Labour and Welfare

The Conservatives seem to be succeeding beyond their wildest dreams in their cunning plan to steal Labour's clothes and paint the 'People's Party' as the party of welfare.

Here's what David Blunkett had to say which was reported in The Guardian yesterday although the way things are going Blunkett may end up being derided as a 'Tory' for having the audacity to speak his mind.

If you ask me, the whole business is spiralling out of control and the real danger for Labour is that welfare becomes an albatross around its neck, as opposed to a serious issue over which many voters have concerns. 

David Blunkett's Today interview - Summary

In his Today interview David Blunkett, the Labour former work and pensions secretary, said the party was “in emotional trauma” follow its election defeat. (See 9.11am.) Here are some of the other points he made.

• Blunkett said that Labour MPs should think about the Labour candidates who did not get elected, and why they did not get elected.

I need to say to colleagues who got elected in May: you were very lucky. Think about those colleagues and, above all, that electorate that suddenly found that it had got a Conservative government and ask yourself why. In 1987 when I was elected, I was euphoric about being elected personally but I didn’t have the temerity to say if only I could have spread some of those 24,000 majority across other constituencies, we might have been in government. We weren’t.

• He suggested that the Labour MPs who rebelled had fallen into a trap set by the Tories. The Tories were “very good” at setting traps for Labour, he said, and George Osborne, the chancellor, was “blatant”, about what he was doing, Blunkett said. “You’ve got to avoid those traps.”

• He said Labour should recognise why there was an argument for restricting benefits to families with just two children.

That is a quite difficult argument for the Labour party: it’s difficult because we don’t want to put children who are with us or will be in the future in a position of poverty, but we have to put adults in a position of responsibility and then the state has to put the mechanisms in place to help them make the right decisions and, when they’re making the right decisions, to reinforce that they’ve got it right.

You see, we talked about something called predistribution about three years and then it dropped off the lexicon of what was being debated. That was about ensuring that people could earn their way out of dependence on the state.

• He said Labour should have linked support for a living wage at the election with support for the idea of making people less dependent on the state.

We’ve got to have a narrative which plays with the people who know that they are sympathetic to those who can’t help themselves but also know that the best form of welfare is work and that the Lord helps those who help themselves.