This graph comes from Chapter 1 of the Households Below Average Income survey from 1994/95 to 2010/11 published yesterday.
The point is a simple one. On every measure, without exception, Labour cut child poverty. That is a massive achievement.
The Tories won't do that.
Worse: they're trying to define the problem out of existence by pretending the problem does not relate to cash. And their cuts will, inevitably, mean that poverty rises whatever happens.
And for anyone with a conscience that's all you really need to know.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Ross Mckibbin, ‘Call that a coalition?’ 5 April 2012: “The difficulty for the Lib Dems, in part, lies in their view of the world. They have a sense of ‘fairness’ but little sense of ‘poverty’.”
Only if you accept the “60% of median income” definition. Which many, legitimately, do not.
So given 60% is in this case not far from very little do you propose?
I voted Conservative, despite coming from underclass origins. I voted for the Tories because they take responsbility for the problems that we’re in and they make tough decisions, which are intended to combat them. I am not naive to think that the Conservatives want to rap the poorest up in cotton-wool and feed them porridge, at their core, the Conservative darwinian idealogy lurks, and we must follow that line of thinking to understand the real intentions of the Tories.l
I vote for the Conservatives knowing that they would be brutal, knowing that they would reduce the size of the public sector, knowing that they would cut benefits and push many more into ‘poverty’, however you wish to define that. But as a child, I was brought up in a workless home; I understand the benefits of a benefit system and the curse that it imposes on the next generation.
I agree that the Conservatives will push more children in relative poverty, but there are positives to be had from this, for the children themselves, despite how idiotic that sounds on the surface. The reality is that the workless homes across this nation have created a cycle of poverty which was perpetuated by the socialist Labour party, whose answer to every problem was to throw money at it. It didn’t work. If a family has generations of worklessness and benefit dependency, their children will follow that inevitable path, unless the cycle is broken. An iron fist is needed to rattle the underclass out of their daze and Cameron will deliver that in his second term; if we throw more money at the problem, another generation of children will be failed and destined for a life of poverty, not only a childhood of poverty.
It is the time for tough decisions, it is the time of Cameron.
You said it sounded idiotic and it does, and is
Without a policy of full employment it is also callous, nasty and brutish
I too want children to live in households where people work. But no one in their right minds thinks that could be delivered now through a policy of cuts
IDS was on the radio yesterday talking about this issue; IDS is one of the better prepared Tory ministers and does genuinely believe, like this poster, that what he is doing – by reducing benefits and support for those receiving benefits – is for the benefit of those recipients as well as reducing the “burden” on society. As Richard has already said, this more hard-nosed attitude only really works if they have the option of actually finding a job. No recent government has really taken hold of this issue of full employment; British industry will never provide enough jobs for everyone again, especially this spurious notion of high-tech manufacturing. High-tech manufacturing, by its nature, requires very few operatives.
IIDS and his Tory acolytes insist that reducing benefits is necessary in order to make work pay. On one level I agree that being in work is of benefit for that individual, his/her family and for society at large. The problem I have with this in practice is that if, as a society, we have decided that the level of welfare provided is enough to ensure an individual and his/her family can survive and this is more than one could earn in a low-wage job, then surely “the market” is wrong?
IDS also stated that there are a significant number of people on welfare with substance abuse problems who just take the “increased” welfare (from the Labour government) and spend it on drugs/alcohol thereby not relieving their families poverty; this is surely a separate issue and to be resolved effectively would surely require increased social services provision to help these people out of their harmful cycles. The Tory view appears to be that they can just choose to stop being dependant on substances! Or that charities will take care of them (they obviously didn’t read Dickens at Eton).
DS also persisted in deliberately confusing the number of people claiming benefits and the number of people unemployed. He stated that his objective is “to make work pay”, then went onto say that there are 5million individuals on benefits. The unemployment figures are 2.65m so is he inferring that those on incapacity benefit (or its new name) are actually capable of working (but then we know that because of his ministry’s changes to the way that Personal Independance Plans are adminstered – people previously classified as being unable to work now told that blindness shouldn’t stop them travelling to work etc)?
Well said
I wholeheartedly agree it is best people work
But the market does not work
And masses of big employers pay sub subsistence wages
Whilst the Tories deny both facts their policies are callous
“British industry will never provide enough jobs for everyone again, especially this spurious notion of high-tech manufacturing. High-tech manufacturing, by its nature, requires very few operatives.”
Not necessarily! Certain sources reckon up to 1 million jobs could be created in the renewable energy sector.
Heavy engineering jobs could be created to build wind and wave turbines. Plus every house in the land (and that is a fair few) could (and indeed should) be fitted with solar panels.
Certainly manufacturing industry needs fewer workers to build stuff, but the reason there is so little jobs is not altogether because of this. It is largely due to the short-sighted policy of destroying our manufacturing base and out-sourcing manufacturing jobs to other countries. This means we have a huge trade deficit and means we have to depreciate ouir currency every time we import something that we clearly have the capacity to make ourselves, such as cars, washing machines and TV’s, as well as the growing industry in renewables.
No, the full employment of the 50s and 60s is unlikely to come back, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create enough jobs to turn our economic fortunes around.
Germany and China proved it can be done. With a big enough investment, there is no reason why it can’t be done here, too.
Full employment? You jest, surely.
We’re now in an age when employment in the UK is steadily falling. That’s a reality all governments will have to deal with. Labour haven’t a clue it’s happening, the tories are slowly bringing in a universal wage.
You are living in an old paradigm that abuses carbon
It’s a failing paradigm
Until you can see that you can live with your myth
Those who can see beyond it realise how absurd your position is
Individual solar power may be useful for each household, but not for every house. It simply will not work. When every house has solar generation the excess cannot be sold….do not forget that each house is serviced by mains electricity which comes from a transformer…..solar power simply feeds into the grid on the domestic side of that transformer….when every house has solar cells then the excess will simply not be used….but the feed-in tariff means that it will be paid for (even at the soon-to-be reduced rate)
Where are you going to produce the wind turbines ?
Not here…too expensive…..and trade regulation means you cannot ignore other countries….the construction has to be put-out for free bidding…..and even with the transport costs China is cheaper (at the moment)
And you cannot train skilled labour in a week……everyone (like me) that has had to, or been forced to, leave engineering and find other work will not willingly return to it…..the benefits of working in the retail industry are much more than in the engineering industry….and I know a dozen who changed jobs andnone wat to go back to a dirty, unsafe and worse-paid job….like engineering. Bearing in mind that Camerons Britain is a low-paid workhouse Britain, to attract work.
So I traded a job with no sick pay (apart from SSP) and no pension, for one with marginally lower pay but with paid sick leave and pension….no contest really ?
You should also not forget that every watt of wind-generated power has to backed-up by standard generating capacity….which will, in the main, be running on standby in case of need.
Given houses can’t normally meet their own energy supplies I don’t but your objections
And I think your extreme view – every house has solar panels – is a deliberate straw man
“Where are you going to produce the wind turbines ?
Not here…too expensive…..and trade regulation means you cannot ignore other countries….the construction has to be put-out for free bidding…..and even with the transport costs China is cheaper (at the moment)”
Germany and France cheerfully ignore trading law. So can we. We are a sovereign nation. If other countries can bend EU law, what’s stopping us?
“And you cannot train skilled labour in a week”
I don’t recall saying that it did! The stupidity of previous governments (not just Thatcher’s) hve left us with a chronic skill shortage! Until that is properly addressed, we will have to do what we have always done when we have a skill shortage – bring in skills from abroad!
“everyone (like me) that has had to, or been forced to, leave engineering and find other work will not willingly return to it…..the benefits of working in the retail industry are much more than in the engineering industry….and I know a dozen who changed jobs andnone wat to go back to a dirty, unsafe and worse-paid job….like engineering.”
Mmmmmm….please, please tell me where you have found a job in retail that pays more than a highly skilled engineer! I’d be most interested! I’ll tell you where….nowhere!!!
“Bearing in mind that Camerons Britain is a low-paid workhouse Britain, to attract work.”
Yes…..and that’s exactly why it has to change. It will not change until we invest in real wealth like the Germans and the Chinese! Cameron’s policy of spending cuts during a prolonged, deep recession is not working because it cannot work!! That’s why we need to do the exact polar opposite of what this government is doing!
“Full employment? You jest, surely.”
Every worker is a consumer – supply = demand. You’d think that by now economists would have worked out what’s causing the blockage.
Might I suggest that you have bought the line, so successfully promoted through the tory press, that the economy can be run like a household – we’ve maxed out on the credit cards. Try thinking a little deeper.
The point genuine makes is genuine. Richard talks of “full employment” but in my view, many people do not want to be employed. They take a job solely because it is in their self-interest to do so. I speak personally: I spent a year on the dole, quite voluntarily, when I left university. Even now, if I could get enough money for staying at home doing nothing, that would be my preferred option. Work is the toad, as larkin wisely wrote.
For as long as people can earn comparable amounts on benefits to what they would get in employment, many will regard employment as a mug’s game. The problem genuine raises is a significant one: if children are raised in an environment where claiming benefits is the norm those children are likely to turn out with similar values to their parents. But rather than cutting benefits, they should be redirected away from the parents and to the education of the children, so the cycle can be broken.
The Tory logic is that forcing income down creates price that ‘clears’ labour into the market
The theory assumes
A) there is a market and benefits are the only imperfection
B) people can work.
Since in many cases neither is true e.g. Child care is a nightmare when well off and often impossible when not the theory – and your assertions are just I’ll informed cover for prejudice
@genuine revidox – sorry, but I think you will find the by far the most significant contributor to a “benefits culture” was the Iron Lady and her frankly brutal – and inefficient and incompetent – policies directed against her class enemies (= all those who didn’t meet the criterion of being “one of us”, i.e. most of the 99% who believed in society, and who did not subscribe to “greed is good”, or to the asinine “trickle down” theory of the economy, which has been spectaculary disproved in the last 30+ years).
You don’t agree? Well, consider, that when Maragret Thatcher entered No. 10 unemployment was around 1.5 million and inflation around 10% to 11%. Inflation then shot up to 22% in late 1980, and was only brought down back to the levels she inherited by 1983 – at the cost of doublling the official rate of unemployment to 3 million, masking a real unemployment/underemployment rate of nearer 4.5 million. This is NOT either masterful handling of the economy, but rather cack-handed inefficiency; nor is it either humane or civilized behaviour. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose – as the same is happening now.
Secondly, of course, the REAL benefit junkies are the big companies, the multi-national corporations, who are quite happy the suck on the nipple of state support and tax-breaks and golden handshakes, and quite frankly of backhanders, greased palms and sticky finger (just listen to the Leveson Inquiry for an explanation of the cosy relations between the political class and their chums in the City and elsewhere).
Please don’t trot out the old argument about the need to “rattle the underclass out of their daze”. First, WHO made them an underclass – Thatcher and TINA. Secondly, WHY did she do so? – because “they’re not one of us” = a desire to break ANY opposition to her plans for a neo-feudal society, in which the underclass/99% have all the duties, and the new Baronage/1% have all the rewards (the EXACT arrangement, I may say, obtaining in France pre-1789, where the aristocracy paid NO taxes!). Thirdly, the under-class has had enough, and more than enough, experience of reality and hardship, unlike Dave C and George/Gideon Osborne and the other sprigs of the Bullingdon club culture, who seem not to know their asses from their elbows.
Cameron is only implementing Stage 2 or 3 of Thatcher’s long-range plan, which will see the renewal of enserfment for all who do not subscribe to their policies, and play their game. And don’t think that won’t include you too, because it will. The new feudal lords care not a jot for the instruments they use to further their objectives – consider the example of the Union of Democratic Miners, who, once they had served their purpose in destroying the Nation Union of Miners, were left to swing in the breeze, like corpses on a gibbet.
Two final points:
1) Why is is that the neo-feudal/neo-liberal mind-set thinks that thinks that to make the rich work harder, you need to reward them even more extravagantly, whereas to make the poor work harder, you need to take money away from them? (Or, to quote the sarcastic observation of one of the two Hungarian economists who advised Harold WIlson – either Balogh or Kaldor, can’t remember which – the clear reason why the World War l Generals were ineffective was because they weren’t paid enough – if we’d paid them more, they’d have been more successful – you think? As if!)
2) Without the North Sea Oil – squandered, I might say, on unnecessary welfare payments, foreign ventures such as The Falklands, and payments and tax-breaks to her “friends”, her experiment would have collapsed by 1982. Now why the Falklands, I wonder!
Wise up, please, and see the wool that is being pulled over your eyes (Origin of the phrase? They used to pull the wool over the sheep’s eyes as it was being led “up the garden path” to be slaughtered).
Andrew
Much appreciated, as ever – and I am aware I owe you a mail
Helsinki has been hectic
Richard
“Without the North Sea Oil — squandered, I might say, on unnecessary welfare payments, foreign ventures such as The Falklands, and payments and tax-breaks to her “friends”, her experiment would have collapsed by 1982. Now why the Falklands, I wonder!”
I’m pleased you mentioned north sea oil. One or two of Maggie’s apologists claimed that the job losses the country suffered due to her policies because of a “global” recession wjuch she could not be blamed for.
They conveniently forget that her government has the tremendous bounty of north sea oil, which could have transformed our economy and easily see off the effects of any recession. Instead, she used the money from north sea oil to destroy our manufacturing base, hobble the unions and create massive unemployment in order to get a more compliant workforce willing to work for buttons. She also tried to destroy the NHS from within, something which, unfortunately, was continued under new Labour with their pernicious PFI contracts, Like this lot, she wanted to destroy the state and let private entrprise reign supreme.
My only surprise here is that there is still people like Revidox all too ready to swallow this right wing crap which, all too often, is a total re-writing of history!
You jest ?
Tough decisions: Cameron.
Not even on the same planet.
It must be really hard trying to figure out who to sell the next public service organisation to…..police to G4S
(hint: Tom Winsor/police reform guy/prospective next Insp of Constabularysolicitor/company arranging the deal with Lincs police and G4S/Herbert/guy who picked Winsor/listed as past director of Reform think-tank/donor to which is G4S)….
Yep. Cameron. Planet. Not-on-this-one.
So who is he working for ?
Not us.
“The reality is that the workless homes across this nation have created a cycle of poverty which was perpetuated by the socialist Labour party, whose answer to every problem was to throw money at it. It didn’t work”
What spending? High government borrowing in this country is a myth! Since the early sixties, government borrowing in regards to debt-to-GDP ratio have steadily fallen. Government debt to GDP in 1963 was around 103%. By around 1972, it had fallen to 59%, a fall in borrowing of 44% in around a decade. Before the crash, government debt was around 39% of GDP.
Big spending governments is a myrh and has been for almost 50 years!
@genuine
“socialist Labour party”
What on earth are you talking about?
Call me John McEnroe if you like, but I do think that that’s a somewhat unserious description of the organisation in question.
”An iron fist is needed to rattle the underclass out of their daze and Cameron will deliver that in his second term; if we throw more money at the problem, another generation of children will be failed and destined for a life of poverty, not only a childhood of poverty.”?
Am I the only one to read this as parody?
Taxi for Alan B’stard!
I am not sure the graph looks that good between 2004 and 2008 when various measures were going in the opposite direction. I wonder if some of the subsequent falls from 2008 were not because Labour was dealing with the issue but because incomes in the wider economy were falling due to the recession, lifting various people at the bottom end out of the definition. Also the final period 2010/11 is more a coalition period than a labour one.
It would help to see a graph that went back to 1994 to see what direction things were going in before 1997. Of course another recession may well repeat the features of the graph of 2008 onwards so 2012/3 might look good as well.
I am not sure many people will rejoice at the idea less people are in poverty simply because the incomes of the people around them have fallen or stagnated.
Point accepted – but the trend was for improvement whichever way it is looked at
IDS made this same point on the radio yesterday.
In my opinion this issue of relative poverty, although inextricably bound up with income, is negatively affected by the excessive cost of housing (particularly in the south-east/south coast). I write this as someone who calculated that if we consider my household after housing costs we would be in relative poverty; this despite the fact that I am a professional with a masters degree. A significant factor in this is that I have two young children and as such my wife does not work. The cost of housing – not to mention energy, food, fuel – means that a single income (even an income over the national median) is no longer sufficient to provide good quality of life for a family in the south of England.
See also http://www.londonspovertyprofile.org.uk/indicators/topics/income-poverty/poverty-before-and-after-housing-costs/
This excessive housing cost also adds significantly to the cost of welfare. JSA for example is around £65/week. Housing benefit is in the order of £150-200/week (or more fore large families). The lack of council housing means that local authorities are forced to rent from private landlords, which has distorted the housing market to such an extent that the cost of housing is well above median income levels. This is not only a signifcant factor in the cost of welfare in the UK but is a factor in the liquidity crisis that afffected the banks in the UK.
I think the housing point is very well made – one of the most pernicious factors of the Thatcher era was the destruction of affordable, decent social housing, for reasons that look only explicable in terms of ideological nastiness.
Not strawman Mr Murphy….
I look at solar cells on peoples roofs and see most are there to earn money from the feed-in tariff (at least until it is lowered…which is by now I think) and not for personal use (although that is a part-reason).
The average electricity consumption in the UK (3-bed) is about 15KW per day.
Maybe in summer the house will manage on solar alone, but not in winter. And that with a good-sized solar array and a south-facing house.
Every little helps, as they say. But investing four thousand to achieve little is not something I intend to do.
Highly qualified engineer….that would be my brother….BSC and MSC, and a professional engineer. 65K/Yr (pension/holiday etc)
Not in the shelf-stacking payscale.
But I can manage 21K easily….which is more than a 40hr/wk gave me in engineering…..and the engineers you want are not degree standard….
Yes, international standards can be ignored……economics cannot.
Nobody is going to design and build and market a wind generator in this country….why re-invent the wheel….go and buy the gearbox from people who already manufacture them….and the generator (another story there….they use rare earths in the magnets…which China mines and refines…and is restricting the export of…of course, the next manufacturer of rare earths could be the US, but they are currently not allowing mining of same because of environmental concerns). That avoids things like courts for using others designs….and not being allowed to sell them anywhere else….
Investing in real wealth, like the Chinese ?
That would be buying Beemers and Mercs ?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
And I just noticed the article below…strange, not only this country has problems:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/18/digital_agenda_scoreboard/