From the BBC:
The number of children living in poverty has risen for a second year, a government report says.
The government called the rise in poverty levels “disappointing” and the increase may threaten its target of halving child poverty by 2010.
The number of children living in poverty rose by 100,000 in 2006-2007 to 2.9 million before housing costs.
Pensioner poverty increased for the first time since 1998, rising by 300,000 to a total of 2.5 million.
The number of children and pensioners in poverty is greater once costs such as rent and mortgages are taken into account.
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A Week in Politics #9
Chloe
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Peter Hirst
Peter Hirst
9 Comments
A question for politics addicts – How many times since Gordon Brown took over has this Government described lack of progress towards its targets as “disappointing”?
Does this refer to the levels of real poverty or relative poverty?
This is relative poverty, not absolute poverty.
Its main use is to justify Polly Toynbee’s beloved forced redistribution and intervention.
What I’d like to know is if people are actually getting poorer, or if they’re just getting richer at a slower rate?
The other question never addressed is whether it is the same people in this ‘poverty’ or if there is social mobility.
Naturally the liberal should question what is causing this increased in range of wealth and what government action is causing it.
And the Liberal answer is that it is the failure of successive governments to capture publicly created wealth, allowing it to flow unhindered into the pockets of the asset-rich while the poor and “hard working families” continue to shoulder the burden of tax. The poor continue to subsidise the rich – and not just in this country.
So this statistic is a waste of time then, even if it is politically advantageous for us to point out that by his own measure Brown is failing.
Yes, Tristan, it does appear that Brown has attempted an audacious political gambit in manipulating the statistical measure (again, hooda thunk it!) and advancing Labour entrenchment.
Now, though, Brown’s dishonesty is coming home to roost because they can’t succeed in reducing relative poverty without alienating aspirational voters or proving that their programme has nothing to offer the worst off – either of which option splits the NewLabour coalition that brought them to power and provides what is left of their mandate.
Brown has fallen into his own trap by creating reliance on this dishonest statistic, as it would be to commit electoral suicide to admit his own mistake and make a policy U-turn.
It’s relative poverty and the target moves upwards the richer we get on average. Strangely none of the media reports, at least those I’ve seen and heard so far, mention this fact.
Absolute poverty is the real problem and the figures for say Palestine (80%) based on their average wage are far more scandalous than these.
There’s no such thing as child poverty. All children are “poor”, their circumstances depend on those of their parents. We should be creating the society in which adults will prosper, instead of using dishonest means like “working tax credits” which discriminate shockingly against single people.
Let’s have all adults better off thanks to a liberal society in which they are equipped (by education & a culture of aspiration) to prosper by their own efforts rather than f***ing about with Brown’s nonsense. That will cut child poverty, rather than just accepting that people are doomed to unskilled jobs & trying to subsidise their low wages in ways that have a pernicious effect on society.
Just in case I was unclear: obviously, there are children growing up in shocking deprivation that shouldn’t be tolerated in a civilised country. By my first sentence I mean that the parents are poor, not the children, and the way forward is by encouraging better-paid, highly skilled work & demolishing the barriers such as poor education, discrimination & lack of aspiration which hold people back. This is a task which calls for liberals 🙂
ending child poverty is a debate all over the world right now.