After a recent conversation with a friend, I found myself thinking about deprivation in Hull. Having suggested that Hull had a problem with deprivation, and being disagreed with by my friend who is rightly proud to be from Hull, we started trying to define what exactly we mean by deprivation.
Firstly, deprivation isn't just about money. If throwing money at deprived areas was the solution then Labour would have been far more successful in improving the lives of people in this country than they clearly have been. Labour's core belief seems to be that what we need is a bigger, more powerful government and throwing more money at things and any problem can be bent to their will. What do we end up with at the end of that? A lot of debt and a lot of people whose problems have been ignored because they don't need yet more "investment".
So what else, other than not having enough money, does deprivation mean? One of the most obvious is deprivation of aspiration, something that is pervasive in the education system in this country. If you measure schools by what percentage get 5 A*-Cs, then what a school will focus its energies on is making sure everyone gets 5A*-Cs. I can't blame any school for this focus, they would be crazy to do anything else because we are told that a school with a high percentage of pupils getting 5 A*-Cs is a success and a school with a lower percentage is a failure. But where does aspiration come in? It's a culture of asking for "OK" rather than striving for individual excellence in every pupil. It's rejecting the idea of grammar schools not because they don't work but because they make it harder for other schools to achieve "success" as measured by 5 A*-Cs. If the only schools where students are told "you can do anything", not just in words but by the very ethos of the school, are private schools, then is it any wonder the our leading universities have such trouble with low rate of application from state schools?
How about deprivation of opportunity, where people are expected to do things but never given the chance? The government says "we want as many people in work as possible" and then stacks the odds against them by creating a benefit system which makes more sense not to work than to take a lower paid job. Who can blame people for choosing not to work given that kind of choice! And why have the Labour government not seen this, are we really to believe that nobody might have twigged this fact? Or maybe the answer simpler than that, maybe having a large group of people whose livelihood depends on a government happy to maintain the status quo might be useful when it comes to elections...
Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg, in so many other ways people have been deprived, and I'm sure in due course. So much of what has gone wrong in this country is about people being deprived of that they should rightfully be given, and the sooner that we have a government who can see that means more than just throwing money at people the better.
