No place for Labour on the moral high ground The Labour Party, Harold Wilson once said, "is a moral crusade, or it is nothing." It is a view, one suspects, that is shared by Ed Miliband. During his time as leader, he has proved eager to fulminate against the wickedness of the Coalition's austerity drive, its apparent determination to punish the poor at the expense of the rich and to remake British society as a harsher, crueller place. He will doubtless follow the same pattern in his speech today to the Fabian Society, in which he will flesh out his "One Nation" vision by arguing that, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown failed to rein in the rich and powerful, he will champion the many against the few in a way that the Conservatives cannot and will not. The subtext here, as in much of the Left's language, is that Labour has a monopoly on compassion - that the Tories are not a party that kind and decent people can support. It is worth asking, then, by what right Labour lays claim to the moral high ground. For while its leader is palpably sincere in his belief that his is the party of social justice, its record in government, and its current policy platform, suggest the opposite. It was under Labour, after all, that the gap between rich and poor widened into a chasm, despite the billions poured into tax credits; that the difference in performance between state and private schools grew wider than in any developed country save Turkey; that the salaries of doctors and nurses soared, while productivity in the National Health Service plummeted. It was under Labour that the poorest and most desperate members of society became trapped in welfare ghettos, their place in the job market taken by immigrant labour. Think of areas such as Tottenham, Toxteth or Easterhouse: elsewhere, the financial crisis resulted in a drastic spike in unemployment, but not there - in the welfare culture underwritten by Gordon Brown, hope-free worklessness had already become the norm. This was not just an economic failure, but a moral one. Labour frequently accuses the Conservatives of being driven by ideology - yet it is Ed Miliband and his party who are Britain's true ideologues. In power, they partly accepted the need for private involvement in the provision of public services. But Opposition has allowed a return to comforting purity. In health, in education, in welfare, in the probation service, the Left howls down any reform, any attempt to diversify provision. It offers little more than to preserve our public services in amber, and in the process leave them no more than fossils. The result is that a deep divide has developed in British politics: between those who judge a policy by its intentions, and those who judge it by its results. In experimenting with new models, or tearing up existing ways of doing things, Conservatives such as Chris Grayling, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove are driven by a fierce morality, but also a fierce practicality: what matters above all is making things better, by any and every means to hand. And their purpose is noble. Raising income tax thresholds - a Liberal Democrat policy that is easily supported by Tories - or tackling failing schools or reforming welfare are not measures that primarily help the rich, yet the Government has committed extraordinary resources to them. To every charge of heartlessness, ministers can and should throw back the last government's record of inadequate schools, malfunctioning hospitals, financial irresponsibility and political cowardice, all at a time of plenty. So how have Labour's efforts to impugn its opponents" motives been able to gain so much traction? Partly, the failure is political. The Coalition has actually raised taxes on the rich and cut them for the poor; income inequality, rather than rising as it did under Labour, has fallen sharply. Yet ministers have failed to make their case, allowing the lowering of the 50p tax rate (itself a brave and necessary measure) to stand as a shorthand for their priorities. Those educated at public school may feel uneasy about claiming to share the public's pain, but the truth is simple: Labour's approach to helping the poorest in society has been tested, and found abjectly wanting. For compassion with results, it is the Tories who have the best answers.