Given how many things Cameron could focus on with the government, it never fails to annoy the hell out of me when he starts coming up with a load of half baked nonsense.
Today Gordon Brown is giving a major policy speech on social mobility. Now, social mobility is known to have decline massively from the late 70s onwards when the Tories came to power. A decade of Labour throwing money at the problem hasn’t reversed the trend, however it has slowed and more or less stopped. That’s according to independent research though I freely admit I have no idea who said it, it’s become one of those ‘facts’ that gets bandied about.
In Brown’s speech he criticises the Thatcher era for abandoning a generation of children, which is true enough. But Cameron claims that the ‘real’ reason we have a lack of social mobility is because of the decade of Labour rule. But this is nonsense! Social mobility seriously declined under the Conservatives and that’s a fact.
Other things Cameron lies about:
“The reason we have got blocked social mobility is that they haven’t opened up secondary education in the way we have suggested, allowing new schools to come through
Lie. Most of the Cameroons are actually Blairites anyway and they’re committed to Labour’s academy reforms. At the moment we’re going through the biggest programme of school building and refurbishment since the Second World War, so that’s just an absolute lie. Cameron’s big thing is to allow parents to run their own schools like in Scandinavia but this has real issues behind it, covered by Polly Toynbee previously (I really should link these things…).
They haven’t adopted tough but important welfare reforms to get people off welfare into work;
Lie. The Conservatives have backed a GOVERNMENT issued report on welfare to work, which the government also backed! It’s just a competition to see who can be toughest on welfare. The simple fact is more people than ever are working under this government.
They haven’t, as we would, really enliven the voluntary sector to deal with problems about drug abuse and homelessness.
Ooh the cheeky sod. Shelter gets a multi-million pound contract from the government every year to deal with the vulnerably housed. The government also provides methadone subscriptions for heroin addicts to keep them from falling into crime and helping them hold down steady lives. This has been described as the secret behind the fall in crime under the Labour government and the Conservatives are committed to scrapping this. As for homelessness, it has fallen massively under this government and it’s actually an area where they have hit their own targets on reducing the number of people homeless or in temporary accommodation. It’s not perfect but it’s better by far than what it was under the Conservatives. Usually when a Conservative talks about encouraging the role of the voluntary sector what it really means is public service cuts and forcing the voluntary sector to shoulder more of the burden, whether this is what Cameron plans on doing remains to be seen but actually most voluntary charities don’t want more of a role, they want the government to do their job properly.
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