Poverty is not about having no money. Pay no attention to povertyfigures because they only measure money. People are poor because oftheir lifestyles; worklessness, family breakdown, bad parenting,drink and drug addiction, irresponsible debt, crime and lack ofaspiration All week expect that message to be blasted out byministers trying to drown out Thursday's official poverty figures.The aim is to rubbish the poverty measure accepted by allinternational organisations and to call for new measures thatignore inequality. The government's problem is not that the figures on "Householdsbelow average income" will be bad, but that they will beembarrassingly good.
The data, compiled for 2010-11 by the Officefor National Statistics, will be the final verdict on Labour'srecord, before George Osborne's cuts. Will that ambitious target toabolish child poverty by 2020, halving it by 2010, be hit? Not by along way. But Labour did well, at a time when poverty was rising inevery other industrial country. The Institute for Fiscal Studies(IFS) expects the figures to show Labour cut child poverty by900,000, with another 900,000 prevented from falling into poverty.At that rate the 2020 target would have been reached by 2027.
TheIFS knows of no other time or nation in which child poverty fell sofar, so fast. The Child Poverty Action Group on Tuesday assembles evidence predicting the figures will go intosharp reverse. The IFS expects that cuts will cause child poverty to surge by 100,000 a year , half a million over this government's term: 18bn of welfarecuts take most from poor families, with parental employmentunlikely to rise. David Cameron will oversee the worst childpoverty record of any government for a generation.
In his sheep'sclothing days, he promised: "It falls to us, the modern Conservative party, to fight for thepoorest." Now his party fights against them. Who are the poor? Most are in work repeat that three times, foryou will hear no ministers say it. Only 4% are addicts. Most arepoor because their wages are so low. Labour's solution was taxcredits, topping up incomes to make sure work was alwaysworthwhile.
Recent cuts knock people back into poverty, with 4,000 cut from families on 17,000 , unless they can up their hours to at least 24 a week: 1.4m part-timers desperately seek full-time work . Ministers boast of whipping people into work with mandatory workexperience, airbrushing out the lack of jobs. Claims of fallingunemployment disguise the drop in full-time work: growth is allpart-time jobs. The government's poverty mantras will echo through this week:personal failings are the cause; anyone who tries hard enough canget a job; Labour "threw money at poverty" with no result; thepoverty measure is nonsense. Cameron said the opposite before theelection: he stood by the relative poverty measure now underthreat, promising his party "will measure and will act on relative poverty the fact thatsome people lack things others take for granted"; and he voted for Labour's Child Poverty Act.
The only way tomeasure a nation's poverty over time is to count how many fallbelow the norm, and how far. This international measure countsanyone on less than 60% of a country's median income not, repeatnot, the mean so it compares low-income households with those inthe middle, not with the richest. The IFS says similar declinesemerge if you set the figure as low as 40% of median income utterly refuting Nick Clegg's toxic line dismissing the thresholdas just "poverty plus a pound" . The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Iain Duncan Smith's thinktank,is running the rubbishing of Labour's record.
Its latest Rethinking Child Poverty report makes a statistical howler (is it deliberate?), claiming a"methodological flaw" because "the poor will always existstatistically as it is inevitable some in society will have lessthan others". But since the measure is those falling below themiddle, not the mean average, it makes no difference, if, say BillGates moves to Britain. Nordic countries have all but eliminatedpoverty by pulling the bottom up towards the middle: it can bedone. CSJ reports focus on family breakdown, calling for Cameron'spromised marriage tax allowance though that gives most to the better-off. They savagely attackLabour's tax credits, oddly claiming poverty has nothing to do withactual income.
Lifting living standards was only part of Labour's anti-povertyplan. In retrospect its record looks ever better, with childcarecredits, nurseries for all, Sure Start children's centres, morelone mothers in work, the education maintenance allowance, the child trust fund nest egg and more: most of this is now cut or abolished. Take BookStart, giving books to all babies at sevenmonths, and again at three and seven years old, encouraging parentsto read to them. Half of families had no books for babies untilthis scheme: it led them to take children to libraries.
MichaelGove cancelled it immediately, Philip Pullman led an outcry , Gove U-turned, cut it by 70% and gave back just 6m, but noweven that's in peril. Publishers donate 22m: if he cancels thefund so will they so much for the cant about helping goodparenting. This week the Institute of Education publishes researchthat early poverty permanently damages children's cognitivedevelopment: poverty makes more difference than whether a motherhas university or only basic education. The government caricatures poor people in terms of the worst casesthey can find: so far they have won the public argument. EricPickles kicked off the pre-emptive rebuttal on Monday by announcingallocations to 120,000 troubled families, with councils offered 4,000 if they reduce the costs these families cause.
Sincesocial services have suffered huge cuts, getting back a couple ofper cent is no doubt welcome. But the only poor people ministersever mention are bad cases, as in Duncan Smith's all-purpose threatto the jobless: " This is not an easy life any more, chum. I think you're a slacker." The campaign of vilification has been clever: Osborne's announcement that no one would get more benefitsthan the 26,000 median wage was another masterstroke, suggesting most are living the highlife. The truth? These represent less than 1% of people onbenefits, exceptional cases in high-cost temporary accommodation inLondon. Yet the large sum lodged in the public mind implying it wasstandard.
It successfully hid the plunge in living standards formillions of others through housing benefit cuts: only one in eighton housing benefit are not in work. What few realise is that 88% ofall the benefit cuts are still to come. Presumably Cameron long agodecided no one cares: he may yet be proved wrong. Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree. I am an expert from China Energy Manufacturers, usually analyzes all kind of industries situation, such as bose ear bud , gps vehicle locator.
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