Tuesday 28 January 2014

The Party of Welfare - so what?


The Tories accuse Labour of being the Party of Welfare.  Well, so what if they were?  What’s wrong with that?  It didn’t hurt me to say it, so why should it hurt anybody who cares?  Except of course, Labour are far from being that sort of party.

Following on from my last blog, I looked at definitions of ‘welfare’. As I mentioned I understand welfare to mean looking after the health and well-being of my fellow human beings. Dictionary definitions will define welfare as 'the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group' and 'statutory procedure or social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need.'  So what on earth is wrong with being the party of welfare?  Instead of shying away from it, shouldn’t Labour be embracing it? Shouldn’t they turn it back on the mean and nasty Tory rhetoric and simply say, ‘Yes, we care about people and we’re proud of that, we would be deeply ashamed to be the party who took that basic security away from people. What sort of a government would be?’ Labour have missed the opportunity, so fearful are they.  That much is obvious to me and many people. 

But such is the climate of harshness and brutality that while the two main parties are so busy locking horns to see who can be the meanest (and dragging in smaller bullies like UKIP) there’s a gaping void meanwhile waiting for somebody to fill with benevolence, compassion and humanity.