David Cameron will oversee the worst minor poverty record for a generation. Yet he is winning the public argument on cutsPoverty is not about having no money. Pay no attention to poverty figures since they only measure money. Human beings are poor since of their lifestyles; worklessness, family breakdown, terrible parenting, drink and drug addiction, irresponsible debt, crime and lack of aspiration … All week expect that message to be blasted outside by ministers trying to drown outside Thursday’s official poverty figures. The aim is to rubbish the poverty measure accepted by all international organisations and to call for fresh measures that ignore inequality.The administration’s difficulty is not that the figures – on “Households below average income” – will be terrible, however that they will be embarrassingly excellent. The data, compiled for 2010-11 by the Office for National Statistics, will be the final verdict on Labour’s record, before George Osborne’s cuts. Will that ambitious target to abolish minor poverty by 2020, halving it by 2010, be hit? Not by a extended path. However Labour did well, at a age when poverty was rising in every other industrial nation. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) expects the figures to exhibit Labour divide minor poverty by 900,000, with another 900,000 prevented from falling into poverty. At that rate the 2020 target would have been reached by 2027. The IFS knows of no other age or nation in which minor poverty fell so far, so quick.The Minor Poverty Action Collection on Tuesday assembles evidence predicting the figures will go into sharp reverse. The IFS expects that cuts will cause minor poverty to surge by 100,000 a year, half a million over this administration’s term: £18bn of welfare cuts capture most from poor families, with parental employment unlikely to rise. David Cameron will oversee the worst minor poverty record of any administration for a generation. In his sheep’s clothing days, he promised: “It falls to us, the modern Conservative party, to fight for the poorest.” Immediately his party fights against them.Who are the poor? Most are in employment – repeat that three times, for you will hear no ministers affirm it. Only 4% are addicts. Most are poor since their wages are so low. Labour’s solution was tax credits, topping up incomes to constitute certain employment was always worthwhile. Recent cuts knock human beings back into poverty, with £4,000 divide from families on £17,000, unless they can up their hours to at least 24 a week: 1.4m part-timers desperately seek complete-age employment. Ministers boast of whipping human beings into employment with mandatory employment familiarity, airbrushing outside the lack of jobs. Claims of falling unemployment disguise the drop in complete-age employment: growth is all part-age jobs.The administration’s poverty mantras will echo through this week: personal failings are the cause; anyone who tries dense enough can get a job; Labour “threw money at poverty” with no result; the poverty measure is nonsense. Cameron said the opposite before the election: he stood by the relative poverty measure immediately under threat, promising his party “will measure and will act on relative poverty … the circumstance that some human beings lack things others capture for granted”; and he voted for Labour’s Minor Poverty Act. The only path to measure a nation’s poverty over age is to count how many fall below the norm, and how far. This international measure counts anyone on less than 60% of a nation’s median income – not, repeat not, the mean – so it compares low-income households with those in the middle, not with the richest. The IFS says alike declines emerge if you locate the figure as low as 40% of median income – utterly refuting Nick Clegg’s toxic border dismissing the threshold as 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 Minor Poverty report makes a statistical howler (is it deliberate?), claiming a “methodological flaw” since “the poor will always exist statistically as it is inevitable some in society will have less than others”. However since the measure is those falling below the middle, not the mean average, it makes no difference, if, affirm Bill Gates moves to Britain. Nordic countries have all however eliminated poverty by pulling the bottom up towards the middle: it can be done. CSJ reports focus on family breakdown, calling for Cameron’s promised marriage tax allowance – though that gives most to the bigger-off. They savagely attack Labour’s tax credits, oddly claiming poverty has nothing to do with actual income.Lifting living standards was only part of Labour’s anti-poverty plot. In retrospect its record looks ever bigger, with childcare credits, nurseries for all, Certain Commence children’s centres, more lone mothers in employment, the education maintenance allowance, the minor trust fund nest egg and more: most of this is immediately divide or abolished. Capture BookStart, giving books to all babies at seven months, and again at three and seven years ancient, encouraging parents to glance at to them. Half of families had no books for babies until this scheme: it led them to capture children to libraries. Michael Gove cancelled it immediately, Philip Pullman led an outcry, Gove U-turned, divide it by 70% and gave back just £6m, however immediately much that’s in peril. Publishers donate £22m: if he cancels the fund so will they – so much for the cant about helping excellent parenting. This week the Institute of Education publishes research that early poverty permanently hurts children’s cognitive development: poverty makes more difference than whether a mother has university or only basic education.The administration caricatures poor human beings in terms of the worst cases they can find: so far they have won the public argument. Eric Pickles kicked off the pre-emptive rebuttal on Monday by announcing allocations to 120,000 troubled families, with councils offered £4,000 if they reduce the costs these families cause. Since social services have suffered huge cuts, getting back a couple of per cent is no doubt welcome. However the only poor human beings ministers ever mention are terrible cases, as in Duncan Smith’s all-purpose threat to the jobless: “This is not an simple lifetime any more, chum. I reckon you’re a slacker.”The campaign of vilification has been clever: Osborne’s announcement that no one would get more benefits than the £26,000 median wage was another masterstroke, suggesting most are living the high lifetime. The truth? These represent less than 1% of human beings on benefits, exceptional cases in high-cost temporary accommodation in London. Yet the large sum lodged in the public intellect implying it was average. It successfully hid the plunge in living standards for millions of others through housing benefit cuts: only one in eight on housing benefit are not in employment. What hardly any realise is that 88% of all the benefit cuts are still to come. Presumably Cameron extended ago chose no one cares: he may yet be proved incorrect.• Follow Comment is autonomous of charge on Twitter @commentisfreePovertyDavid CameronConservativesChildrenLabourEqualityChild benefitCommunitiesBenefitsPolly Toynbeeguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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