Labour - the unelectable in search of a home?

I have listened to the new year messages of Labour and the Conservatives and now I want to give them mine

Unelectable?

Both, of course, sound very sensible. I am of course very biased and will never vote Conservative. The rhetoric, since Thatch in the Eighties, suggests that hard work and endeavour would be rewarded but the evidence is arguably to the contrary. Since the late seventies the gap between the richest and the poorest in the UK has grown. I should note that the government comments at the end of the article  are interesting as Universal Credit at time of writing is looking like a piece of unusable but highly expensive public expenditure, also some of their legislation has directly impinged on the less well off i.e the "bedroom tax" (has reduced the cost of the housing bill but done nothing to relieve the lack of housing in the community) still I digress.

old Etonian

The article also states that public services are the greatest leveller in the UK. Hear, hear. That appeals to my socialist side - to each according to their needs, from each according to their needs. Don't mistake me for some sort of communist however. 

My gripe with David Cameron's message is that hard work and endeavour are palpably not enough to ensure prosperity in today's Britain. A previous blog aired the claim from an MP that work in itself is not enough to lift one out of poverty. So already it is not true. It is a message that I think the UK likes though. There is a lot of adverse feeling toward those on benefits at the moment.

David Milliband's message of tackling the cost of living swings it for me. But only just. My problem with Labour at the moment is that they are not an effective opposition as they don't actually seem to stand for anything at the moment. This is at least a step in the right direction. My concern is that an artificial levelling of the cost of living may just stave off the inevitable and leave us with a mountain to climb at the other end.

Who?

The reason that we have a cost of living problem is that wages have not risen in line with costs for a while. I believe since the Seventies. The advent of easy access to credit has largely covered that over however. So how is The Labour party going to fight the cost of living? That has been largely left unsaid save for a promise of an price freeze on energy. 

It has been said that during this recession more people remained in employment than might have been the case. The result is that wages have not risen. So companies have kept staff so that they may take advantage of a recovery more quickly. 

This country has a complex issue to resolve I believe. In my opinion business has a little too much pre occupation with the bottom line. In many industries it is fine and good, healthy in fact. But the reason we have lost large areas of manufacturing is that we tried to compete at the wrong level. We are an advanced industrialised nation and our industry should reflect that. We cannot compete with the far east or anywhere outside of Europe for that matter, on mass production. We should be more concerned with the added value we can put in. The level of technology and engineering for instance. 

The issue that needs resolving too is how do we provide educated and skilled engineers and workers to fulfil this vision. The middle classes of society recognise the value of a good and useful education but at the lower end of this country it is not always recognised. Up here in the north east there appears to be a significant proportion of the population that only give this idea lip service. All parents want kids to do well but there does seem to be a level of rebellion against education. The roots are clear to see in the north east. Heavy industry up here soaked up labour from mines to ship building. Traditional working class attitudes to education were that it was to be endured. 

A book called "learning to labour" is still relevant in parts of the country. However I have heard the author saying that perhaps it is asking too much of education to lift these people out of that culture. 

My own feeling is that education itself must change. The way it is delivered at any rate. I personally found Schooling from the age of 11-16 to be too adversarial. 

When  I was at agricultural college we took a football team to HMP Charnwood. It was an eye opener. With the exception of security I recognised many features from Secondary school. I am not saying my school was really like a prison but there was a lot of need for conformity that I found stifling.

As a matter of balance my children do not agree with my hypothesis on school discipline!