This piece by Oliver Letwin is dishonest and incoherent:
David Cameron's Conservatives are committed to the government target of ending child poverty by 2020. It is an aspiration, not a pledge...If we imagine that it will be easy to meet this challenge, we shall fail. Nothing could be more arduous. This is not a field of endeavour in which short-term solutions or bureaucratic quick fixes have any part to play. The ambition has to be long term, and the policies will have to be long term.
This is plain false. A bureaucratic quick fix could abolish child poverty overnight - simply by raising benefit levels to 61% of median equivalized income. This follows from the definition of child poverty - as a family income below 60% of the median. The only challenge then is to ensure that all families get the benefits to which they are entitled.
In this context, this is gibberish:
Nearly one and a half million people live on an income of under £100 a week, even after benefits and tax credits. Real incomes have grown most slowly for the poorest in society. And since 1997, real incomes for the very poorest have fallen...This isn't like the problem of families just below the poverty line; it can't be solved by money alone.
No - the problem of low incomes can be solved by money alone.
I suspect Letwin means something else here. Here's what I think he would have said, had he been honest:
We could meet the target of abolishing child poverty overnight. But we'll choose not to do that. To do so would require higher benefits and taxes, which would alienate our supporters and possibly depress economic growth. Also, it's bad for the poor to look to the state to lift them out of poverty. They should do it for themselves. The money we could spend on higher benefits would therefore be better spent on other ways to empower the poor, by improving schooling and raising their aspirations.
This, though reasonable, raises issues managerialist politicians don't want raised. It shows that politics is about choices (higher benefits versus lower taxes or better schools), virtues (what exactly should be the character of the poor, and why?) and power (how can the poor be truly empowered within capitalist society?)
But there's no place for questions like these in today's politics. So Letwin hides behind dishonest managerialist gabble about "aspirations" and "arduous challenges." That there are trade-offs and choices in policy is a fact the managerialists are desperate to avoid.
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