In this harshly political age the left has to stop using child poverty as a way of avoiding a debate on income redistribution
Families with children, through a combination of changes to tax and benefits, will be "shouldering the burden" of austerity, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The average family of four will be £1,250 worse off a year by 2015. The research was commissioned by the Family and Parenting Institute, which last July awarded the government a C– for its family friendliness. It's an invaluable institution for the persistent and rigorous evaluation of how much more screwed you are under this government when you have dependents – but the sheer bleeding obviousness of its message makes me wonder why we can't, finally, bury this child-centric rhetoric and start talking about the issue that underlies it: equality.
It is obvious that families with children will be hardest hit by benefit changes because they are in the receipt of more benefits. This is because they are subject to circumstances in which a number of people in the house – the kids and, depending on their ages, the mother – have myriad physical needs but almost no earning power. While it is true that some children will inevitably be born into very high-income families in which the mother didn't work anyway, this is a very slender slice of society: the "yummy mummy" trope, where motherhood is synonymous with affluence and narcissism, is a construct kept up by the twin engines of misogyny and a fear of stealth redistribution. It bears no relation to the financial realities of raising children.
In some cases the economic argument is straightforward: a government paying towards childcare costs, as the working family tax credit used to do more generously, extends female workforce participation and is good for the nation's GDP. PricewaterhouseCoopers once did a report in which it found that funding universal free childcare would reap £40bn more than it spent – though, granted, that was over a period of 65 years, so it's unlikely to appeal to this coalition, which can't see to the end of the next three days. Other policy areas had more complicated benefits: Sure Start centres were the precinct of support and "intervention" which, it was hoped, would prevent all sorts of costly outcomes like delinquency. Their impact was found to be positive, although over a timespan too short to be conclusive.
Fundamentally, the last government concentrated on children because they were politically neutral. Who could accuse you of being leftwing when you are just trying to make things easier for a tiny mite who doesn't even have a vote? Children had to be "lifted out of poverty" – not just rhetorically, but as a statutory requirement – with no mention of the fact that their parents would, de facto, be lifted out also.
I don't begrudge the Labour party this legerdemain. That was the era of triangulation, when it was infra dig to talk about redistribution, when the only "equality" that dared speak its name was that of "opportunity", when socialism was a joke because capitalism needed no alternative, and when the biggest fear of all was that someone accused you of sounding like Michael Foot (we'll have to deal with this blind spot another time – suffice to say, one day this party will realise that hiding from unions and having your hair cut professionally do not, in themselves, win votes).
This present era, however, is not triangulated, it is deeply political: the cuts hit the poorest hardest as a logical result of "shrinking the state"; every person who, for reasons of age, infirmity or job opportunity, is not pumping out man-hours at maximum capacity, will find their state support eroded. The coalition has its own dodgy narrative, of course – "There Is No Alternative" being its main plank. So they too are avoiding the ideology of their decisions, and would prefer to insist that the coffers were empty than to admit to the politics behind the policies.
Nevertheless, in a way the "TINA" argument is less murky, because it's falsifiable. The problems with using children as a way of talking about broader equality are these: first, everyone can see you're doing it and yet it has sentiment on its side, so it's hard to contest. Instead, among those on the right, it fosters feelings of resentment towards families in need, which you can see in the ubiquitous rumours of benefit fraudsters with 14 children. This spectre of the social freeloader could be traced, I believe, directly back to Blairite rhetoric and the way it choked off real debate about what equality meant and what steps a reasonable society would take to promote it.
Second, when the debate centres on children – and the Children's Society responded to the IFS report with stark estimates that a benefit cap will undermine support for 200,000 children and potentially make 82,000 homeless – a sense of helplessness descends. They become as a snow leopard or a panda, threatened by circumstance, desperate for intervention (even £5 a month would help!). A crucial element of the equality argument is that we should seek it not only out of goodness but also out of pragmatism. Society will falter if enough people have insufficient stake in it, but it's hard to conceive of 82,000 homeless children as a threat to the structures of human co-operation. Picture the same number of homeless adults, and it's not hard at all.
The left has been hiding behind children for far too long; it's time to thrash this out as mature political creatures, and leave the kids to their (deprived, possibly homeless) childhoods.