Ok, so we are in a recession that may turn into a depression but hey, those folks who work so hard in the Poverty Industry only see that as a sign that we need to spend £££ Billions chasing the phantasm of “child poverty.” The Rowntree Foundation is a BBC favourite and each time they produce liberal tosh it is treated as if it were the received wisdom of Solomon. As we have discussed here before, it is the political invention of relative poverty that is being retailed by the bleeding hearts at Rowntree and as ever, only one side of this faux argument is permitted on the BBC.
POVERTY INDUSTRY UPDATE.
Bookmark the permalink.
BTW ‘relative poverty’ is a poisonous Marxist trick to bring about a communist society, it feeds on jelousy and envy and it preys on the feeble minded looking for an excuse for their own failures, its a dishonest ratchet type policy that can be used to create the utopianist equality so loved by Maxist/socialist/lefists the world over, those who use the term are using it for political purposes and its as dangerous as it is stupid.
good points by grimer and grant re seeing actual poverty and who have more life experiences than a room full of BBC editors or ‘poverty experts’ put together
‘relative poverty’ is a poisonous Marxist trick
what??? found any commies hiding in the closet yet McCarthy??
I think people here are going overboard on the alleged ‘socialist’ resonances of the idea of relative poverty.
Actually there is no reason why a society shouldn’t have quite a large spread of income above the median (thereby rewarding entrepreneurial effort with great wealth etc) but a tighter bunching below the median, so no-one is desperately poor.
Tom,
The problem is, you don’t get rewarded, you get punished:
1) Why should somebody earning above £38k per year get taxed at 40% of everything they continue to earn?
2) Why should somebody earning above £100k get taxed at 50%?
You are already earning more and paying more. Why the punishment of those people that are generating the wealth?
This isn’t really the place for discussion of the UK tax system, so you’ll have to indulge me.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind paying more tax, if poorer people paid less tax. So long as the system was fair. For example:
If there was a flat rate income tax, with high personal limits – e.g you could earn £12,000 and pay no tax, but everything above that was taxed at 30%. You would see:
1) Somebody earning £13,000 a year would only pay £300 a year in tax (2.3% of their total earnings)
2) Somebody earning £150,000 a year would pay £36,000 a year in tax (24% of their total earnings
This would ensure that the lowest earners would pay very little and the ‘richest’ would pay the most.
I have no problem paying more in tax than the lowest earners. I certainly wouldn’t agree to a ‘national poll tax’ as a replacement to income tax.
What I object to, is my money being stolen by the government (under threat of imprisonment) and given to the feckless and work-shy. How is it morally acceptable to allow people to vote for theft? All the recipients of government largess are allowed to cast a vote demanding the government steal yet more of my/your cash. I’m supposed to bend over and take it. Why?
Maybe your school was different, but at my school the morons that are now spending their entire lives on benefits, are the same ones that disrupted lessons and made life difficult for those kids that wanted to get on. The teachers warned them they wouldn’t get jobs. Unfortunately, that threat turned out to be hollow, because Labour have kept writing cheques and made employment unnecessary.
Why should I now support them, when they had every educational opportunity that I had?
Tom:
No-one is desperately poor in the UK. Are we done yet? Or do the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and their supporters at the B-BBC wish to take even more of my hard-earned cash to lavish on the idle and feckless?
go to the BBC home page…headline about jaqui smith and her dodgy expenses. oh those nasty BBC people really do bury stories that are negative towards labour don’t they…..
Grimer | 18.02.09 – 4:11 pm
I largely agree with you on the flat… or flatter taxes point. The only political problem it throws up is that it creates a huge, potentially election winning bloc of voters who don’t have a stake in the tax system and couldn’t care if the standard flat rate was 20, 30 or 40 per cent – as they won’t be paying it. Unscrupulous NuLab types could have a field day.
Andy | 18.02.09 – 4:20 pm
There are some desperately poor people in the UK – and among them are lots of children. And you can’t blame them for their situation.
Picture a one parent household with three kids where the one parent is herself a drug addict and alcoholic and imagine what life must be like for the kids.
Andy doesn’t know what hes talking about. Yes we don’t have poverty akin to some countries, but to say we don’t have real poverty in the UK (even if it is relative) is just wrong.
After one of Polly Toynbee’s more preposterous outbursts on “child poverty” in Britain, the journalist Keith Waterhouse tore her up for arse paper, recounting a tale of his early life in Leeds in the early 30s.
Have been sent to the corner chippie, he was on his way home when he dropped the family supper. A young girl he knew appeared from nowhere and started to gather the chips up from the dirty cobbled street. He thought she was helping him but then saw she was ramming them into her mouth. A few months later she was dead and so were her parents and four brothers and sisters. Dead from starvation and TB.
Now THAT is poverty. I wish I could find the article. That had more effect on me than all the Rountree reports and all the BBC bluster about it.
Tom,
“The only political problem it throws up is that it creates a huge, potentially election winning bloc of voters who don’t have a stake in the tax system and couldn’t care if the standard flat rate was 20, 30 or 40 per cent – as they won’t be paying it.”
We already have that block of voters now. The problem is, they not only don’t pay tax, they vote to steal my money and pay it to themselves as benefits!
“Unscrupulous NuLab types could have a field day.”
They are already!
____
My views on the subject are quite complicated. I have a brother that is physically and mentally disabled. He probably won’t ever find meaningful employment. However, he does his best and sells eggs door-to-door and does a couple of days a week at the recycling centre. His main source of income are his benefits and my father is his ‘carer’ (mother deceased).
My father’s cleaner (he needs one as he has to juggle work, caring for my brother and a very minimal social life) is a lady whose husband did a runner. He left her with four kids (three under the age of five). Through no fault of her own, she was left in the shit.
Did she deserve more government help? Too bloody right she did.
Does my brother require government help, as he is unable to earn enough money to support himself? Of course he does.
However, because the government spunks away so much money on people like this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/4016233.stm
They have less money for the people that actually deserve State help.
Where/how you draw the line, is very difficult. However, the ‘blank cheques’ for people that have never worked (or planned their families) need to stop. It doesn’t help them, it doesn’t help society and it doesn’t help their children.
‘Child poverty’ is another trinket for the NuLabour regime to waste our money at. Show me a poor child, and I bet we’ll see them watching Sky Digital playing Xbox.
The poverty rate is only higher these days cos of all the dirt poor immigrants, who have fled Somalia and the Banana Republic to rip off the British taxpayer.
Picture a one parent household with three kids where the one parent is herself a drug addict and alcoholic and imagine what life must be like for the kids.
solution;
jail her or put into rehab and foster or adopt kids out. Don’t use this sentimental crap on us, I am not going to constantly pay for other peoples mistakes.
There will come a day when the freeloaders will rue the day they first claimed false benefits!!
Tom: there are enormous social and family problems and suffering caused by drug addiction and alcoholism but that is not poverty as such – it is just that the money is spent on things other than feeding and looking after the children.
Gus Haynes: But we have the term ‘relative poverty’ used by the likes of Toynbee and her leftie mates.
So if a child doesn’t have a computer they are deemed as poor. Why? If a child needs to use a computer then the school should lend them one.
Years ago when I was at school many parents couldn’t afford a calculator for their kids. So the school used to loan them out if one was needed.
I don’t remember that being called ‘poverty’.
No one is suggesting that benefits be stopped for everyone. However, the way benefits are handed out does need to be changed.
There is NO excuse for any child to be denied food, healthcare a home and education. But that does not mean that every child should have the same standard of living.
My local shop is also the Post Office. I’ve often see women draw out their child benefit then go straight up to the shop counter and hand over £50 for lottery scratch cards and lottery tickets.
I don’t think that is what child benefit is for. Do you?
And yes Gus people who refuse to work should have their children taken off them and their benefits stopped.
It doesn’t happen because Liebour need those people to vote for them.
My Pennyworth.
Singapore has a free health service, reasonable living standards, is run a bit like a benevolent dictatorship but there nothing is provided for families with more than two children. You are quite permitted to have more but social housing and benefits etc. only provides for 2 + 2 families, any thing more its down to you. Can I imagine a U.K. Government announcing a wholesale recasting of the benefits system such that in nine months two weeks time all child allowance, tax credits, sizing of council accommodation etc. will stop for the third child onwards born after that date.
RAMBO: Another troll I see. The BBC have finally had to run this story as it’s been churning around in the press for weeks now.
However, when the story first broke the BBC ignored it as they do with any Labour sleaze.
I don’t remember BBC Newsnight running it as their top story for several days like they did with Caroline Spelman?
Or perhaps you might like to correct me?
It’s ONLY because OTHER media reported the story that her neighbours are now questioning the claim that spliff lives with her sister most of the time.
Had it been down to the BBC only this story would NEVER have surfaced in the first place.
We cant afford moral blackmail of the feckless claiming for their children.
if you go to work, you dont get extra for having a family or offspring. In the real harsh world, having children is your choice and your responsibility- and your cost and curtailment of other things. So it should be in benefits world.
RAMBO you turd.There’s nothing like being selective with your counter-arguments is there?The purpose of this site is to highlight the institutional bias at the bbc.Nobody has said that every news story is biased,just a large percentage.So your ‘one off’ example really is a little bit pathetic.
It only took a fortnight for the £3billion funded BBC to get round to reporting it. Guido (no public funding) has been running with the story for much, much longer.
No bias to see here, move along…
I wonder how many complaints it took, before the BBC realised the cat was out of the bag and they had to print a story?
The Rowntree Foundation should stick to what they’re best at – making Fruit Pastilles.
Child poverty exists in the UK, to claim otherwise is wrong.
As for the Rowntree Foundation they are the stereotypical left-wing unelected think tank, which as a political foundation should not be allowed to have its reports published by the BBC without any counter arguments.
Casssandra’s comment was spot on, and tells you all you need to know about these left-wing entities.
Why don’t all the poor children ask their parents for some money?
If everyone’s income were to be doubled, then the gap between richest and poorest would also double. That’s something a socialist cannot take-in.
Tom:
“There are some desperately poor people in the UK – and among them are lots of children. And you can’t blame them for their situation.
Picture a one parent household with three kids where the one parent is herself a drug addict and alcoholic and imagine what life must be like for the kids.”
That is abuse and the kids should be removed from the “one parent family”.
Gus Haynes:
You can’t have relative poverty that is real. That’s the whole point of this debate. And I would ask him not to be so personal in his remarks. We can hold differing views without resorting to insults. Thanks.
Colin W,
Spot on, the foundation is in reality a political entity and an unelected one at that, their political views are leftwing and their ideals are socialist utopianist, they are the typical state parasite bloodsuckers with a huge over inflated opinion of both themselves and their unimarxist world view.
Almost entirely staffed by political agitators with a specific social vision they are the cancer eating away at our nation, the cancer infecting our charitable institutions and they have a common purpose to impose their world view on us all whether we like it or not, these people are arrogant and self assured, so self assured they feel it beneath them to run for democratic office, I mean how could the ordinary stupid proles plumb the depths of their self perceived wisdom, it would be degrading for these self appointed leaders to have the ignorant common voter sit in judgement over them, sound familiar?
Never ever trust a political party that does not trust the voter.
BTW,
Someone call me MCarthy? Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Perhaps it is a myth – but funny if true – but wasn’t there a Union bloke who said everyone should be earning above the average national wage!?
Typical of leftism I’m sure along the lines of accepting that govt spending of taxes creates wealth! As ever 2+2=5 – Brownian (Keynesian) economics rule, KO!
One way to cut child poverty would be to stop welfare handouts for breeding and to cut welfare benefits in total, reducing the tax burden on people and businesses, thus raising the level of disposable income.
However, only the govt knows best how we should spend our money so I guess we should have a 60% basic tax rate with all household bills covered by a welfare handout.
The socialist is more concerned with the inequality of wealth. It doesn’t matter whether the poor can afford Playstation or HD TV.
I find this a useless point of view. Or maybe useful for the leftist that wants to breed discontent and class warfare.
“The Government has a target of eliminating child poverty by 2020, which is a questionable aspiration when we are talking in relative terms. This is far better addressed by improving the social mobility that has almost stalled because of the scandalous failure of the education system and by trying to rebuild families in broken Britain.
Ministers should concentrate on what they can do for the elderly poor. They could, for instance, help them with their council taxes since their fixed incomes do not rise anywhere near as fast as the tax. As a consequence, not only is the proportion of their income taken in tax greater than it is for earners, but it also rises every year.
Two million pensioners do not claim the council tax benefits to which they are entitled and which would cut household bills by £450 a year on average. The take-up rate of benefits is just 50 per cent for pensioners, but is 98 per cent for younger single-parent households.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3559311/Pensioners,-not-children,-suffer-real-poverty.html
Now I wonder why New Labour don’t help the elderly – and never talk about the “realive” povert they have to suffer.
“The Conservatives, whose total vote share was unchanged, were the main gainers of the reduced Labour share of the vote, especially in southern England. The biggest swing towards them among voting groups was among voters over 65 years old.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/issues/4520847.stm
Cassandra 7:27
Exactly. Did you say “Common Purpose” ?
Welfare handouts are simply a way of paying the poor to stay poor. The left has a vested interest in preserving this underclass because they’re a stage on which to perform tedious morality plays about greed, inequality and sharing – the fuel that keeps the left alive.
The vested interests of the left: Class warfare, poverty, racial tension, illegitimacy, tribalism, social conflict.
The vested interests of the conservative right: Prosperity, economic freedom, personal responsibility, family stability.
It’s incredible that the debate still exists.
Nice non biased review of left and right there Jason. I wonder which side you’re gunning for…
Marky Mark | 18.02.09 – 9:03 pm | #
The side which roots for personal responsibility and economic freedom and which isn’t clinically obsessed with viewing the world through the prism of race, gender and class.
Should the vested interests of the right really say:
Making sure the wealthy hold on their cash, bowing down to the power of the market no matter what, social self righteousness, and traditional (aka. often outdated, and backward) values?
“The vested interests of the left: Class warfare, poverty, racial tension, illegitimacy, tribalism, social conflict.”
Which is why Labour has squeezed the middle classes until the pips squeak.Socialist keep the middle classes down because prosperity is the enemy of socialism.Wouldn’t do for people to see there is an escape route.
“social self righteousness, and traditional (aka. often outdated, and backward) values?”
No one is more self righteous than a liberal lefty.As for values,look what a shit hole the liberal left have made of British society.
marky mark
a stunning misunderstanding of right wing values of self determination, aspiration and standing on your own two feet. Traditions are often there because they work (hard work for example)
The left are merely control freaks condescending to pass the poor down the crumbs from their groaning feast table.
To be fair to the BBC, although none of their news stories on “poverty” ever mentions the point, they did explain a while back that actual poverty had in fact disappeared in the fifties, and the concept had to be reinvented in the sixties.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4070112.stm
In fact, wind the clock back and the percentage of people in poverty has fallen by little over 10% since the first great UK poverty surveys were carried out at the end of the nineteenth century. But no one in their right mind would suggest that one fifth of the population in modern Britain are as steeped in poverty as their Victorian ancestors. Essentially, how poverty is measured has evolved. The social scientists have being busy moving the goalposts.
By 1950 poverty, as defined by a basket of basic goods, had virtually disappeared. Employment – the lack of which had led to a rise in poverty in the 1930s – had returned and the welfare state was having a major impact,” Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics, told BBC News.
It follows inexorably that “child poverty” is not a sociological challenge but a linguistic one. The way to solve the problem of child poverty is exactly the same as the way it was recreated • redefintion.
Simply defining it as 50% or 40% of median income will make it go away. Easier still would be to define it as say 50% of mean income in 2000. Then it will never be seen again.
The chap who was defending the Beeb on here by arguing that there was a wide consensus, because Cameron panders to the relative poverty lobby too, was playing an ancient BBC game, which they also play with things like the EU.
There’s a consensus because both Labour and Tory front benches support the idea that relative poverty is a problem / the EU is a good thing etc. So opponents are a mere fringe that we can ignore most of the time. The fact that there is a large minority which wishes to have nothing to do with the EU, and almost certainly a substantial majority that thinks poverty means destitution not inequality, is irrelevant.
But if there’s a left wing cause célèbre that is opposed by both front benches • like say the idea that we shouldn’t support the US decision to invade Iraq • the fact that there’s a political consensus against the line that the BBC prefers is no bar whatever to endless campaigning by the BBC against the consensus.
There are many people on both sides who support the war in Iraq.
Hello, is there another conservative right here? I thought values of the right were identical to values of the left, just hidden behind different objectives:-
“Self, self, self – at all costs.”
yea, the right wing economic theory based on the wealthy ‘holding onto their wealth’ i.e. not having it stolen off them, has produced poverty wherever it has been applied.
Whereas the lefty solution has made the soviet states rich beyond imagination. Its clear cut to a mind so warped.
Ratass Shagged | 18.02.09 – 11:49 pm |
Hello, is there another conservative right here? I thought values of the right were identical to values of the left, just hidden behind different objectives:-
“Self, self, self – at all costs.”
You forgot about all those Jewish neo-cons.
“Self, self, self – but don’t pay retail.”
Grant,
‘common purpose’? Hmmm now where have I heard that phrase before?
The rise of the wholly unelected social manipulators is a twentieth century phenomonen,groups of political activists hiding behind a facade created or taken over to obscure their real activities, charities have become a favourite target and thinktanks are fast becoming the vehicle of choice.
Charaties that used to actually work with the poor/disabled etc now only concentrate their efforts and funding on political agitation and insider nonjob creation, not only was actually helping the poor and disabled time consuming and expensive these hands on works meant that the bulk of money coming in had to be spent on those who actually needed helping!
This is NOT what the new charity commissars want at all, they want to be IN the political game, their efforts are to create a parallel and unelected political structure while not having the bother of standing for elections, those charities that have discarded their caring duties like a empty crisp packet to concentrate on political agitation and self serving power seeking should be banned from being charities, they are poisoning the world of real charities that actually help the needy.
Did you know that the biggest charaties now spend most of their incomes on ‘administration'(gravytrain nonjobs)? There are many charities living hand to mouth and using their income on actual assistance and then there are fake charities that extract cash from gullible people and use it to further their own political ambitions alone, the fake ones should be rooted out and closed down, they are easy to spot!
Cassandra | 19.02.09 – 9:34 am
Charities have always campaigned. It’s the essence of what they do.
And “the biggest charaties now spend most of their incomes on ‘administration” just isn’t true, if by administration you mean back office functions
Lee Moore – good point about redefining poverty slightly to make it disappear.
High Street charity shops are like a business, except they do not pay rates and they get free stock and free staff, apart from the shop managers, but unfortunately the high up people in the charity business sometimes appoint managers who think they do have to pay the same attention to customer relations that an independent second hand shop does.
An old man went into the local Age Concern shop and offerred 17 pounds for a suit costing 18 but was refused. The same suit was still for sale months later.
The hate being spewed out here is increadible, if only you could direct some of this venom towards some of the bankers who have been sucking the world dry, I can only assume from some of the comments here that some of you have never experienced the struggle at the bottom of this social pyramid scheme, such narrow mindedness and tunneled vision helps to give rise to the world we live in today, yes there are shirkers, bums and frauds out there but they’re not all on welfare, some people on benefits who suffer with mental health problems for example feel so guilty that they are unable to work on a till in asda, or in a call centre top themselves, the kind of thing that would make some one like frankos for example very happy indeed…
MWL,
There is a whole world of difference between campaigning and political agitation, the old charities used to actually campaign by HELPING the poor/sick/infirm now they spend millions on publicity/propaganda campaigns and lobby parliment like big busineses do.
Tens of thousands of nonjob parasites infest the sector bringing corporate ideas like ‘chugging’ and stripping out the expensive and time conusming part of actually HELPING people, those political fronts now pretending to be charitable foundations found the cash saved from dumping those unfortunates who relied on them could be used to grossly expand their ‘admin costs’.
These fake mega charities are now expanding to include political agitation and lobbying like never before, those that still dirty their hands with frontline services find they cannot compete for a limited amount of funding without resorting to the tactics of the new fake charities using all the ‘modern methods’.
Remember the spastics society? from a wonderful hands on charity to a grubby and selfish political front in a few short years!
Like the enviromental movement which was taken over by leftist/marxist ideologues as cover for their political activities, the charities are being taken over and used as a fake front for the propagation of the leftist/marxist social dogma.
The vast amount of funding that goes into these new fake charaties is being used for entirely different purposes and that which is still donated by the public is being gained under false pretences as the people that still give are labouring under the false impression that the cash will acually go to people in need NOT to some greedy parasites expense account/pension pot!
If the average giver knew what went on behind the scenes and just what their money was actually spent on there would be an uproar.
Garden Trash:
Socialist keep the middle classes down because prosperity is the enemy of socialism….Garden Trash | 18.02.09 – 10:06 pm |
Yes, the more poor they can make us, the more people are dependent on them for tax credits etc, plus, the more poverty they can create, the more they can make it an issue and pretend to provide the solution, i.e. more planning, more job creation (for the state sector), more socialism. But it is not so straightforward; they have to take us to poverty slowly. Make the dependents in the free houses too numerous too soon and they bankrupt the country and get kicked out of power. If only we had a Mrs Thatcher waiting to take over.
And another point about the socialists. They pretend their motivation is positive, ie equality, fairness. But in fact their motivation is negative • they feel they must stop people who are clever or harder working or in some way ‘better’ from getting any kind of advantage in terms of wealth or power. I think they have a strange thieving gene that has gone haywire. In caveman times they would have simply stolen other people’s things. Now their condition has worsened and they actually hate the people who make the things that they want to steal.
This negative and destructive urge motivates them strongly to get into the media, where they are so over-represented.
This behaviour is also not advantageous for themselves, or their children, or their country. They know this, for example, by looking at the state of Britain today.
But knowing what they are doing does not stop them. However, they will try to live in affluent areas, take out private health, and send their children to the best schools.