Child poverty bill criticism fail

The government will be introducing a child poverty bill, which aims by 2020 to ensure that no children are growing up in relative poverty.

Grassroots Tories have attacked this plan, because they claim it is mathematically impossible to achieve this. They combine this with amusing jokes about how the government is full of maths clowns, before going a bit quiet when it turns out that it is, in fact, they who are the maths clowns.

Others say that poverty is caused by teachers, who teach poor children that they face discrimination, and that this is why social mobility has fallen. In a similar way, presumably people become ill because they visit a doctor and the doctor tells them that they are sick.

Meanwhile, Labour MP Tom Harris attacks one of Labour's big achievements in government by claiming that "those who claim that we should simply increase state benefits to help lift families out of poverty haven’t been paying attention for the last 25 years" ignoring the fact that that's exactly what Labour did (and that higher benefits for, say, lone parents helped increase the number who got jobs).

Perhaps, in future, before people decide to share their brilliant ideas for reducing poverty, they could understand the terms which they choose to write about, familiarise themselves with what teachers do, or understand the consequences of the policies that they have voted for. Better yet, a period of silence from them and more attention to people who actually know what they are talking about.