Posts Tagged ‘ Start ’

It was a piece of breathtaking cheek and bare-faced larceny when David Cameron pledged to “Make British poverty history” this week, stealing Gordon Brown’s slogan and Labour’s policy stronghold. Cameron snatched the starting day of a month of action on child poverty, run by the End Child Poverty campaign, an umbrella group of 90 children’s charities originally assembled by Gordon Brown himself, as a counterweight against other spending demands. This year it plainly didn’t work: poor children got 48p a week, while the well-off middle-aged got a £1.4bn inheritance windfall. Symbolically, that suggested the fight against growing inequality was politically lost.

So it was a good time for Cameron to pounce, as ever astute at firing unexpected mortars into weak spots in the heart of the Brown camp. Most of Cameron’s speech was a litany of gross distortions, fantasy accounting, ominous threats on US-style welfare reforms with no road map for eradicating poverty, but it was a clever piece of politics. His centerpiece £3bn (unfunded) plan to pay extra tax credits only to couples came unstuck yesterday. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that if his £3bn were instead to be spent on credits for poor children it would lift 700,000 children out of poverty, more than twice as many as his plan would. That would almost reach the government’s 2010 children poverty goal, so Cameron’s plan is an expensively wasteful gesture.

However, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, David Cameron manages to say things labor never dares: “Poverty is not acceptable … not when we have people who earn more in a lunchtime than millions earn in a lifetime.” It was only a neat phrase, backed by no policy, teasing labor, which never dares say anything like it.

End Child Poverty’s campaign launch coincided with yet more dismal reports revealing how deeply British life is riven by class, the gulf growing wider, blighting many children’s chances. Ofsted spelled out the stark social, economic and racial divide that determines how well children do at school: low-income children are half as likely to get five good GCSEs as the well-heeled.

The Foresight report on obesity told much the same story: class is health and fitness destiny too. Twice as many girls in the lowest fifth as in the richest fifth of the population are obese. The government target to stop children getting fatter by 2010 has slipped back to 2020 – the same date for abolishing all child poverty, a neat synergy. If nothing is done it will be lethally worse by 2050, and not just among the poor. Some sensible and easy things can be done – no more advertising of rubbish food to children on TV or anywhere else, traffic-light warning codes for high-calorie food, naming and shaming of supermarkets that don’t do it.

Would that make much difference? Every little helps, as they say. But frankly, the task is gargantuan, much harder than getting the nation to stop smoking: you can’t “just say no” to eating. Consider the power of all entertainment, fashion, sporting and playground culture in the west telling us fat is ugly, yet it fails to keep us thin. Polls show most women are miserable about their bodies, young girls more so, boys too, yet a gigantic diet industry is a failure. Something deeper is at work.

What can mere government do when all that social pressure fails? The Foresight report is right to be circumspect about solutions. Given such an intractable problem, school cookery lessons, or removing sweets from supermarket checkouts sound pathetically weak.

What is needed now is nothing less than a national culture change, embracing every aspect of life. Step back and look which nations have the fewest obesity problems. You guessed it, it’s the Nordic countries, where social divisions are narrower. Fat is a class issue. Obesity is mainly a disorder of the less well off, an added stigma to a life of low esteem, making a poor life worse. Revealing epidemiological research in Richard Wilkinson’s The Impact of Inequality shows how being at the bottom makes people sick, prone to obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Whether it is obesity, drug addiction, drink, mental health or children leaving school uneducated, the country scrambles to correct the dysfunctions of class divisions without ever talking about it. David Cameron, in his poverty speech, said crassly: “Aspiration is not about class, background or position.” But everything in Britain is about class, report after report hammers it home. Results will never significantly improve until the distance between the top and bottom starts to narrow.

But the politics of the times seem bent on denying it. It is not a winning message with voters increasingly beguiled by the American dream: even the poor themselves are fooled into believing anyone can make it if they try. They can, of course – like anyone can win the lottery. Overwhelming evidence that family is usually destiny is counter-intuitive when people wrongly think Britain is becoming more, not less, meritocratic. Focus groups show people doubt there is poverty, or if there is, the feckless are to blame for their failure. Parties no longer dare speak the politics of class, but only of “aspiration”, now that the middle-class is all that counts electorally. The loss of the inheritance tax argument seemed to sound the last post on the politics of class and social justice. So is that it, time to give up?

Both these reports and the shocking Unicef revelations on UK children suggest another way. labor has embarked on it, but often forgets it. Ed Balls in a speech to directors of children’s services this week revived it, talking of a “revolution” to put “children at the center of policy”. Imagine if Britain really did it, with every department dedicated to just that, Labor’s single national goal, its one big message and best narrative flowing through everything. Children are the key that unlocks ideas of social justice.

Putting children first would be a social revolution, redesigning everything, turning the world on its head. Walking and cycling in streets safe enough for any unaccompanied young child going to school would take priority over cars, parks over car parks, buses over 4x4s. Youth centers that were palaces of pleasure, where arts, sports, drama, dance and fun would take priority over adult pleasures in the neighborhood. Children’s centers, still a fledgling program, would be community hubs from before every baby was born. (A report this week finds the first year of a baby’s life is most mothers’ loneliest time.) Supermarkets would indeed be required to hide away the bad and promote the healthy, with a state unashamed to be the good nanny and raise drink prices steeply. Banning smoking and the London congestion charge show how cultures can be changed, if government has the nerve to do it.

With children as the focus, universal children’s services would need to be good enough to be appreciated by rich and poor alike. That means the best childcare and nurseries, better subsidized for all, with breakfast clubs and extended afternoon schools that really do match the activities of middle-class children. All these would make it a politically possible national goal that every child in every family should have the very best of everything. It is the Nordic, not the American dream to sell to this tax-averse nation. But in the name of everyone’s children, it might be done, if they had the nerve.