Poverty of Ideas

According to the Government's own statistics, the first year of the Osborne economic miracle put an additional nine hundred thousand people in poverty, including three hundred thousand children from the households of working scroungers. The Government has a legal obligation to reduce child poverty to below ten per cent by 2020, and we all know how seriously the Government takes its legal obligations. Iain Duncan Smith, the well-known statistical expert, blamed the figures on inflation, which increased faster than incomes during the period in question; and of course there was no question of the Government doing anything to boost incomes except through tax cuts for wealth creators like Bob Diamond. The brilliant Duncan Smith blathered that there really isn't much of a problem: "we have successfully protected the poor from falling behind", presumably by relieving them of those nasty spare bedrooms which were weighing so many of them down. The brilliant Duncan Smith wishes to "take a new approach by finding the source of the problem and tackling that", much as the Government has found and tackled the sources of economic recession, climate change, phone hacking, corruption and so forth. Perhaps the brilliant Duncan Smith hopes, with Labour's willing abstention, to force through another retroactive law deeming the legal targets to have been met. In any case, doubtless the situation will improve yet further as the effects of the last two years of incentivisations become clear.