Contribution
I say “well done” to the noble Lord, Lord Walker. I was confused when I was asked to follow the noble Lord and, in the tradition of the House, to praise him. I thought to myself, “I don’t know anything about Walkers crisps”. That was the only Walker I knew. Then I thought, “Ah no, it is Johnnie Walker”. For a while I was confused, but I got there in the end.
What really excites me about what the noble Lord is doing, as well as putting a lot of people into work, is the idea that he extended the hand to people who had been banged up. He has given jobs to people who were in prison. I am glad that the noble Lord is in competition with Timpson. I think, in a way, he is a bit ahead of it and maybe it is going to have to catch up. It is a good bit of competition. The only problem I have with the noble Lord—and I really do have a problem—is: where was he when I needed him? I remind noble Lords that I am an ex-offender.
I turn to the Bill. What a wonderful Bill, to get rid of something like this. We may like it or not; we may or may not be with the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, wanting to give hand ups rather than handouts. I have to say that the noble Baroness stole that from me; she knows that. I was the first person in the United Kingdom to use those terms, and I stole them from Bill Clinton, who stole them from Jesse Jackson. Is that not interesting? Is it not wonderful that we can talk about a hand up, not a handout? The whole of my working life, since starting the Big Issue 34 years ago, has been about giving people a hand up, not a handout.
My mother had six children. Every year that she had a baby, she got poorer—and poorer and poorer. Big families are not good for the bottom line. They are not good for you. But the problem with this Bill, and where I fall out with our Conservative friends, is that while it may punish mum and dad, it really punishes the children. To me, if we need anything in life today, it is to be behind our children. Our children are being undone before us: mobile phones and social media are undermining them. Our children are really at the sharp end of things.
I come from the pre-social security period. We were brought up with very little help from the state—in the 1950s and 1960s, there was none of that. We got five shillings per child: that was about one pound and 10 shillings for a family of six boys. Because Britain is a low-wage and low-investment economy, British capitalism is really good at making slithers of money out of jobs that are low-paid. It is very difficult now for a lot of people to nobly go out to work and earn enough money to feed themselves and their children, even though they are doing a 40-hour week. We are a low-wage economy because we are a low-investment economy.
Capitalism is quite happy with that. It does not matter if you make millions of pounds out of slithers of profit, or whether you buy and sell things that are worth £50,000 each. This is the thing that I came into the House of Lords to try to sort out: I came in to dismantle poverty, not to make the poor more comfortable, nor to keep them outside as though they were a different species. I have listened to the debate so far. I am not sentimentally attached to the poor; I do not cry over them. I think there are too many people who cry over the poor and who do not do anything. I want to get the poor out of poverty. I want to get the poor into a situation where they can make decisions about their own lives, where they can have the kind of life that they want, where they can get rich and socially mobile and get out of poverty. There is only one cure for poverty and it is not the state. The only cure is social mobility. If you get social mobility, you are out of it.
The funny thing is that most people in Britain, even Conservatives, will be a few generations away from the coalface. They will have morphed their way to better times. The problem is the inheritance of poverty—for example, 90% of the people I have worked with in prisons and on the streets come from poverty inherited from their parents. Until we work on that, we will not get anywhere.