I did say I didn't want to harp on about Polly Toynbee, but reading her Hard Work - Life in low pay Britain book in bed last night, I have a paragraph I'd like to remind her of.
Firstly, a little background, the book, rather brilliantly, details Polly's experiences of hard work on low pay (as the title suggests) in Britain, she is living on Clapham Park Estate, which at the time of writing, had been awarded £56 million as part of Blair's New Deal.
Dominic was a fellow resident who Toynbee got to know. Arriving in Britain from Nigeria as a student in 1970, he worked hard until his kidneys failed him, and was now too "weak to run for a bus" , living on incapacity benefit. I quote from her "Clapham Park Neighbours" chapter:
"He (Dominic) had been to a public meeting or two (re the New Deal grant for the estate) but was unsure what to believe. Essentially until he saw an entry-phone on our front door and central heating fitted in our cold flats he was disinclined to believe anything was changing for the better, even though the repainting of our block, inside and out, was already clearly under way...However I was surprised when he suddenly burst into a riff of optimism about this government: "I rate Tony Blair most highly", he said. "Almost as highly as I rated Harold Wilson. It was Margaret Thatcher that destroyed everything, and look, all around us here, this estate is part of her wreckage! Once we had caretakers on every block, but she took them away. She took everything away, cut everything." He was shaking with anger at the thought of her as he took his Labour Party membership card out of his wallet to wave at me with pride."
Maybe Polly could think of Dominic when writing her next column, and the millions like him, who rely on a united Labour Party fighting to govern. If he and the other residents of Clapham Park are forced to accept similar cuts and wreckage from a Cameron government, who have not learned the lessons from Thatcher, they would never forgive a Labour Party for turning inward now, instead of fighting tooth and nail until May. And they'd be right not to. So, this time, I think Polly's advice will, and must, fall on deaf ears.
3 comments:
But we don't have any more money The Stilettoad Socialist. We're running a deficit of 12.6% of GDP and thats on top of the national debt mountain thats virtually unpayable.
How are the poor and the vulnerable going to feel when we experience a real fiscal crisis and the government physically runs out of cash?
Polly Toynbee joined the SDP in 1983. She has made several contradictory comments about poverty in the last couple of years ranging from proposing that Labour were highly successful to the fact that they had been almost woeful. She has suggested that people should vote Lib Dem in May 09.
Polly is who Polly is. The issues that the New Deal for Communities was designed to address highlights the very best of our hopes, but also the very worst of what happens when things don't work. I think the NDCs were one of the best ideas the Labour gov had...I'm not sure where I am now. If you want to continue the debate, email me at jUNDERSCOREhitchin44AThotmailDOTcom
Post a Comment