By guest author, Sunder Katwala
Given the tough economic climate which Alastair Darling faced for his first Budget, finding extra money to tackle child poverty shows that this has arguably now become the Government’s number one domestic policy priority. The increases in child benefit and child tax credits announced today will lift another 250,000 children out of poverty, costing government £765 million this year and £950 next year.
But they might best be seen as a down-payment in political trust, with the Budget offering an important signal of how the battle lines for the next general election are shaping up.
The End Child Poverty campaign believes the Government has shown it is seriously about ending child poverty in a generation, though pointing out that it would have taken at least two or three billion more to get back on the timetable for halving child poverty by 2010. As child poverty is measured in relative terms – at 60% of median income – the Government’s 1999 goal of ending child poverty in 20 years amounted to a pledge to take Britain from being the most unequal society in the (pre-enlargement) European Union to among the most equal, right up there with Sweden.
There have been significant reductions in child poverty, but not on the scale the target demands. In some ways it was surprising how much progress was made with so little fanfare. But as spending tightens, many feared that the limits of progress had been reached. Proving that wrong can not be a job for government alone.
Child poverty campaigners have been good at holding government’s feet to the fire. We have not succeeded in making an end to child poverty at home a great cause for our times – a public issue which can engage the wristband generation like international development.
Watch out for the cross-party politics too. David Cameron believes that supporting calls to end child poverty is a way of showing his party has changed. But his spending priority has been to take the affluent out of inheritance tax. The big debate inside the Conservative Party is whether it was a mistake to sign up to the Government’s spending plans – squeezing out the scope for tax cuts. So was the child poverty target a Brownite trap? Most of the right-wing think-tankers and backbenchers still take the Thatcherite line that ‘relative poverty’ is just a socialist twisting of words. Will they call on Cameron to ditch the pledge?
Expect James Purnell – the most Blairite of Cabinet Ministers – to start an old fashioned political scrap when leading for the Government in the budget debate tomorrow. We got an early taste at the Labour Spring conference fringe, where Purnell accused the opposition of ‘cynical weasel words’ merely pretending to have signed up to the target.
But Labour was too wary of the 'e' word – equality – at the last two elections to make child poverty a central campaign issue. This budget may signal of how Gordon Brown believes he can persuade voters that there really is a difference between the major parties.
Sunder Katwala is General Secretary of the Fabian Society
Alas, the battle lines are always the same - how much can the government appear to be giving the public to encourage its vote, and how much can the opposition dream up in whacky ideas, with the same objective, that the government hasn't thought of. One does hope that Cameron and Clegg will draw up their battle lines together and we can see something new - and more democratic - in British politics.
Posted by: john problem | Thursday, 13 March 2008 at 09:23 AM