One more role for society

Originally posted @ 10:02 am, Wed 23rd Jul 2008

Having been away for a week, I was a bit surprised to headlines on whether Margaret Thatcher should have a state funeral. Had something happened? Perhaps CNN were not as on the button as they liked to claim.

I don’t know how this started, but I do know that Margaret Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, so I wonder if she would she want anything provided through common endeavour?

Even more surreal than the talk over a funeral, was returning to hear that John Major had issued warnings on the value of official statistics. As David Smith of the Sunday Times reported, John Major “knows how corrosive a widespread mistrust of official statistics can be. In the 1980s, after repeated changes to the unemployment figures, Margaret Thatcher’s government found that when the jobless total went down, the public did not believe it.”

Worse, the drive to get people off unemployment figures led to too many people being consigned to incapacity benefit, with no support to get healthy and back to work, leading to poverty and dependency.

As for society, Labour has shown in the last 11 years how much can be achieved by us working together than we do apart. Better hospitals and schools. Lower crime.

Labour has halved the number of people unemployed, and there are more people in work than ever before. And with less spent on unemployment benefits, more can and has been spent on helping poorer families who are, on average, £4,500 better off than in 1997.

And the impact of society is measurable in other ways. Surveys have shown that the correlation between people’s satisfaction with the quality of life in their area, and the deprivation in their area is high.

So it’s important to reduce poverty, not just for the poor, but for all our sakes.

The Govt’s new initiative on helping people off benefits (offering both challenge and support) is part of gat drive.

The support makes the difference. Concerted and co-ordinated efforts have increased the proportion of people who are economically active in Nottingham by 3% in the last year (see May 9th entry).

More people paying in means we would be able to afford more national provision, and perhaps even, a state funeral.