Left Soft on Solutions

There is rather a good piece in the Comment Section of today's Guardian entitled "A cloistered metropolitan elite is in denial about Britain" by John Harris, whose photograph shows a young man who looks a bit like the singer Paul Weller (later of Red Wedge) during the early 1980s. I'm largely in agreement with what Mr Harris has to say, with one exception, his presumption(?) that only the centre-left is really interested in the subject matter of his article : "inequality".

Whilst organisations like the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), Demos and the Young Foundation will I'm sure be sympathetic to Mr Harris's message (even if "a former editor of a tabloid newpaper" was not), one problem with these manifestations of the centre-left is that they have been soft on real solutions, or at least ones that have taken root in the body politic. Indeed, I would argue that the John Major government was stronger on solutions than this one.

There have been some excellent analyses of inequality by "the soft left", including Professor Robert Macdonald's study of "Disconnected Youth" in Middlesbrough, published last year by Palgrave. However, these analyses have not led to the development of coherent policies by the present government to tackle the sort of problem "indicators" identified in Mr Harris's article , and perhaps most of all that "abiding sense that the good life was happening somewhere else".

So why has the centre-left been soft on solutions to tackle inequality ? This might well provide the subject for another article by Mr Harris. One reason, I would suggest, is the tendency for the soft left, however well intentioned, to inhabit a rather cloistered world of its own, all be this rather less grand that that inhabited by New Labour and its adherents in the media etc.