Labourboy

I felt obliged to write something about this as it annoyed me so much. It’s a classic opposition move of laying claim to territory traditionally seen as the territory of the other party. Blair made this famous when he declared Labour to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.

So Cameron is taking (yet another) leaf from Blair’s book and claiming Labour have failed on poverty and the Conservatives, the party who put so many of these people into poverty in the first place I should add, are the natural party of social justice.

Frankly, my knowledge on this area, and the statistics Cameron spouts, aren’t in depth enough to systematically take apart his arguments. However, Andrew Sparrow from the Guardian does a good article summarising the debates, and although he doesn’t come out and say it, I couldn’t help but feel when reading the argument that he didn’t really agree with Cameron’s comments.

At least Blair could point to rising crime figures under the Tories when he was Shadow Home Secretary, the best Cameron can point to is that child poverty figures rose (unexpectedly might I add) 100,000 last year, but in the context of the Labour government that still leaves 600,000 children not in poverty who were in poverty under the Tories.

He’s also accusing the government of witholding the latest figures on child poverty (which are expected to show another rise) until after the local elections. The thing with this is, that the National Office of Statistics (or whatever they’re called) control the figures, and they’ve delayed them because there is a problem with them. It’s nothing to do with the government, and surely Cameron knows this, but he also knows it gives him headlines in the run up to a local election.

He’s also using figures on extreme poverty which no proper statistician uses, because they’re known to be unreliable. Michael White, linked to below, explains it better than I can but essentially the figures are unreliable, and no-one, except for David Cameron, uses them.

I’ve actually emailed Polly Toynbee (ah, Polly Toynbee…) about this asking if she planned on doing an article taking him to task. Guess what - she replied! ‘Quite right, I’ll have a go’ she said, so hopefully we can see an article giving them what for soon enough.

For those who doubt the wealth redistribution under Labour, Lucy Powell posted independent figures from the Institue of Financial Studies: Decile / Since 1997, change to net income from direct and indirect tax

Poorest / 12.4%
2 / 11.8%
3 / 7.3%
4 / 4.3%
5 / 1.5%
6 / -0.1%
7 / -1.2%
8 / -2.4%
9 / -3.5%
Richest / -5.4%

In the mean time, a good summary of what other people have said is listed below:

From Steve Richards: I liked it when he (David Miliband, being interviewed by Andrew Marr) said of the Conservatives’ confused interest in the policy area of poverty: “If the Conservatives want to make poverty a big area of debate, I say bring it on”. He was also effective in dissecting David Cameron’s poor performance on the same programme.

Michael White:In any case, the core Cameron claim that Labour’s anti-poverty policies have failed because the latest figures (for 2005-06) show 100,000 more kids in poverty and 600,000 more in severe poverty - below 40% of median national income - rests on questionable assumptions which are designed to make Labour’s record look worse.

A blip or a trend? Too soon to say. The spending patterns of that bottom 40% suggest they have more money than they report, which is why the data is mistrusted. Why? Benefit fraud? Black economy cash? Or simply that income varies wildly from week to week?

Politically more important, notes the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, is the awkward fact that when economies do well relative poverty tends to increase, because benefits lag behind wages. Had chancellor Brown not taken action in 1997, child poverty, already the worst in Europe, would have risen by a further 1.7 million (my italics).

So Brown’s modest achievement in getting 600,000 kids out of poverty before his programme stalled is that he was bucking a trend.

Update: A good blog from Hopi Sen about it here.