child poverty | ukwatch.net

Stopping the rot of child poverty

Alex Doherty — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:03:33 +0000

Last Saturday’s rally by the Campaign to End Child Poverty deserved wider coverage than it received. The campaign’s work and research findings, published last week, are a reminder, for those who needed it, that economic hardship and a widening chasm between rich and poor did not begin with the credit crunch. They go back to before the Blair years. They continued through them and under Gordon Brown.

The figures on child poverty on Britain, in the third term and 11th year of a so-called Labour government, returned with majorities beyond the dreams of Harold Wilson, are symptoms of a deep sickness in our society.

In my own constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow are some of the highest concentrations of child poverty anywhere in the country. There are 23,450 children, 79%, living in poverty. Neighbouring Poplar and Limehouse is not that different.

Across Tower Hamlets as a whole in 2007, two-thirds of children were living in “income-deprived families” (how Orwellian the language of public policy has become), making it the most deprived borough in England on that measure.

The incidence of child poverty is directly linked to lack of work and dependency on benefits. Despite these root causes children, parents, teachers and education officials in Tower Hamlets have done extraordinarily well in raising the level of educational achievement – a success praised by the End Child Poverty Campaign.

Responding earlier this year to news that the government was going to miss its target of halving child poverty by 2010, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, England’s children’s commissioner, said:

Poverty is, in our view, the single most pernicious influence that is blighting the lives and prospects of our young people. We are one of the richest countries in the world. Yet Unicef has found that we have some of the highest levels of poverty. Poverty underpins most of the other social issues we are concerned with.

We also have the unhappiest children in Europe. Beneath the aggregate statistics lies an ocean of suffering. It is not simply the overall family income that is stunting the lives of children in east London. Housing, health and welfare inequalities are cutting them down at an early age. It is by no means unusual for constituents to turn up to my surgery looking to be rehoused because they are living 12 or 14 to a two-bedroom flat.

To repeat – this was going on throughout 2005 to 2007, and before I became the MP. It was going on while New Labour and their clique were boasting endlessly of the economic bounties they were bestowing on Britain. It was going on while Gordon Brown assured us – against all experience and contradicting the insights of even sophisticated pro-capitalist economists – that he had abolished the boom/slump cycle.

And through those years the people of east London saw the gleaming spires of finance capital soar higher and higher in the City of London and Canary Wharf, dwarfing the inhabitants in between. The wealth would trickle down sides of the Gherkin and the NatWest Tower, we were assured. Instead, the poorest got swept down the gullies. And now it is going to get a lot worse, quickly.

The official anti-poverty strategy for Tower Hamlets cites the 90,000 jobs “created” at Canary Wharf as central to progress. But scarcely any of those jobs went to people living in Tower Hamlets. And now, as the empty Lehman Brothers offices bear witness, the question is how many of those jobs are going to go over the next few months.

It is not only Brown and New Labour who stand hopelessly exposed by the turn of events. So too are David Cameron and the Tories. Their call for an end to casino capitalism and for tighter regulation of the finance sector falls into the category of telling the biggest whopper you can think of in the hope that the public will be so stunned they’ll doubt their own critical faculties.

This is the same Cameron who says he wants to be as radical in the social field as Margaret Thatcher was in economics. It sounds like a darkly mumbled line from Marlon Brando in the Godfather. I can only imagine that it means something like shutting every social services department and getting rid of red-tape such as legislation guaranteeing children’s rights. It was under Thatcher that child poverty doubled.

The steps proposed by both parties are hopelessly inadequate. The Liberal Democrats don’t even enter the picture thanks to their hapless leader choosing this of all moments to lurch towards the free market – watch the space between those shoulder blades.

As this financial crisis deepens, people will want radical policies – more like the New Deal of Roosevelt than Blair’s workfare scheme of the same name. Already public ire has turned against the stockbrokers, the hedge-fund managers and the City slickers.

It is becoming clearer by the day that an emergency programme of radical anti-poverty and anti-recessionary measures is required. The signal from Brown’s reshuffle is that he is going to do exactly the opposite. Who on earth in the Brown circle thinks the Peter Mandelson has traction with Labour people? Putting him in charge of business is a sign that it will be the bankers and the chief executives, and no one else, who get to enjoy a lavish welfare state and economic protection.

From the Chicksands Estate and the Roman Road there’s a burning resentment at what’s been done to this country and its children. A glance at the history of the East End should give the powers that be fair warning: they’d be ill-advised to ignore the suffering lapping at their gates.

Forty percent of children live in poverty

Alex Doherty — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:55:43 +0000

More than 40 percent of children in the United Kingdom are living in poverty, according to the latest research. That is some 5.5 million children.

Whilst official measures of child poverty are based on a national survey of family income, the new research published by the Campaign to End Child Poverty was compiled using tax credit data. This gives the percentage of children on low incomes in local authorities and constituencies across the UK, as well as at the more local ward level in England and Wales and in local zones in Scotland.

There are two groups of children whose families receive the maximum Child Tax Credit because they have low incomes. Some 2,895,000 children are in families claiming Child Tax Credit, plus a Working Tax Credit entitlement related to their earnings. Another 2,664,000 children live in families claiming tax credits that also depend on benefits, because no one in the family is employed.

In 174 of the 646 parliamentary constituencies across the UK, more than 50 percent of children fall into these categories. Naturally there is a wide discrepancy between affluent and poorer constituencies.

Whilst the constituencies with the lowest levels of families in poverty are Buckingham and the prosperous constituency of Sheffield Hallam, both with 17 percent, the parliamentary constituency with the highest number is in Birmingham Ladywood, with 81 percent or 28,420 children living in poverty.

Other areas with high child poverty are Bethnal Green and Bow in London, with 79 percent (23,450), Bradford West with 75 percent (24,900) and Nottingham East with 68 percent (12,360).

At more localised levels, the poverty rate is even higher. For example, in the London electoral wards of Tower Hamlets, Bethnal Green South and St. Dunstan’s and Stepney Green there are very high levels of child poverty, with 87 percent. When broken down still further, the concentration is even greater. For example, in the two zones selected by the Campaign to End Child Poverty in parts of Glasgow Baillieston—Central Easterhouse and North Barlarnark and Easterhouse South—98 percent of children are living in poverty.

The Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion has compiled the research figures by using data from August 2006. Economic developments since then will have already further increased child poverty. Rising food and energy prices and the slump of the housing market are pushing ever more people to the brink.

The Campaign to End Child Poverty, which is made up of more than 120 organisations including children’s charities, child welfare organisations, social justice groups, faith groups, trade unions and others, will stage a rally in Trafalgar Square as part of its Keep The Promise campaign on Saturday, October 4. The “promise” refers to the pledge to end child poverty made by Tony Blair when the Labour Party came to power in 1997.

At last week’s Labour Party Conference, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced plans described as “ground-breaking legislation” to enshrine in law Labour’s pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 and to end it fully by 2020.

However, Brown gave no concrete details on this legislation or the policies that would be employed by Labour to this end. And there has been no further information forthcoming. Not only is the target of halving child poverty out of reach, but figures show that it has in fact increased over the last two years by 200,000.

In reality, Brown’s pledge was made in recognition of the fact that Labour’s original promise is nowhere near being met. Nor could it be, given that the Labour government is entirely beholden to big business and the super-rich and that all its policies to this end have only increased social inequalities.

While Labour continues to make empty promises, it is fully aware that these cannot be squared with its using billions of taxpayers’ money to bail out billionaire and multimillionaire shareholders and bankers. Brown’s never-ending guarantees to do whatever is necessary to save the system will mean further handouts for failing banks and rising taxes, rising prices and deeper attacks on social benefits for workers, driving even more children into poverty.

It fucks you up, your country.

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:43:46 +0000

Every now and again, the government has a policy review about how it will deal with the national childhood problem. There are a range of themes taken up, but the basic problem is that they are violent, clubbish, bestial and need to be controlled. Britain is, as studies have shown, a particularly harsh place for children to live in. New Labour, representing a virulently authoritarian version of neoliberal social-democracy (if that’s possible), proposes a combination of modest poverty-reduction strategies (which fail, both in the specific goal, and in the intended effect), curfews, control orders, ASBOs, hoodie bans, stop and search mechanisms, and more detention. Blair wanted to spy on potential ‘problem families’ (apparently identifiable through the warning signs of track suits, tatoos, Lambert & Butler cigarettes and an insufficiently appreciative attitude toward the government). The heavily punitive accent of government policy is supported by a culture of child-hating, which is ironic given the late capitalist infantilization of adults (in which capital tries to convert us into impulsive, needy, irrational consumers, cultivating nonsensical enthusiasms so that we part with our money more quickly). A direct corollary of the sentimentality about ickle children is the incredible amount of aggression toward the young in popular culture, especially as they reach their adolescent years, and especially if they’re working class. Behind the scenes, if you like, this aggression more frequently takes the form of child abuse by parents than one might think. For example, a study in the UK found that 11% of boys and 21% of girls experienced some form of child abuse. I would have thought that most of this is emotional abuse or neglect, which is horrendous enough, but the study found that when it is narrowed to ‘contact’ abuse (sexual or physical), 16% of women and 7% of men said that they had experienced this kind of abuse. Obviously, this is not simply an unpleasantness that one can ‘walk off’ and ‘get over’. It exacts a long term psychological toll – shrinking the hippocampus, which deals with emotional responses, and producing abnormal levels of cortisol, which deals with fight or flight responses – and the younger it happens the more severe the effects. Beyond the family, it is also expressed in the other institutions in which a child might be raised: foster care, obviously, and penal custody. On average, two children died in penal custody every year since 1990, and a controversy has recently erupted over the officially sanctioned abuse of children known euphemistically as ‘restraint’.

The ‘Children’s Commissioner’ has become an easy target for rightist polemic after he criticised the use of painful ‘restraints’ in custodial institution, which are designed to control behaviour with the application of pain. He spoke of the rights of children, and he lamented some of the authoritarian measures used by the government. Melanie Phillips blustered in the Daily Mail: Children’s rights? What about the rights of those who live in fear of young thugs? This was only a particularly forceful version of the raised media heckles of ‘dimwit’, ‘who-does-he-think-he-is’, ‘waste-of-taxpayers-money’, ‘we’ll-smack-our-kids-if-we-want-to’, and so on. (These people do get terribly exercised about their inherent right to beat their children. When a smacking ban was first proposed, they went absolutely bonkers. The comedian Jack Dee, by contrast, suggested that it was a good idea to stop beating kids, but “maybe we should stop fucking them first”). For this particular persuasion, children have only one right: the right to remain silent. Here is one ‘young thug’ who won’t be around to bother the nice people. A fourteen year old boy, who suffered enormous trauma due to deaths in his family, experienced emotional turmoil, and was locked up for ‘behaviour difficulties’ after allegedly wounding a man. He survived a month in his prison until he was violently ‘restrained’ by officers, who broke his nose, leaving him terrified, as well as sickened and depressed: he hung himself. But that’s just one example. There was also Joseph Scholes, a mentally unwell young man given to self-harm, who was imprisoned for a minor street crime, despite multiple expert witnesses telling the judge that the boy would kill himself if he was put in that kind of environment. Of course, even those witnesses couldn’t have known that he would be forced to wear a loose garment resembling a horse blanket, and demeaned and driven to his death within a week. Then there is Gareth Paul Myatt, who died four days into a one year sentence at a ‘training centre’ run by Group 4 following an ‘incident’. Shortly after that death, the government announced £16m for more child prisons.

Now these examples are not incidental. Gordon Brown’s twee catchphrase is that “children are 40% of the population, but 100% of the future”. We can either collectively vomit over this phrase or try to extract some literal truth from it (or both). The truth is that fucked up children make for fucked up adults. Brutalising children is not going to produce a nation of well-adapted citizens. The clinical psychologist Oliver James points out that one of the most alarming statistics of recent years is the discovery that 90% of the prison population was in some way mentally unwell. As he further elaborates, the causes of this are not rooted in the poor genetic stock of the working class, who are vastly over-represented in all penal institutions. Far more often, it is the result of a particular kind of nurture experienced especially but not exclusively in the first three to six years of childhood. You raise a kid in a comfortable bourgeois home with lots of attention, you get a comfortable bourgeois person. You raise a kid in a strict, authoritarian home with parents trying to break his will through the application of regular violence (tough love) all for his own good, you get a young fascist. You raise a kid in a chaotic household with episodic, rather than structured, violence and abuse, you get manipulative people with poor consciences prone to acting out physical or sexual violence. You raise a kid in a tough working class household with a survivalist mentality and regular insecurity, you get Monty Python’s bragging Yorkshiremen. Sorry, I’ve lost my thread, where was I …? Oh yes. To extend the logic, suppose you raise children in a cruel, aggressive country with: violent, manipulative, sanctimonious hypocrites in charge; a virulent ethos of social competitiveness saturating the culture; underfunded schools with over-worked teachers and kids bored or stressed through banal lessons and routine examination; few and degraded amenities and hostile over-policing in the remaining public spaces such as shopping centres; violent ‘control’ of children encouraged on the one hand, with violence exalted in the culture as a means of empowerment on the other; with manifest injustice coupled with powerlessness to do anything about it; and so on. Violence, neglect, hypocrisy, wilful manipulation, insecurity, competition as the sole source of self-esteem, abuse, injustice, indifference – it’s a recipe for disaster. Yet the program appears to be more of the same: cut benefits, close facilities, install CCTV, impose stricter discipline in schools, toughen policing, lock more kids up in violent penal institutions, threaten their parents with benefit-cuts if they bunk off school, intensify social competition through more testing – and now, on top of it all, Lord Goldsmith wants kids to swear allegiance to the Queen so that they’ll feel more British! If Goldsmith epitomises ‘Britishness’, then our elusive national ‘values’ can now be summarised as naked corruption, criminality, careerism, arms dealing, warmongering and a facade of blustering pomposity.

Of course, I would be the first to admit that children are awful people. Having a sensible conversation with anyone under nine years old is almost impossible, and they are as a rule unbelievably tactless. The smaller they are, the less they know about anything. As Randy Newman once sang about rednecks, they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. On the other hand, most population groups have flaws, especially those in the armed forces, and I wouldn’t wish the amount of crap kids go through on them either.

Budget Defeat Over Child Poverty

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:07:51 +0000

In 1999 the Government said it would halve child poverty by 2010 – taking 1.7m children out of poverty. To date it has missed its targets and only removed 600,000 children from poverty. In the pre-budget briefings pouring out of Number 10 and the Treasury we were all led to believe that the Chancellor would make a major announcement today to get the Government back on course to meet its target.

Instead, the Chancellor has admitted defeat in the war against child poverty and has confirmed that the Government will not meet its 2010 target – and will leave over 2.5m children still living in poverty in the fifth richest countries in the world.

The measures announced today will only remove at most a further 250,000 children from poverty by 2010. Some of the media and other agencies have grasped at this straw argung that at least the Government’s budget proposals aren’t as bad as some thought they would be . But on analysis the situation is even more disappointing. In calculating child poverty the Government has massaged the figures by removing housing costs from the calculation. If these costs are put back the real assessment of child poverty confirms that in fact 3.5 million children will remain in poverty in our society. The TUC has rightfully expressed the deep disappointment of the trade union movement at the failure of the Government to prioritise effective action against child poverty.

At the same time the Chancellor has done virtually nothing to tackle the unfairness of our tax system. Big business benefits from the lowest corporation tax in this country in decades, which is to be cut further on 1st April. Proposals to tackle the scandal of non doms, some of whom are paying less tax than their servants, have been watered down and there are no measures to address the £97 to £150 billions the Treasury now admits to losing each year from tax avoidance.

If after eleven years in office, a Labour Government cannot meet such a basic aim of lifting our children out of poverty, many will judge this period of government as the greatest missed opportunity in the history of the Labour party. There is a growing feeling that the Government is running out of both time and ideas.

Scandal of child poverty in Britain exposed by report

JamieSW — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:38:24 +0000

The true hardships of the one in three children in Britain who live in poverty are exposed in a new report revealing that a quarter of the country’s poorest households cannot afford to put a daily hot meal on the table for every family member. However, as a result of incessant neo-liberal propaganda many people, possibly even a majority, refuse to believe that poverty can exist in today’s Britain. Indeed unless it is visibly Dickensian, it won’t illict even liberal sympathy, much less help.

The ground-breaking report, ‘Living With Hardship 24/7’, which was published on November 14 by the child poverty charity , takes an in-depth look at the experiences of families surviving in low-income households, exposing details of their daily struggles that would not look out of place in a developing country.

The study found that children as young as five were so keenly aware of their parents’ financial difficulties that they gave back money to help support the household. The children surveyed were from 70 families across the country with an income of less than £11,000.

‘No winter clothes’

Almost half of the parents interviewed, said they could not afford basic toys or sports equipment for their children, and a third did not have enough money to buy the winter clothes their offspring needed. Some children said they did not ask for Christmas presents for fear of adding to their parents’ burden.

Eight-year-old Fiona said her parents’ financial situation made her fear for her sister’s life. Her parents were dependent on benefits and were £30,000 in debt. Asked how she felt about their predicament, Fiona said: “I’m really, really scared … Because if we don’t have much money then we won’t buy food and then my baby sister will die.”

The report’s author, Dr Carol-Ann Hooper, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of York, said: “Children as young as five recognised that poverty was a key source of stress for their parents, and some tried to alleviate it by hiding their needs and wishes, and giving or lending money they had received from other family members. They were also often sad, angry, frustrated or upset by the impacts of poverty on their lives and hardship clearly impacted in a range of ways on all dimensions of children’s well-being.”

The anxiety of children who felt they should be helping more was also highlighted in the report. Amy, nine, explained how she was worried about her mother being able to afford a birthday present for her: “I just think I should really be paying for stuff,” she said. “I should do more for my mum that I’m not doing really, but I don’t really have enough money to do any more.”

In the foreword to the report, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, wrote: “The Government pledged in 1999 to halve child poverty by 2010 and to end it by 2020. While absolute poverty in Britain has fallen as a result of the measures taken by the Government, there are still 2.8 million children living in poverty in the UK today – that is one in three children. A great deal more needs to be done.”

‘Often I don’t eat’

Laura Macarthur, 22, a single mother, lives in Huddersfield with her one-year-old son, Camden. She is unemployed and surviving on benefits: “I don’t manage to pay all the bills. With it getting so cold now we need the heating on more; it’s very difficult. Sometimes I run out of gas or electricity because I haven’t been able to top up the meter.”

When Ms Macarthur broke up with her boyfriend she was left with nowhere to go, so she went to the local homeless centre. “I had to take the first council flat that came up, but it was in a really rough estate, and had almost no provisions. Often I don’t eat because I can’t afford to. I’m more worried about feeding Camden. The Government seems to think you only need £59 a week to survive, but it’s not enough, and child benefit doesn’t come close to covering the extra amount that you need to bring up kids.”

‘End Child Poverty’, a coalition of 100 children’s charities, has been lobbying the Government to keep its promise of eradicating child poverty by 2020. This is looking increasingly less likely, as the number of minors living in poverty rose by 100,000 last year.

New Labour’s hollow promise.

Hilary Fisher, the director of ‘End Child Poverty’, said: “It’s shocking to think that in this country, one of the richest in the world, there are children worried their siblings might die because they don’t have enough food. We have five-year-olds so concerned about money that if they receive any they give it to their parents.

“Most people in the UK don’t believe poverty exists, and they can’t imagine what it looks like. We have one of the highest rates of child poverty in the industrialised world and we need action now to tackle it. We are calling on the Chancellor to make the 2008 Budget, a Budget to end child poverty. Without the investment of an extra £4bn by April 2009, the Government’s commitment to child poverty targets will just be a hollow promise.”

Last year, 110, 000 were added to the child poverty figures.
So ‘hollow promise’ it is then.