My work was not only relatively lower paid than thirty years ago, it was also entirely insecure, day-to-day agency employment. Back then at least I had the security of joining the staff of the NHS from day one: it was a safe job for life if I wanted it, but everything is shifting sands for the low paid. It is called ‘flexibility’, and in the name of flexibility the hospital had shed or ‘outsourced’ all its ancillary workers. I was about to learn the full meaning of contracting out. (Toynbee, 2003, pp 56-7)

It so happened that on the day I left Tony Blair was making an important speech about public services. It was another of his ambivalent muddled messages. He praised public-service workers but then called for more ‘reform’ and ‘flexibility’, which from the ground floor felt like a threat. The government always speaks with several agendas. And they are often contradictory. The low-paid public workers consist of the working poor, the deserving poor, many of them women and mothers, the very people the Working Families’ Tax Credits are designed to help. These are the very families whose poverty the government has pledged to abolish. But that springs from the part of the government's brain labelled ‘poverty targets’.