As Peter Riddell reports in today's Times, Alistair Darling, in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts yesterday, chose, rather encouragingly I thought, to speak on the role of the Treasury in the 21st century.
Darling's central theme, writes Riddell, was:
" ... that elusive term 'fairness', which, to his surprise, one questioner asked him to define. It was, he said, about equality of opportunity and aspiration, not just fair processes."
Good on the chancellor!
Riddell laments the tendency, in recent years, for the Treasury to involve itself in social policy instead of just managing the public finances and keeping the economy in good shape.
But what he neglects to point out is that over the timeframe he discusses, the rules under which the economy is run have changed almost beyond recognition. Those rule changes have had the positive effect of increasing the wealth-generating capacity of the economy, but have done little for the poorest in society: thus the growing gap between rich and poor both in wealth terms and in respect of life chances.
Before the rules were changed, largely at the behest of Mrs Thatcher, the natural workings of the economy, and the policy interventions it permitted, tended to deliver a more equal society. The Treasury has, in fact, always meddled in social policy. In the postwar period it did so by establishing and overseeing a macroeconomic framework that served the majority of citizens reasonably equitably. Now that the framework has been changed, it is only to be expected (or at least hoped) that a Labour chancellor would take a more active role in social policy.
But Darling has a problem. The changes of the last three decades, which as far as I am aware he has never seen fit to question, make it much harder for the government to intervene in pursuit of more positive social outcomes. So while Riddell is wrong to suggest the chancellor should keep to a much narrower remit, Darling is kidding himself if he thinks the treasury can have much of an impact on the social issues like poverty, homelessness and equality of opportunity which are apparently close to his heart, without addressing the fundamental changes his recent predecessors have wrought on the economy.