By Professor John Robertson
Astonishing! FFS
Labour voted against the Scottish Child Payment, plan no reversal of the two-child benefit cap, have voted against free school meals and in Labour Wales, child poverty is far higher, yet the Daily Record allow Brown to lie shamefaced.
In the Guardian on June 7th 2024:
Local child poverty rates across the UK correlate very strongly with the percentage of families affected by the two-child benefit cap, research has found, indicating that the controversial policy is a key factor behind children growing up in deprivation.
The study, carried out by Loughborough University for the End Child Poverty Coalition, will heap pressure on Labour over the party’s refusal to abolish the cap, which limits universal credit and child tax credit to a family’s first two children, if they come into power.
The limit can cost families more than £3,000 a year for each additional child, with earlier research showing scrapping the policy would take 300,000 children out of poverty around the country.
The new study was based on existing government statistics for children living in low-income families – defined as those with incomes below 60% of the local median income – but adjusted these for housing costs to avoid underestimating poverty rates in places such as London.
The Loughborough researchers have the level of child poverty at 24% in Scotland, in Wales at 29% and the UK average at 30%: https://endchildpoverty.org.uk/child-poverty-2024/
Not unusually, these English researchers are not well-informed on developments just to the north.
It is remarkable that the Loughborough researchers do not seem to know about the Scottish Child Payment after two years since its launch. On checking the data tables for constituencies, I see that the most recent data is not for 22/23 but 21/22 and that matters in the light of the Scottish Child Payment above.
Though with limited control over the economy, the SNP Government has taken steps with the Scottish Child Payment, described by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in November 2022, 9 months after the Loughborough research’s last data collection, as a ‘watershed already showing that poverty can be tackled with political will.’
The Child Poverty Action group is confident that child poverty is already falling in Scotland, way below that in the rest of the UK, and that the figures for 2022/2023 and, especially 2023/2024, will reflect that
Only the SNP has had the political will to introduce the child payment and only the SNP has consistently called for an end to that other major cause of child poverty, the two-child benefit limit, which the Loughborough researchers are calling for, but which Labour conspicuously refuses to promise an end to.
Sources:
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Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
C4 had a programme on how AI could influence voting intentions in a forthcoming Elections which is astonishing in itself that the brainwashing English MSMedia may lose their monopoly on this.
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Must watch that
Artificial is better than biased
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In the news article referenced below on the increasing rates of child poverty in NE England, we learn of the Labour Party’s considered position – essentially the ‘country’, the UK can’t afford to end the child poverty associated with the Tories’ two child benefit cap!
Source: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/labours-promise-reverse-north-east-190000891.html – ‘‘Labour’s promise to reverse North East child poverty rise and cut life expectancy gap’
In the article we learn: ‘New analysis published today [Friday] by the TUC has revealed a 44 per cent increase in child poverty among working households in the region – with more than one in four children in working households here now growing up below the poverty line.’
And on Labour’s response? ‘Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, called the figures a “damning indictment on 14 years of Conservative government”. But Labour refuses to scrap the Tory two-child benefit cap!
This is despite evidence like this: ‘According to the End Child Poverty Coalition, one in eight of all children growing up across the North East are now living in families affected by the Government’s ‘two-child limit’ – affecting 65,450 babies, children and young people in total. The cap means that almost all families having a third or subsequent child are no longer entitled to receive support for those children through Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit.’
‘Mr Streeting said Labour was opposed to the limit and had “no doubt” about its impact on struggling families, but had to “make sure every promise we make is a promise we can keep and a promise the country can afford”.
Opposed but won’t abolish! No doubt about its effect but won’t abolish! The UK under a Labour government the same as the UK under the Tories, will keep a policy that condemns children to poverty. To what question is Labour the answer, the solution for Scotland – or indeed NE England?
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DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS. WELCOME TO THE LABOUR PARTY
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Gordon Brown and Labour caused poverty worldwide. Illegal wars, mass migration, financial fraud and tax evasion. Other countries are paying the price.
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