Tom Peck's Sketch: Is that the bottom of the barrel I can hear?
Poverty, to the layperson, might be characterised by an absence of money – but our Prime Minister is no layperson
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Your support makes all the difference.Once upon a time, in May 2015, Lynton Crosby told the Prime Minister that such matters as social justice and caring about the poor were the “barnacles on the boat” and must be scraped off. Winning the election would be about keeping it all about the economy, keeping it simple.
Sticking barnacles back on a boat is, one imagines, not a straightforward task, which would explain why David Cameron’s speech was so excruciatingly long. He was launching, he said, “an all-out assault on poverty”. It took place in north London, opposite a new Hilton Hotel and next door to a bar which sells craft beer by the half pint for £11.
Poverty, to the layperson, might be characterised by an absence of money. But our Prime Minister is no layperson. “If it was simply about money, we would have solved the problem by now,” he patiently explained, in the process of explaining how virtually no money would be set aside to deal with it.
“Sink estates” would, he claimed, be “torn down and rebuilt” and as he did so, his communications team were sending out the relevant press releases and publicity materials to show that the sum being made available, to sort out more than 100 estates, would be £140m.
Don’t worry though. The private sector can do the rest: “Regeneration will work best in areas where land values are high, because new private homes, built attractively and at a higher density, will fund the regeneration of the rest of the estate.”
Entirely coincidentally, I happen to live in new-build block overlooking a notorious south London estate, and have in the past been woken on a Saturday morning by the sound of a policeman leaning into a letterbox and shouting: “Move slowly toward the door and I will put the Taser down.”
I am yet to work out quite what the arrival of a handful of rip-off apartments with little glass balconies and people like me living in them is doing for these people’s life chances, but what do I know?
Satire, of course, has been dead for some time now, so it falls to me only to repeat the fact that our Prime Minister did stand on a stage and point out with grave concern that, “people don’t get left behind, they start behind” and to point out that this is the same person who drank 1969 Dom Pérignon while being flown to America on Concorde for his friend’s 12th birthday party.
It means, by the way, that our old friend the Big Society is back. “We’re not just taxpayers who have to abide by the law,” he said. “We have broader responsibilities too.”
A noble sentiment, but perhaps not when it’s your job to make the laws. Either way, expect there to be more scraping to be done soon.
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