Friday, October 15, 2010
Labour's Legacy of failure
The BBC report that children born in Wales this century are more likely to be living below the poverty line than their peers in the rest of the UK. They say that researchers have found that one in three Welsh seven-year-olds live in a family with less than 60% of the UK's average household income.
This is despite the fact that tackling child poverty is a "top priority" of the Welsh Government and was a major focus of the previous Labour UK Government:
The research was carried out by the Institute of Education at the University of London and involved a survey of 14,000 children born between 2000 and 2002 from across the UK.
Overall it found that while the millennium generation of children in Wales do experience a relatively high poverty rate, their parents believe their lives get off to a healthy start.
In Scotland, which has the lowest poverty rate of all four countries, just over one in four of the millennium families (26%) had such a low income.
However, some English regions had higher poverty rates than Wales: the North East (40%), other northern regions (35%) and London (36%).
In light of these figures the Welsh Government's aspiration to end child poverty by 2020 is looking increasingly unattainable. For all their rhetoric about the fairness or otherwise of the Coalition Government's programme and budget, the real failure of the last 13 years has been Labour's who, despite specific programmes and targets, have left Britain as poor as and less equal than they found it.
This is despite the fact that tackling child poverty is a "top priority" of the Welsh Government and was a major focus of the previous Labour UK Government:
The research was carried out by the Institute of Education at the University of London and involved a survey of 14,000 children born between 2000 and 2002 from across the UK.
Overall it found that while the millennium generation of children in Wales do experience a relatively high poverty rate, their parents believe their lives get off to a healthy start.
In Scotland, which has the lowest poverty rate of all four countries, just over one in four of the millennium families (26%) had such a low income.
However, some English regions had higher poverty rates than Wales: the North East (40%), other northern regions (35%) and London (36%).
In light of these figures the Welsh Government's aspiration to end child poverty by 2020 is looking increasingly unattainable. For all their rhetoric about the fairness or otherwise of the Coalition Government's programme and budget, the real failure of the last 13 years has been Labour's who, despite specific programmes and targets, have left Britain as poor as and less equal than they found it.
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In the USA poverty is directly related to out of wedlock children and no father in the home. That is also the story of high crime--no fathers in the home. We have a two caste system--low poverty among married couples, high poverty in single parent homes. Our anti-poverty programs actually punish married people.
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