Personal Blogs

The Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, has recently announced a new Grand Plan to Fix All Society's Ills. This particular GPFASI is called "predistribution". The idea is that rather than tackling inequalities by redistribution (ie taxing the rich and giving money to the poor), Miliband will fix society so that the rich are less rich and the poor are less poor in the first place, so no redistribution is needed.

It has struck me how much this has in common with David Cameron's pet GPFASI, namely the "Big Society". The idea of the Big Society is that we all come together and help each other out, so the various mechanisms that the state has for helping people out will no longer be needed.

What do these two GPFASIs have in common? Well, for a start, they are both great dog-whistle policies designed to appeal to their traditional voters: for Labour, the idea of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and for the Tories, the idea of scrapping state mechanisms of looking after the vulnerable.

They are also both, on the face of it, splendidly desirable ideas. It really would be good if there were less inequality in society to start with so that government redistributive policies were unnecessary. It would also be really good if everyone in society was nice to each other and looked after each other, so there was no need for the state to get involved.

But the main thing they have in common is that they are both ridiculously idealistic and impractical. Both are couched in vague aspirational terms. Neither has the slightest hint of any specific policies that have a snowball in hell's chance of working in the real world.