Jonathan Portes – my part in his downfall

In 2018, the Equality and Human Rights Commission commissioned and promoted a report which predicted that an extra 1.5 million children would be plunged into (relative) child poverty by 2021/22 if the government implemented Universal Credit. The proportion of children living in (relative) poverty would, it said, rise from 29 per cent to the unprecedented figure of 41.3 per cent.

If you think such prognostication is beyond the remit of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I can only concur. The report was written by Howard Reed and Jonathan Portes. I know Reed’s work because he is often commissioned to produce research for nanny state groups. For example, he recently claimed that smoking costs Britain £173 billion a year! I know Portes a little, mostly through a series of increasingly ill-tempered Twitter interactions, and expressed to him my disbelief about his poverty prediction.