What with one thing or another, the proclamations that have come out of our new government’s first Party conference so far have been frankly less than inspiring. It’s probably forgivable that after 14 years of socially damaging austerity, the Labour Party should focus its initial rhetoric on rebuilding a better Britain, restoring civic pride and driving an economic revival. Sadly, neither its early actions – such as its determination to remove pensioners’ winter fuel allowance – nor its declared plans to Conference this week show much prospect of a preferential option for the poor, or indeed any real understanding of the societal motivations of the UK population.

It is often quipped that when in power the Labour Party tends “out-Tory the Tories” and certainly a damaging week of ill-judged and unpopular policy announcements chased by accusations of freeloading and questionable expense claims won’t have done much to endear the government to the nation. Neither will the conference speech comments made by the Health Secretary Wes Streeting this morning. Perhaps recalling the visionary zeal of previous Labour Health Minister Aneurin Bevan, who is generally considered to have been the founder of the NHS, Mr Streeting began his keynote speech by telling the conference: “can’t tell you the weight of responsibility I feel to make sure the National Health Service… is there for the next century and beyond”.

As with everything in this particularly mission-led government, solving the problem of a “broken” NHS requires a very long-term strategy rather than any fast or immediate fixes. So today’s promises were somewhat generic, sweeping and uncontroversial statements about creating an NHS that will hopefully work fairly for everyone in about ten years time.

Somewhat more disturbingly, Mr Streeting also announced in passing that urgent action is going to be taken to target the out of work – as it seems that a plan to send teams of top clinicians to hospitals across the country “to oversee reforms” will head out initially to 20 hospitals in areas of the country with the most people off sick. Whatever the intention, this is hardly going to been as anything but a campaign to drive the poor and vulnerable off vital benefit lists and onto the lowest rungs of the employment ladder.

Following hard on the heels of Mr Streeting, Labour’s Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall cut a somewhat different tone in recognising that far too many families have slid below the poverty line, with food-bank use soaring and more than four million children growing up in genuine, measurable poverty. Sadly, in a reiteration of the familiar ‘non-workers are the problem’ narrative, it seems the primary fix to is going to be “to get Britain working again” according to Kendall. New jobs and a refreshed career service, a child poverty task force, focussed regional employment strategies and the “biggest reforms to employment support in a generation” are being presented as the antidote to family deprivation. However, this ignores the reality that many of the families in the deepest poverty are in employment – but in pitifully poor jobs where the salary doesn’t cover even the most basic necessities of life.

Given that the majority of today’s legislators come from secure and privileged backgrounds, it’s not really surprising that they have little concept of what sustained deprivation can do to the human spirit. Looking in from the outside, it’s easy to assume that really struggling families just need regular, generally low grade employment to solve all of their issues. This is a very flawed view of the societal landscape, especially coming from a party with its roots embedded in addressing social inequalities; Labour really could do with consulting some of the agencies devoted to helping the most vulnerable in society before stepping into the public sphere and embarking on policy reforms.

For some, the early actions of this government are heavy with shadows of the kind of oppressive communistic socialism that had the Catholic Church so uneasy in the early years of the 20^th century. More latterly this interference in the private lives of citizens has become known rather benignly as the ‘nanny state’, which seriously belies its intentions.

Just last year Keir Starmer wrote a highly revealing article for The Guardian on the subject of child health, in which he proposed an extremely invasive incursion of the state into the lives of children at school – that strange concrete and tarmaced landscape where the role and responsibilities of parents are handed over formally at the gates every morning to the state’s control.

In this article Mr Starmer proposed a wide range of actions, including a 9pm watershed for junk-food ads, banning vape adverts aimed at children, a free breakfast club in every primary school, better access to mental-health support, cutting waiting times for hospital care for children, and guaranteeing more dental appointments. He even went on to call for supervised tooth-brushing for three to five year olds in a bid to reduce tooth decay and dental visits for the very young.

Whilst such policies can be sold on their practical virtues, there is a very substantial danger that the ever-increasing incursion of the state into the private and personal lives of families and our young people can do more harm than good to the social fabric of the country. Unquestionably there are many instances of families that are failing in their responsibilities to both their children and to wider society, and this problem does seem to be worsening. However the response to issues with certain individuals should never be to legislate for the whole – this penalises the compliant and ultimately leads to a dangerous blurring and breakdown of trust between the state and the citizen. It’s the kind of fog that leads parents to disrespect schools and teachers, and encourages schools to interfere in areas where parents ought to have primary responsibility. At its worse we’ve seen the state interfering with the ideological structure of what children are taught, and even taking primacy over parents on issues such as social behaviour, cultural outlook and even gender identity.

The landscape created by such a legislative approach is one where parents and the state become antagonists when they ought to be collaborators, and this in turn impacts on the young. Until governments understand and address this we are always going to get the kind of social consequences that we witnessed in the wake of the riots after the Southport killings, where children as young as 12 have been ending up before the courts.

It would be no bad thing if governments looked at society – and especially young people – from the other end of the telescope, not as an unpredictable herd that needs to be controlled and restrained, but as a community looking eagerly for leadership, definition and a sense of meaningful purpose.

Given the disparate nature of the world we’re currently living in, there really ought to be far more focus on the role and future of our young people, not least because they are not only going to be the ones taking all of this grand ideology forward, but are also the ones who will have to live with the consequences. Sadly, this requires role models, and they are in extremely short supply just now. From politicians to pop performers, sports stars to media personalities most young people are hard-pressed to hitch their dreams and aspirations to individuals who invariably seem flawed and self-obsessed. More significantly, most would-be role models today seem to possess only an exterior identity, and lack any flame of an internal life.

One young person who possessed this inner passion with an intensity was Carlo Acutis, so it’s little surprise that he is becoming increasingly recognised by young people as an exemplar of a life that might be aspired to. Thousands turned out to venerate his relic in Manchester this week, including many local schoolchildren. Carlo was a London-born web producer, who died from leukaemia in 2006. During his brief life he created and ran a website for miracles, and helped run online sites for Catholic organisations, as well as helping the poor and homeless.

Acutis’ parish priest said of him that: “Carlo was a young man who was exceptionally transparent. He really wanted to progress in loving his parents, God, his classmates, and those who loved him less. He wanted to apply himself in his studies to educate himself in his catechism class as well as in school and computer science.^”

During his final illness Carlo offered his suffering both for Pope Benedict XVI and for the Catholic Church, saying:, “I offer to the Lord the sufferings that I will have to undergo for the Pope and for the Church.” The doctors treating his final illness had asked him if he was in great pain, to which he replied, “There are people who suffer much more than me”. His final words to his mother were: “Mom, don’t be afraid. Since Jesus became a man, death has become the passage towards life, and we don’t need to flee it. Let us prepare ourselves to experience something extraordinary in the eternal life.^”

Carlo passed away on 11^th October 2006 at San Gerardo Hospital north of Milan, aged just 15. He was buried in Assisi in accordance with his last wish.

Following the recognition of a miracle attributed to his intercession in 2020 Carlo is expected to be canonised next year.

In the document that concluded the Synod on Young People in 2018, Pope Francis paid a moving tribute to Carlo: “Carlo did not fall into a trap. He saw that many young people, if they seem to be different, end up, in reality, looking like each other, by running behind what powerful people impose on them via mechanisms of consumption and stupor,” said Francis.

“In this way, they do not let the gifts that the Lord has made for them flow into them. They do not offer the world these personal and unique gifts that the Lord has sown in each one of them.”

Admiration for the inner life of Carlo Acutis is gathering pace across the world, especially amongst young people who are recognising in him that – with an outlook of love – an ordinary life can be lived extraordinarily. As the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Rt Rev. Mark Davis, said in his homily at the Diocesan Mass for the Pilgrimage of the Relic of the Heart of Blessed Carlo Acutis last Saturday: “a human life is only wasted and lost insofar as we fail to discover the Love for which we were made.”

The thousands who turned out in Manchester this week to view the relic of Carlo Acutis may be a long way from reins of power in Westminster, but it would do legislators no harm to see and experience for themselves now and again what potential for human goodness really lies in the hearts of those they claim to serve.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian

Picture: Carlo Acutis, back row, second left. Reproduced with family’s permission.

For more information on Carlo: https://carloacutis-en.org/