Frank Field - saying the previously unsayable

The biggest transformation of anti-poverty programmes since the war will "require a testing of some of the 1940s welfare state’s sacred cows" says the Guardian. Can't remember a report, ever, commanding the sort of broad-band support ( here, here and here) that has greeted Field's response to Cameron's challenge.

Frank Field is a Labour MP and a life-long anti-poverty campaigner who, in 1997, was charged by Blair to "think the unthinkable" about social security when he appointed him Minister of Welfare Reform at the DSS and made him a privy councillor. His ideas, then, were killed by Chancellor Broon and Field's boss at the DSS, Harriet Harperson, with Blair wimping out as usual, so Field resigned in 1998.

"Poverty is a much more subtle enemy than purely lack of money" he writes, affirming that financial poverty is NOT the dominant reason why disadvantage is handed down from one generation to another. This is hardly the unthinkable - thousands of parents, teachers and social workers have thought this forever. However it is saying what was unsayable in a Labour regime intent on turning a majority of the population into clients of the state.

This time around, Field's ideas have received the whole-hearted and public support of Oliver Letwin, the Conservatives’s chief policy thinker, while Cameron and Clegg have published a joint letter to Field praising the report as "a vital moment in the history of our efforts to tackle poverty and disadvantage".

Thirteen wasted years. And still polls indicate 40 percent of the British support the Labour pukes. Most of that 40 percent will bitterly resent attempts to give their children a better chance in life.

Labour - the crab bucket party