This battle will define us. We must protect our children from austerity
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Version 0 of 1. The definition of a decadent society is one that destroys its own future, knowing full well the terrible consequences. On that basis, Britain is truly degenerate. Just look at how it trashes its children and teenagers. Our young are the very people on whom the rest of us will one day come to depend – to care for us, and to earn the country’s income. Rather than mere lifestyle accessories, to be slotted in alongside handbags and cars, they represent our best hope. This human truth has sustained societies around the world and down the ages. Yet in austerity Britain, children have been chucked to the bottom of the pile. They have been robbed of their rightful benefits. And the support they could once draw upon – everything from Sure Start centres to youth clubs to mental-health workers – has been hacked back. Hyperbole? I really wish it were. Instead, I am merely repeating what professionals in field after field, from social care to mental health, are saying – and what the expert analysis shows. The landmark study of the social effects of David Cameron’s austerity was produced at the start of this year by a team of academics led by Professor John Hills at the London School of Economics. They found that the biggest victims of the spending cuts made since 2010 were children, and their parents: “Tax-benefit reforms hit families with children under five harder than any other household type. Those with a baby were especially affected.” None of this was accidental. Treasury officials stick each prospective change in tax and benefits under a Whitehall microscope – which is why so few budgets are an omnishambles. When making their cuts, Cameron and George Osborne would have known that children and babies would suffer most – and proceeded regardless. Remember that next time you catch some commentator talking with great gravitas but little policy detail about the new compassionate Conservatism. Two things stand out in Cameron’s assault on children: it is precisely the opposite of what he promised, and exactly the reverse of what he himself knows any prime minister should be doing. Before coming to office, the Conservative leader unveiled a poster of a handsome tot: “Dad’s nose, mum’s eyes, Gordon Brown’s debt.” The whole point of cuts was “because we believe children like this deserve better”. One parliament later, the Trussell Trust reports that more than a third of the one million food parcels it gave out last year were for children. The great irony is that Cameron understands the long-term damage inflicted on young people brought up in poverty. He and his lieutenants can quote you chapter and verse on the need for “early-years intervention”. They’ll point to the odd good deed, such as giving free part-time education for the most deprived two-year-olds. So far, they’ve been able to duck the flak on the damage they’ve done to children because the official statistics are more than two years out of date. That all changes at the end of next month, when we get the official figures on child poverty in the year from April 2013. That year saw the launch of the bedroom tax, the welfare cap and the holding down of child benefit and child tax credit below the rate of inflation. And it’s likely to show a huge surge in child poverty – the first of many that we’ll get for the rest of this parliament. The Institute for Fiscal Studies is predicting an 80s-style explosion in the number of children living in poverty by 2020 – and every other serious organisation I’ve come across agrees. And this will have happened under a prime minister who took leadership of his party proclaiming, “I believe that poverty is an economic waste, a moral disgrace.” And all of this will have been deliberate. Those children and their families have been plunged into poverty, and had their lifelines cut off not to pay back the deficit but to make the rich richer. David Miliband said as much in 2013 when he attacked the coalition’s “rancid” plan to hold benefit rises below the rate of inflation, and observed that the same savings could be made simply by not giving tax relief on millionaires’ pension savings. In its summary of the harm caused by the government’s austerity programme, the LSE team judged: “Almost all of the savings achieved by cutting benefits were offset by gains for richer groups.” Because the poor must always pay for the rich. Look at the Cameron-Osborne economic model and the society it gives rise to. In their system, the past – as represented by the elderly and the asset owners – is prized more than the future. And growth becomes meaningless – because what is the point of growth if it doesn’t give young people a stake in the system? Related: No more cuts to adventure playgrounds and youth centres – we will defend them | Letter Plenty of experts have good suggestions for turning this around. The Child Poverty Action Group rightly calls for the introduction of a triple lock on child benefit and tax credit – just as pensioners enjoy. Little of that will be heeded by this lot. Meanwhile, more and more services for the young will be whittled back to almost nothing. Just in time for half term, youth workers in London tomorrow launch a campaign to save playgrounds and youth clubs from closure. Good for them, but they have a hell of a battle ahead, as local councils up and down the country are forced by Westminster into another five years of budget-slashing. Warwickshire more than halved its youth services in one year; Carlisle has closed 21 playgrounds. When a rich country can no longer be bothered to provide play spaces for its kids, you have to ask what the point of all that wealth is. Although of course, there will always be playgrounds and school trips for the wealthy. In Battersea, the Conservative council shut down a supervised children’s adventure playground, only to reopen an unstaffed public space and hand over the other half to a private company called Go Ape offering treetop adventures. “I suspect it will be the first thing that many children ask to do when they’re thinking about how to celebrate their birthdays,” is how one local councillor sells the idea. Go Ape typically charges about £25 per child ticket. Within a generation, Britain will have bred a large wave of children who have been deprived of decent meals and housing. As a result they will come out of school with fewer qualifications. They will take up worse jobs and suffer health problems – thus depriving the Treasury of tax revenues and costing the NHS more. We are breeding a demographic disaster. And we won’t be able to say we weren’t warned. |