Red Toryism apparantly is taking the worst of New Labour paternalism and combine it with the worst kind of …erm… New Labour free market fetishism, if two recent trail balloons — aid vouchers for people in poor countries to spent on private schools and investment vouchers for the poor in the UK, paid for by the sale of the nationalised banks to make them into “asset investors” — are anything to go by. So much for fresh new ideas from Cameron.
If you genuinely want to give poor people control over how to spent the money to get them out of poverty, give them the money directly, don’t arse about with bloody vouchers. But if you give them money you can’t control what they do with it and they might actually spend it on the wrong things. They might even buy …cigarettes. What’s more, vouchers are like company scrip, only redeemable through approved venues, another way to channel money supposed to help the poor into the pockets of your business friends.
The best way to lift people up out of poverty is by giving them money. Sure, some no doubt will fuck up, but they do so already and the thing about fucking up is, it matters less if you have more money (and are safely middle class) as we all know. I know I’ve made mistakes, but none of them could doom me, as I had money and more importantly, my parents had the money and connections to shelter me from my mistakes.