Don’t get conned by Labour’s “Child Poverty” scam

Wednesday blog

You’ll all know that Reeves’s latest budget from hell – the ‘Benefits Street Budget’ – is supposed to raise hundreds of thousands of children from supposed ‘child poverty’ by scrapping the ‘two-child’ benefits cap. Adolf Starmer claims that scrapping the two-child benefits cap is one of the policies he is most proud of. In fact, many families with more than two children will be our foreign ‘guests’ who have decided to enrich our country and culture by moving from Third-world hell-holes of their own making to our once green and pleasant and relatively crime- and rape-free land. So scrapping the two-child cap is just another example of UK-loathing Labour giving British taxpayers’ money to foreigners.

But there is a further problem with Labour’s claims about lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. The way child poverty is measured is a relative measure. This means that any child living in a home with less than 60% of the median income, is considered to be living in poverty.

Let’s quickly look at how this works.:

• Imagine median incomes were to fall by say 30%, and the income of all households 60% or more under the median income fell by only 20%. This would mean that using the relative measure of child poverty there were many fewer children in supposed’ child poverty even though their household incomes had actually declined by 20%
• If median incomes were to rise by say 30% and the incomes of those 60% or more under median income were to rise by say only 25%, there would magically be many more children in supposed ‘child poverty’ even though their household incomes had risen by 25%.

And now for some real figures. From what I can find out, ‘poverty’ for a family with two adults and two children is defined as having a weekly income of £530 or less – that’s £27,560 a year. Having lived in some Third-world and developing countries, an annual income of £27,560 in Britain doesn’t look particularly ‘poverty-stricken’ to me.

Perhaps a more useful measure of poverty is ‘absolute poverty’ – those households earning less than is considered sufficient to live. I haven’t been able to find a figure for ‘absolute poverty’. But I have found charts from several organisations showing that, however this is measured, this has plummeted over the last few decades:

So beware Labour’s claims that child poverty is widespread.

But, of course, the real bombshell which blows apart Labour’s claims that there is widespread child poverty is the claim that a working family with three children would have to earn as much as £50,000 or more a year before tax just to get the same standard of living as a non-working family with three children on benefits.

As they say, Britain is now just a massive socialist benefits system with an ever-shrinking ever-poorer country attached.

An important video by JRM

I thought it worth mentioning this recent shortish (about 11 minutes) video by Jacob Rees-Mogg (JRM) as it seems to me to be rather important. A key point JRM and several other commentators have made is that there is a statute of limitations of one year following an election for prosecutions for alleged misreporting of election expenses. As we are now more than one year away from the last election then the police shouldn’t even be investigating the allegations against Reform leader Nigel Farage. But no doubt our ever-so-impartial judges will decide to reinterpret the law in order to smear, attack and destroy Farage and Reform if they can get away with it: