http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/03/london Karen Buck, the shadow work and pensions minister, is in trouble for saying at a public meeting that Tory ministers simply did not want poor women, and specifically Muslim women, to live in London. She was speaking at a meeting for International Women's Day in Islington, a partly-gentrified but still gritty slice of north London, and reportedly declared that the government:
do not want lower-income women, families, children and, above all, let us be very clear – because we also know where the impact is hitting – they don't want black women, they don't want ethnic minority women and they don't want Muslim women living in central London. They just don't. They want people to be moving out of anywhere that is a more prosperous area into the fringes of London and into places like Barking and Newham. I have nothing against Barking and Newham. The problem is they are already full of people who are quite poor
As Conservative party bosses called for her to resign, Ms Buck later qualified her remarks to say that while very, very concerned about housing benefit cuts: "In the passion of a political meeting I was wrong to imply motive on behalf of Government ministers. I can't say what their intention and motives are."
So where is the split? Well, as luck would have it, the Blairite think-tank Policy Network has just published a long series of essays on how social democratic parties should cope with populist anger surrounding identity, multiculturalism and globalisation. Reading the essays, I came across this unwittingly topical thought from Trevor Phillips, head of Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission (a non-partisan post, though his essay is addressed explicitly to the centre-left). Mr Phillips writes:
the UK government’s proposals to cap rent subsidies, known as housing benefit, are said by Labour to attack black and minority ethnic households. In actual fact, while it is true that some ethnic minority families have benefited from a conspiracy between the state and landlords to drive up rents on the back of local authority payments for poor and unemployed minority families, and this would be undermined by a cap on housing benefits, the policy may benefit working minority families if it drives down rents overall, since those minority families are far more likely to be in rented accommodation and there are far more in this group than in the non-working group