Old and New Labour

Tony Blair is the exemplar of the "New Labour" politician, the successor to the founders of the British Labour political movement in the early 20th century and the welfare state in the late 1940s. I had an unexpected meeting with the ghost of the "Old Labour" party while walking along Addington Road in December.

This road lies a mile south of the town centre and, for much of its half-mile length, does not look particularly up market or appealing. With its undistinguished mixture of house styles from the 19th to the late 20th century, it could be any of a thousand unremarkable roads in British towns and cities. It is named after Lord Addington, the only Prime Minister to come from Reading. He is best remembered for a mocking rhyme comparing him to the great William Pitt:

"Pitt is to Addington
As London is to Paddington".

The only fact that makes Addington Road triply desirable is its location; close to the town centre, close to Reading University AND having both the top-ranking Reading School and the Royal Berkshire Hospital bordering on it. Near the west end, there used to be a long-neglected piece of overgrown ground which was once a playing field for Kendrick School, the best girls' school in town and one of the top 10 girls schools in the country. What sports they played on this sloping land I do not know. But nature abhors a vacuum, especially when there is so little new housing in a very desirable location, and finally builders bought the land and erected a mixture of houses and apartments. They thus created the only noteworthy feature in Addington Road - a curving terrace of 14 town houses, designed to evoke an 18th century Bath terrace. The 18th century originals in Bath, 70 miles west of Reading, sell for £3 to 4 million ($6-8 million). So the Reading imitations look like all-time bargains at only £500,000 ($1 million) each, especially as they provide 21st century features such as integral garages in the basement. You could even have a lift installed to provide disabled access, though at four stories high they must be the least likely homes ever touted as "disabled accessible".

Many housing developments in Reading provide some public amenity as part of the deal with the council giving them planning permission. So one apartment block next to the terrace was reserved for "essential workers" such as nurses. The Royal Berkshire Hospital is only a hundred yards away, but not many nurses or junior doctors can afford half a million pounds for accommodation. In addition, the semi circle of land in front of the concave terrace has been landscaped into the smallest park in town, and possibly the smallest in the whole country.

On entering it, I found a sign declaring it named after Lorenzo Quelch (1862-1937), a founder of the Labour Party in Reading in 1918 after a lifetime of working in various socialist movements. One of them was named the National Socialist Party - unexpectedly funny, in view of the later political career of Mr Hitler. But there have been so many parties, tendencies, breakaway groups, factions and sects in left-wing British politics in the last 200 years that it must be difficult finding a fresh and distinctive name for each new formation. I knew of one extreme left-wing "party" in Reading which consisted of one family of four people. Lorenzo used to live in Addington Road, which was one reason for naming a local landmark in his honour.

I could not help but marvel at the numerous overlapping ironies in naming this tiny patch of land after Lorenzo. What would he, who spent so much of his life fighting the "hydra-headed monster of capitalism" (aka Huntley and Palmer's Biscuits, the biggest employer in town), have made of a public park provided in a complex deal with a multi-million pound property company? What did he have in common with the smooth talking highly educated spokesmen of the local Labour party who named it after him? Lorenzo was born into desperate poverty. One of his childhood memories was trudging through the snow to pawn his mother's wedding ring. Lorenzo was a Sunday School teacher as well as a tireless politician. Quite a contrast to the privately educated "Phoney" Tony Blair with his eyewatering income and his association with a millionaire hard core pornographer. It was a sad reminder of how the most ardent dreams and noble desires of pioneers get twisted and soured over time.

But a few hundred yards to the east of this luxury development I was reminded of a different way in which the socialist dream had curdled in a probably predictable way. I used to work for the Department of Social Security in Reading and in 1976 I had to visit a house in Addington Road. Under the one roof there were two "families" claiming social security. Nowadays, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, "family" means whatever you want it to mean. But this menage was an eyeopener to someone as young and naive as me. Upstairs, a man, his partner and their two children constituted one "family". Downstairs a woman and her four children constituted the second "family".

What made it unforgettable (and required my presence to write a report) was the fact that the man upstairs was the estranged husband of the downstairs woman. He had abandoned her to move in with his partner and sire two children, while his wife and four children lived on social security. But he had lost his job and thus the means to support a second household. Either he was a silver tongued SOB or his wife was excessively charitable, but she agreed to help him out by allowing him plus new family to return to the original family house and live on social security.

With the information I gleaned from my visit, the adjudicators back at the office agreed that was OK to pay them as two separate "households", even though they shared one none too large house which had not been subdivided into apartments. Even in 1976, in the early days of the sexual revolution, this "family" set up was obviously exceptional and there were few precedents to guide civil servants in making decisions. And, of course, any decision made could itself serve as a precedent for later decisions....

What is obvious is that this sort of behaviour is possible only for the wealthy or the poor who effectively have unlimited access to the funds extorted from the luckless taxpayer. At that time few of the general public were fully aware of what they were being forced to underwrite and I am sure most would have objected vigorously to funding such arrangements, if they had been allowed any influence in the matter. Yet it was an inevitable consequence of the Social Security legislation passed in the 1940s (under Lorenzo Quelch's Labour Party successors) and its later legal enhancements. It seemed so humane and essential for any modern civilised society - we look after the jobless and especially their children.

But now some sections of the Labour movement find themselves in effect condoning even more immoral behaviour. An extreme, though illuminating, recent example concerned a "family" where the three daughters aged 11, 13 and 15 had all conceived children. Needless to say, all three daughters had themselves been conceived without benefit of matrimony - we are now a whole generation on from my Addington Road "families". The grandmother, her three daughters and their children were living on around £25,000 ($50,000) per annum in combined Social Security and housing benefits. Also, needless to say, none of the "fathers" of these babies were making any contribution, nor were they ever likely to make any.

Roy Hattersley, one of the surviving relics of "Old Labour", makes a lucrative living as a media pundit and in one newspaper column he protested at the media vilification of this family and implied that the real tragedy was the poverty in which this family found themselves and about which the middle classes cared nothing. Plainly £25,000 a year was wholly inadequate. But the family's small house is obviously inadequate and they will doubtless soon be allocated a larger public house. What level of Social Security would relieve Roy's tender conscience without encouraging even more dim witted young women to produce babies on a production line basis? I hope he knows a guy who is expert at squaring circles. But people feel reluctant to suggest reforms which would take resources away from children in one parent families - "compassion" for poor children is a combined ace, king and queen card for the Social Security lobby. Some in the Labour Party, especially the religiously inspired such as Frank Field, see clearly the horrible morass that compassionate instincts have lead so many into and suggested reforms, but they are still very much in the minority.