Saving the children? Another child poverty report misses the bigger picture

Yesterday’s reshuffle isn’t the only story in town. Save the Children, a global charity, has today started to fundraise for children in Britain whom it says are affected by the government’s cuts. It is now run by Justin Forsyth, an ex-aide to Gordon Brown, who will have understood the political implications of the research: that coalition policies are making child poverty worse. The problem is that this analysis mistakes the nature of poverty in Britain, and – worst of all – the ways of alleviating that poverty.

The root problem is a confusion of low income as a cause of these issues, rather than the symptom of wider social failings it often represents. This basic failure has characterised political programmes and grand government schemes for years.  The starting point has been that poverty (and child poverty) means living below an arbitrary income line – set as it currently is at 60 per cent of the national median – and, accordingly, the way to fight poverty is to redistribute wealth in order to move households just above said line.