It’s easy to agree with what someone’s saying if they’re only saying what they think you want to hear.

I’d think you would find it harder to agree with what the Tories will actually do if they come to power.

Excuse me? Who made the poorest poorer? Who left youth unemployment higher? Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories … you, Labour: you’re the ones who did this to our society.

How can you be a member of the Labour party when it has turned its back on everything it should believe in, and its grassroots are completely powerless to stop it? Indeed, ordinary Labour members like you, are complicit in what the government does.

Hang your head in shame.

@ Apathy

*irony alert*

@ Denim Justice

Complicit? How so?

Could Polly Toynbee secretly be moonlighting as David Cameron’s speechwriter these days?

No, she’s moonlighting writing hypocritical crap like this:

http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2009/10/10/toynbee-then-and-now/

Dave,

Really good article.

‘Nuff said.

Does anyone take her seriously anymore.

“NO”

But then again most of the Labour party never did in the first place.

The benefits trap thing is something IDS has been banging on about for years now. If it made it into a leader speech, he must be having some success. The other thing IDS likes to go on about is the ‘couples penalty.’ On hearing this term, most on the left think tax breaks for married couples.

In fact, what exercises IDS is the DSS cutting your payments if you live together, ensuring tracy towerblocks is forever alone (at least officially). How they plan to afford changing these things is another matter altogether.

“The Tories are no slouches themselves at making the poorest poorer and presiding over three million long dole queues. Anyone who was around the 1980s will recall that Thatcherism did not exactly work wonders for the UK Gini Coefficient.”

Repeat after me. Absolute poverty and relative poverty are not the same thing.

Yes, even Dave is wrong about this (Cameron that is, not just Osler).

It is entirely possible that the Gini gets larger, that inequality and thus relative poverty rises, while absolute poverty falls. Even, that relative poverty rises while the absolute living standards of the poor rise.

As, in fact, has been the case. The UK’s Gini was at its lowest back in the mid 1970s. Relative poverty has risen since then. Yet the actual living standards of the poor have risen over the past 30 years.

It may be worthwhile to worry about both of them, inequality and poverty, but it is crucial to draw the distinction between the two.

Dave: Cameron is clearly trying to float a new narrative to the effect that Labour’s record on poverty and inequality is one of downright failure. Some on the left seem to be accepting this narrative uncritically, and I am not sure this post is an exception: ‘Cameron has New Labour bang to rights…’

Well, no, actually, he doesn’t. I have tried to present the facts in a recent post over at Next Left. Yes, inequality is higher than in 1997; but it is lower relative to where it would be if Labour had just carried on with the Conservative policies of 1997, reflecting the fact that Labour’s budgets have been consistently and significantly redistributive in effect. One other consequence of that redistribution is that, for most groups, poverty rates are lower today than in 1997, notwithstanding the rise in poverty since 2004/5. On current policies, the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates that child poverty will fall by 500-600,000 up to 2010/11.

On Cameron’s use of the single mother tax incentives example: as you say, this is a problem intrinisic to any system of income transfers in which assistance is withdrawn as people move up the income scale. I’m not sure anyone has pointed out that Conservative policy could well make this problem, in its severest forms, more widespread, precisely because they favour cutting ‘middle-class’ welfare, i.e., withdrawing benefits more rapidly as people get higher incomes. The implication of what Osborne was calling for in his conference speech is, I think, more of the problem that Cameron criticises Labour for.

You mean this David Cameron?

http://i35.tinypic.com/wsa1xc.jpg