Rising Fall Into Tragic Cycle

The gap between the richest and poorest - or, as the Glorious Successor would put it, between hard-working families and those who don't play by the rules - has been increasing year by year since the last general election and is now at its widest since records began. The poorest fifth of households have lost two and a half per cent of their income, while the richest fifth have gained more than three per cent. Britain's leading think tank on tax and benefits has made the dazzling deduction that the increase in poverty "was due to weak income growth for those on low pay". Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives do not appear to have commented on the matter.

Despite the confidence of Gordon's little Darling that green shoots will begin to push their way out from the economic manure pile fairly soon, New New Labour has decided that one more broken promise will make very little difference, and has announced that it won't be lifting half of Britain's children out of poverty after all. "It is very difficult to model the impact of the recession on child poverty," said Beverley Hughes. Meeting the 2010 target is also "very difficult", although it appears that child poverty will be cut by half a million thanks to something or other which the Government has been doing since 2007 - dawn raids and data losses, presumably. Theresa May, the shadow Secretary for the Undeserving Poor, babbled that "it is a tragedy that the number of children falling into the poverty cycle is continuing to rise". Once the Daveybloke administration gets under way, we shall no doubt observe the rapid metamorphosis of that tragedy into a price worth paying.