It has never been clear to me what the nice people who work for think-tanks actually do. Perhaps I haven't thought hard enough. Do you rise of a morning and say, "Well, I'm off to have a good think. Don't wait up"? Or do you get up, realise that a depression has settled over your cerulean-skies cogitating, and decide to state the remarkably obvious?
The Institute of Public Policy Research is better than most. Consistently, it supplies analysis - and reliable data - pertaining to stuff that matters. This is not trivial. I still wonder, though, about the innocent ability to issue a New Year press release with the reminder that the poor, amazingly, are always with us.
I do not mean to be disdainful. Someone needs to remind us that after a decade of Gordon Brown's precise and specific version of new Labour, 1.4 million British children are still in poverty. It is important, too, to enter in the record the fact that these youngsters have been "let down" by government. Above all, someone needs to observe that these are all part of those "hard-working families" we hear so much about.
No wasters. No dole dependents. None of the casualties of cliché. The IPPR has been talking about children from families in which at least one adult is in work. Yet still poor. Still dispossessed. Still the detritus of enterprise, so called, and aspiration. Still - and this may be the point - not susceptible to the solutions offered, for 10 years and more, by think-tanks, good Christian politicians and an industry devoted, with intense sincerity, to the eradication of poverty.
How come?
Sincerely. Much as I value the IPPR, I probably don't need to hear that poverty continues. I could get on a bus and call it "research". I don't need to be told, either, that new Labour's logic collapses at the touch.
Public-sector pay: bad. Sleek executives doing nicely: essential to the economy. Which? And how? Or could we, just for once, attempt to reconcile these fascinating propositions?
As a paid-up peasant, I don't hold much with economics. I value internal consistency in an argument, however. Poverty as an act of God strikes me as something of a stretch. But since the IPPR does not choose to question the god-like system upon which it comments diligently, indefatigably, I cannot help but notice a gap in the argument. Close to one and one-half million kids did not get poor by accident.
More precisely, a prime minister towards whom the IPPR is not averse has built a career by offering us - or 1.4 million children - exact answers. Family credit, an American wheeze, was one. "Hard-working" was another: the old Protestant ethic, always adaptable for a globalised world, was another. Full employment and unchecked market forces simultaneously: who'd have thought?
Then there was, as a kind of intellectual damp patch on the back wall, trickle down. New Labour believed, and believes, in this voodoo. If someone gets rich, everyone gets rich. "Activity", of the economic sort, is everything. Your private equity go-getter is an unwitting Saint Francis for these times. When he enriches himself we are all enriched, and suitably grateful for it. Peter Mandelson, famously and unforgettably, was "comfortable" with the stinking rich.
This was the new Labour proposition, the unique selling point. Concerned but guilt-free. An old conundrum - all that depressing class-war stuff - was resolved in an instant. Gordon Brown said explicitly, repeatedly, that this was what he believed. He also brought some intellectual firepower to the argument.
How does wealth operate, and develop, and spread? What is wealth? How had all the prior nostrums helped anyone? And what use was a Labour Party that couldn't get elected in a tax-cutting world? These were good questions.
They impressed the hell out of some London media folk I could mention. "Can't buck the bond markets," they said. "Capitalism's the only game in town," they would add. Then I realised that, no, in fact, they were not really kidding, that most of this was the Voice of Tony, but some of it - the interesting part - was the Breath of Gordon. Circles were being squared left, right and - geometrically speaking - centre.
We have had a decade of Mr Brown's micro-managed solutions. We have had noble, soft-left rhetoric for 10 years. We have seen a Labour movement turned into a Poujadist enterprise and heard more than enough, I think, from tame economists and peers-in-waiting.
So: 1.4 million children. How come? Forgive me for jumping to conclusions, but apparently the fabulous solutions didn't work. Can't blame the feckless, not this time. For those children, a decade is the best part of a life. Allowing wealth to slosh around, unchecked, would appear not to have done the trick. Applying a certain economic model would appear, unless I am mistaken, merely to have demonstrated deficiencies in the model.
Didn't work.
That is not a sentence upon which anyone can elaborate easily. The eradication of child poverty was one of those few things new Labour offered in mitigation. An excuse, if you like. Yet the IPPR claims that the headline number, of 1.4 million, has not altered in a decade. It says that fully half of all poor children now live in a "working" household. It apportions no blame, however, and prefers the usual language of tax-credit reform.
I am a little less kindly. Taking unearned cash from the undeserving still strikes me as a plan. Obliging those who "work with poverty" to explain their own failures also occurs to me. Taking new Labour to task, in terms of policy, ideas and beliefs, might also be worth a shot.
Mr Brown's current career difficulties don't interest me much. I simply say that a century's decile has been expended while the individuals who stole a Labour movement were promising to "lift" children from want. For the sake of that one thing, if it had been managed, I might have forgiven a great deal. Didn't work, though; and it didn't happen.
So, a final point. Did they - and Mr Brown in particular - ever believe it would happen? Was the good guy just doing his poor best, or was he self-blinded by the light of pseudo-science economics? Was it all a mere lie? This is, like poverty itself, a moral issue. And it deserves better than a snap judgment.
Contrary to what has been fashionable for 30-odd years, I am a big fan of throwing money at problems. The poor, one finds, could do with money. They neither want nor need "credits", or "programmes", or parasitic rhetoric from the pious. They tend to have earned the money to begin with, after all. They tend not to trust politicians, either: a remarkable coincidence.
If you don't care about poverty, you don't care. If you prefer other problems to the issue of children in need and want, you have probably outstayed your welcome, morally. And if you lied, for years, about your concerns? Live or die by that.
Or discount 1.4 million young lives, or the usual glib populist leftie comment, or the sense that you have either betrayed others, or yourself.
But who will then aid the poor?
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