We’ve never had it so good : up to a point Lord Young

Lord David Young, former favourite of Margaret Thatcher and now the current prime minister’s ex-enterprise advisor, suggested that we should all stop complaining because most of us have never had it so good. Up to a point Lord Young. Those millions of us who, for the time being, are still in reasonably well paid jobs or receiving adequate pensions do have it good and it may even be that some of us have never had it so good. We can pay the mortgage on our house. We can feed and clothe our kids. We can even afford to spare some of our cash to give to charities providing for the "deserving" if not the "undeserving" needy for whom the commonwealth of the state no longer wants to take responsibility. Our kids will get places at the new free schools because they have the right social fit. They will eat healthy Jamie Oliver style food and will not become obese because they will have access to increasingly scarce playing fields and expensive recreational resources.



Even if Lord Young’s remarks reflect what the coalition government would really like to say he had to walk off into the sunset because his sentiments didn’t harmonise with the “we are all suffering together equally” propaganda. Should we stop complaining and keep our noses to our own grindstones and not look about too much at what else is going on around us ? Or, should we have a care and provide without condescension for those of our community who are struggling to bring their children up by doing essential jobs which pay them little money, for those whose health does not permit them to work, and for those who are losing their jobs, their homes and their dignity ? These are the people who are increasingly being seen by politicians more as an economic problem than as human beings.



Struggling against inequality seems to have become unfashionable. Have we really been longing for a return of those heady days of the 1980s and 1990s when we were “in it for me and mine” ?



Well, you have to be careful in land of “we’re all in it together.” This is especially so if you not only believe every child is uniquely different, but you also think equality is about making certain that children have, whatever their family background when they are born, equal access to, and an equal share of, all the resources of a society to ensure they grow up physically and emotionally healthy. These days such thoughts will not make you influential. They are considered idealistic. We should dare to say that they are not. Unfearful adults can make this notion of equality happen.



So it is unsurprising to hear the home secretary Teresa May who is also the equalities minister decry the last government’s Equality Act as “socialism in one clause.” True, the Labour government was itself shamefully ineffective in dealing with child poverty and perhaps pushed the Equality Act through as if seeking absolution for the guilt it felt when it found that all the research findings it received concerning child poverty concluded that the gap in income between families from middle class backgrounds and those from poor backgrounds (notice we have left the very wealthy out of this) was getting wider and wider to the extent that it had become impossible for poor families to find a ladder long enough to take them out of the poverty trap.



In response we may wring our hands and say “There’s really nothing we can do about all this.”

Many of us may be having it good, but do we feel good about it ?

(First posted at the goodenoughcaring.com website home page at http://www.goodenoughcaring.com/  on November 22nd, 2010)