Permission to Redistribute

The good news from the latest research about tackling poverty is that where the government has acted to help people out of poverty, they have been largely successful. Single pensioners, for example, are much less likely to live in poverty than they were when the Tories were in power, explicitly because of the policies like the Pension Credit. Tom Freeman has more on this here.

Rather than trying to reduce all poverty, the government has been focusing on the 'deserving poor' - children and pensioners. Levels of poverty amongst working-age adults is, according to the research, unchanged, and this has a knock-on effect on children, with half of all children living in poverty having at least one parent in work. “The overall picture is not so much a mixture of success and failure of policy as one of success and neglect. Where the Government has acted, change has happened. Where it has not, previous trends have continued,” as one of the authors of the report put it.

What this shows is that targeted state action does reduce poverty, but that work on its own is not a route out of poverty, largely because employers do not pay enough to provide workers with enough to live on. This doesn't just harm the workers, it harms their children - you don't get rich children living in poor families.

The government is well aware of this, but is nervous of the next steps needed to reduce poverty, which involve not just redistributing wealth to people judged as 'deserving' such as pensioners, but to people of working age - they say they need 'permission to redistribute'.

I think it is feeble for a Labour government to say that they need to feel that they have permission to redistribute wealth from rich to poor - the Tories never felt that they needed permission to redistribute wealth to the rich massively. But there is a chance here of giving millions of people the chance to live their lives free of poverty, if only we can win the argument within the Labour Party to do so, and make sure Labour stays in power. And if that's not a reason for all socialists to put aside any concerns about individual policies and redouble the efforts to campaign for Labour, I don't know what is.