If you are poor or if you have been unable to find work for a long time is it all your own fault? David Cameron thinks so.

In a recent speech he bundled the poor in with the idle and the obese and said they have only themselves to blame for their plight! A ‘morally neutral’ society, he suggests, has led to a situation where these people fail to see the difference between right and wrong, between what is good and what is bad. They have, he says, failed to take responsibility for their lives. During his speech, Mr. Cameron went on to say; ‘we talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things – obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction – are purely external events like a plague or bad weather."

Do some people make bad choices in life? Of course. Do some people who could work try to avoid it and live off the rest of us? Yes they do. But those people are a minority and it is more than a little rich for Mr.Cameron, an old Etonian bon into a wealthy family, to tell all those people struggling to find work that the problem is all theirs and that they are lazy.

When Mrs Thatcher closed down the mines in the 1980’s not only did she destroy a whole industry but she also failed to ensure that the communities that depended on them, some of them right here in East Kent, were given the resources they needed to recover. These communities were not made up of idle people, but found themselves at the mercy of all that comes with high unemployment and low opportunity – crime, drug abuse and hopelessness.

They needed help and support and they did not get it. They did not need ‘a good talking to’ by Tory politicians to be reminded of their personal responsibility; they needed investment, educational opportunities and re-training. Telling them to ‘get on their bikes and look for work’ (to paraphrase Norman Tebbitt) helped no-one.

Now the Conservarives are trying to reinvent themselves but what is becoming clearer, as the mask of ‘compassionate conservatism’ begins to slip, is that they have changed not one bit. To Mr.Cameron and his team if you are poor or out of work it’s your own fault.

Labour, on the other hand, understands life does not always go the way you want it. That is why we have introduced a national minimum wage and tax credits and why we have created millions of jobs since 1997 and pumped money into schools and universities to create opportunity for all.

Of course individuals must take responsibility for their actions and do the best they can. This is why the government has recently reformed incapacity benefit, making it far harder for those who might seek to abuse the system to do so. If you can work, you should.

But Mr Cameron talks of morality whilst it is clear from his speech that his party would shirk the single most important moral responsibility of government - to ensure that each individual is given a fair chance in life. This is why here in South Thanet my Labour colleagues and I have been fighting for investment, fighting for jobs and fighting for the high-speed rail-link. It is why the government provided the money to build Thanet Campus and it is why so many schools around Thanet are being re-built and modernised. It is also why we created Sure Start, the programme designed to deliver the best start in life for every child.

People do not choose poverty. It chooses them. Until Mr.Cameron learns that lesson the Conservatives will never be fit for Government.