can, if they wish, change their situations and are encouraged to do so.
- Have a policy of full employment at a living wage.
All of this is possible, and entirely affordable. All we need to do is:
- Have a genuinely progressive tax system of the sort that I describe in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024.
- Turn private savings into public capital in the way that I describe here.
- Have a government that makes the meeting of need its highest priority, rather than the servicing of the wants of the clients of the financial services industry the focus of its attention.
- Have a government that believes in a genuinely mixed economy, which has to be the basis of our future prosperity. The market-based dogma of the right, and the state-based dogma of the left, cannot solve the problems of poverty: only mixing the best can do that.
Such a government would also, necessarily, be focussed on delivering sustainability, but those now in poverty do not threaten that. The threat to our planet comes from the wealthy.
It is simply not true that we do not know how to eliminate poverty. We could achieve that goal. The reality is that Kemi Badenoch wants us to think that we cannot, because those who support her believe it would threaten them if we were to do so.
The choice is simple. Do we run the economy in the interests of those who are in need, or for the benefit of those who already have a great deal but want more? That is the political question that we need to answer now. To add piquancy, human life can only survive one of those choices. That should make deciding fairly easy. Unless you are Kemi Badenoch and the Labour Party, that is.
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Radical common sense!
‘Relative Poverty’ is the one you cannot eradicate?
You can make the term irrelevant
A report from Oxfam in 2018
https://money.com/billionaires-made-so-much-money-last-year-they-could-end-extreme-poverty-seven-times/
“The global economy created a record number of billionaires last year (2018), exacerbating inequality amid a weakening of workers’ rights and a corporate push to maximize shareholder returns, charity organization Oxfam International said in a new report.
The world now has 2,043 billionaires, after a new one emerged every two days in the past year, the nonprofit organization said in a report published Monday. The group of mostly men saw its wealth surge by $762 billion, which is enough money to end extreme poverty seven times over, according to Oxfam.
According to separate data compiled by Bloomberg, the top 500 billionaires’ net worth grew 24% to $5.38 trillion in 2017, while the world’s richest person, Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos, saw a gain of $33.7 billion.”
The paper, like a lot of work Oxfam does, is naive. But the point is a good one: poverty can be addressed, but not just by tackling billionaires. That is not nearly enough.
That paper was written before the pandemic, too. How many more millionaires are there?
Prem was on nottheasndrewmarrshow today, saying he was at a meeting of the Patriotic Millionaires recently and they are begging the government to tax them more.
I disagree with them on a wealth tax though: they cannot work.
https://leftfootforward.org/2023/11/group-of-uk-millionaires-project-tax-our-wealth-on-to-treasury-and-bank-of-england/
The problem is that the poor have little money compared to the rich.
The rich want even more money (even though it will make little difference to their lives – they just want it anyway).
So, to get more money, they have to take it from the poor. And they have to impoverish many people to make themselves a little bit weathier.
The end result, if we allow it, is a return to feudalism (but without noblesse oblige).
Perhaps feudalism worked (whatever that may mean) in the mediaeval past. But it can’t work in a modern industrial society. We have large factories, a good example being semiconductor fabs, costing circa $10billion. They need well educated and motivated workers. We won’t have those in a feudal society where a very few expropriate all the wealth. But we need such large cooperative endeavours to sustain modern society.
If the growing inequality continues it will eventually destroy society; modern society cannot function with huge inequality. So, eventually, the wealthy will destroy the very society they, and everyone else, depends on. They will have lots of money but nothing to eat.
Perhaps this is the modern meaning of the Midas myth, though perhaps this time the wealthy won’t be spared by Dionysus.
Excellent summary Richard. If only Labour could say the same …
Good edito in the Observer today:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/25/the-observer-view-on-the-magical-thinking-behind-jeremy-hunts-autumn-statement
It is the language of Badenoch that is arresting. Having a “cure” for poverty suggests that poverty is an illness (such as a virus, but one with no vaccine available and no known solution); but perhaps behind that heavily orchestrated phrasing, there a particular kind of illness intended to be sown in the reader’s mind; poverty as an illness of addiction, and therefore in some way self-inflicted, an avoidable harm to which blame can then be ascribed to the victim; perhaps even criminalised, but at least requiring no more action than ritual hand-wringing in consequence; that nothing either can be, or should be done, but cross over and pass it by on the other side of the street.
Badenoch and her ‘me-me’ generation have come to be inured to poverty’s manifestations. It is so mundane, my dear; it is not the business of government; Not Me Guv. Greed and Self is the business of Government; and you use Government as a means to keep Party in power exclusively, by bribing solely your voters with targeted tax cuts, hand-outs or dog-whistle legislation.
But I am old enough to remember that for my father’s generation (both Conservative or Labour – including the ‘Wets’ Thatcher hated), the world required a different perspective. They were the last generation to believe in post-war ‘progress’, or able to claim some of the blights of poverty were gone – like rickets, or people sleeping in doorways.
It is a commonplace of public health that poverty creates sickness. Yet, I saw the scourge of sleeping in doorways, which in my lifetime had been quite rare, first return; in London. This was what Thatcher brought us as the fresh fruits of Neoliberalism. It spread like a Thatcher plague. It is everywhere, It is with us still.
Badenoch passes on the other side of the street.
Good last line
During Covid Kemi Badenoch was Minister for Equalities. Given her assumptions, i am still trying to understand why.
In one exchange at the Covid Inquiry on contacting and communicating with minority populations, Badenoch focused on her own personal perspective as a minority through her international WhatsApp group as an illustration of the difficulty of government communicating with minorities. I found this revealing. It missed the more obvious and fundamental point that many poorer minorities may be identified and direct communication between Government and that community developed through the community’s own inner social connectivity (religious, cultural, health, educational institutions and activists/leaders as a base point), by starting from the basic postcode, upwards; rather than positing the hopeless prospect of engaging with numberless, unidentifiable communities of impenetrable encrypted Apps. It is usually sensible to begin by using the conduits that may actually function for both parties; but that requires long-term planning and resources to execute, and we know this Government had none, and prepared none; in spite of Pandemic warnings from Public Health, and the Cygnus Report, 2017. Apparently Badenoch’s main, refined and highly polished technique is to disguise a red herring as a salmon.
Badenoch is an elected politician; that was the only reason she was in her job. I found Badenoch’s testimony, which was as a Government minister and politician; not a functionary, statistician or scientist, but as someone representative of those with the final executive, political decisions produced from the technical work; and not for designing the technical methods used by professional advisors, to ensure such work finally produced effective, safe usable ends for the public; and instead I found her testimony to be skilfully over-designed principally to be exculpatory, or of a kind that finally landed in a void of executive responsibility for the real outcomes of Government.
It is well established in Public Health that poverty and deprivation are key factors in the development of problematic illness (including chronic illness) and sickness. If that doesn’t make those who suffer from poverty a prime problem in a pandemic requiring prime government focus and direct action.
I loved ‘Apparently Badenoch’s main, refined and highly polished technique is to disguise a red herring as a salmon.‘
…. I don’t know what does.
Mr Kent,
I was not unappreciative of your joke, or embracing division. Up to a point, I agree with you, but I confess my point was slightly different. I do not like FPTP, but allowing for everything; Governments are elected. Politicians are drawn, albeit skewed by self-promotion of the inappropriate, but nevertheless drawn from the electorate.
Allow me to reconstruct my point as a question. What lessons of life are learned by the children of sharp-elbowed families from the practice of misleading the education authorities, and depriving others of a place in a school?
I suggest that the lesson is, if you cannot succeed in your ambition be fair means; then cheat.
I look at the Britain we have built over the last forty years, and can only conclude that it is a lesson not just learned and established, but a roaring success; not least in politics. It is a myth that governments are at fault, but the electorate, somehow are never wrong. I give you Brexit.
John S Warren –
I think we are at risk of vigorously agreeing 😉
I quite take your point that breaking the rules sets a terrible precedent that can become embedded. That’s probably happening. I’d like it to stop.
Badenoch and her ‘me-me’ generation have come to be inured to poverty’s manifestations. It is so mundane, my dear; it is not the business of government; Not Me Guv.
What does this mean? Badenoch is 43. Fewer than 15 per cent of 43s vote for Badenoch’s party. The bulk of Tory support isn’t among her age cohort or the younger ones, but among the 65+ cohort. Three quarters of this cohort vote Tory or different versions of ex-UKIP party.
I don’t know anyone over 65 who will admit to wanting to vote tory any more, and I live in a redwall constituency.
It isn’t the 85% who are taking the decisions; and a lot of bad decisions have been made for years, so even if they will not vote now; that is not to say they have not voted for the ‘me-me’ generation in the past. Many disown it now, only because the Conservatives have become indefensible ,in polite society. It is a cultural norm. It has changed.
It was a Conservative MP, I recall representing a very comfortable seat (I think in Dorset); who, some years ago when challenged over constituents renting homes not to live in, but to mislead the local education authorities, and ensure their children were given places in preferred schools (it was exposed by an education authority investigation, in which one family went to elaborate lengths to mislead); and who responded to the uncomfortable facts by saying frankly that he represented “families with sharp elbows”.
The sharp-elbowed families are everywhere; and haven’t gone away. Wear padded clothing.
Joh S Warren –
Of course the sharp elbowed families are distasteful. But are they really to blame?
We live in a dysfunctional society. We must expect parents to do what they can for their families within this broken system. Hopefully they may do that within the rules. Perhaps by buying within a school catchment area. But not everyone has the wealth to do that. Yes, it may be against the rules to rent, to be sharp elbowed, but is that worse than buying in the catchment area? Or is it worse than, totally within the rules, paying for private education? The rules are set up to favour the wealthy. Are we really criticising parents for trying to do what their wealthier peers do with impunity because they are wealthy?
I would say that a parent is morally bound to do their best for their children. That’s why I dislike politicians being criticised for sending their children to private schools. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t like private schools. They should be taxed more heavily to compensate the damage they do to society. But parents have to do their best in the system that exists, not in the one they wish existed. It is perfectly consistent, and not hypocritical, to send your children to private school (or try to get them into a good state school) whilst simultaneously campaigning to eliminate the unfairness.
At the end of the day the real problem is that the government is strangling the state sector and providing insufficient funds (so that the wealthy can be just a tad wealthier). It’s the government that’s more at fault than the sharp elbowed families.
It’s like the old joke:
A banker, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting at a table with 20 cookies.
The banker takes 19 cookies and warns the worker: “Watch out, the immigrant is going to take your cookie away.”
The government wants us to be squabbling amoungst ourselves, blaming each other, when they are the real culprits.
Called redwall seats because the people voted labour up until the 2019 election. They voted tory then because they were promised the tories would get brexit done, and that’s the main reason.
They were deceived. There was a Greek minister talking today about how the country has cut its immigration numbers because they are part of the EU who agreed to a law together to cut numbers. People were conned that numbers here would be reduced because we were in control of our own borders.
Not quite sure why people in north west Durham thought that was important. Perhaps they believed that the government would give them jobs. That didn’t work either.
The only person up here who does anything for the people in the north east is Jamie Driscoll, because he goes down to London and gets money out of the government for us.
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/budget-was-pure-westminster-electioneering-with-more-independence-we-will-solve-our-problems-ourselves/
That’s why Starmer doesn’t want him in the party.
Mr Kent,
I think you misunderstood; a favoured ploy was that parents who lived outside the catchment area, rented empty houses inside the catchment area, but did not live there. In one case an inspector for the local authority came round at an appointed hour, to discover the family were having a meal in the dining room. The interview took place there; but on leaving, the still suspicious inspector walked round to the rear of the house, looked through the windos and found all the other rooms were empty.
Some other parents, living in the catchment area, and obeying the rules, would have been prevented from their children attending the school, save for the alert inspector. Families with sharp elbows make the system work for them. It is their system, and remains unchanged. It is a system that favours only two standards (extending far beyond education); money and sharp elbows. Would that the effort was put in by the endeavour to buy or cheat the system, to achieve fairness; but it isn’t, and the standard of behaviour set becomes the norm. Nothing changes. Who is going to change the system if the families that use it; are prepared to buy it, or abuse it?
I have no objection to private schools, although given you own argument about renting an empty house to bend the system (at considerable expense), I would point out for those manipulative enough to do so, it isn’t tax deductible; but private schools are given charitable status (or does your argument then become, if charitable status was withdrawn only billionaires could then afford private schooling, putting more pressure on the sharp-elbow brigade’s cornering the best of the rest) in an infinite regress. Is this really the standars we wish to set for public life? Well, we have alrady, reinforced by proof of success: in spades. “Distasteful” doesn’t quite do it justice.
John S Warren –
I fully understood your point.
My point was that, distasteful though sharp elbows are, we should put the blame where it most properly belongs. That is government underfunding. If we had excellent universal education there would be no need for the sharp elbows, and much less advantage to buying privilege through private education.
Hence my reference to the joke.
I’m sure we’re both on the same side. Let’s not let ourselves be divided.
Ministry for equalities with Badenoch in charge sounded straight out of 1984.
What she also said was that they could not do more for the black and ethnic communities to test and trace because it would mean discrimination. So not even positive discrimination is allowed in her world.
Been reading John McDonnell’s response to Hunt’s autumn statement. Sounds quite good to me.
https://labouroutlook.org/2023/11/25/hunts-autumn-statement-divorsed-from-reality-john-mcdonnell/
(I am sure it wasn’t John McDonnell who misspelt divorced.)
Surprised he’s still allowed to be in the labour party.
She denies that there is discrimination
https://www.independentsage.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Stigma-and-Inequalities_16-12-20_D6.pdf
She needs to read the People’s Covid Inquiry where people haven’t forgotten what happened.
What sort of world does she live in which does not recognise that there is discrimination?
She is in deliberate denial
People want greenonomics, not greedonomics.
Laura Trott is doing the rounds today.
When pressed on the Autumn Statement she claims we have had to pay back our covid debts. Readers of this blog know covid was directly financed. I wasn’t aware we had paid anything back. I must have missed it. Surely she wouldn’t be lying?
And, she asserts, Labour have refused to do the same. If Labour had followed the advice of this blog I would be very pleased.
She is lying
There is no Covid debt
The government owns it all
The line about COVID debt is one that the government has been pressing quite hard. The government borrowed to buy PPE, and fund furlough and track and trace, and all the rest of it. We have to pay it back. They never say who we borrowed from and who needs to be paid back or when.
It is all nonsense of course given most of this “debt” is held by the BoE APF. But it has the ring of truth, and as Goebbels knew repetition of a lie makes it more believable. Particularly if Labour does not refute it.
I think I should do a Twitter thread….
Indeed. You have explained this well over a couple of years.
But Kuenssberg didn’t challenge it. Neither did her panel. And neither does Reeves.
Yet again this shows where the problem lies.
Ah but, if you buy the myth that the Government doesn’t have any money of its own – it’s all taxpayers’ money as we’ve been hearing incessantly since Thatcher proclaimed it – it follows that the Covid debt owned in its entirety by the govermment can only be paid collectively by the taxpayers. Believers in that (and other such myths) have to lie, whether knowingly or in ignorance, about money to toe the party line, and in doing so demonstrate their unsuitability for high office. I despair about the future of mankind when avoidance/ ignorance of the truth permeates politics world-wide.
Of course there is a cure for poverty – it’s called sharing.
Most of us are content to share with family, friends and neighbours. Sharing more broadly? Famously, a legal expert asked “Who is my neighbour?” – and the answer has been challenging us for the last 2,000 years. This is hard enough… but when we have a self-selected pool of candidates for leadership whose success depends on narcissism it is almost impossible.
PS. If Kemi Badenoch is appealing to the phrase “the poor will always be with us” as justification then she needs to read and reflect on that passage more carefully.
We may have less poverty now in the UK than we once had, but we still have much, much more than we should have. And if you’re looking to ascribe blame for that (and who wouldn’t?), Ms Badenoch’s quote says all you need to know.
Indeed, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that “Around one in five of our population (20%) were in poverty in 2020/21 – that’s 13.4 million people.”
Source and report: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/uk-poverty-2023
For me what screams out from your post and the replies is clear and simple: the wrong people are in control. Of course how this is resolved is the problem. Electoral reform to provide a more representative government would be a good start. But how do we get our turkey politicians to vote for Christmas?
I first came across the same phrase in George Orwell’s Lion and the Unicorn in the 1980s. He was a patriot -though not a nationalist-and he said ‘England’ like a family with the wrong people in charge. The phrase is something that stuck in my memory, He wrote that about 80 years or so ago.
What a great post Richard. I’ve commented on the past about the imperative to express all of your detailed working in a form that is persuasive with the electorate, and in this post you’ve come very, very close to finding it. You (we!) need a ‘what’ and a ‘how’ that can be hammered home relentlessly.
Your two sets of bullets are almost there.
The first five are just about perfect. They’ve the ‘what’. The second set are close to ‘how’, I’d simplify these to a set of principles along these lines:
– Fair taxes for all
– Invest in the future
– People not bankers
– Public and private
What’s missing is the strap line, the key to it all. The ‘get Brexit done’, the ‘make America great again’, the ‘’Labour isn’t working’? Sadly, ‘for the many not the few’ had its chance and fell agonisingly short for other reasons.
How about ‘For our future, not our past’?’
I’m not a professional communicator (are there any reading this blog with some time to spare..?) but I’ve had enough coaching to know just how important messaging is and, crucially, that there is a science to getting it right. Reagan had a saying that both sums up the challenge we face and contains the seeds of our solution: ‘if you’re explaining, you’re failing’.
A few years ago I took a senior civil service master class given by Vincent Covello. It opened my eyes to how it’s done and why it works.
The detailed working is best set out in the WHO guidance on risk communication. That’s a lot of technical material based on science and case studies from all areas of politics, public service and private industry, but it can be boiled done to a couple of principles to use in every initial communication.
27 words, nine seconds, three points.
Compassion, confidence, optimism.
Once you know this trick you can’t help seeing it everywhere. It’s akin to being admitted to the magic circle.
It breaks my heart that the right wing have it easy because they can scapegoat, but we know what to do and Attlee, Bevan and Roosevelt proved it can be done.
Wow. Much to think about. Thank you.
Start here. Pages 11-15.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/effective-communications-participants-handbook
The whole WHO guidance is at the link below. Applicable to any high risk, high stress situation and we can all agree that’s a fair description of the state of our politics.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/risk-communications/guidance#:~:text=Risk%20communication%20is%20one%20of,Influenza%20Preparedness%20(PIP)%20Framework.
Downloaded, thank you
I saw Reagan once, working a crowd in a Presidential Election speech; when in Boston. It was open air, down at the waterfront and easy to attend. Coming from Britain and used to old-fashioned, soap-box and bus political electioneering by such as Heath, Foot, Wilson or Thatcher I was astonished by the sheer, slick professional operation; and by Reagan (an experienced screen actor) whom, I never thought understood much. or exercised considered thinking about issues. I found out what he could do in a big, open, dynamic country with great internal differences; how he could deliver a message that was telling with his audience, with minimum effort, impeccable timing; and a confident but warm sense of human reassurance.
I found it both slightly disturbing, and an ‘eye-opener’. The delivery is 99% of everything in politics. You neither have or need a lot of time, so you cannot actually develop, explain or prove anything. That lesson applies even more today than for the Reagan era. Remember why we are where we are; the devil has all the best tunes ….
How was Brexit won? Actually moved over the line? With a confident, well known Chump driving a bulldozer, and repeating ‘Get Brexit Done’. That is how we do it in Britain; how we interpreted Reagan, and turned politics into slapstick.
Which is why we need a plan
How about “ make it Fair” as a strap line to chant?
It should be possible to to come up with Words for each letter eg for the NHS
Free ( at point of delivery)
Accessible (to all)
Individual (for each patient)
Realistic (expectations balance Rights with Responsibilities)
I am sure a focus group could find some better ones for Education, Housing etc than I can manage before going to sleep!
A weownit campaign.
https://weownit.org.uk/act-now/only-the-nhs-public-letter
Massive inequality is what you get when governments are completely controlled by the wealthy. When greed is good and there are no consequences (or anything even close to consequences) for when greed becomes utter callousness, then democracy becomes a vicious sham. They want to make the UK a rat race. Jimmy Reid wrote a speech called ‘Alienation’ in 1972 to counter that view. It was very relevant then and much more so now. We need people of his caliber to help reverse the political corruption that is leading to a very dark future.
Jimmy Reid was wise as well as clever
… and played great blues guitar!! (or was it Jimmy Reed?)
In any case – both worth listening to.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/26/if-we-want-lower-taxes-we-should-get-serious-about-becoming-healthier
A statement of the obvious but not heard in Whitehall
Having two aortic dissections wasn’t a lifestyle choice!
Depressing but revealing piece on the corruption behind Starmer’s rise to leadership:
https://novaramedia.com/2023/11/14/the-corruption-behind-starmers-rise-has-finally-been-exposed/
which makes it clear that a Labour win will be ‘no change’
“ The choice is simple. Do we run the economy in the interests of those who are in need, or for the benefit of those who already have a great deal but want more? ”
The answer it seems is in today’s Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/nov/27/uk-spends-more-financing-inequality-in-favour-of-rich-than-rest-of-europe-report-finds
Good work by Stewart Lansley.
The Taxing Wealth Report is the answer
Labour together may have provide the ££ and a strategy to get Starmer elected, but it was the much-earlier capture of most Regional Offices by the Blairites and their power over Branches that worked from that point. Regional Officers indicated targets to be suspended, suspended member themselves, stifled criticism, backed right-wing candidates, suspended branches occasionally, often with the connivance of the local MP. Labour’s hierarchical structure facilitates multiple post-holding, and systemic blockages in a supposedly democratic organisation. If that failed, apparatchiks could be deployed.