Our News
Social Justice Speech
Beveridge:
‘The greatest evil of unemployment is not physical but moral, not the want that it may bring, but the hatred and fear which it breeds’.
March 2006
Social Justice
To begin by outlining some of the history and background to the social justice agenda.
Just over ten years ago, in December 1992, John Smith, then leader of the Labour Party, set up the Commission on Social Justice.
That decision was taken against a background where one in three children in the United Kingdom were living in poverty, one in five men of working age were not in work and one in seven of our young people lacked the basic skills of literacy and numeracy.
In 1992, the long years of Conservative government were by no means over. Yet, during the 1980s – that mean decade of greed and irresponsibility – the pace of inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor, was increasing in the United Kingdom at a rate faster than any other developed country in the world except for New Zealand. Indeed, whatever spurious assertions might now be made to the contrary, neo-liberal economics rest on the claim that the route to economic efficiency has to be through every greater inequality, just as the only way to increase employment was to press for ever lower wages.
Ten years on, it seems almost unbelievable that serious politicians at the time were prepared to argue that economic inequality on the scale which Thatcherism so deliberately produced had no relationship with social injustice – that higher levels of crime and of drug abuse, and that lower standards of health and educational attainment, had nothing to do with widening inequality.
But they did. And it took the foresight of a Labour leader, a leader out of the heart of the Labour movement, to highlight the fallacies of these received wisdoms and to set up a Commission to confront those who had the arrogance to believe that their way of describing the world, and how it worked, would forever go challenged.
Ten years on, so many things are different. Just think of how long people in this hall, and those who have gone before them for a hundred years and more in the trade union movement, had argued for a national minimum wage. Think of how long that basic idea had been opposed by employers and their political mouthpieces. Now the policy has been put into practice for nearly five (?) years. It may not be at the level which many of us would wish, but here in Wales we know what a difference it has made – and not just in terms of money, but in terms of job quality, too. Paying a proper wage reduces staff turnover, improves worker morale and encourages employers to train and equip workers adequately for the tasks they have in hand. Exactly, in fact, as the Borrie Commission argued when it supported the minimum wage idea as an essential brick in the wall of social justice.
As a traditional Welsh socialist the truth of that argument seems to me to be self-evident. Social justice is rooted in economic justice. Without the former, then trying to achieve the latter is just making bricks without straw.
Poverty
The second key themes which I want to explore today, and to make part of the social justice portfolio at the Assembly is, to pick up an idea which the First Minister argued here yesterday, that of spreading prosperity more equally across Wales.
Just as very many members of the trade union movement, I have become used, over recent years, to hearing, and to using, the term social exclusion. I think it is worth saying plainly, however, that economic justice remains primarily a matter of tackling poverty where, and still too often, it continues to scar the lives of individuals and families in Wales.
Poverty amongst children, denied from the outset the sort of choices and opportunities which other families simply take for granted.
Poverty amongst older people, living below even the minimum income guarantee – which the Social Justice Commission proposed, by the way - because of fear of stigma or lack of proper advice.
Poverty which causes illness, when families cannot afford to heat the homes in which they live.
Poverty which lowers the expectations and narrows the ambitions of young people starting out in life, when their horizons should be as wide as we can make them.
Now, Labour in office, in Westminster and in Wales, has set out with real determination to reverse the tide of poverty and inequality which, when the Social Justice Commission was set up, we were told were simply the inevitable consequences of making a competitive economy. The list is impressive:
• the winter fuel allowance for pensioners
• free TV licenses for over 75 year olds
• free bus travel in Wales for people over 60
• Assembly Learning Grants for younger people in Wales
• Free swimming in local authority leisure centres for children in Wales, started over Easter and to be extended further during the summer holidays this year.
And, in Labour’s Assembly election Manifesto, a further set of key pledges, directly aimed at tackling poverty:
+ abolishing prescription charges
+ free breakfasts in our primary schools
+ half-price bus travel for 16 – 18 year olds
+ free swimming for older people in local authority leisure centres
All of these are essential steps in the agenda which we have set ourselves. But, by themselves they will not suffice if we are to succeed in reaching those individuals and communities which need help the most. Right across the Assembly’s range of responsibilities there are essential levers which we will need to bend, collectively, to achieve our social justice objectives.
I will be working closely with Ministerial colleagues, in health, economic development, local government and so on to make sure that we act collectively to achieve our common objectives.
My job, as Social Justice Minister, is to ensure that the decisions made in the Welsh Assembly Government reflect what the First Minister said to me, when he asked me to take on this responsibility: ‘Edwina, your job is to see to it that the people who are at the back of the queue now are moved to the front of the queue in the future’. That’s not a bad definition, I think, of practical socialism in action, and it’s one which I intend to pursue vigorously over the coming term.
Crime
The final topic about which I wanted to say something this morning concerns the responsibilities which I will exercise in relation to crime prevention in Wales.
Where social dislocation has been at its most pronounced, crime has become an issue of immediate and pressing concern. There is something in the temper of modern times which also means that fear of crime spreads from places where the problem is a real one, to those places where order and are social harmony, for the most part, very well preserved.
If we are to succeed in recreating the confident, cooperative and responsible society we need in Wales, then dealing with the corrosive impact of crime in a necessary pre-requisite.
Let me be clear that, in my view, the focus of the criminal justice system upon catching and dealing with people who commit crime cannot, of itself, provide an answer to this problem. By the time someone has been arrested and produced before the Courts, the damage to individuals and to community confidence has already taken place.
What we have, through the Welsh Assembly Government, is a chance to tackle the conditions in which crime is created, and thus to prevent the damage it causes from taking place.
Over the next four years, it would be my intention to provide a new and more concentrated focus upon the delivery of social crime prevention in Wales. A great deal of this will, of necessity, be focused upon young people in our communities. I know, of course, of the tremendous work which is already done by local police forces through, for example, the Splash schemes which run in school holiday periods. I know, at first hand, of the new work which is being carried out by Communities First constables in parts of South Wales and the community safety warden scheme which is being rolled out in Rhyl and Denbigh and which works in partnership both with local communities and with North Wales police community beat officers.
What we will need now is a new focus upon younger people as they move through adolescence and into young adulthood – those amongst whom crime is concentrated and who also the hardest to reach. We need purposeful, challenging and worthwhile ways of occupying such youngsters, which allow them to achieve in new ways.
Communities are not strengthened by turning their backs on their own young people, even when those young people are the cause of difficulty or distress to others. We need, instead, to find ways of reinforcing the capacity of communities to respond to these problems in a way which protects vulnerable people and prevents matters from becoming worse in the future.
The arrangements now in place in the Assembly Government clearly demonstrate our determination that next four years will need to see a strengthening of our social crime prevention strategies. The full range of our responsibilities will have to be drawn upon in doing so, and an essential part of my job will be to work with cabinet colleagues to make this happen. Transport, for example, makes a tremendous difference to issues of crime and disorder. Where good public transport exists to take people quickly and safely to their homes from city centres late at night, then the risk of trouble along the way to those homes is much reduced. Better street lighting and security within the home are both important means of making opportunistic crime, in particular, less likely. But there are wider measures, through tackling disaffection in schools and providing opportunities for work, which are also vital ingredients in the sort of strategy I have in mind.
My plan, as you can see, is that ours is a government which will be genuinely tough on the causes of crime. I suggested earlier that social justice rests upon the achievement of economic justice. I suggest to you as well that there can be no criminal justice without social justice. These matters are all linked, one with another – and that’s why drawing these responsibilities together in one portfolio makes such good sense.
The Borrie Report set out an idea of social justice which is worth recalling today. The Report set out four basic ideas which it said were inherent in :
• a belief in the equal worth of every individual human being – equal before the law; equal in terms of political rights and having an equal claim on key citizenship rights;
• a belief that such citizenship rights extended to every single person an entitlement to the basics of food, shelter and other necessities
• a belief, however, that simple survival is not a sufficient ambition for any welfare state: that a just society is not one where, simply, people do not starve but where the state has an active role to play in ensuring that communities and individuals have access to opportunities and life chances through which they can flourish and feel that they are flourishing
• a belief that while not all inequalities are unjust – my chance of beating Colin Jackson in a hurdle race were never probably going to be that good – those far too many unjust inequalities which do exist in our society should be reduced and, as far as possible, eliminated.
What can we hope to achieve in Wales?
Solidarity, tolerance and respect
Social Justice and the Welsh Tradition
Address by First Minister, Rhodri Morgan to
Cymdeithas Cledwyn, National Eisteddfod 2003
1. drawing on the heritage and the history of the Labour movement, and reapplying those principles to the needs of the modern world.
2. theme is Social Justice and the Welsh tradition.
3. need to start with a bit of history, before going on to isolate three main traits which, as I will argue, as central to the Welsh tradition and a fourth which, under devolution, seems to me to provide the essential underpinning of our social justice thrust over the next four years.
4. History:
In so many ways the relationship between economic and social policy was one forged in the industrial revolution which took place in Wales two hundred years ago and which set the tone for industrialisation across Europe. It was in Wales that we saw unprecedented change during the 19th century where the impact of massive industrialisation in mining, quarrying, steel making created a new kind of society based on mass production. Mass industrialisation in those industries was a variant on the Northern English and Scottish experience, because it took place without creating a Welsh middle class. The newly created working class was thrown back on its own resources.
That was a society in which investment in industrialisation was the key driver for change. The development of social policy – such as it was – was something which followed the imperative of economic change. In a number of important ways, that legacy and that dialectic still apply in our nation at the start of the 21st century.
We have seen communities grow in Wales – in many cases from nothing at all a hundred and fifty years ago – to become significant centres of population with all the institutions and systems necessary to provide the complex network of local political and service organisations. We have also seen the same communities severely challenged by recent changes in fuel use, the switch from coal to oil to gas and the huge productivity gains in steel. This is the fabric of Welsh life with which we are all very familiar. This is the sometimes proud, sometimes agonising history of a nation built very largely on the efforts of working people in hard surroundings. This is the raw material, the social heritage out of which Welsh devolution has been created – and in which we can now, for our own generation and in our own time, set about fashioning our social justice policy for Wales.
5. Three key characteristics of the Welsh tradition:
• Active not passive participation
The blaze of industrialisation during the 19th century which I have just discussed created a country in which a large and heterogeneous working class was forced, out of its own resources – intellectual, physical and financial – to create a society in which communal effort was the basis for individual success.
The great institutions of such a society – the chapel, the rugby club, the choir, as well as the union and a municipal health service – were based around an ethic of participation, the recognition that in order to receive the benefits of society, then we have to participate in the creation of those benefits in the first place.
Of course, the participation of the 19th century was shaped by its own time and conditions. Today we have to reshape that tradition in our own circumstances. There should be no single greater source of pride to us, as a Labour movement in Wales, that the National Assembly Labour group is made up of 19 women and 11 men, and that the Labour Cabinet – uniquely in the democratic world – has a female majority.
There are a whole series of other ways in which, as a Movement and a Government, we have to press ahead with new ways of encouraging and responding to participation. Our approach to Freedom of Information is in advance of anything else in the UK. The Cabinet Open Mic sessions have brought a level of direct contact between Ministers and local populations which is unrivalled.
Social justice depends upon a shared sense of investment in making our society We have to build on these ideas, to find new ways in which the Welsh tradition of participation can deliver those qualities of solidarity, tolerance and mutual respect which a justice society requires.
• Co-operation not competition
My second trait is the Welsh tradition of privileging co-operation over competition as a means of maximising the common store of human happiness. I don’t need, in front of this audience, to rehearse the achievements of Robert Owen in Newtown, or the great cooperative building clubs which gave working families decent homes in which to live in the industrial Valleys. The knowledge that individuals achieve far more for themselves when working one for another is deeply ingrained in the Welsh psyche.
The Eisteddfod tradition itself is an excellent example of the point I am trying to make. Of course, competition is very important here. But it rests on the strongest possible foundations of co-operative effort. Nothing would be possible here without the huge efforts which local communities invest each year in making the Eisteddfod a reality. Nothing would be possible without that network of local events in which participants try out their trades before making their way to the peak of a llwyfan performance. Nothing would be possible, in so many of the performances themselves, without the co-operation which finds its shape in a choir, or a recitation group or the intricacies of a traditional Welsh dance.
In a practical sense, we have to reinvent this tradition in the social justice field in Wales. We read a great deal, these days, about the need to design our services around the need of the citizen-as-consumer. That is not a route which I think a Welsh Labour tradition would understand or support. The provision of schools and public transport and health services is simply not the same as the provision of candy floss or tins of baked beans. These are collective goods, in which the collective voice of citizens needs to be heard and strengthened. That is why, for example, we have decided to retain and reinforce Community Health Councils in Wales. That is why, too, we have rejected the introduction of Foundation Hospitals. Co-operation before competition is a characteristic which is as important to us today as it ever was in Wales.
• Universal not means-tested services:
My third great tradition is one which emphasises the social justice dividend which is produced through the development of universal rather than means-tested services. It was Ghandi who once said that ‘There is enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed’, and it was Aneurin Bevan and James Griffiths who shared the responsibility for putting that principle into action in the days immediately after the Second World War.
As a result, the great reforms of the Labour Government of 1945 - 51 were by and large universalist – education for all and higher education opportunities for all, a National Health Service, full employment, family allowances, security in old age through an adequate state pension.
Members of this audience will know very well the compelling argument social justice argument that services which are reserved for the poor very quickly become poor services. That is why, at the Assembly, the Labour Group are determined to ensure a continuing stake in social welfare services for the widest possible range of our citizens. Universal services mean that we all have a reason for making such services as good as possible. Free access to social welfare services means that they become genuinely available to the full range of people in Wales, not simply those able to afford them. Here are just
Here are just five quick examples from our first term:
+ Free school milk for youngest children
+ a free nursery place for every three year old
+ Free prescriptions for young people in the age range 16-25.
+ Free entry to museums and galleries for all our citizens.
+ Free local bus travel for pensioners and disabled people.
In a second Assembly term, we will look to maintain this principle and to carry it further forward. We will make prescriptions free for everyone in Wales. We will provide free breakfasts in all our primary schools. We will build on our agreement with local authorities to provide free access for children to swimming pools in local authority leisure centres during school holidays, and extend that service to older people too.
Of course there will be occasions when, for financial or policy reasons, we will have to introduce new provisions which are means-tested, such as Assembly Learning Grants. From a social justice perspective, however, there is a clear Welsh tradition which knows that by pooling our risks together, we all receive the benefit – and that universal services are the practical embodiment of that approach. I am proud to have led our Party in the last Assembly elections with a Manifesto in which that principle was writ large – and I have no doubt at all that the clarity with which we demonstrated our enduring commitment to that tradition played a major part in our success.
• A new tradition of devolution: the responsible society
I want to end by suggesting to you a fourth and final tradition which, I think, has come into its own in the devolution era – the notion that social justice brings with it a set of new responsibilities as well as new rewards.
Now, as a socialist the idea that economic changes produce social consequences is a simply matter of logic. It does not take a sociologist of genius to recognise that the institutions which I identified earlier as having made Welsh communities strong have also been in decline over the same period. The binding force of shared experience, through religion or sport or culture, is less powerful and, in the most difficult cases, has produced communities fractured by crime, self-destructive abuse of drugs and alcohol and an evaporation of a sense of progress which shapes individual lives in socially constructive and cooperative ways.
The challenge which faces us in Wales today, and over the next four years, will be to reinvent ways of expressing a social solidarity which give back a sense of responsibility and confidence which goes beyond simple individualism, to harnessing the efforts of individuals to the wider common good.
I have no doubt at all that the willingness exists in Welsh communities to take that sort of responsibility. What the Labour movement, and the Labour movement in government in particular has to do is to find ways of harnessing that willingness which is so apparent in our communities to bring about improvements in their own lives by providing them with the means of doing so. That is what the social justice agenda I have outlined today is all about. That is what Government which is tune with the temper and the tradition of the people of Wales would seek to do, and that is the sort of Government which I hope to continue to lead.
30 September 2009
