Politics needs someone tough to sort out the mess. Louise Casey is just the person for the job

Recently I was asked to speak on the radio about a particular high-profile person who has been used for almost 30 years by various governments to add some balls to delivery of government targets, largely around poverty and homelessness. The person in question is a tough, no-nonsense woman who, using some oft used cliches, does not ‘entertain fools gladly’ and ‘takes no prisoners’. 

She is, and has been, impressive. What’s not impressive is the tasks she has been set. Another cliche springs to mind: ‘A racehorse used to pull a milk cart.’ In other words she has been assigned, not on all occasions, a job to do that lacks depth and does not utilise her true skills. I concluded my piece by suggesting that if said person had put her labours to getting rid of poverty, had been tasked by government to do so, she would have been much more formidable in her 30 years of governmental labours. 

I have often pointed out that government is fascinated with projects and initiatives. It loves nothing more than to come into office with a new-broom-like attitude that eventually is less of a new broom than a sweeper of problems to under the carpet. It rearranges the problem only for a new administration to wield their own new brooms and initiatives and projects. In some ways it is like an old-fashioned department store that fills its windows full of new products; yet behind the flash novelty is the same old drab delivery. The same old predictable failure to address the issues. 

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Three decades is roughly the period that the subject of the radio programme and I have been operating in the governmental sphere. She as a big fixer, me as a provider of emergency help, through work, to those cursed by homelessness and poverty. Neither of us has solved the big problems that society needs to face.

The inability of government to shift resources into preventing the inheritance of poverty – meaning there’s always a new generation available to join poverty at birth, and on most occasions remain in poverty for the rest of their lives. Neither of us has got any government to take a fresh look at how it allocates budgets and resources towards prevention of problems. They simply accept the growing poverty budget. 

Read more:

• The number of homeless deaths is an entirely preventable tragedy. What are we doing?
• Marmot principles should be applied to government departments for ending poverty
• How government inaction is radicalising Britain

But even before Louise Casey and I hit the political scene in the early 1990s, deep grief had been administered to the body politic. Stopgapism had become triumphant. Not educating a skilled-up working class to become an industrial nation that wasn’t simply a Victorian industrial nation. A calcified nation of workers doing jobs that were going out of use.

The acceptance of the British class system – poorly educated workers and educated middle classes – ensured that by the time Louise and I tried to rekindle some magic in social delivery we were being held back by poor social investment. Instead of a vast investment on skilling up people away from poverty in the 1950s and 60s, initiatives and projects and royal commissions abounded. Innovating out of being a collapsed Victorian industrial nation did not occur. 

What Louise and I have faced in our efforts to make the best of a bad job, me to deal with the pressing problem of street homelessness and her to try put some vim into government delivery, is the inheritance of poverty. And the inheritance of a poverty of government thinking. Lacking in thoughtfulness. Lacking in depth. More of the same. Just don’t forget to put the newest initiative in the window for all to see. 

The recent growth of politics based on fear of boats is pushing us towards a new politics that is more strident than we have ever seen in this country. We have to be preparing for this and not creating another stopgap initiative. What’s coming down the line, driven by public fear, is the damage poverty does to the world. The people escaping poverty to Europe. And our own poverty-strewn country with our poverty-dominated NHS and social services.

Over the last 30 years that is what governments should have been addressing. Imagine a country where POVERTY IS CRUSHED BY PROSPERITY, rather than a country where government handouts keep people in poverty. 

When I spoke on the radio about an impressive government fixer, I could only reflect on those 30 years when ‘we did our best, but our best was not good enough’. (Lots of cliches in this week’s article; lots of cliches in current governmental thinking.) But a rethink of government expenditure is nowhere to be seen. And at a time when more and more people are being radicalised into a new kind of politics, I fear for the ability of the government to respond to the challenge. Poverty busting is hardly in sight as the government follows the pattern of ‘more of the same’. 

My radio interview about a well-known government fixer threw up for me the harsh reality that this government needs a real new big broom. Perhaps Baroness Louise Casey could apply for the task. And not be reduced to another stopgap bit of government thinking.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

Listen to John on Times Radio with Adam Boulton on Sunday 26 October, giving his expert take on the rise of Baroness Louise Casey.

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