Labour endorses inequality

The BBC reports the political left must stop "holding up egalitarianism as the ideal", Communities Secretary John Denham told the Fabian Society . Basing fairness purely on "society's response to those in greatest need" risked being unpopular, he said. Denham said that the numbers within society who signed up to the traditional egalitarian view were "simply too small to construct a strong, viable and inclusive electoral coalition". The group of people who sign up to a traditional egalitarian view of society (only 22% according to research) tends to be older and more traditionally working class. In other words, a demographic that is actually shrinking.

He told the Fabian Society: "We must confront the difficult truth: that this form of egalitarianism, the one that defines fairness solely in terms of society's response to those in greatest need, is badly out of step with popular sentiment."

Ah , so there we have it , the Labour Party instead of what any principled organisation would do , try educate and convince the public of its aims , bows down to the mob rule of prejudice for the sake of political power . Denham said Labour had to relate to the aspirations of people on middle incomes, adding that this group felt excluded by policies and language aimed at 'the poor'.

Denham talks of his family history , "If I think back to when my father was growing up in South Yorkshire in the 1920s and 1930s, they knew what was wrong with society. Basically, the railways on which his father worked were owned by private owners, and the mines in which everybody else round his street worked were owned by private owners, and the problem was the bosses. What you would have had very widely and for a long period of time was a common description which would have been shared not just across the left, but a large chunk of society, why our society is the way it is.What came across really strongly in this research is that there is no common story about why our society is unequal. People have varying levels of knowledge about how unequal it is, or the consequences of inequality. But no story about why it is the way that it is."

At last an element of truth from his speech. After a century of lying and deceit about the true state of affairs , particularly by the Labour Party is it no surprise then that people are confused about the real cause of inequality. There were always some trying to build a "fairer" society but what has emerged was not a slowly evolving socialism but a Labourism which increasingly judged itself on its electoral success, and which depends on its ability not to rock the capitalist boat it was trying to steer. But, in truth, the majority are impoverished. It is impoverished insofar as it has no other option than to sell its working abilities to those who monopolise the means of living and whose conspicuous wealth must irresistibly provide the very yardstick by which that poverty will be starkly exposed. This may not be the poverty of material destitution. But if the measure of a human being consists in the accumulation of material possessions to which he or she may claim the, by that token, we are demeaned. And, ultimately, it is in this devaluation of our human worth—not simply in the fact of material inequality but in the meaning this society attaches to it—that we may glimpse the very essence of this poverty.