Of all the buzz-phrases which New Labour invented, ‘the many, not the few’ remains the most effective.
Of all the buzz-phrases which New Labour invented, ‘the many, not the few’ remains the most effective. Labour may, in fact, have failed the many, but they retain their rhetorical advantage over the Conservatives. Now the government wants to make inequality actually illegal, through its Equality Bill, and the Tories are frightened of being on the wrong side of this argument. Yet surely common experience shows that the many need the few. This is true in the straightforward sense that the few pay a vastly disproportionate part of income tax (the top 1 per cent produce over 20 per cent of the total take), but also in the sense that almost all of us learn more from exceptional people than from the ordinary run of which we are a part. A world of equal ability, equal wealth, equal talent, is unimaginable. When Churchill, in 1940, spoke of what the many owed to the few, it resonated. The idea needs to re-enter political argument.
The ten-yearly national census is due in 2011. For 200 years, it has been an admired feature of this country. It is a mark of civilisation for nations to gather accurate information about themselves. But I realise, with a slight shock, that I no longer trust our government to make proper use of this information, to preserve its confidentiality or to collect it competently enough for the information itself to be relied on. The last census, in 2001, tried to make us all report our own ethnicity. Since I do not want to live in a society defined, like apartheid South Africa, by race, I wrote, so far as I remember, ‘I am British’ all over it, which may well have been an offence.
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