LONDON, 1 January 2005 — The Horror of the tsunami drowns optimistic new year thoughts. Images of human flotsam and jetsam prompt nihilistic thoughts of meaninglessness.
All previous experience suggests too little help will be promised and even less given. A year ago response to the Bam earthquake offered a new openness with Iran: But the non-arrival of pledged cash only added to suspicion of the wicked West. Meanwhile in Iraq, that ongoing calamity for which we are directly responsible, the news that 28 more have been blown up fades into the inside pages. But the new year is for optimism, if you can manage it. Both Tony Blair and the UK’s Finance Minister Gordon Brown look to 2005 as Britain’s big chance at the helm of the G-8 to engage the rich with debt relief, aid, fair trade, carbon emissions and AIDS-crippled Africa. On debt and trade Blair’s Labour Party has done well, but it is difficult to believe great strides will be taken in redistributing power and wealth in a world in which economic and intellectual forces are pushing in the wrong direction and the wealth gap widens. Social democracy and global cooperation are struggling under the tsunami of US neoconservatism.
Countries that tolerate vast wealth gaps are unlikely to concern themselves greatly about the poor even further from their door. Countries that give most — the Nordics — are the ones that have created the most socially equal societies at home first. Can America be anything but unjust in dealing with foreigners when it cares so little about the poverty within its own borders? Britain has yet to confront honestly the scale of its own dysfunctional inequality. Labour still has not found a language of redistribution and fairness that it dares to use when talking to voters. In public, both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are at ease with the language of global injustice, but not with talking about domestic poverty. “Africa”, in Blair’s speeches, is a noble cause more than a real place, sanitized by distance. The fewer details he sees, the easier it is to express the “scar” on our conscience. Brown attacks debt abroad, yet debt at astronomic interest rates still cripples poor families here.
Seen close up, the poor at home are politically difficult. Their children get into trouble and their parenting skills may be questionable; too many are on invalidity benefit with various intractable difficulties. “You can’t just throw money at them” is the official stance — while quietly redistributing a lot in tax credits and benefits. Labour has not begun to turn the poor into an unequivocally good cause. Far-away orphans are easier: poor children at home arouse ambiguous political feelings. This is pitiful cowardice.
Labour’s great chance to be “at its best when at its boldest” now happens to be its best electoral strategy, too: Take a risk, be brave, talk loud and often about its mission to abolish child poverty. Be honest about how it will be paid for, the good it will do, the vision of a country and a world without poverty. Take the big risk of losing some middle England votes for the gain of plainly doing the right thing. That’s what political trust is made of.
If this seems to have traveled a fair distance from the tsunami, it hasn’t. Charity begins at home because people’s basic good instinct for generosity and decency has to be nurtured by leaders brave enough to take the risk to appeal to altruism, at home and abroad. Optimism is the great progressive virtue: Things can and must get better; hope is the great political energizer. Pessimism is the conservative state of mind: Fear all change, self-interest is the only reliable human motivator. Tsunamis may be inevitable; human failure to minimize suffering and share wealth is not.
