Look Left: Gay marriage, child poverty targets and the IMF verdict
James Bloodworth looks back at the week’s politics, including our progressive, regressive and evidence of the week.
James Bloodworth looks back at the week’s politics, including our progressive, regressive and evidence of the week.
First, for the last 30 years, poverty in the UK has hovered close to the one-in-five mark, mostly a little below, but sometimes a little above, but a rate almost double the level of the 1970s and much higher than the average amongst other rich nations.
This has been driven by a sustained widening in the gap between top and bottom along with the erosion of life chances.
Yesterday on the pages of this blog, Stewart Lansley claimed that I had “hurled a hand grenade” into the poverty debate by urging Labour to rethink its approach to child poverty. Leaving aside the hyperbole of that statement, Lansley’s case seems to be that my intervention “chimes with the line being taken by the coalition” in its attempts to redefine child poverty and its causes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Dropping the child poverty target would mean accepting a level of poverty much higher than almost all countries of comparable wealth.
One of the fundamental faultlines of the British model of finance capitalism – its failure to steer resources into the real, productive base of the economy – is not even on the government’s agenda. That’s why the prospect of sustained recovery is proving so elusive.
Cormac Hollingsworth looks at the City’s idols; for all that Wall Street is known in the real world, Glengarry Glen Ross is the real star piece.
Packman looks at the findings that the boom before the bust was caused by growth in the consumer credit market, and asks what happens when it inevitably fails.
Carl Packman reviews Stewart Lansley’s “The Cost of Inequality,” and loves it.
The battle against the health bill continued apace this week, the petition to scrap it soaring past 100,000, making it eligible for a parliamentary debate.
Stephany Griffith-Jones presents the plan for reformation of the banking system to end the perpetual crisis of finance.