Things To Worry Less About

1. Romanians & Bulgarians coming over here. The migration from those two countries won't be anything like the scale of that which came with the entry of the central European states because they are a lot smaller in total and it isn't just the UK & Ireland to which they can migrate. Roma from Romania may cause problems but I doubt they are waiting until January the 1st so they can work here legally.
2. Food banks. There is no crisis of malnutrition among Britain's poor, food banks should be considered as melodramatic street theatre rather than a symptom of a real problem.

Poverty Pimps Hoist On Own Petard

Child poverty figures have declined.

Hooray!

However the poverty industry rightly warns that the figures are misleading, because they have only declined because the incomes of middle income workers fell faster than those of people on benefits during the last few years.

They are right, but the only reason why we use relative poverty figures in the first place is because activists used them to imply that poverty levels were far higher than they appeared to be using absolute poverty figures.

In the years when we were all getting richer relative poverty was the only way to make it seem as if poverty was not declining at an impressive rate.

Quote Of The Day

I had wondered why guardianistas and assorted poverty pimps complained so vocally about the benefit cap- this government's best policy so far- considering that by definition it won't affect anyone who isn't already well provided for.

I think Julia explains it here:

Yes, this is all about the effect on low-income families of the benefit cap, which numerous charities and pressure groups fear will remove their client base from comfortable walking distance from their cosy London offices…

It would be  unthinkable to have to commute all the way to Luton when doing one's bit to help the (high income) poor.

Perpetually Offended Are Offended.

Stating the obvious offends people:

John Redwood provoked outrage yesterday by saying victims of the budget cuts should wear more clothes, turn the thermostat down and eat more vegetables.

Seems pretty sensible to actually. Everyone knows people who moan about the cold crank up the heating, all while wearing a tee shirt.

As it happens Redwood was specifically referring to those on middle incomes rather than the poor so the idea that his comments were aimed at the "cold and hungry" as the Mirror headline claims is nonsense.

Even The Butler Was Poor

There was once a pupil at Eton who had to write a short story about being poor, the opening lines of the essay were something like, "They were a poor family, the father was poor, the mother was poor, even the butler was poor.....". It's probably apocryphal but I suspect Mark Field MP would concur with the sentiment:

Many people who buy a second home outside the capital as an addition to a small London base do so not because they are enormously wealthy but precisely because they are not.

It is virtually impossible even for many of those earning multiples of the average national wage to trade up the property ladder in the capital. For those with growing families, the only option is often to buy a [second] house with garden outside London

Via Mark Wadsworth.

Root Causes Update

India looks likely to execute the surviving culprit of the Bombay massacre, Priyamvada Gopal is upset:

Questions must be asked about the unwillingness of both the Indian and Pakistani states to address the root problems of poverty, expropriation and disaffection that propel mere boys like Kasab into the arms of militias against their own interests.

The root causes that drove the highly educated and well off terrorists to attack the World Trade Center are unspecified. Coincidentally the root causes of terrorism appear to be things that women like Gopal didn't like anyway- Americans, multinationals etc- what a surprise.

Stupid Poor People.

Polly Toynbee writes:

Child poverty is "boring" because it hasn't entered the political bloodstream..... But the word "poverty" plays badly with focus groups, even with the poor themselves: people are unconvinced it exists outside Africa.

So the people whom Polly is so keen to rescue from poverty, don't actually consider themselves to be in poverty? To me this suggests that the formal definition of poverty is not really measuring poverty. To Polly Toynbee this shows that she is better able to judge whether someone is impoverished than the poverty stricken wretch themselves.