Wasted opportunity

OVER 30 years ago, the Red Paper on Scotland, edited by a youthful Gordon Brown, argued that Scottish poverty would never be eradicated through capitalist economic growth and called instead for redistribution of income and wealth from the rich to the poor.

It predicted that, unless income and wealth were redistributed, then the scale of poverty in Scotland and Britain would remain constant.

When the paper was published in 1975, there were around a million Scots officially classified as "poor." According to the latest Scottish statistics published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, there still are a million Scots trapped in poverty.

This is not really surprising since, in the period since 1975, we have had 18 years of Tory governments and 15 years of Labour governments that have all carried through a massive redistribution of wealth and income from the poor to the rich.

The Red Paper, of course, was calling for redistribution of wealth and income in the opposite direction. However, the knowledge that history has vindicated the Red Paper prediction will provide no comfort to socialists anywhere.

What it should do is stir among us a renewed and passionate debate about the means by which the scourge of poverty, that has been constant throughout Scottish and British history, can finally be defeated.

The by-election in Glasgow East ought to have provided us with a classic opportunity for such a debate. The East End of Glasgow is scarred by some of the worst poverty indicators in Britain, which have persisted over generations and through capitalist boom and bust alike.

Normally ignored and written off by the major political parties as safe Labour territory, it has suddenly found itself thrust into the national spotlight, invaded by a ravenous pack of metropolitan journalists and with the fate of a British Prime Minister turning on the outcome of Thursday's poll.

Glasgow East is also included within the current Clyde Gateway regeneration project. This public private partnership is led by an urban regeneration company that promises to invest £1.6 billion over the next 20 years in housing, commercial and retail units and facilities for the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Its supporters claim that it will create 10,000 local jobs and massively impact on local levels of poverty and poor health.

Its opponents argue that it is mainly about selling public land cheap for highly profitable private property development and will do little or nothing for the poor.

The stage should have been set, therefore, for a contest in which the candidates disputed, on what had now become a national stage, the root causes of the endemic ill health, low life expectancy, worklessness and income poverty that scars too many of today's deprived communities.

There should have been arguments around models for urban regeneration that actually work instead of claiming to work for local communities.

The parties should have used the by-election to address the reasons why poverty has persisted in one of the richest countries in the world.

What we needed, in effect, was a real battle to decide which of the parties would be toughest on the causes of poverty.

Instead, the national media and press narrowed coverage of the three-week contest initially to the four big parties, with the smaller socialist and green parties written out of the script. Then, it became a two-horse race between new Labour and the SNP, with the policy debate firmly focused within the comfort zones of both of these pro-business parties.

Accordingly, there were lots of rival claims around whether Scotland or Britain would best stimulate Scottish economic growth, but an almost complete silence on how to close the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

The opportunity was simply missed to challenge in the heat of electoral battle many of the key assumptions that lie behind the anti-poverty and regeneration strategies of both governments in Westminster and Holyrood.

The candidates might have debated how work can be a pathway out of poverty when two-fifths of children in poverty already come from families in which the adults do low-paid work?

They might have asked themselves what is wrong with taxing the rich to spend on the poor?

They might even have addressed the question of why it is that prime building land is always reserved for expensive private development.

Or even, perhaps, the question of why taxpayers should have to subsidise and line the pockets of rich private developers in the name of reducing poverty.

In the event, these and other important questions around the persistence of poverty in affluent societies were simply ignored.

The major party candidates stuck safely to the major parties' own policy concerns - independence or the union, anti-social thuggery, North Sea oil, local income tax versus the council tax and so on.

The condition and concerns of the people of Glasgow East played no part in their grand political strategies.

Whichever of the two contending party candidates wins on Thursday, the poor will continue to lose out.

Both new Labour and the SNP cling to the idea that free markets and economic growth are the answer to everything. Neither of them would dare to raise taxes on the rich to help the poor. Neither of them deserves the support of the poor.

Whoever wins on Thursday will not deserve to win. But, then, that is equally true of countless working class constituencies across new Labour Britain.

John McAllion is a former Labour MP and MSP for Dundee East.