Author Archives: Danny Alexander MP

This month when the policy paper ‘Freedom from Poverty; Opportunity for All’ goes before the Liberal Democrat federal conference we have the chance as a party to put forward a radical and unique set of proposals to tackle poverty and inequality in the UK.

If we are honest with ourselves this is a challenge which we have not stood up to for too long. While many people within the party have proposed and put into practice polices at a local level, it is now seven years since we have put forward a coherent package to tackle inequality and eradicate poverty.

After 10 years of Labour the time is ripe for us to make ourselves the only party offering genuine solutions to help the 12 million people still living in relative poverty. It is simply unacceptable that in the UK a person’s life chances still are determined more by their parents’ income and employment than in almost any other developed country.

Labour’s attempts to reduce poverty have come at the price of trapping people in dependency, with means-tested benefits. Labour seeks to move people over an arbitrary ‘poverty line’, rather than giving them the real opportunities which would allow them to play their full part in society.

Labour has failed to tackle educational inequalities, failed to get ‘hard to reach’ groups back into employment; failed to deal with the dramatic shortages of affordable housing; and failed to strengthen the pensions and benefits safety net. The Conservatives meanwhile have no sensible policies to deal with poverty and inequality at all. They want to “roll back the state and roll forward society” in a great leap backwards to nineteenth century Victorian conservatism.

It is time for us as a party to wage a new war on poverty, and give people the opportunities to succeed in life. To establish a real meritocracy where, regardless of background, everyone is given the opportunity to acquire the education and skills to succeed. Where the poorest in out society are no longer abandoned to a childhood spent in failing schools followed by a lifetime of form filling to claim means-tested benefits. But if these aspirations are to be more than merely platitudes, if we are to prove ourselves as a party of substance against two parties of spin, we must take difficult choices, and look not only to the state for solutions but also individuals and business.