On Sunday I watched the latest period drama by the BBC. Called 'South Riding', it is set in 1930s Yorkshire.

The central character and heroine of the story is a very 'progressive' teacher named Sarah Burton who has just been appointed principal of the local school and is intent on dragging it, and the surrounding area, into the 20th century.

Arrayed against her are the usual villains. For example, there is the reactionary squire as well as the preacher who is, naturally, a hypocrite from head to toe.

Not far from the school is an area called 'the Shacks', populated by desperately poor people of the sort who clearly need rescuing by Sarah and her allies.

And it's just not poverty they need rescuing from because in one of the scenes we find a woman trying to induce an abortion because she can't afford to have another child.

In the mythology of the Left, it is organisations such as our own Labour Party that have helped to rescue people like this from squalor and ignorance and the grip of sexual repression.

In this mythology, what has come to the rescue is the welfare state and sexual liberation.

In fact, the legacy and effect of both is highly dubious, especially on the poor, and this is one of the chief reasons why Labour's moral appeal rests on very shaky foundations. Keep this in mind today as you vote.

Imagine if our friends living in the Shacks were around today, how would they be faring?

Materially, they'd be a lot better off. They would probably be living in council houses, not huts. At face value, the welfare state would have delivered this improvement to them, but only because of the wealth generated by the hated free market.

Above all, it is the jobs and economic growth generated by the free market that has improved the lot of the people who would once have lived in the Shacks because the free market made the welfare state possible.

But the welfare state has also created huge pockets of morale-sapping dependency, chiefly in the form of deep poverty traps that have robbed many people of both the incentive and the ability to work.

In today's version of the Shacks, a great many people would be on welfare rather than in jobs, no matter how well or how badly the economy in general was doing.

To put it mildly, that is not unambiguously a good thing and at the very least it should give pause to the Left and cause them to question their self-congratulatory mythology just a little bit.

What else would be happening in a modern-day equivalent of the Shacks? Without a doubt, marriage would have virtually collapsed as an institution, aided by the welfare state, which often acts as a father-substitute, and abetted by the sort of very liberal social norms propagated chiefly by the Left.

Therefore, many of the children in the modern-day Shacks would have no father in their lives, miring the children and their mothers even deeper in poverty and in all the other social problems associated with fatherlessness.

The collapse of marriage in many working-class areas, here as well as in Britain, is a calamity we still haven't remotely come to terms with because the Left is both the architect of this calamity, and is in complete, angry denial about it.

I will be voting for Fine Gael today because I believe it has the best policies to help the economy.

But I also believe it has the best policies to help the poor -- contrary to what the Left would have us believe.

For one thing, if you boost the economy you help poor people into jobs, but another reason is because Fine Gael has in it individuals like Leo Varadkar who would have the steel to reform the welfare state so that it will help its recipients far better than the present version.

This is why Enda Kenny should make Varadkar the next Minister for Social Protection.

In addition, Fine Gael's manifesto refers favourably to marriage. It also refers to the fact that the welfare system currently punishes welfare recipients who marry by reducing their payments.

I highly doubt that the Fine Gael leadership has properly cottoned on to the fact that one of the best ways to reduce poverty and help children is to promote marriage, but it is vastly more likely to do so than the Labour Party.

Finally, Fine Gael is pro-life partly because it has dawned on the party that this is a way to win seats. The abortion issue has cost Labour votes, and lots of them.

On practically all fronts, therefore, a vote for Fine Gael makes far more sense in this election than a vote for Labour.

Labour represents higher taxes, higher, often wasteful spending, welfare dependency, and a set of social policies that would harm society, but the poor most of all.

Irish Independent