The Road Not Taken

I’ve been reading “An Uneasy Inheritance”, Polly Toynbee’s memoir/reflections on class, and it’s fascinating. But one moment stands out, where she describes Blair’s Beveridge lecture in 1999, when he set out his plans to abolish child poverty. He’d deliberately invited a wide range of experts, analysts and journalists - many of whom were openly sceptical - Does he mean it? Does he know what’s involved?

Toynbee’s answer to both questions is an emphatic yes, and she insists that by 2010 he had got a third of the way there. Whcih came to me as total news, and I reckon to follow politics fairly closely. But that wasn’t my fault; it was Blair’s. He felt the electorate was conservative and grudging, wouldn’t approve of doing stuff for the poor, so that kind of initiaive must be kept under the radar, surreptitious, on the sly.

Which means that when Cameron and Osborne take over, and immediately reverse a lot of that progress, there isn’t an informed public leaping to protest. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference if they had known, but it’s fascinating to think that if he’d played his cards differently Tony Blair might now be known as a scourge of inequality rather than a key architect of the War in Iraq.