How Do You End Child Poverty?

The Labour government has already made some tremendous efforts to reduce child poverty so far. These include Sure Start, increased child tax credit, working tax credit and the minimum wage. However, the 2010 target of halving child poverty has been missed by a long way. ‘Middle England’ will lose any remaining compassion to help pay towards ending child poverty unless they can see a coherent and precise strategy and evidence of this being implemented and producing results. Here are some policy solutions for a long term strategy to end child poverty:

Public service and redistributive solutions:

* State funded maids (yes seriously) as they have in France to help single mothers stay at work and keep the young kids looked after, washing, keep the house in order and meals cooked.

* Truly universal childcare 7 days a week, in every community. This will further increase gender equality in the labour market as well.

* A living wage.

* Tax cuts for the low paid.

* Much higher child tax credit for low earners.

* A preventive welfare state that helps prevents young teen pregnancies and other social ills from happening in the first place instead of just picking up the pieces afterward.

* Cohesive communities and an end to apartheid cities and sink estates. Community solidarity is needed. Incentivise housing developers to build mixed communities. What we have at the moment is middle and higher income residents ignoring and avoiding lower income residents and vice versa. Polarised residencies are a bad thing in themselves and are part of a divided society.

Economic solutions:

* Industrial Activism: Grow the number of well-paying private sector jobs using a smart state investing in the science, training and infrastructure that industry needs.

* Flexicurity: A flexible labour market complemented with a rapid and responsive state providing redundancy pay, benefits, training and job allocation for workers made unemployed, at risk of unemployment or about to be made unemployed. Wales’s pro-act and re-act could provide some answers.

* Make the job guarantee/training place for unemployed 18-24 year olds permanent and extend it to unemployed single mothers/fathers with low employability and little work experience.

* Introduce more progressive taxes on ‘bads’ such as fuel, cars and electricity and link them to citizens' incomes, in order to pay for the investments needed. Make sure these taxes don’t hit people on low and modest incomes. Much of the investments will pay themselves off through increasing the number of people in full time work.

Ending child poverty cannot simply be achieved through either increasing child tax credit or growing the knowledge driven economy alone, it will require both of these policies and many more. Labour needs to construct a coherent strategy to end child poverty and present it to the electorate, otherwise people may give up hope and interest thinking it’s impossible to ever achieve. This will also confirm that Labour is the most progressive force in British politics.

No, Ann: Women, Black, & Ethnic Minorities Young People Aren't Second Class Citizens

Ann Widdecombe has recently criticised David Cameron's selection process for Tory candidates, saying that it will lead to a Conservative government full of "second-class citizens". She’s concerned about older politicians who lost their seats in 1997 being passed over in favour of new, first-time candidates, and seems to think that selecting a more diverse range of candidates is primarily a tick-box exercise.

Now, Labour as a parliamentary party could probably be more diverse in terms of age, gender and ethnic origin, but at least we’re trying. All-women shortlists have contributed substantially to the growth of women’s representation within the Labour Party, while the Tories languish well behind. Women making up only 8.8% of Conservative MPs, compared to 27% of Labour and 14.3% of Lib Dem MPs. Discussions around ethnic minority shortlists illustrate how seriously our party takes increasing diversity.

Widdecombe’s assertion that she’d like more women and ethnic minority Tory candidates, as long as they get there on merit alone, is fundamentally flawed. In any sphere of public life dominated by older, white, ABC1 males, it’s going to be harder to come forward as a potential candidate if you don’t fit into that narrow category. Women aren’t so hard to find on the Tory benches because they’re less good than the men, but because they often don’t have the confidence or the opportunity to put themselves forward in the first place. As for Davey C’s efforts to attract more new PPCs, why not?

Surely it’s better to field candidates with new ideas, rather than those whose last brush with politics was failing to hold on to their seats twelve years ago. Being an active London Young Labour member, I could reel off a long list of names of fantastic, politically-minded and civically-motivated people young people who would make great MPs. Far better for the Tories to find some young people removed from the Westminster bubble and more in touch with their communities’ needs, than to keep selecting tired old has-beens.

So, you could vote for the Tories, a substantial number of whom think, apparently, that their non-middle-class white male candidates are mainly for show. Or, you know, you could vote for a party who believes that your ability to be an MP and represent your fellow citizens doesn’t depend on various biological details. Now there's something to think about.