During the 11 years that Labour has been in power it has allocated considerable resources and energy to reducing childhood poverty; it can fairly boast that between 1999 and 2007 it lifted 600,000 children out of poverty. This is undeniable - but it is also undeniable that progress has been patchy. When the government has taken its eye off the ball, even temporarily, the child poverty graph has resumed its natural upward trajectory. As Suzanne Moore argues on page 26, it remains an astonishing and shameful statistic that in the fifth-richest country in the world, nearly four million children (almost one in three) live in relative poverty, meaning that they come from households that must survive on 60 per cent of the national median household income.
"Relative poverty" is a slippery concept, interpreted by many on the right as not real poverty, given that 60 per cent of a high national median need not be poor at all so long as the rich are allowed to go on getting richer. Yet this is far from the truth, as a report just published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows.
The JRF carried out a public consultation to find out what ordinary people believed was an acceptable income level to provide their basic needs. From this, the researchers have established a way of determining a new "minimum income standard" for Britain based, for the first time, on what ordinary people, pensioners and parents believe is an acceptable way to live. As one of the authors, Donald Hirsch, reveals on our website, the report shows that the arbitrary standard of 60 per cent of the national median wage is, in fact, pitched rather low. The public consensus turned out to be that a household with children that lives on less than 70 per cent of the median wage would be deprived of the means to participate fully in society.
In short, poverty in Britain, particularly for families with children, is even worse than we currently acknowledge. But it is not just in terms of household income that we are failing children. Moore points out that, among industrialised countries, on nearly all the criteria by which we measure the well-being of children, the UK scores poorly. We lock up more children; the quality of their relationships with parents and peers is poor; the health and safety of children is more imperilled in Britain than in other countries; and, maybe saddest of all, children themselves report that they are unhappy.
In a powerful photo essay on the state of British childhood, starting on page 30, the award-winning photographer Nick Danziger captures the reality of the restricted and diminished lives that many children are obliged to live in Britain. Poverty is far from the only issue. Even richer children are constrained by poor environments and limited opportunities and spaces for play and recreation.
And yet there is something that the children in Danziger's photographs have in common. He captures that remarkable resilience and indomitable spirit with which all children start out in life. It is our responsibility, at whatever cost, to see that this is never taken from them.
Interviewed by Martin Bright and Suzanne Moore on page 12, Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, makes it clear that he knows Britain is selling its children short.
At the end of last year, his Children's Plan made a bold pledge that Labour would halve child poverty by 2010 and eradicate it by 2020. It was an ambitious commitment, but it remains the right one. An estimate of the cost of such a scheme, from an earlier JRF report, was that the first target, halving poverty, was achievable but that the second target, abolishing it, would cost £28bn (about £3bn more than Alistair Darling had to find for Northern Rock). If the figure is large, then that is because the number of families in poverty in the UK is itself unacceptably large. The return on such an investment would be huge, and guaranteed to trickle down the generations in better health, reduced crime and higher educational achievement.
The struggle against childhood poverty is not never-ending. The children we lift out of poverty today are the parents of 2020.
An examination of expletives
We are unsure whether or not to commend Peter Buckroyd, the chief examiner of English for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, who has instructed colleagues that they may reward pupils who write expletives on their answer papers if they demonstrate "simple sequencing of ideas" and "some words in appropriate order".
Buckroyd himself granted two marks out of 27 to a GCSE candidate who, asked to "describe the room you're sitting in", wrote "fuck off". An exclamation mark would have increased the total, added Buckroyd, as it would have showed "a little bit of skill".
This may seem risible; but in these days of text messaging, with vowels scattered to the winds and punctuation, apparently, for mugs, perhaps there's something in the ruling. The candidate's spelling cannot be faulted. He or she has also demonstrated a certain laconic precision and a clarity that eludes many academics. The jargon-laden world of business, too, could also take a tip.
It is possible, as this was an English exam, that the candidate was thinking of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. Pinter had his character Max utter the words "fuck off" but had to change them to "flake off" to suit the Lord Chamberlain's censorship rules (this was 1964). Further elaboration by the candidate might have deserved a few more marks. But Pinter only recently returned to his original text; and evidence of such familiarity with one of our greatest writers is surely worth two marks, at least.
