Creating Deprivation and a Deserving Poor

The country is splitting in two. As the appalling financial and now economic damage caused by New Labour's power-seeking installs itself irreversibly into our economy, defence mechanisms set classes against one another.

The high earning highly qualified, with low mortgage exposure and embedded cultural and economic goals, are paying off all and any debt, saving, limiting large optional expenditures, and concentrating on acquiring positional goods, both skills and physical goods as well as services. The less fortunate, or less informed, are wasting time and communally-supplied resources maintaining and trying to continue to expand, immediate consumption.

Both groups are acting individualistically (even the unionised still in employment) and defending personal or at best category interest. It is another aspect of the disaster that is New Labour that this destruction of a co-operative model of socio-economic behaviour has been embodied in the United Kingdom. Had we a politically competent government there would long have been investment in social and communal infrastructures, serving, and promoted as serving, the common good.

Local services would have been essentially for community consumption, not individually commandeered by favoured clients. Libraries, including extensive and accessible internet facilities and teaching, instruction and training as well as education in the broader sense, available to all age groups; sports facilities that included facilities to work out and facilities to play team games, widespread access to sporting activities in winter too, with covered facilities. Transport and communications not defined as free bus passes but as good networks and for all, not just over sixties or under sixteens. Add your own particular interest: art, music, dance, access to the countryside or access to the great cities and their knowledge centres, ......

Universal provision, not means tested discrimination by New Labour's watchers, made affordable by providing for the many not the few, with the resultant saving on sorting those who qualify and those who do not (and on such doubtful grounds as New Labour uses), should have been there. As once it was, and as what it once was - the realisation of the social and economic justice the Labour Movement stood for. But that dream has been lost for ever under this regime, and the means and opportunity to pay for it lost until the cycle advances.

So the competent will be safe, enhancing their lives and realising their hopes for their children and themselves, but the least-defended will be the victims yet again of their short term understanding, their various inadequacies springing from self- and other- inflicted disadvantage, that will be visited on their children and their old, as well as on themselves.

This will blight decades for people locked into lifestyles and localities they will never be able to afford to leave.