In his Hugo Young lecture last night David Cameron again tried to reinvent himself, this time as the man who will abolish poverty – no, don’t laugh. He has already donned several improbable aliases over the last four years – as environmental campaigner, hoodie-hugging youth enthusiast, NHS defender, Eurosceptic ally of the ex-Nazi far Right, and now social activist on behalf of the under-class. One must admire his camouflage, if not his insincerity. This time he has sought to pout his wares by a misrepresentation of history that even the holocaust-deniers would find difficult to beat. His theme was that Big Government is now so large that it is worsening poverty and inequality, and that the recent growth of the State is behind the rise in selfishness and individualism. That is such a reverse of the obvious truth that it’s astonishing he even dares to peddle it. He does so however because it serves a crucial purpose in the overall Tory strategy, namely to provide cover for the real Conservative goal of shrinking the State and decimating public expenditure. There are several precedents for this ploy.

It has been standard Conservative pre-election rhetoric to disguise the true goals. Reagan said the State was the problem, not the solution. Bush campaigned on compassionate conservatism. Thatcher promised where there was discord to bring peace. And now Cameron makes the breathtaking claim that by removing the State from the action, social responsibility will triumph again. By ending “Labour’s massive expansion of the State”, people will at last be free to escape the shackles of poverty. This is nonsense from start to finish.
First, the real cause of poverty is of course the drive to inequality generated by capitalism. The enormous, and still growing, maldistribution of power, wealth and income produced by deregulation, privatisation and unfettered market forces inevitably widens the inequality between rich and poor and swells the ranks of the relatively impoverished. This is what New Labour’s courting of neoliberalism has brought about, and the idea that the Tories by taking neoliberalism further still will somehow reduce poverty is sheer fantasy.
Second, why was State intervention, in the form of the Welfare State, born in the first place? It came into existence, first under Lloyd George, then Beveridge, and finally the Attlee Government precisely to ensure that there was no return to the Poor Law and the degredation of the 1930s. The State, so far from being the problem, was actually rightly seen as the only means of escape from the ravages of market fundamentalism. To shrink the role of the State, a la Cameron, wouldn’t produce a flowering of Lady Bountifuls; it would thrust Britain back toward the class-ridden divide of the Thirties.
And nor, thirdly, has there been an enormous expansion of the State under New Labour. The truth is that public sector net debt actually peaked at 43% of GDP at the end of the Tory government in 1997, and then sharply reduced down to 29% in 2002, and was still only at 36% in 2007 before the financial collapse. The increase in spending has been largely concentrated in health, bringing the level of spend to French-German levels of 7.7% (and most of it devoted to PFI), and education – a rebalancing long overdue. Perhaps then David Cameron would like to tell us precisely what he proposes to cut in his massive reduction of the State’s role?

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