Political lessons for Labour - child poverty
No sooner has George Osborne's absurd boast about the Conservatives being the party of fairness become chip paper than Martin Narey set out how Labour can achieve its child poverty target in the same journal.
It's worth reading the piece from beginning to end in the middle is this:
....for all Osborne's rhetoric, for all the impressive policy announcements
from Michael Gove and Nick Herbert, despite David Cameron's spirited
leadership, there remains a crucial difference between the two main
parties. The Conservatives aspire to ending child poverty. If they want
genuinely to be considered the party of the poor they need to drop the
meaningless "aspire" now and assert their commitment.
Labour
continues to commit. In James Purnell's words, the eradication of child
poverty is "a social, economic and moral imperative". But for all those
words, the determination to halve child poverty by 2010 seems destined
to fall short.
Memo to Alistair Darling before today's paper suffers the same fate as yesterday's: It will take an increase of less than one-half of a percent in public expenditure or reallocating resources more equitably to succeed.
What are we waiting for?
