Brown and his understanding of poverty

He has said it so often that it probably doesn't even register any longer. "I/we have taken a million children out of poverty".

It's a porkie, of course. Even accepting his definition of poverty, that of 60% of the level of the median family income, where median income is the very middle one if you lined up all incomes from smallest to largest, he is wrong.

So he is attempting a greater equalising of incomes, not removing the very poorest from absolute poverty.

At best he has removed 600,000, which is nearer half a million than the million he likes to quote. The removal may be by only a few pounds to the other side of the 60% line, and if so makes very little difference to their living standard.

What he does not like to quote, as it would reduce his self-entitlement to the role of "chief poverty remover", is that income equality, that is the spread of incomes, has actually widened since he took over at the Treasury. The median level may not have moved, but the spread about it has become more marked. The 40% below his line are in fact much more below, in fact more below than for perhaps 30 years. So much for the saviour of the poor! Forget the recent 10p tax band fiasco, and he has still done little for the very poor.

Those he has transferred above the line are generally on some kind of supplementary benefit. In fact the percentage receiving these benefits has risen from 1997 from 4% of those of households of working age to 15% now.

So his methods are not enabling lower income earners to increase their earning capacity. Rather, an increasing number are becoming demoralised by living dependency on the state. Some are even third generation on benefit. How much better if he had spent ten years not building up supplicants but investing in them to earn more and break the cycle of dependence.