Responding to Rashford

Jan 15, 2021 by

by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:

We argued yesterday that those losing out most during this pandemic are not those at the bottom of the poverty ladder, but those on the next rung up.  These include a mass of the “just-about-managing”.

Since policy options are necessarily limited, whoever is in goverment, and demand trade-offs between different interests, it isn’t hard to see what the consequences will be when the pandemic abates – and are already.

In sum, the Government can’t avoid making choices that most help those who remain the poorest, or else those who have recently become poorer.

At the moment, it is unsure which to do.  Explaining why this is so also explains why it is on the back foot against Marcus Rashford’s campaigning, and suggests a means of it getting back on the front foot.

New Labour’s original child poverty target in government was to reduce the number of children living in households with less than 60 per cent of median equivalised income.

This measure can have perverse outcomes: for example, if the average income goes up, but the incomes of people lower down the income scale stay as they were, then poverty will be officially recorded as having increased.

“Such a definition means there are more people in “poverty” now than in the 1970s despite decades of material progress,” our columnist, Neil O’Brien, argued in back in 2012 when he was heading up Policy Exchange.

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