The majority of children in Britain will be living ‘below the breadline’ by 2015, according to an alarmist report from the TUC this week.
This ludicrous scare story was seized upon by the usual Left-wing suspects as yet more evidence of how the ‘savage cuts’ were targeting the ‘most vulnerable’ in society.
If you believed the Independent’s hysterical front page coverage, more than seven million children will be living ‘close to poverty’ within two years because of this heartless Government’s policies.
An outraged TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady howled that these findings should ‘shame any civilised society’. She complained: ‘Families are suffering the tightest squeeze in living standards in nearly a century.’ This fatuous, sentimental drivel is what passes for intelligent political debate these days.
You might imagine the streets are full of starving waifs begging in rags, consigned to hunger and destitution by callous, cartoon Conservative ministers in top hats, lighting cigars with £10 notes and handing out ‘tax cuts to millionaires’.
So what, exactly, is defined as living ‘close to poverty’? Well, for a family of four — two adults and two children — it means surviving on an income of just over £29,000 a year.
That’s around £560 a week, before tax. Not a fortune, by any means, but can it really be described as ‘close to poverty’?
I’m sure there are plenty of people reading this column who manage to live on much less than £29,000 a year, especially pensioners and others on fixed incomes.
The majority of children in Britain will be living 'below the breadline' by 2015, according to an alarmist report from the TUC this week (picture posed by model) Welfare has become so generous that it is a way of life for millions. It often pays better than going to workIn fact, there are people at the TUC itself working for less than £29,000. The organisation is currently advertising on its website for a Community Campaign Manager, based in Northants, offering a salary of just £27,919.
In Dorset, the TUC is looking for a Local Fighting Fund Manager with ‘proven organising, administrative and IT skills’ on £24,931 a year. How does Frances O’Grady defend paying her own staff so little that their children are living ‘below the breadline’?
e are told that the figures are based on research by the ‘respected’ Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a bien pensant, Left-wing think tank. Respected by whom? For as long as I can remember, the Rowntree trust has been cynically revising upwards its definition of relative ‘poverty’.
More from Richard Littlejohn... RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: When they said fight them on the beaches, Dave... 27/05/13 RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Toytown jihadists and a lack of political willpower 23/05/13 RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The paying public are sick and tired of being ignored and patronised. So who are the real swivel-eyed loons? 20/05/13 The truth at last! Peter Mandelson admits Labour 'sent out search parties' to bring migrants here after losing the votes of the working class, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN 17/05/13 So that's why they called it an oil rig! 16/05/13 When did an 8-month jail sentence become eight weeks? 13/05/13 We're riding along the crest of a rave: How far is Julie Bentley prepared to go in order to make the Guides more 'relevant' to 21st-century Britain? 09/05/13 Arrest first - ask questions later: How dawn raids and ransacking houses became standard operating procedure 06/05/13 RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Proof no good deed ever goes unpunished 02/05/13 VIEW FULL ARCHIVETwenty-odd years ago, it put out a risible report which claimed that a notional family then living on £200 a week, in a three-bedroom house in Worcester and running a second-hand Vauxhall was officially ‘poor’.
Since then the ‘breadline’ has risen almost threefold to £560 a week.
Pressed by Nick Ferrari on London’s LBC radio, the author of this latest report admitted that one of the definitions of ‘poverty’ these days was not getting a holiday every year.
Admittedly, there are plenty of families who may miss out on a fortnight in Majorca this summer. But can they by any stretch of the imagination be described as ‘on the breadline’?
Ferrari was, of course, only doing what any proper journalist would do in exposing this rabid piece of propaganda to sceptical scrutiny, rather than repeating it gullibly because it fits the political agenda of the anti-Tory ‘compassion’ industry.
Frances O’Grady accuses the Government of turning back the clock almost a century. But even the poorest today have advantages that would have been beyond the wildest dreams of most people even a generation back, never mind 100 years ago.
Given that welfare spending increased by 60 per cent in the decade up to 2010, can anyone be said to be living in genuine ‘poverty’? Hard up, certainly. Not as well off as some other people, undoubtedly.
But in the 21st century, no one in Britain has any excuse for going hungry, for instance, or being denied medical treatment. Welfare has become so generous that it is a way of life for millions. It often pays better than going to work.
We read regular stories of families on benefits demanding and being given flat-screen TVs, PlayStations, mobile telephones, free cars.
There was that woman at the weekend who gets enough money from the State to keep a horse.
The TUC and its Left-wing media stooges paint a Dickensian picture of snot-nosed, raggedy children condemned to scrabbling in the gutter for a piece of stale bread and dripping.
But far from having too little to eat, there is an obesity epidemic among the ‘poor’, most of whom seem to exist on expensive processed meals and unhealthy junk food.
Tesco's has brought Giraffe restaurantsThey might be living in moral poverty, they might suffer from poverty of ambition, but please don’t insult our intelligence by trying to convince us that half the country is living ‘on the breadline’.
More heavy-handed 6am raids and arrests from the phone-hacking squad yesterday.
Among those carted off to the nick was a female journalist who is seven months pregnant and was at home alone with her young son.
Still, I suppose there was always the danger she might try to make a run for it.
Again, I make no comment on guilt or innocence. But I’m sure the timing of the high-profile operation on the same day that talks over the implementation of the Leveson Report broke up in deadlock was purely coincidental.
I had to laugh at the news that one of Britain’s biggest meat suppliers is owned by Lord Vestey, the Queen’s Master of Horse.
And, yes, his firm’s products have been found to contain horsemeat. You couldn’t make it up.
After stumbling over the headline about Tesco and a ‘can of worms’ earlier this week, I spotted another story on the business pages which caused me to sit up.
‘Tesco to pay £50 million for Giraffe restaurant chain . . .’
Operation Road HumpIn Tuesday’s column I wondered what might have happened if the French military invasion of Gosport, Hants, last weekend had been for real and not a training exercise.
I needn’t have worried.
A number of readers who live in the area have written to reassure me that even if the beaches were left undefended, the French would never make it off the Gosport peninsula.
That’s because a revamped £2 million traffic management scheme, opened last November as part of a supermarket ‘planning gain’ deal, has brought gridlock to the A32 and surrounding roads.
After sitting in a jam for hours, the French forces would probably decide to turn round and go home long before they reached the new ‘magic roundabout’ at Fareham.
We may not fight them on the beaches, but our traffic would scare the French offPerhaps that’s all part of the cunning plan. Britain may not have much left in the way of civil defence, but we do have an elaborate system of traffic calming which is guaranteed to stop any invading army in its tracks.
This must be the modern version of taking down all the road signs during World War II to confuse the enemy. We may not be able to fight them on the beaches any more, but we can frustrate them on the roundabouts, contraflows and one-way systems.
Let’s hope the Old Bill didn’t read Petronella Wyatt’s ‘I was a teenage Lolita’ feature in the Daily Mail this week, in which she described as a 15-year-old girl receiving sexual advances from a number of well-known older men, including the actors Laurence Olivier and Albert Finney.
Petronella with would-be suitor Robin DayIf the article has come to the attention of Scotland Yard, Finney can expect to wake up any day now to find the Savile Squad kicking in his front door at dawn.
And just in case they fancy adding Lord Olivier to their impressive list of celebrity collars, I should point out that Dear, Dear Larry — like Jimmy Savile — is, rather inconveniently, still dead.
Lord Ahmed of Rotherham has been suspended from the Labour Party Peace, love and understanding?Lord Ahmed of Rotherham has been suspended from the Labour Party over an anti-Semitic rant on a Pakistani TV station.He claimed the only reason he was jailed for dangerous driving on the M1 in 2009 was because of a vast Jewish conspiracy against him.A man was killed when Ahmed’s Jaguar hit a stationary car. Police subsequently discovered Ahmed had sent and received a series of text messages shortly before the crash. The Muslim peer escaped being charged with causing death by dangerous driving, which carries a long sentence, but was sent to jail for 12 weeks.If there was a vast Jewish conspiracy at work, it wasn’t very effective. Ahmed was released after serving just 16 days.Some might think he got off lightly, given that the maximum sentence for dangerous driving is two years.But instead of contrition, he maintains that his sentence was really a punishment for supporting the Palestinians against Israel. He claimed Jewish-owned media organisations put pressure on the courts. If he had made his remarks in this country he could have been charged with incitement to hatred under the Pubic Order Act.We could dismiss all this as the deranged ramblings of a madman. But, worryingly, his belief in the vast Jewish conspiracy reflects a mindset among many Muslims both in Britain and across the Islamic world.What we are entitled to ask is why this rabid anti-Semite was ever feted by the Labour Party in the first place?Incidentally, Ahmed was given early release because the Appeal Court felt his continued incarceration would hinder his work ‘building bridges’ and fostering peace, love and understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.Funny way of going about it.
